Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

All Sermons are © Copyrighted and may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the express permission of the author.

Tennyson wrote, “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” My father liked to quote that line, thoughtfully (when he was sure my mother could hear), “’Tis better to have loved and lost – far better!” Well, Dad to the contrary notwithstanding, the poet had a point. Love in and of itself builds us up. There are many ways for love to disappoint, but (though we may not see it at the time) the experience of loving and being loved -- of risking accepting the love of another and risking extending our love to someone else -- that experience transforms and enriches us. Of course, for St. Paul that enriching through love begins with God’s love for us (“grace”), continues with our love response to God (“faith”), and culminates in our love for one another He would say, I think, that since God is love, human love gives us insight into the nature of God, and in that way makes us better. Fontine sings, in Les Miserables, “To love another person is to touch the face of God.” Knowledge is good, but knowledge without love can be a train wreck.

Remember, Paul’s writing to Corinthians, Greeks (the world’s greatest practitioners and purveyors of knowledge), and he’s bold enough to say, “Knowledge puffs up, love builds up.” The issue facing Paul would have no relevance today except that Paul, in his great mind, used it to illustrate an eternal principle. It had to do with eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols. Some Corinthian Christians, apparently, were doing that. But some other Christians in Corinth, especially those who were new to the faith (who may, themselves, have only recently been sacrificing meat to those pagan gods) were queasy about it. It didn’t seem kosher (which, of course, it wasn’t). Somehow, if you ate something that had been offered to a pagan god, on a pagan altar, you were keeping company with the devil. But the “smarter” Christians at Corinth, as they clearly saw themselves, said, “Wait a minute. Pagan gods are false gods, and therefore they have no power to help us or harm us.” So. Bon appetite!

Paul said to those “smarter” Corinthians, “Your knowledge is right as far as it goes (pagan gods can’t hurt us), it’s your love that’s inadequate. You’re not being sensitive to the needs and concerns of fellow believers. And with all your puffed-up knowledge, even if you are right, you may actually drive someone away from Christ. “Sometimes right is just as wrong as wrong is,” says the country song. You have already caused divisions in Christ’s body, the Church. “Knowledge puffs up,” Paul says. “Love builds up” – “edifieth” the King James version said, “adds to and builds upon as a builder builds.”
Paul was not opposed to knowledge and learning. He was well educated himself in the Jewish law, and in Greek wisdom. We can tell from his writings that he was familiar with the works of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. He never pitted knowledge against faith. He wasn’t a know-nothing Christian, and we shouldn’t be either. But, perhaps because he was so well educated, he was always conscious of the limitations of knowledge. “We know in part,” he insisted. What we know about God and God’s universe is a mere fragment of what there is to know. That keeps us humble, keeps us from being “puffed up” in our knowledge. True knowledge, about anything, begins with the recognition of our ignorance, with humility. Paul says, “If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know.” “Knowledge puffs up. Love builds up.” We can’t know God fully, but we can love God. We can’t understand our fellow beings perfectly, but we can love them. Love, Paul believed, was the only truly creative force in the universe. Love builds up.

The film, A Beautiful Mind, was a love story – in a very serious sense. You remember that the lead character, John Nash, was utterly brilliant. A prodigy from the start. Studied at Princeton with Dr. Einstein. Knew and understood things the rest of us never dream of. Was the brightest of the bright, and he knew it. And he made enemies with his boasting. Too soon, however, his great mind is clouded with mental illness, and all his knowledge cannot overcome it. But his wife loves him, and it is her love (not his knowledge) that redeems the story. “Knowledge puffs up. Love builds up.”
I have always admired those who teach the mentally retarded. In classrooms where that takes place, different from all other classrooms, it seems to me, knowledge is not the coin of the realm. There is no question that the teacher knows more than the pupils, so it is meaningless for him or her to be “puffed up” in knowledge, or arrogant, or boasting. Here it is love that makes it happen, that builds. Love and immeasurable patience which is the way love manifests itself in such situations.

Yesterday’s catastrophe, we all understood immediately, was not the loss of the Shuttle Columbia. It was the loss of seven human beings who had the capacity to love and be loved.. Before the accident, when we thought of the space program, we marveled at our human knowledge and accomplishments: that such a thing could be possible! That people could travel at nineteen times the speed of sound two hundred thousand feet in the air! That we could invent a machine that let us do that! Marvelous knowledge! Yesterday’s tragedy does not call such knowledge into question. But it does, once again, remind us of the limitations of knowledge. Our hearts turned, immediately, to the astronauts and their families. In an instant we stopped seeing them as objects, exchangeable parts. We saw them as people capable of love. Now they were husband, wife, father, mother, son, daughter. Now they were the little boy who had dreamed of being an astronaut since he was four. Or the mother raising a teenaged daughter. Or the young lady from India who had been brilliant in school and had more or less stumbled into the space program only to find how much she loved it. Or the family man from Israel who been serving as one of the few non-violent role models in that war torn country. When we have to face the realities of life, love trumps knowledge every time. It is our love, not our knowledge, that makes us who we are.

Education’s a good thing. Send your children to school. But remind them frequently of the limitations of knowledge. Teach them how to love. Educate their hearts.