Hello,
Well, I am back at my computer and in the United States after a 10 day
trip to Europe to see some Martin Luther sights (2017 is the 500th
anniversary of the Reformation) and visit some friends. Seeing where Martin Luther spent some
of his childhood, one of the first Lutheran Churches, the place that Luther was
hidden away when he had a price on his head, and the University where he taught
and lived out his life all helped me understand the events of the day and how
to extrapolate them into this day.
But more than gathering an appreciation for events and history, I found
myself more profoundly
appreciative of friendships in general, and the friendships we have with the
folks we visited.
In Amsterdam we stayed with a couple of which the woman was an exchange
student at my wife’s house when they were both in high school. In Germany, we spent our time
travelling and staying at the house of the parents of a girl who was an
exchange student at our house when we lived in Arlington, Ohio (about 13 years
ago).
Friendship really is an amazing thing. Friendship has people open up their home and share their
lives with another in intimate ways.
Friendship has a way of spanning the distance of time and space that
makes neither seem that much of a distance. Friendship has a way of welding together the cores of
people’s lives whose peripheral parts are extremely different. Friendship has a way of broadening
one’s horizons and taking a look at one’s own life without feeling the need to
become defensive or protective.
Having come home from a time with friends in Europe, I find myself
thankful for such friendships.
Could I live without them?
Of course. But with them my
life is fuller, deeper, and richer.
Thank you God for friends…European friends, and you, my friends.
But most of all thank you God for God’s friendship to me, a friendship
that many in Europe and around the world and in our country are saying they can
live without. In Germany, where
people pay a “church tax” as a way of maintaining their place in the church,
many are opting out, saying that there are things in life to which that money
needs to go that to them puts the church (not necessarily Jesus, though) as
something they can live without.
In Amsterdam there are many churches, most of them just cultural
buildings, because for whatever reason, the things of the church have become
something that a person can live without.
The fact that many people live fine lives without being connected to the
church is evidence that a person can live without it. But having had a glimpse of the wonder of friendships, I am
thankful for the friendship that I find week after week in the church where I
am embraced by a God who so loved me that he sent his Son to live, die, and
rise again to seal that friendship.
I am thankful for the friendship of a God who doesn’t want me to wonder
if I have or have not fallen out of his thoughts and care as he spoke that care
to me in the waters of Baptism and echoes it over and over again at his table. I am thankful for the friendship of a
God who wraps me in the arms of people who see the pain in my life, the shame
in my life, and the sin in my life and say, “In this place those things have no
voice. Only God has a voice and
his voice is of forgiveness and mercy.”
I am thankful for the friendship of God who is resilient to my
fickleness and irrepressible in his faithfulness to me.
It is true that God’s friendship with me exists outside of the confines
and gathered community of the church….just as my friendship exists with my
European friends when we are not with them face to face. But I am thankful that I got to rub
shoulders for a week with my European friends, and I am more thankful yet, that
I get to be invited into the house of God every week to have my life deepened,
widened and brightened by the transformational friendship of God.
The song may be a bit smaltzy, but it’s true: What a friend we have in
Jesus!
Have a great week.
God’s grace and peace, (ggap)
Pastor Jerry Nuernberger
No comments:
Post a Comment