Love Hopes All Things

(The below was delivered to the Rocky Mountain Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church of America at its stated meeting in the building of Skyview Presbyterian Church on January 28, 2016, at which I represented the OPC's Presbytery of the Dakotas as a fraternal delegate.)

“Love hopes all things,” Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 13:7. When love is directed toward God, that hope is obviously eschatological: love hopes that one day we will see our Lord face to face and know fully even as we have been fully known (1 Corinthians 13:12). But what is that hope when love is directed toward other persons? How about when love is directed toward the most unlovely of persons, other presbyters?

In that case as well, our hope must be eschatological. We may be quick to grant the salvation and piety of presbyterian brothers with whom we disagree, but slow to recognize that they may also act against their baser instincts and, with us, strive for the good of the Church and the souls of fellow believers. That slowness and distrust, of course, is cynicism, and whatever aid cynicism may be in surviving the cruelties of a fallen world, it is hope’s opposite. Cynicism bears nothing, believes nothing, hopes nothing, endures nothing. Cynicism presumes more than it can ever know while hope rests in the Lord’s perfect knowledge, as we read in Psalm 131.

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up;

my eyes are not raised too high;

I do not occupy myself with things

too great and too marvelous for me. 

But I have calmed and quieted my soul,

like a weaned child with its mother;

like a weaned child is my soul within me. 

O Israel, hope in the Lord

from this time forth and forevermore. 

Love is not arrogant. Love does not know the hearts and minds, the innermost thoughts, of others. Love knows the heart is a mystery and so hopes that, even in a presbytery, common cause can be made with one’s brothers. Cynicism is arrogant: it knows the future and thus the futility of reaching out to those who have repeatedly proven their recalcitrance. Love knows the limits of its knowledge, and so hopes that presbyterians can work together.

Hope is always eschatological because it believes that the Christian love which will be manifest at the end may be realized now.

Such hope has been manifested in the OPC’s Presbytery of the Dakotas. At our September meeting, we erected two special committees. One is working to provide counsel to the Churches as to how to survive and prosper in the legal environments of the five states within our Regional Church after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision. This has been a marvelous opportunity to bear each other’s burdens and receive counsel made more wise by collaboration. The other committee is proposing a revised set of bylaws which, Lord willing, will help institute a more presbyterian practice in a Regional Church still struggling with independency, fundamentalism, and congregationalism, even nearly 80 years after our denomination’s founding.

In light of our presbytery’s many failings, especially in its failure to discharge commonplace presbyterian duties to the Churches under its supervision, I feel compelled to take this opportunity to apologize on behalf of my brothers who use the PCA as whipping boy and bête noir. Rather than seek to reform ourselves according to Biblical principle, we congratulate ourselves for not being as bad as a PCA in which we imagine liturgical aberration and theological innovation more prevalent than the Trinity Hymnal. We have been censorious and uncharitable, and for this I offer my most sincere apologies.

With that apology I offer another hope, perhaps the most audacious hope which presbyterian love can hold. I hope your Churches will regard each other as sisters, and your elders look to elders in other Churches as brothers. I hope we will soon see a new day of interdenominational cooperation, but first must come intra-denominational charity, coordination, and cooperation. Brothers, hold regular pulpit exchanges and joint worship services. Encourage the deacons of the various Churches to cooperate in shared mercy ministries. On behalf of my own session, I issue a standing invitation for a pulpit exchange to all your sessions, as a first step to the inevitable: a joining of the OPC and PCA. Furthermore, I invite you to send your young people to our summer Bible camp, a very successful ecumenical venture between our Presbytery of the Dakotas and the PCA’s Siouxlands Presbytery within our overlapping jurisdictions in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Love hopes all things, but love need not be naïve. Things changed for us reactionary social conservatives last summer, and you surely are wondering when a presidential administration (or its philosophically similar successor) which sued a Lutheran school over its employment practices will begin using the full force of the law to make things uncomfortable for Churches without “evolved” views on human sexuality. Our congregations, like most of yours, are small. Most of ours, as do most of yours, get by on the thinnest of financial margins. What congregations in our Regional Churches could survive a lawsuit over a refusal to marry a same- sex couple? A former member of your presbytery, Phil Strong, who is now in my presbytery, remarked to me last summer that “doing Church” the way the PCA and OPC have for years now is a luxury we may no longer be able to afford. We need to bear one another’s burdens: we must either fight together, or hang separately.

Love hopes all things. It even hopes presbyterians will learn to love one another in word and deed before the last day, when hope will pass away, along with faith, and love will abide forever.

How to read Scripture in worship

Most men arrive at seminary with little to no training in public speaking, and for the most part the seminaries which confessional presbyterian preachers attend offer little to no training in the basic mechanisms of public speaking. (Frankly, I find this shocking, and so should you. I'm even more shocked by indifference to this sad state of affairs.)

As a lapsed Lutheran (currently Roman Catholic), Russell Saltzman probably hasn't visited many confessional presbyterian seminaries, but he does all their students and alumni a service with "Everything I Know About Being a Lector I Learned in Third Grade," over at the First Things website. He writes for Roman Catholic lectors, but presbyterian pastors (or rather, their congregations), would profit greatly from a careful study and implementation of his advice.

(In other First Things-related news, yesterday I finished reading the January 2016 issue before the February issue was delivered, thereby catching me up to the present moment. This has never happened before.)

Christmastide is beer

It being the 12th day of Christmas already, I had better get to the winter warmers I've newly discovered and enjoyed this yuletide season. Interestingly, none have a specifically Christmas theme, perhaps becaues all lean toward hoppy and pale rather than the stoutness most frequently associated with a belly like a bowlful of jelly.

Hitachino Nest Celebration Ale is a lovely white ale, very hop-forward, and the first from a Japanese brewer over which I've actually gotten excited.

Brrr, from Widmer Brothers, is a hoppy red ale. The hops and malts nicely balance each other; the mellowness I associate with reds gives it a nice finish.

Elysian Brewing Company's BiFrost is smooth, slightly sweet, and with just a hint of hop bitterness. Intriguing.

Finally, it turns out Left Hand's Polestar Pilsner isn't a seasonal. I'm glad to learn it's available year-round, but I'm including it here because I have just encountered it during my annual Christmastide ale exploration. It's got the crispness and hoppy finish for which I love pilsners. This may become my go-to session beer.

The end of Christmastide means the beginning of the long, miserable winter slog. Perhaps these winter warmers will help you get through the dark eternity which is February.

We wish you "A Dave Brubeck Christmas"

I'm not ready to call an end to all hopes for a stunning new Christmas album coming out of left field, but, as is too often the case, 2015 is definitely a washout. Since I've been spending much of the past year exploring Dave Brubeck's catalogue, both with his legendary quartet and as a headliner, I decided to buy a copy of A Dave Brubeck Christmas. Brubeck plays solo piano on mostly traditional Christmas songs, plus a couple originals. Some interesting arrangements highlight his strengths in composition, but overall it's a marvelous showcase for his depth and sensitivity as a player. His rendering of "The Christmas Song" deserves to become that chestnut's jazz instrumental standard.

It's Christmas time. Enjoy the great Christmas tunes as offered up by one of the true greats.

Vindication

Medicine has authoritatively proven that a curmudgeonly attitude is healthy, because happiness won't make you live longer.

Thanks, science!

Voter identification & American identity

My media consumption habits led my meandering thoughts into some surprising confluences yesterday. Whilst working out, I listened to a Center for Global Development podcast in which two researchers pointed out that progress toward the U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goals cannot be measured unless all persons in the developing world have a legal form of identification, beginning with registration at birth. The contrarian I am, I immediately began wondering about the people who might not want to be registered at birth. (Let the record show Pa Curmudgeon was careful to register me as a natural-born U.S. citizen under color of law, and I have the State Department-issued piece of paper to prove it.) 

I remembered Robert Heinlein, the Ayn Rand of science fiction, whose work I read avidly in high school until it dawned on me that his exaltation of the heroic individual was profoundly anti-humanist. But while I was still an adolescent, I read, in any number of forms, Heinlein's argument that the truly free individual will abandon any society which makes legal identification mandatory. Objectivism aside, this always seemed to me a very American concept: the individual should not be hindered by the regulatory government, even when the individual runs the very serious risk of endangering himself.

Then I opened up the December 8 Denver Post to an article on the living situation of Robert Dear, now infamous for shooting up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs a couple weeks ago. Reporter Kirk Mitchell visited the plains of Hartsel, Colorado, a desolate, utilities-free place where newcomers squat in trailers and makeshift fortresses of dubious structural integrity on plots of land bought in order to strike it rich in marijuana cultivation. (No one has yet struck it rich, by the way.) I'm a big fan of the electrical grid and indoor plumbing, so the lifestyle doesn't appeal to me, but there's something very American, and definitely western, about people willing to suffer any adversity in their attempt to live their lives as they choose.

Out here in the Great American Desert, we tend to associate that instinct with conservatism, and conservatism tends to be associated primarily with the Republican party. As I was eating my raisin bran (I'm at an age at which fiber intake becomes a controlling priority), I thought it ironic conservative Republicans are insisting that people must have a government-issued identification card in order to vote. Call me naïve, but it doesn't seem very conservative, or even very American, to ask the government permission to exercise a personal, unalienable right.

A humanist, in the best sense of the term

Amazon made some kind of deal with the late Kurt Vonnegut (Jr.)'s estate, and has been releasing some of his previously uncollected short fiction in Kindle editions. It was uncollected for a good reason: it's mostly rather slight fare, with little of the intellectual heft or daring of his breakout Slaughterhouse Five or the underappreciated Galapagos. Nonetheless, reading it has been a helpful refresher for me.

I discovered Vonnegut during my senior year of high school, and had worked through all his published works by the time I graduated college. Having been confronted by the bleak nihilism of Cat's Cradle and Breakfast of Champions, I wasn't surprised to learn that John Irving, in whose world according to Garp we are all terminal cases, studied under Vonnegut at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. In spite of my youth, however, the nihilism wasn't why I compulsively read Vonnegut.

Instead, it was his humanism, in the best sense of the term. Vonnegut, for all his despair over humanity's fatal flaws, loved human beings and insisted on treating all people as such. That humanism informs even the early writings now being released, the stuff he wrote for popular magazines back when popular magazines published short fiction rather than cooking tips from vapid celebrities. (I can't find the quote, but I remember Vonnegut writing about selling short stories to Cosmopolitan long before it became "a harrowingly explicit sex manual.") Every page drips with compassion for his characters, even when he's making fun of them.

Cynicism is filled with contempt, and Kurt Vonnegut was no cynic. He was a humanist, in the best sense of the term, and that's why I still find his writing refreshing.

The new pilgrims & the rule of law

The Sept. 20 edition (I'm only a month behind in podcast listening!) of Research on Religion was a discussion with Joseph Castleberry on his recent book, The New Pilgrims. The discussion focused primarily on the religious and entrepreneurial vitality of both legal and illegal immigrants to these United States, and to that extent was interesting, but not particularly revelatory.

Things got interesting toward the end of the podcast. Many political and social conservatives oppose illegal immigrants on the simple ground that they have violated the law. Castleberry offers an intriguing counterproposal: the rule of law is a two-sided arrangement wherein the citizen (or individual) ought to obey the laws, and the government is obligated to provide just laws. Castleberry noted the widespread consensus that immigration law in these United States is "broken" and offered a skeptical read on both Democrat and Republican Party failures to reform it. In sum, Castleberry suggests that when a law is unjust, individuals ought not be faulted for breaking it.

It's a provocative observation which echoes the arguments posited in our nation's Declaration of Independence. Political and social conservatives, including Christians, who revere that Declaration would do well to consider it.

Goliath

Tom Gauld isn’t challenging the 1 Samuel 17 account of the events at the Valley of Elah, but he is asking us to consider our assumptions about Goliath of Gath. The truth of the matter is that he’s not even really interested in the historical person Goliath; instead, he’s interested in the reality and prosecution of war.

Neither Goliath nor the rest of the Philistine army seem to have much idea as to why they’re at war with the Israelites; instead, they, like armies throughout history, wait for the fighting to erupt under a vague sense of foreboding. Goliath himself ends up at a post he didn’t choose, under orders devised by an ambitious young captain. Back in the camp, some other soldiers have tied up a bear which they force to fight various other animals for sport and gambling; that literal bear becomes a metaphor when it runs away.

I always read comic books at least twice (mostly because I can’t keep myself from quickly turning pages to read dialogue, without paying sufficient heed to the art). On my second read, I made sure to go through the whole book in a single sitting so as to track Gauld’s development of the atmosphere without interruption. A plot summary cannot convey the melancholy tones conveyed by Tom Gauld’s monochromatic, cartoonish line drawings. Why doesn’t Goliath also run away? Why does any soldier in any war remain at his post, when he is at best a mere cog in a machine and a disposable weapon for a cause which means precious little to him personally? When Goliath must finally enter battle, the war is settled, but his death resolves nothing for him as an individual.

In Goliath, Tom Gauld asks us to join him in reflecting on what it means to ask men to go to war. In our time as much as any, it’s an invitation we all should accept.

The case for reparations

Quite some time ago, I concluded, with Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address, that the Lord has already determined, and wrought, the reparations owed for the years of American chattel slavery. Credit is owed to Ta-Nehisi Coates for accomplishing the near-impossible feat of making me reconsider an opinion with his Polk-prize-winning 2014 essay, "The Case for Reparations." He powerfully demonstrates that systematic oppression of African-Americans continued long past the formal end of chattel slavery, effectively countering my assumptions regarding that for which African-Americans might be owed reparation. It's a long read, but Coates' arguments are thoughtful and deserve thoughtful engagement.

What reparations, then? How might they be gathered, administered, and distributed? Is money even the issue? At the end of section IX, Coates writes,

What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

Amen.

But how to effect such a spiritual renewal? Nate DiMeo, creator and producer of the elegant and wonderful The Memory Palace, has a suggestion in "Notes on an Imagined Plaque to be Added to the Statue of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, Upon Hearing that the Memphis City Counci has Voted to Move it and the Exhumed Remains of General Forrest and his Wife, Mary Ann Montgomery Forrest, from their Current Location in a Park Downtown, to the Nearby Elmwood Cemetery." DiMeo and Coates agree that in order for our nation to truly change, we must first become historically aware.

But that, in turn, must be a spiritual renewal. Our nation must want to become historically aware, to know its sins in order to make amends for them. Those who want to know their sins are those who want to repent of them because they long to lay them at the foot of the Cross of Christ.

Both Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nate DiMeo speak eloquently of the persistent and evil problem of race relations in these United States. Perhaps unwittingly, the case they make is, ultimately, a case for the preaching of the Gospel.