Last week, my wife and I had dinner with two longtime friends to celebrate their wedding anniversary. The less sensitive might say we are old friends. That is all right. My friend from high school and college days, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote once that “one of the blessings of old friends is that you can afford to be stupid with them.” My wife can tell you how much I enjoyed that blessing as the four of us dined and talked.
KirklandI never think about friendship without remembering a tactic employed by our grandson Preston to gain the upper hand in our relationship on those rare occasions when he did not get his way. When receiving nothing but negative feedback from Grandy and me, he would at times declare as only a defiant 3-year-old could, “I am not your friend.” The flaw in his ploy was that he failed to take into account the tenacity of the modern grandparent. “Too bad,” we would respond, “but you’re our friend and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
I am grateful that our Lord gave his followers the lofty title of friends and that he followed this with the command that we love each other. Sadly, friendship often is the first thing lost when differences — many of them significant differences — crop up among us as South Carolina Baptists and fellow church members. And it is tragically true that the distance from withdrawing or withholding friendship to regarding others as enemies is short indeed.
I recall from a number of years ago a sermon by Jim Wooten, now pastor of The Baptist Church at Beaufort, taken from 1 Samuel 18:10-11 and entitled “The Javelin and the Harp.” In that passage, a jealous and fearful Saul in his madness began to view his friend David as an enemy of his. In a poignant portion of the text, the Scriptures say, “So David played music with his hand as at other times” in his efforts to cool Saul’s fevered mind and spirit, “but there was a spear in Saul’s hand.”
King Saul had withdrawn his friendship from David, who remained ever faithful to the king — and though his own life was in danger, the future king of Israel never attempted to kill Saul even when presented with the opportunity.
Who is the enemy of today? I have been in denominational service long enough to remember when, for the conservative, it was a moderate or liberal, and for the moderate or liberal it was a conservative or a fundamentalist. For the conservative now, it might be another conservative who is not conservative enough — or for the moderate, it might be a moderate who is not moderate enough. For an Armenian it could be a Calvinist, or vice versa.
Too often, and perhaps most of the time, the one who possesses a piece of the fabric of truth mistakes it for the whole cloth and cannot or will not see and respect that piece of the fabric held by another.
Admittedly, it can become confusing out there in the real world, not to mention in the churches of our convention, unless we finally come to the realization that it is Satan who is our true enemy and he is having a grand time watching Christians who confess that “Jesus is Lord” at each other’s throats with too little of the love of God in their hearts.
We ought to spend more time with our fingers gently strumming a harp rather than tightly gripping a javelin. I pray that we will continue to hear the sweet and soothing strains of friendship filling our South Carolina Baptist Convention than to suffer the deep cuts to our fellowship caused by javelins thrown in anger — and mostly in ignorance.
Our grandson is now 18 years old, and is about to graduate from high school and begin college studies at The Art Institute of Charleston. He is more mature now and places a higher value on friendship and has a greater appreciation for its benefits to himself and to others. We, too, must see friendship for what it is in the eyes of Christ and what it ought to be in the lives of each of us.
No doubt, we will encounter people who will withdraw or withhold friendship from us, saying in effect, “I am not your friend.” And you know the right response to that.