"LOVE IS NOT ARROGANT OR RUDE"
a message by Rev. Dr. Bruce Havens
Coral Isles Church, U.C.C.
September 29, 2024
4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Luke 22: 24–27 NRSV
24 A dispute also arose among them as to which one of them was to be regarded as the greatest. 25 But he said to them, “The kings of the gentiles lord it over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. 26 But not so with you; rather, the greatest among you must become like the youngest and the leader like one who serves. 27 For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.
I once heard about two men who were good friends. They were friends even though one of them was a redneck cowhand from outside YeeHaw Junction. He lived pretty much hand-to-mouth his whole life. The other was a Boston-raised trust-fund baby whose hardest work was making sure his investments continued to support his lifestyle. They had met at church and somehow became friends.
Someone asked them once how they became friends, from such different backgrounds. The man from YeeHaw spit some tobacco on the ground and gave a harsh laugh. He said, “When I first met him I thought he was so stuck up I could hardly stand him. He was always talking about going to polo matches and drinking fine champagne it made me want to spit.”
And the Boston rich boy laughed and said, “I thought he was the rudest, crudest human being I had ever come across. First time we met he spit tobacco just like that and didn’t even offer to shake my hand. After church one day he laughed at me when I stumbled in the church parking lot and fell into a puddle. But he helped me up, brought me a towel from his truck to dry off with and took me to lunch. Nobody has ever paid for my lunch before, or even offered to. Surprised the heck out of me.”
And the old cowboy said, “when we went to lunch he explained to me when he talked about those polo matches he was trying to show me he loved horses too, and he said he knew I liked beer but he didn’t know much about it so he was trying to get me to talk about what I was interested in, I reckon.” The two men said that from then on they worked at not being so obnoxious with each other and the friendship just blossomed. Boston learned about beer and YeeHaw stopped giving him a hard time about riding with a funny saddle.
Paul, the follower of Jesus who wrote the words “love is not arrogant, or rude” could have been thinking of these two guys two thousand years before their time. The people in the church Paul was writing to could have used some lessons from the two fellows who learned how to change, how to find friendship in spite of attitudes.
All that begs the question of how we recognize if we are arrogant or rude and how to change. Because the caution here is be sure you aren’t guilty before you convict someone else. And the first rule of dealing with someone who is arrogant or rude is not to return tit for tat. Obviously, Paul would say we still need to love someone who is arrogant or rude but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a challenge. Obviously, the political realm has shown us an awful lot of arrogant and rude speech. Our role as followers of Christ starts with our personal relationships, but at the same time we cannot give in to our lesser selves in the public arena, as I have been guilty of a few times on Facebook. The incredible hate-filled actions of a few politicians has sent me off a few times.
Let me try to connect our personal relationships with our public responsibilities as Christians. I am going to try to heed Martha Spong’s encouragement to use the “Thumper Rule” more often. You know, from the movie about the deer? Thumper the rabbit shares his mother’s wisdom which was, “if ya can’t say something nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.” But at the same time Rev. Spong also reminds us that “there are times for hard words, too—times when injustice, cruelty, racism, and other bigotry must be named by people of good faith using challenging, even confrontational words.
She says, “[In such cases] ‘bad’ words can serve a good purpose; their strength can shock us into rethinking our assumptions.” She invites us to use this test: “Does a word illuminate a situation or accelerate a fight for the sake of disagreement? Are we righteously angry, or simply angry? Are our hard words a product of a ‘good treasure of the heart?’”[1] That is an important point to remember!
There’s another place where we must confront arrogance, if not also rudeness. It is the false theology of some who claim to follow Christ in regards to our earth, God’s Creation. This false theology argues that we should hasten the destruction of earth so that God will take “home” the true believers [ like them, of course – “arrogance alert!” ], and leave behind all the poor miserable nonbelieving sinners [ I assume like us! “rudeness alert?” ]. This theology ignores the truth of Scripture while appealing to non-Scriptural arguments. The odd thing is this comes mostly from people who claim to take Scripture literally. They appeal to works of fiction like the Left Behind series that are based on INTERPRETATIONS not the literal words of Scripture. So in place of that I am proud to be part of a congregation and a wider denomination that believes:
“The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” from Psalm 24. We believe that Genesis reveals God as the creator and nowhere does it authorize us to be its destroyer. We believe in the words of Nehemiah who proclaimed, “You are the Lord, you alone. You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them; and you preserve all of them; and the host of heaven worships you.”
Even the early Christian Scriptures expressed belief in God as Creator and even in Christ’s presence with God in that work:
John 1 tells us that the “Word” referring to Christ was with God in the beginning, and verse 3 tells us that “All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.”
The very final book in the Bible, Revelation proclaims “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.”
So we must not give in to a selfish arrogance that we have the right to destroy God’s creation and to put it mildly, how rude is that to even think that we have the right to take away the future of our children’s grandchildren’s great-grandchildren! Let us continue to work, to fight, to speak on and vote on behalf of creation justice. This isn’t mixing two things that should be separate. It is fulfilling our calling as those who love, and those who are following the way of Christ in doing God’s love on earth.
If we proclaim we love God, that we love creation, that we love others – not only our siblings here in this sanctuary this morning - but those in every sanctuary and beyond, including the sanctuary of all creation itself – then we must look for ways we can multiply God’s love.
Let us be the ones who multiply the power of God’s love on earth. Let us not give in to rudeness and arrogance. With love, we can multiply the blessing of creation, the blessing and spread of God’s reign of justice and love. Let us multiply the deepest love possible for God, with others. Let God’s love multiply in us and through us! AMEN.
[1] Martha Spong, “Bad Words,” Sept 23, 2024, dailydevotionals.org
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