Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer
Church of the Redeemer
New Haven, Conn.
Scripture: Deuteronomy 18:18
I Corinthians 8:1-3
Mark 1:21-28
Love and Knowledge
The love of knowledge is a Biblical virtue. The young lad Jesus in the Temple astounding the scribes and teachers and priests with his answers is a quintessential Biblical scene. It wasn’t just the questions Jesus could ask these best of teachers. It was his answers that astonished and astounded. Jesus knew something.
A talking point today with the children in our church is teaching and learning. The lectionary curriculum for them today, as for us, is about teaching and learning, about Biblical teachers and about Biblical knowledge.
Ask a child today: “What do you know? What could you teach me? And who are your teachers and what did you learn?”
The Bible is alphabet soup for the soul and we are all in that soup together.
I had a quest-for-knowledge moment this week: an experience in the love of
knowledge. On Wednesday morning as the ice and snow in Chester warmed to
water—and I’m sitting in my study chair doing sermon research, looking out the
window, calling it prayer—my out-of-focus eyes suddenly saw the array of
diamonds on the bare tree limbs, the galaxy of blinking, twinkling,
whiter-than-white, bluer-than-blue lights of the water drops everywhere in the
woods outside my window.
It was beautiful, of course. It was hard to believe I hadn’t been seeing these little bright lights all along, scores of “morning stars,” water drops on tree limbs reflecting sunlight.
Now, a certain knowledge came to me in that astonishing sight. A thing I realized that I knew (in addition to what I saw, what I knew) was that the light in these water drops was sunlight, and that it really was sunlight that had traveled all the way from the sun, that it had started there and that the curvature of the globes of water was bending the light, realigning the light, and bringing it to my eyes: all those light-years of distance and then a final bend, focus, and a quick shot across the yard from the tree limbs to my eyes.
This knowledge felt like new knowledge—you know the great “DA-UH” of Enlightenment! I decided to write a poem. I would base the poem on the science of all these curves. I figured that with the earth turning, the angle of the droplet lights would change, that some drops would—so-to-speak—“go out” and others light up. I figured this probably could even be predicted: that there would actually be some mathematical formula that could calculate the speed of the earth’s turning, etc., as reflected on the curved surface of the water drop. As infinitesimal as these measurements would be, I knew that is was, in principle, in fact, knowable.
I figured that the greatness of this poem-to-be would come from the interplay of these calculations, these knowable things, with the experience of seeing.
But, lacking that knowledge, I went back to the sermon. I’d always wanted to be an astronomer, but I couldn’t even add my verbal SAT score with my math SAT score! I knew theology and poetry were my way of knowing the stars. I lacked the math. I would be a magi of a different sort. I lacked the math, but not the glory of knowing that the world is full, and that knowledge of the world wonderfully fulfilling.
The great Jewish thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel has a biography entitled, I Only Asked for Wonder. Knowledge of the world, knowledge in the world, is a wonder, a wonderful thing. A wonderful and a Biblical thing.
The Bible does not say that the wonder of the world will be shown by Hercules pumping iron or Zeus throwing thunderbolts or people and empires imitating those gods. No, the Bible says that the wonder and the wonders of the world will be revealed by prophets. By people who speak the word of the Lord, by teachers, in other words.
In our first Bible reading today from Deuteronomy, the way of our God is defined. Moses the prophet is the hero and the archetype. A prophet is the way of our God being known. Jesus and Paul fulfill that tradition. When God says in Deuteronomy I will raise up prophets, God in our Bible is being defined as a God who is revealed through human beings who speak about something they know from God. In our Bible God does not speak ultimately through the burning bush that Moses saw, but through Moses who saw the burning bush. God gave Moses knowledge. This information, “I want my people to be free of slavery”: Moses taught Pharaoh and the world that lesson.
Even Eve was a teacher. I, along with Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, call Eve, “St. Eve of Curiosity.” The Tree of Life was a tree to know. It was the Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil that was only for God to know. The Bible makes saints out of its sinners and Eve is one. And the subliminal message of the Bible is that we are all like her; we all want to know as much as we can. The Bible really is the great drama of our tragic quest for knowledge. And it even gives us a happy ending for that quest, Jesus Christ.
But isn’t it always a quest? This knowledge thing?! Isn’t there something basic about knowledge that is always too little, too late?
We know when the horse is out of the barn. We rarely know which horse will do that, when, and out which door. Our best knowledge is hindsight, our deepest need is for sight.
I’ve been reading a history of World War II and Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt knew the Japanese fleet had left Japan. But no one knew where it was going. The war department warnings went out to Singapore, Manila, several other sites, and lastly, to Pearl Harbor. Too little. Too late.
Army generals are notorious for fighting the last war over rather than the one they are in now.
Politicians too. Ever since we didn’t see Hitler soon enough, leaders have looked to catch the next one on time or sooner. Was Saddam Hussein the next Hitler, or just a bad guy with a moustache? We’ll never know, never have that knowledge. Knowledge is like that.
Search committees and churches work with the same backwards brains we all have. Do we want someone just like, or not like? How can we look to the future knowingly without looking through the past?
The power of the perceptions of the past is, of course, the bedrock of psychoanalytical psychology. Not because therapists are ancestor worshippers, but because patients are, whether we want to be or not.
Childhood trauma, any trauma, is the horse that got out of the barn. After Katrina several of you told me of the re-occurrence of trauma that you felt from an earthquake from years ago. After the coal miner disaster in West Virginia, I talked with someone whose childhood town had gone through—what we call—the “same” thing. And it was upsetting to re-feel.
A great deal of our life is spent trying to make a fortress out of a barn from which the horse has already escaped. We build up as much knowledge as we can to prevent what has already happened, rather than learning how to ride a free horse.
The only knowledge we need to have to get out of this craziness of trauma is to know that God punishes wickedness and that God forgives the contrite sinner.
The Christian point of the Cross is that God can and has and will take care of the past.
A therapist has nothing to offer a person who deeply knows that God is just and punishes the wicked, and that God is love and forgives the sinner that turns and asks for forgiveness.
That is one of the great gifts of Christianity, or one of the great gifts of God to humanity: that the past can be over. Cycles of revenge and hatred, patterns of fear and defense, can end. God wants them to end.
The other gift of our faith is that knowledge is not the way, the truth, or the life. Love is.
There will never be enough knowledge to give us a rational basis for security, peace, peace of mind, happiness. Knowledge cannot deliver what we most want and need: peace, happiness. That is why the teachers in the Bible ultimately are not just smart. They are good and just.
Moses, our first prophet, knows next to nothing about what he is doing: freeing the people from slavery. He’s just devoted to following the leader: God.
When Jesus, our ultimate prophet, meets the man with the unclean spirit what happens is not information but transformation. The crazy guy knows who Jesus is—he knows that better than most of the disciples—but he doesn’t need to know what he knows, he needs to want what he wants, to be healed, and this Jesus knows because that is what love teaches. What Jesus knows about this man is known to Jesus because Jesus loves this man. Love reveals.
Jesus doesn’t argue with this attacker. He heals him. Love heals.
It’s not that Jesus is an idiot. One psychologist I read estimated Jesus’ I.Q. as 200. In the story one feels Jesus is knowingly, wisely, assessing the situation. But it is love, not knowledge, that tells him what to do: “I will heal you, I will name your demon, and by the power of the love that is who I am you will be healed.”
And because St. Paul was loved by Jesus with that same over-powering love, Paul switched from knowledge as salvation to love as salvation.
Paul was a smart, smart man on top of the best of Jewish learning. But when he saw that it only made him angry at others, he stopped. He stopped trusting his teachers and started trusting his lover: Jesus Christ.
So when Paul takes Christianity into the heart of the Roman Empire he knows how to bring that Empire down. The pillars of the universe are not Cicero, Homer, Plato, and Virgil. They are God, Jesus and Spirit. Known in the new love of Peter, James and John. Of Mary, Mary, and Mary.
So, I didn’t know enough to write a poem on the curvatures of light reflected in the molecules of water—hanging droplets of light off limbs on a turning and circling earth around a round ball of light called the sun. I didn’t. I don’t. I wish I did. But I know enough to see that moist light in your eyes! I know enough to see that light in tears of sorrow and of joy. I know enough to know that if I love that light—I will have everything I always wanted to get through knowledge and so will you.
The knowledge we need is always too little too late. The love we want is always right here, right now.
Of course it was love of the light, love of the lovely morning lights, that drew me into thinking—thinking about the sun and the earth and the curvature of water drops. Love is what makes the world go around. Gravity, said Jonathan Edwards, putting the Gospel into Newton’s laws, gravity is the love of God.
So love makes the worlds go ‘round. Love of knowledge makes it interesting. Knowledge of love makes it endurable. Knowledge of the love of God, wonderful. Let us be a teaching church of such love.
Amen.