Graphic Couresy of Jim Burklo
Musings | May 20, 2026
God needed friends. That’s one way to explain the first book of the Bible.
God suffered from existential loneliness. He could not bear to be God anymore without companions. So, according the sacred myth of Genesis, on the sixth day of creation he created us.
If you read between the lines of the story, you can see that before the snake tempted Adam and Eve, he had arms and legs and walked upright. The snake was smart -- a witty conversationalist. He was there first in the Garden of Eden - a fifth-day wonder. God saw that the snake was good. But clever and smooth as he was, it seems the snake wasn’t close enough to the image of God. God needed a creature capable of more straight talk than the tiresome flattery that seemed to be all that the snake could utter. Naturally the snake was jealous when the human newcomers appeared in the Garden -- so he tried to run them afoul of their creator.
But what happened at the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was just a symptom of the emerging problem between God and humans. The ancient philosopher, Aristotle, recognized that people need to be social equals in order to have true friendships. The God of the book of Genesis jealously guarded his status of superiority over people – so it is no wonder that his relationship with them was never fully satisfying. That’s how we got the Flood, that’s how we got the Tower of Babel, that’s how we got the miseries of Job.
You think of all the kinds of relationships we have – what makes friendship different? We can be friend-ly – treat perfect strangers in a way that invites friendship. But most of the perfect strangers we meet will remain just that – strangers. It has been said that you can have in-depth relationships with no more than about 100 people at a time. I don’t think that’s a scientific figure, but it’s a good guess. And that’s exactly why I’ve made a career of serving small churches!
Other relationships have limits in time and space, boundaries that often must be maintained for very good reasons so that people who don’t know each other that well can get along politely with each other. The boundaries make it possible for us to be friend-ly, so we can open ourselves to the possibility of real friendship with new people. Once we become real friends, we can cross those boundaries, so we can help each other become who we are meant to be.
Aristotle said in the fourth century BC that “those who wish for the good things for their friends, for their friends’ sake, are friends most of all, since they are disposed in this way in themselves and not incidentally… With friends men are more able both to think and to act.” He also said:
“Therefore while in tyrannies friendship and justice hardly exist, in democracies they exist more fully; for where the citizens are equal they have much in common.” Under dictatorships and oligarchies and autocracies, people are afraid to speak their minds to each other for fear of being ratted out – it is highly corrosive to real friendship – and as a result, the whole society suffers for lack of deep connections among citizens. Let’s do all in our power to prevent that from happening in this country – because it’s a real danger right now!
You might interpret the New Testament as the choice that the God of Genesis finally made to become real friends with humans – getting down to our level so there could be some kind of real mutuality. Hence the incarnation of God in Jesus in the sacred myth of the gospel. At the end of the New Testament, God is defined as love, and friendship is love – so in a sense we can say that God is friendship. Gregory of Nyssa was a fourth century Eastern Christian bishop who once said that “the one thing truly worthwhile is becoming God’s friend.” In worship, we aim to be God’s friends. And the way we strive to do that is by reflecting God back to God. We sing about God to God. We pray about God to God. We pay attention to our divine experience of unconditional love and reflect it back to its divine source. God cannot be God without creatures like ourselves who seek to know God intimately.
Jesus needed friends. He had hearers – the folks who showed up for his talks. He had followers – the folks who went to the next town to hear him talk, too. He had disciples -- the folks who went to every town with him, the folks he chose as his apprentices, to inherit his mission. But such relationships weren’t enough. He needed some people with whom he literally could let down his hair. His best friends were three siblings named Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Their home in Bethany was the nearest thing to his own home during his three-year career as an itinerant rabbi.
Why weren’t Mary, Martha, and Lazarus in Jesus’ inner circle of twelve disciples? I think the answer is pretty simple. Friends can teach each other a lot, but if one is always the teacher and the other is always the disciple, it creates a boundary that is hard to cross into deeper friendship. Jesus needed friends that weren’t his disciples.
Our religion boils down to divine agape - unconditional compassion for others, whether or not they go with our religious program. For us, friendship is an end in itself. Friendship is deep connection between equals who accept each other “as-is,” honoring and respecting their differences. Friendship has no agenda except friendship! And as community-builders, we’re devoted to creating contexts in which real friendships can form and thrive.
Our churches and ministries can inspire people to think deeply about what true friendship is all about – and what it isn’t about, too! It starts with asking open-ended questions and knowing how to really listen to the answers they inspire.
There is a crisis of loneliness in America and much of the rest of the Western world. I have seen its effects first-hand on university campuses, contributing mightily to the mental health crisis among students. There’s no worse loneliness than the loneliness of a student surrounded day and night by thousands of peers. In the wider society, loneliness is also an epidemic.
And that’s where progressive Christians can make a difference. We’re unusually equipped to teach people, particularly young people, how to make and keep friends. Because of the anti-social consequences of “social” media, because of the transactional nature of so many relationships, because of the alienating nature of our culture, people are losing people-skills. Our churches and ministries can inspire people to think deeply about what true friendship is all about – and what it isn’t about, too! It starts with asking open-ended questions and knowing how to really listen to the answers they inspire.
Intentionally, we can create and maintain church community that makes friendships more likely to form. Mario Luis Small, a sociologist, did a study of child care centers, which he found to be powerful engines for the creation of positive social capital. He discovered that not all child care centers are equal in this regard. His research showed that the ones that forced parents to work together to put on fundraising events are far more effective in generating friendships. One minute, the parents are baking cookies together. The next, they are babysitting each others’ kids, getting groceries for each other, and socializing with each other regularly.
The child care center has no intention of generating this kind of social capital. Its fundraising policy has the inadvertent but overwhelmingly positive effect of fostering friendships among parents. How much loneliness could be eliminated if all organizations – including churches and temples - purposefully created the conditions for friendships to form and continue? It is a question for all of us, who work in institutions of all kinds, to consider carefully…
Jim Burklo 2022
The Rev. Jim Burklo
The Rev. Jim Burklo is pastor of Simi Valley United Church of Christ in California. His latest book is "Water in the Desert: Progressive Christianity for the Spiritually Thirsty." Watch the video introduction to his book.