Dear God Lovers:

I seldom experience past sermon preparation bleeding over into my Monday brain—by Sunday afternoon I’ve pretty much exhausted all interest in that morning’s texts, and I attempt to create some headspace to welcome the following week’s passages. But yesterday’s epistle reading from 1 Corinthians 8.1-13 has left some spiritual residue about which I have been musing.

For those who were there or who listened online, the focus of my sermon was the conclusion of the first verse of the passage, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” These words were convicting enough to wrestle out a full sermon. But verse 2 is equally if not more startling. Paul writes, “Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge”.

Linger over this thought. If you claim you know something, by that very claim you demonstrate how you do not yet have necessary knowledge. (This mirrors what I have been thinking the past few months about the conflict in Gaza—if you think you have a solution, you do not fully comprehend the problem.) But Paul is not confining his statement to complex issues like 21st century Middle East peace. Paul claims, and this is the piece I find extremely discomforting, that anytime you think you’re in the know, you’re proving your ignorance of what is truly important. Ouch! The challenge for the church, or more pointedly the challenge for me, is my reputation. On what do I base my value, my importance to the community, my uniqueness above others? If I desire to be lauded for my great knowledge, Paul dismisses the basis of significance as proof that I do not yet understand what’s going on.

Paul’s kicker follows in verse 3, “But anyone who loves God is known by him.” I initially took this phrase as a pastoral throwaway. If you’re puffed up without love, then God does not really know you. But the power is in the orientation of the preposition. “Known by [God]” is not about God’s knowledge of us; that’s constant and complete. Known by God is how the world perceives our affiliations and ultimate values. If we love God, Paul asserts, then we shall be known by that fact alone, not by our command of human intellect, or secular insight, but by our love of God.

It reminds me of Harvey, the movie starring Jimmy Stewart. There’s a scene where Stewart’s character, Elwood Dowd, is accused of always being kind, even to those who were mean to him. Dowd responds, “Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be’ – she always called me Elwood – ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.”

Naturally, I don’t mean to reduce the Christian life to the addled world of invisible pooka rabbits any more than I would reduce the world-altering power of love to mere pleasantness. But I must confess, Elwood’s mother captured something of the apostle’s point in 1 Corinthians 8. For what are we known? Insight? Smarts? Knowledge? Recognition for these falls far short of Paul’s deep desire for the Christian community. What makes Elwood’s mom so wise is how she understood that, in this world, smart and pleasant are often at war; or as Paul put it, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.”

What might it mean for us to be known as the lovers of God? It is, after all, the first and greatest commandment. What too might it mean to hold love’s capacity as a higher standard than any other category of human achievement?

Musing over the residue of past sermon preparations, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor