It's about friendship

From the outside of the church, the work of the church -- the tasks of a Christian life -- might seem obvious: prayer, worship, scripture reading (both alone and in a group), confession, and participation in the sacraments. These things are all good and crucial and true, and, if they were all you saw in Christianity, you would be missing out on some of the best Christianity has to offer: Christian friendship.

As a pastor, my hope is of course that my students would enjoy worship and seek out scripture and develop their personal and collective prayer practices. And my hope is that those practices would produce in them good fruit that help them to live friendship-shaped lives. It's not just about how deft you are in scriptural interpretation or how articulate and eloquent your prayers are, but how able you are to live in community and in harmony with the people around you. So much of what the bible instructs us to do is about giving and receiving care to one another, about forgiving people their missteps and asking forgiveness for our own, about cultivating generosity whether or not it is repaid, and about sharing in and enjoying God's beautiful creation with one another, and all embodied not alone but in community and in fellowship.

So much of the work of Christianity takes place outside of the context of Church: driving people to their doctor's appointments or letting somebody tag along with you to Target, taking a pal out for coffee if they've been having a hard week or just letting them come over and dissociate on your couch while you make dinner, knowing how to repair the relationship when your feelings are hurt and your friend's feelings are hurt and you both feel stuck in your offendedness. One way to paint the big picture idea of the Gospels is maybe that it is a brutal world out there, so how can we figure out how to live together without wanting to kill each other? It's the work God has been ushering us along in since Cain and Abel, and in my esteem, the prescription is friendship-- big, broad, freely given, fiercely defended but playfully held friendship.

Christianity, I think, is trying to reframe the economy of friendship for us. Rather than thinking: "these are my family and these are my friends and everybody else can kick rocks", Jesus wonders with us if friendship is meant to be given away. Rather than withholding the kind of care and attention we reserve for our friends, he wonders what the world with be like if we gave that care and attention away to everybody that we meet. Look around, I imagine him proposing, how different would the world feel if you saw everybody here as your friend, and you theirs? That is the experiment that we get to run at church, and its acutely true for campus ministries. Look around this living room full of strangers and acquaintances. What if everybody here was your friend?

Sometimes, for a campus ministry, that means that our big outing for the week is a trip to the pumpkin patch with the instruction simply being: 1. pick out a pumpkin that you love, and 2. don't go off alone. And I guess I mean that literally but also theologically. Don't go off alone, it's better together.