Friend Like Me by Rosie Best (with an assist by Patti Lusher)

I don’t know about you, but I have 912 friends… or that’s what Facebook knows! Some of my friends are sitting here in front of me, some live in different countries, some are friends I’m “following” (which sounds a little ‘stalker-ish’) and one is a person who lives in my house with me… though I think she’s a bit more than a ‘friend’… maybe a “special friend!”

Friend… I used to work with someone who called everyone “friend,” and it took a while for me to figure out that it was her way of dealing with the fact that she couldn’t remember anyone’s name!
              Friend…So, Facebook aside, what are the attributes you look for in a friend? Compassion, loyalty, honesty, be there through thick and thin, open mind, intelligence.

I think I might like the following qualities in a friend…

Play the clip from Aladdin where the genie sings, “You ain’t never had a friend like me”

There is something to be said for a friend who can grant you three wishes and pull things out of hats.  But I want to tell you that in Jesus we have a much better friend than even the genie (though it has to be said that role was perfect for the comic stylings of Robin Williams.)

So, many of you know that I love things theatre and I was able to see the show “Beautiful” in NYC a couple of weeks ago. The show is the story of Carole King’s life. “You’ve got a friend” is a song that she wrote for her friends when she was going to leave NYC to go and live in California. The song, which we will hear soon, expresses that “You’ve got a friend” and gives examples when that friend might be needed: when you’re down and troubled, when you need some love and care . . . they are indeed comforting words, words that I think speak to true and meaningful friendship. Comforting words are so important in a time of need.

It’s comforting to know that God is a friend to us who knows all about us. The first six verses of Psalm 139 assure us that we are ‘searched’, ‘known’, and ‘hemmed in’, we are not cast adrift in the world, with no boundaries or anchor points. I think if I was a mother, the thing that I would think of as safe and secure is tucking my children safe and secure in bed. 

Verses 7-12 of the psalm let us know that we cannot hide from God. “Where can I go to get away from you?” The answer – nowhere.  Again, an assurance, that we are safely IN God.  I have to tell you, as someone who has ‘settled on the far side of the ocean’ I find it incredibly comforting to know that there is no place that I can move where God will not be able to be with me.

The third section of this psalm that we read today is a maker’s mark… no, not the whisky!  The sign that we are not just some mistake, we have been designed and made by God.  God knows us, and takes care of us because God made us. And, as the saying goes, “God don’t make junk!”

So, it’s all good right? We have been assured of these truths so we don’t need to worry any more… oh, that it were so easy. You see, the struggle is real! We don’t just need to know that our friend is there for us once a month… or week… sometimes the struggle is so present that in each moment we need to be assured that we can get to the next moment. Knowing that God has hemmed us in is a great reminder, but sometimes that consistent presence and care is communicated to us through a phone call of a friend, or a postcard, two kids jumping in a truck and driving a long way, a text, a song, a rainbow in the sky.  Messages not from a genie, but from a God who knows us because that God knit us together, made us ‘fearfully and wonderfully’. God declares us to be treasures. God doesn’t abandon us when we are less than perfect, because God had no illusion that we were perfect in the first place!  That’s my problem.  I get disappointed in myself because I think practice makes perfect.

I have to take a little pause here. There is a lot of rhetoric flying around in the air at the moment about what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Recently some folks who have set themselves up as examples of what it means to be a believer have then woken up with the proverbial egg on their face. These bold claims followed by humiliation are almost becoming predictable. It’s why I don’t want to be known as a ‘model’ believer because I am very aware of ‘there but for the grace of God go I’. I hope this makes sense.  I’m trying not to get too bogged down in specific examples of failure, because I think it would almost be like doing the same thing, suggesting that I am somehow morally superior to these people because I haven’t done whatever the current ‘stupid thing is’. I am just a fallible, broken human being, not better because I’m speaking today, not more perfect because I might have been a believer longer; just loved and known by an incredible friend, and secure that I am a member of a community of friends who also know they are known and loved.

Loved by a God who knows that we are works in progress, still very much loved, and placed in a community to support one another.

So let’s look at the third song about friendship, the one that we sang before the bible reading for the day - “What a friend we have in Jesus!” Surely the person who wrote this was making some big claims from a place of triumph? Well, in fact, not, as I found out when I was preparing for today.

For someone like me who grew up in the Methodist church, this song is so well known. Joseph M. Scriven, an Irish poet, was born in Dublin in 1819. He was someone who was very familiar with sorrow and sadness.  At age 25 he was to be married to his fiancé, but the night before the wedding she drowned. Tragedy. Then because of strained family relations, he moved to Canada, and it was while he was living in Canada, he heard that his mother had fallen very ill. He wrote a poem to encourage her, and later that poem was set to music.

Later, Scriven fell in love again, only his second fiancé died of pneumonia shortly before their wedding. When Scriven himself died, it was unclear as to whether he drowned by accident, or as a result of suicide.  He was 66. Is it any wonder he was depressed? What a tragic series of events for one man to experience. Yet as a legacy, he left a poem reminding us that we can, at any time, take our troubles to God in prayer.  It doesn’t have the genie’s three time limit. We have access to God at all times.

Sometimes we are so frail and wounded that we need to be reminded, lifted up, carried even, because the weight of the circumstances we are living through feel like they are so heavy that they will crush us. The death of a parent, the loss of a friendship, a job that seemed so perfect but fell through, a diagnosis of something.  Some of these troubles are being experienced by people in our congregation right now.  These are times when we need to know not how many friends we have, but how many friend have our backs.

I believe that if we do not have hope, we are lost. How comforting it is to know that we have an incredible friend in Jesus, who doesn’t judge us because we are down and troubled, but is there to listen to our cries of pain; and we are connected to a group of people who are concerned and who care for us when the situations we are in seem to be about to get the better of us.

Thank God for the Village Church!  Amen.