Love Believes and Hopes All Things

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 
~1 Corinthians 13:7

This verse from the pen of St. Paul is part of a passage most commonly heard in the context of wedding ceremonies, though these words were written first and foremost for Christian communities. Though marriage is indeed a form of Christian community, it is the Church to which Paul writes these words. As we stare down the barrel of an intensely divisive and polarizing election season, I want to briefly reflect on what it means for love to “believe all things” and “hope all things” as this passage puts it, for the health of Christ Church Anglican.

To “believe all things” and “hope all things” in Christian community means simply to believe the best of one another and hope for the best for one another. We trust that we hold our views with the best of intentions, remembering that we are ultimately on the same side in Jesus Christ, so for this reason we have hope. The purpose of this chapter in 1 Corinthians is to remind the young, diverse, and growing Christian community in that city that they are one in Christ, loved first by God, and so should be marked by love for one another. Every time I read 1 Corinthians lately, I am struck by how poignant Paul’s words are for us today.

The diversity of views, opinions, and beliefs at Christ Church Anglican is a blessing. It may surprise you to hear that, on any given Sunday, you are sitting among Democrats, Republicans, people who identify as neither, or some mixture of the two. Until the day when one can truly say a political system is wholly Christian (a case that can not reasonably be made today), it is healthy for the body of Christ to feature political diversity, so long as that body is grounded and unified in Jesus Christ. That we are not fiercely divided along partisan boundaries because of our firm commitment to the teachings and benefits of our Lord is itself a sign and testimony to the world that we operate by a different set of standards, with a different value system than the world around us.

While this diversity is a healthy sign of a church with its priorities in the right place, Ministers and those under their care often preserve this diversity by simply saying nothing at all about anything resembling “politics.” Were there any other tension simmering so near to the surface of a congregation, we would surely not consider “doing and saying nothing about it” to be a healthy way to address it. On principle and from a legal sense, I can not tell anyone how to vote, at least in the sense of telling them who to vote for to use one extreme example, and I have absolutely no interest in doing so. However, as our public and political lives are not hermetically sealed from the Lordship of Christ, it is right for the church to say something about how to vote: prayerfully, with appropriate expectations, by standing on the firm ground of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In that line of thinking, in the coming weeks, I would like to use the Weekly Compass to equip Christ Church Anglican with some resources for engaging our political situation from a foundation in Christ. If the Church continues to allow social media and major news networks to shape its response to the issues and questions of the day, it will cease to be the Church. We have seen it happen time and again, and there is no reason to imagine that Christ Church is immune to simply becoming a church that reflects the culture around us. If the Church is not able to say and believe that neither Joe Biden or Donald Trump will usher in the Kingdom of God, that neither candidate should be expected to preserve and protect the Church; whose mission and meaning come from a completely different source than the American political system and its unpredictable outcomes, then the Church has placed its hope in the wrong places. May God have mercy on us if we do so.

Almighty God, your truth endures from age to age: Direct in our time, we pray, those who speak where many listen and write what many read; that they may speak your truth to make the heart of this people wise, its mind discerning, and its will righteous; to the honor of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Fr. Matt