Specifically, a problem with my post is that by creating a "special" friendship category--a sacramental friendship--we are still erecting a sort of filter between rich and poor. The goal should be friendship. Plain and simple. Not sacramental friendship, or any sort of qualified friendship, just friendship.
So a note of clarification about this.
My coining the phrase "sacramental friendship" isn't an attempt to create a new sort of "special" friendship, one that remains inherently distancing because it is "special." When I speak of "sacramental friendship" I'm speaking of just plain-old, regular friendship.
So why call it sacramental?
If you'll recall from the earlier post, I use the term to help churches move away from seeing the poor as a project, and therefore as an object, as a group of anonymous people who need help or need to be fixed. The adjective "sacramental" is being attached to the word "friendship" to signal how agendas of those sorts--"You are a project."--should be stripped away. Leaving just friendship.
In short, I'm using the word sacramental as a sort of scalpel to cut away the "you're a project" agendas a lot of people have when they approach the poor in a non-relational and programmatic way.
Additionally, the adjective sacramental helps tame the Messiah-complex, the social-justice-hero-complex, the ride-in-on-a-white-horse-complex. Sacramental is just trying to get us to focus on what William Stringfellow calls "the sacrament of mere presence." Or the sacrament of what Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche community, calls "accompaniment."
Which is to say, the sacrament of simply being a friend.
Basically, the word sacrament is being attached to the word friendship not to qualify friendship but to put a hedge of protection around friendship. To consecrate and hallow friendship in a way that says: Friendship is enough.
The word sacrament is attached to remind us that friendship is not utilitarian. Far too often, Christian "friendship" drifts toward the utilitarian. We use people to achieve our Christian agendas. Liberals use people for their social justice agendas and conservatives use people for their evangelism agendas. You're counting the number of people fed or the number of souls saved.
The word sacramental is used to remind us that true friendship rests in the simple "being with" others, for no other purpose than the "being with."
And that is why friendship is a sacrament, an experience of grace.
