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.