LOVE is? NOT RUDE

Well, it's a lovely day. A beautiful day in the neighborhood. Yes, I record this this morning. It's early. The sun is just peeping over the horizon, and you may, in fact, hear a dubs cooling in the background, or we have a family of red-wing blackbirds here around their house, and they have a particular trilling sound that's pretty from our perspective. And on occasion, you'll hear cars no doubt going by as people get up early on a money morning to head for work. Want to come back to that hymn of love in 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul is just talking to folks in a town, a party town, in southern Greece, where self-centeredness, apparently, has sort of gotten out of hand. So he talks to him about love. Some thought has been given to this by scholars, and they call it the hymn of love. But you know it, many of you know it. Here's the first part again. Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It's not proud. It does not dishonor others. It is not self-seeking. It's not easily angered. Keeps no record of wrongs. I like how Eugene Peterson says it in his paraphrase. The message, love never gives up, cares for others more than for self. Does not want what it doesn't have. Love doesn't strut. Doesn't have a swelled head. Doesn't force itself on others. Isn't always me first. What I find fascinating, particularly fascinating about this text, is that it tells us eight things that love is or does, and they're all positive. And it also tells us eight things that love does not do, and those are also positive. When you get down to verse 5, it says this, love does not dishonor others. Honours an interesting thing. Honour is one person saying to another or an institution saying to a person, you have value back in the day when I was president of small college, on occasion we would give honorary degrees. And an honorary degree is a degree, most often a doctorate of some kind, is a degree that recognizes practice or the practical work that someone has done, even though they might not have done the academic work. And one day I was asking our academic dean, why do we do the honorary degree or what's the value of giving an honorary degree? And he had a very wise thing to say. He said, when we give an honorary degree, Dick, what we're really doing is bringing honor to ourselves because we are associating ourselves with someone who has done something of significant goodness and help to the world. And so there's a very real way in which we get in on that glory. I thought that was an interesting thing. You can rarely, if ever, go wrong by honoring someone. I have several friends who are really good at bringing honor to people. It doesn't cost us anything except the time to think about it. But it is such a delightful gift to give. And here it approaches in this text, it approaches honor from the other direction. Love does not dishonor others. Some of the older language used in other translations says that love is not unseemly. That's kind of a classic old word. Or how about these options? Love is not disgraceful insulting or rude. I would submit that we dishonor probably more often with our words than with our actions. There's this thought that out of the fullness of the heart, a person speaks. And when a person is rude, insulting with words, if it were a physical act, it'd be walking up to someone and slapping them in the face. Just a few examples. When we criticize people verbally, in particular, we devalue them. We criticize people because we're trying to get them to change. We criticize people to protect our egos or place blame. Oftentimes instead of addressing our own issues, sometimes when words get out of hand, we say, well, I'm just defending myself. You know, it's defensive language. My experience would be that that might be true. It really gets out of hand when we go on offense with that kind of language. So being rude or insulting is negative period. And why is negative speech so harmful? Someone has put it this way. Negative speech is loaded with judgment. Takes a lot of energy to make judgments about people. Negative speech is full of assumptions that are often wrong. I have spent tremendous amount of time, inordinate amount of time, acting on the basis of assumptions, about a bunch of things. And then I have to rewind, do a do-over, ask forgiveness, say, I'm sorry, back up. Negative speech is subjective. It's just my view of things. Often one sided. When I use harsh words, they have serious and lasting emotional effect. You have heard me on this broadcast, talk about a piece of prose by Carl Sandberg. And he talks about proud words. I used to keep it on my desk back in the day. Watch out how you use proud words. They wear long boots. They walk off proud. They can't hear you calling. You can't get them back. Proud or harsh words have serious and lasting emotional effects. And finally, it just perpetuates negative things and resentment and distrust. It's easy for me, I think, to understand why society today feels divided. A lot of it has to do with harsh language, rude or insulting language. And it's pervasive, isn't it? But it's an absolutely non-effective or ineffective way to inspire change or solve anything. When we can't have conversations, we end up shouting at each other. And it's a total waste of time. So coming back to the positive love doesn't have space for rudeness or insult. And the primary reason, as I think about it, for why it doesn't work is when I'm rude to you. It tells you exactly who I am. I just like to encourage us to think about that today. It's not love because love wants the best for the other. Love does not want to diminish the other. So give that some thought. We'll be back in a while, a few days to pick it up and keep going. This love thing will get us along the way if we're not careful. That's it. Take both saying, God bless. I'm out. We'll catch you later. Bye-bye.