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The Episcopal Diocese of Lexington Love First, Knowledge Second: Baccalaureate Address to Berea College Class of 2005 May 22, 2005 By The Rt. Rev. Stacy F. Sauls
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I think of my mother as
something of a trailblazer. She
did not have a college degree herself, having dropped out of the night
school of the University of Georgia to marry my father.
She never went back. But
she did want a career for herself and she did go to work.
She worked almost all her life.
She was never, except for an isolated year here and there, a
stay-at-home mom. Most of her
career was in banking, as a teller. She
could count money faster than anybody’s business and could balance a
checkbook down to the penny every time.
And she had a great deal of people smarts.
She enjoyed working with the public.
And she worked with all sorts of people as colleagues at the bank,
many of whom, though younger, would quickly advance beyond her because
they had a college degree. It
was not until I myself had earned a Bachelor’s degree, and I’m sure
had proudly revealed something of all the newly acquired knowledge that I
now had, that she revealed something to me about what that felt like. “All
college graduates are alike,” she said.
“They think they know everything.”
And so I speak particularly to the graduates among you, to the
newly minted class of 2005, fresh from exams and final papers and theses
and projects. I speak to you
who are only hours away from graduating with a very somber warning.
You have in your possession something that is very dangerous
indeed, something that can be, quite frankly, deadly.
After four or more hard years of working to attain it, you have
probably never given it credit for the danger that it is.
That most dangerous of things in your possession, my dear friends,
is what you know.
Let me explain. It was
only 600 years ago that we knew the earth was the center of the universe
and the sun rotated around it. It
was only 500 years ago that we knew that it was impossible to reach the
east by sailing west. It was only 300 years ago that we knew that kings ruled by
the divine providence of God almighty.
It was only 150 years ago that we knew that slavery was an
institution ordained by God for the good of all, including those enslaved. It was only 50 years ago that we knew that God intended the
races to be separated. It was
only 40 years ago, at least in my church, that we knew that people who had
been divorced could never be remarried.
It was only 30 years ago that we knew, at least in my church, that
leadership in the church was intended by God only for men.
It was only 20 years ago that a major American religious leader
pronounced his knowledge that God does not hear the prayer of a Jew. It was only yesterday that we were taught the knowledge that
material success is a sign of God’s favor and blessing.
It was only yesterday that we knew that America was especially
beloved by God. It was only
yesterday that we knew that people who are constitutionally oriented to
the same sex instead of the opposite sex were abominations in the sight of
God, a threat to marriage as the foundation of civilization, and unworthy
of being protected by basic civil rights.
And here is the most dangerous part of all.
Do you know why we knew all those things—that the earth was the
center of the universe, that segregation was God’s will, that some
people’s life long love is an abomination to God—because the Bible
told us so.
It is the danger of what we know that scares me to death.
As a boy, growing up in the American South of the 1950s and 1960s,
I cherished the visits we made from our home in Atlanta to my grandparents’
farm in what was then rural Georgia.
One of the things I cherished most was the mid-day meal, which was
called dinner, never lunch, that my grandmother prepared for my
grandfather, my uncles, and the hired help working in the fields.
She would ring the large bell in the yard, audible even in the most
distant part of the farm, at about 11:30.
Everyone would come to the house.
My grandfather and my uncles would come in, wash up, and sit down
at the table. The hired men, whom we called “colored,” came to the
house, washed up at the spigot in the yard, and sat on the steps outside.
It was all I had known. It
was never questioned. It was
just a known fact that black folks did not come in to eat at the table
with white folks. And what appalls me now, much more than the actual situation,
is that it never occurred to me question what I knew.
It never occurred to me to question what I knew about how the world
was until I learned that there was a man from my home town who had
questioned some of the things I knew the Bible said, based, of all things,
on his faith in God. I had trouble appropriating that at first.
It is funny, isn’t it, how often we attribute what we know to the
Bible when the Bible is a book about faith and not about knowledge at all.
At least, that is what St. Paul said.
“Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the
necessary knowledge” (1
Cor. 8:1b-2). It is those
with knowledge that Paul rebukes. He
might as well have said, they think they know everything.
He must not have been writing to the graduating class of Corinth
College. Whatever rights come
from the knowledge you have gained, whatever privileges ascertain to the
degree you are about to receive, which are more considerable than you may
yet realize, all of them are to be laid down out of love for the building
up of the community. The fact
that the Bible is the source of the knowledge makes no difference at all.
Here is the principle to which I implore you, not as a matter of
practical advice, but as a matter of faith.
Love first, knowledge second.
As a matter of faith, love precedes truth.
To be godly, all knowledge yields to love.
For whatever else the word may say, even the word is subject to the
reality that the Word of God has been made flesh in Jesus, and that Word
of God, Jesus Christ, is love incarnate.
Everything yields to that. Every
knee shall bow. Every tongue
confess. Every heart make
room. Everything yields to
love.
All knowledge must yield to love. The 18th and 19th
century’s knowledge that the Bible said that slavery was ordained by God
was subject to the questions that faith asked in light of love.
And indeed it was faith that asked that question in the person of
leaders like Frederick Douglas and Harriett Tubman, and John G. Fee.
It is in the best of the tradition of Berea College that knowledge,
even that which claims the Bible as its source, be questioned by faith and
subject to love. The
knowledge of my parents and grandparents that God had said in the Bible
that the races were to be separate was questioned out of faith in the
interests of love. Leaders
like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., and even before them, the men
and women of Berea College who challenged the State of Kentucky all the
way to the Supreme Court over whether black students and white students
could go to school together questioned what was known out of faith in the
light of love. Even our
knowledge that women cannot lead the church is subject to being questioned
out of faith in the light of love. Even
our knowledge that people who are oriented to the same sex rather than
opposite sex are despised by God is subject to being questioned out of
faith in the light of love. Knowledge,
my dear friends, is not eternal. It
changes every day. Only love
endures.
My dear young men and women of the Class of 2005, there is no
knowledge—none—that is not subject to faith and love.
Knowledge left unquestioned by faith, like the colored men sitting
outside on the steps, is a very dangerous thing indeed.
There is nothing you have been taught, or that you will ever learn,
that does not need to be questioned by faith in the light of love. Knowledge is always subject to faith and the standard of
faith is love. And whatever
sins against love, you may be assured, cannot be true.
Now I want to be careful not to be misunderstood.
I am not for a minute advocating that you check your mind on the
outside of the church door on the way in.
Nor am I advocating that you check your faith at the inside of the
church door on the way out. Just
the opposite. God gave you a mind. I
am convinced God intended you to use it.
Jesus summarized the greatest commandment of the Old Testament as
to love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind.
I am convinced God meant it. I
am saying that there is nothing you know, including nothing you know from
the Bible, that is not subject to being questioned by faith because it is
faith that saves you and not knowledge.
And faith is not about what you know.
It is about how much you love.
“Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.
Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary
knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him.”
We hear so much about the Bible these days.
The Bible gets used for some really horrible things in the name of
what we say we know. It
always has, just like the picketers who visited Berea not that long ago as
well as some of my churches proclaiming the most hateful things in the
name of God about God’s gay and lesbian children.
Jesus, on the night before he died gave his disciples a new
commandment. It is the one
and only thing that Jesus ever said that he said was a commandment.
It is this, “Love one another” (Jn. 13:34).
Love one another. I
wonder why we aren’t trying to have that commandment put that up on
courthouse walls. I wonder if
the reason is that it might call into question just a little too much of
what we think we know. Be proud of your accomplishment, just as my mother was proud of mine 30 years ago. But do not think it means more than it does, just as she didn’t. Life and salvation are not in the end about what you know. If you think they are, all the knowledge you have now and all that you ever will have will be deadly to your soul. Life and salvation are about how much you love. All the knowledge in the world matters nothing next to it. Love first, knowledge second. Love precedes truth. Know that, and all the other will fit into its proper place and work for the good of all. Thank you.
Other Links: Desmond Tutu to Speak at Berea College Commencement Posted May 26, 2005
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