Each morning I receive an email from a website dedicated to the writings of my dad’s favorite preacher-writer, Frederick Buechner.  Yesterday’s passage was entitled “Friends,” and the essence of its message was that, for each of us, there are some friends — only a few — who we count as friends “for no particular reason,” meaning (among other things, which Buechner expresses best) that we love being with them, and can’t imagine not being in fellowship with them, nothwithstanding that we may be as different as night and day in some respects, or maybe even in most respects.  It’s a mystery, really, but for some relationships such differences are, as Buechner puts it, “beside the point.”

You can find the “full” text of Buechner’s “Friends” passage here, but I was particularly struck by this:

Basically your friends are not your friends for any particular reason. They are your friends for no particular reason. The job you do, the family you have, the way you vote, the major achievements and blunders of your life, your religious convictions or lack of them, are all somehow set off to one side when the two of you get together. If you are old friends, you know all those things about each other and a lot more besides, but they are beside the point. Even if you talk about them, they are beside the point. Stripped, humanly speaking, to the bare essentials, you are yourselves the point. The usual distinctions of older-younger, richer-poorer, smarter-dumber, male-female even, cease to matter. You meet with a clean slate every time, and you meet on equal terms. Anything may come of it or nothing may. That doesn’t matter either. Only the meeting matters.

Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter’s Dictionary (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993), 54.

Now, I realize that Buechner in this passage is speaking of bonds that “believers” and “unbelievers” can forge with one another as readily as can one Christian with another.  But it’s hard for a Christian to read that passage and not call to mind Paul’s message (however shopworn) that insofar as we Christians are “all children of God through faith, . . . [t]here is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female.” Galatians 3:26, 28 (NRSV). What’s more, a close reading of Paul’s text discloses that his foundational point was not simply that ancestry, gender and social status are irrelevant to our bond in Christ. There is that, of course, but even more fundamentally Paul was saying that because as we are “all children of God through faith” — and faith alone — our bonding in Christ is equally independent of the degree to which your behavior or mine conforms to “the law [that] was our disciplinarian before Christ came,” before we were privileged to be “justified by faith.” Galatians 3:24 (NRSV).

And that, my friends, brought to mind this, from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, making the point that we Christians are duty-bound not only to abide one another, but to be grateful for our unconditional fellowship with each other in Christ, which rests not at all on whether your conduct or mine is falling short of anyone’s standard, not even of God’s:

Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients. … We do not complain of what God does not give us; we rather thank God for what He does give us daily. And is not what has been given us enough: brothers, who will go on living with us through sin and need under the blessing of His grace? Is the divine gift of Christian fellowship anything less than this, any day, even the most difficult and distressing day? Even when sin and misunderstanding burden the communal life, is not the sinning brother still a brother, with whom I, too, stand under the Word of Christ? Will not his sin be a constant occasion for me to give thanks that both of us may live in the forgiving love of God in Jesus Christ?

Thus the very hour of disillusionment with my brother becomes incomparably salutary, because it so thoroughly teaches me that neither of us can ever live by our own words and deeds, but only by that one Word and Deed which really binds us together– the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. When the morning mists of dreams vanish, then dawns the bright day of Christian fellowship.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (New York: Harper & Row, 1954), 28-9.