Friend of God

     I was reading my Franciscan friend, Dan Horan’s, recent column in a Catholic periodical when I hit upon this phrase, “friend of God.”  He was writing a tribute to the African-American theologian, Shawn Copeland, who is retiring as a professor at Boston College.  She is a world-class theologian.  As a black woman, she can think theologically like most of us cannot do.  She has experiences that most Catholic theologians---and even Quaker theologians---do not have. 

    I can imagine she even experiences God in a way I never could.  I would like to think that her God and my God are, indeed, the same God, but surely we experience, know and relate differently to that same God.  I am not sure humans are sufficiently aware that our own make-up as persons affects the way we experience the world---including God.  Rather than be saddened by this, I am grateful. I can learn more about my God from Shawn Copeland.
   
    Horan gets to his announcement that she is a friend of God in an interesting fashion.  He tells us that most folks “might not know is that she is one of the holiest people doing theology today.”  I am intrigued by this claim and would like to explore it a little more.  I have long told students that people do not need to be believers in God to do theology.  This is because I contend that theology is human construct.  This means that humans create theology.  It is fabricated in our minds as well as in the mind of the faithful community.
   
    Faith is primary and theology is secondary.  Surely, theology thinks about faith, experience and revelations of God.  This “stuff” of theology needs to be there for theology to mull over, organize and articulate.  But people who read theology don’t need to be believers.  They can read another theologian’s ideas and understand those ideas.  This is easy to grasp.  Most of us can recall things we may have read and understand, but don’t really think that way ourselves.  A good example of mine is communism.  I have read about it and think I understand it, but that does not mean I am a communist.
   
    But Horan knows that Copeland is a believer.  She is writing about her own faith, her own experience and the revelations she has been given.  I am confident Dan Horan would agree with this assessment.  Listen to him in this sentence and see how clearly Copeland is a woman of faith.  Horan tells us, “For Copeland, being a professor of theology is not merely a career, but has always been and remains a profound vocation.”  She did not study theology in order to get a good teaching job at a college.  She is a theologian because of vocation.
   
    In the theological world the idea of vocation still implicates God.  In our secular world vocation may be more practical skills that the non-college bound student studies.  It might be welding or the like.  But for the church and theology, vocation contends there is a God and that God has a “call” on our life.  Vocatio is a Latin word, which means, “calling.”  Vocation is the way God calls each person to be and asks for them to do something special.  In Copeland’s case, God wants her to be a theologian of the church. 
   
    Vocatio, God’s call, implies we are to answer and to respond.  We pick up the call and say to God that we are ready to go.  This is what Copeland has done throughout her career.  She accepted the call and has been obedient.  All of this points to why Horan rightfully can call her a friend of God.  And that is how it works for all of us.
   
    Surely, behind this idea of friendship are the words to the disciples that Jesus offers in John’s Gospel.  On that last night before the crucifixion, Jesus turned to his disciples and told them he was no longer going to see them as servants or slaves.  He tells them he will now call them friends.  And the Greek word used in that passage is a word for love.  In Greek at least, a friend is always a person characterized by love.  And undoubtedly, this is what God desires and Horan wanted to convey about Shawn Copeland. 
   
    To this point, Horan actually quotes a line from Copeland herself.  Fairly recently, she told folks, “By using the phrase vocation, I wanted to signal that our theological work, our theological lives, are not so much about careerism, upward mobility, but they are about a response to the word made flesh.”  She makes a couple key points here that I hope are also true for me.  And maybe it is true for you, too.
   
    She says a vocation is not about careers---or careerism, as she says.  She is not saying having a career or even pursue careerism is bad.  It is just not the way God works in our lives.  The issue with vocation is obedience.  To opt for vocation is to become a friend of God and that might well not put you on a path of career success.  Her second point is equally significant.  A vocation is not about success, but response.  For a Christian it is response to the God who became human.
   
    And if we follow that incarnate God, we might just be called to sacrifice rather than succeed.  That’s what friends do.  And Shawn Copeland is a good friend and model for all of us.