THE SUPERFICIAL SAGA: PART IV
Will Willimon was once the chaplain at Duke University, and is now a bishop in the United Methodist Church. In a book entitled Sinning Like a Christian, he addresses the topic of anger. More specifically…he addresses the topic of how people deal with their anger. This is what he had to say:
As a pastor, I have grieved over those people – usually women – who suffer some great injustice…and who handle it by turning that pain inward upon themselves rather that toward its proper object, the perpetrator of the pain. There are those who think that Christians are not allowed to be angry. If you are Christian, you’ll always be all smiles.
I’m thinking of a woman whose husband left her without any word of warning after two years of marriage. She was terribly depressed. I asked her as her pastor, “Are you angry that your husband has done this to you?” “No,” she replied, “not really angry, just hurt.”
“Not angry?” I asked. “I think you’ve got a right to be angry with him. And maybe angry with God, as well. After all, God told you to be faithful in your marriage vows, and you were. But the other side of the bargain wasn’t kept. I would think you would be angry!” “No, just hurt,” she said. I decided then and there that depression is often the result of anger turned inward, anger inappropriately expressed, anger suppressed.
Willimon suggests that suppressed anger can result in depression. I suspect he’s right about that. But I also suspect that suppressed anger can result in something much, much worse. As many of you know, there was another school shooting in Chardon, Ohio – a community about sixty miles west of here. A teenage boy, named T.J. Lane, opened fire in the high school cafeteria, killing three of his classmates. It’s a newspaper headline that’s becoming all too common in our country these days.
What makes a person reach a point in their lives where they are willing to put their classmates to death? Many studies have been done over the years to try to obtain a psychological profile of school shooters. Those studies have reached the conclusion that no one shooter fits a definitive psychological profile. However, the studies did show that there were a few common denominators between the shooters. According to Katherine Newman, a sociology professor at Princeton, school shooters are people who feel they have failed at social integration. Other common factors include a feeling of rejection by others, being bullied by their peers, and a sense of severely suppressed anger. Like I said, suppressed anger can result in something much, much worse than depression. Keep that thought in mind as we move on.
This is the fourth in a series of sermons entitled, The Superficial Saga. It’s a sermon series on the seven deadly sins. We poke a lot of fun at sin these days. Truth be told, I don’t think we take sin very seriously. Yet God takes sin seriously. In fact, God takes sin so seriously…that he sent his Son to die on a cross in order to overcome it. Sin is not a matter to be taken lightly, as though a person could saunter into God’s presence at any time, in any mood, with any sort of life behind them…and at once perceive God there. No, the sense of God’s reality is a progressive and often laborious achievement of the soul; the soul that takes sin seriously and earnestly tries to dispel it.
Like I said, The Superficial Saga is a sermon series on the seven deadly sins. The seven deadly sins are as follows: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. Yet along with the seven deadly sins there are what we call the seven holy virtues or the seven cardinal virtues. The seven holy virtues are meant to counteract the seven deadly sins. For example, the opposite of pride is humility. The opposite of envy is love. The opposite of wrath is forgiveness. The opposite of sloth is diligence. The opposite of greed is charity. The opposite of gluttony is temperance, and the opposite of lust is chastity…or purity. You see, the way to conquer sin…is to replace it with something better.
Two weeks ago, we examined the sin of pride. There we determined that pride is a sin basically because Jesus said it was. The secret to overcoming pride is humility. We determined that the key to humility is to approach God not as the big, self-sufficient, self-reliant adults we pretend to be. Instead, we approach God as little children – frail, empty and dependent – needing a gracious and loving God in the worst possible way.
Last week we examined the sin of envy. We determined that envy is cold-hearted and cruel. Envy is basically our own sense of dissatisfaction with the way God created us. The secret to conquering envy is love. And the secret to love…is to wish what’s best for someone else.
Today we examine the sin of wrath, or anger. If it’s all the same to you I’ll be using the words interchangeably. Even though I believe there’s a basic difference between the two, I also believe that modern day semantics renders them synonymous. Thus, today we examine the sin of wrath …or anger.
In the stories we encountered at the beginning of this sermon, we saw that anger turned inward, or anger inappropriately expressed, or anger suppressed, can result in depression. It can also result in something much, much worse. Thus, there is a simple and obvious solution to our problem, is there not? Anger should not be bottled up inside. Anger should be expressed. To coin a phrase, perhaps we should let it all hang out and vent our anger at the drop of a hat. Now please, don’t turn your minds off just yet. I don’t want you to be saying to the police when they arrest you after you express your anger toward your spouse, or toward an aggressive driver, or toward some simple-minded sales clerk, that the minister at the Presbyterian Church said it was okay. You need to hear me out a just a little bit longer.
If you’re like me, you’ve heard it said that it’s okay to express your anger. I mean, even Jesus got angry. Look what he did when he chased the money changers out of the Temple in Jerusalem. It appears as though he flew into a rage, and drove them out with a whip of cords. In fact, that’s the very passage I read a moment ago from the gospel of John. I mean, if Jesus was allowed to have a temper tantrum, then why shouldn’t we be allowed as well?
I think there’s a difference between why Jesus got angry and why we typically get angry. Let’s take a look at what was really going on in the Temple in Jerusalem. The Passover of the Jews was at hand. Jewish pilgrims from all across the land would be making the trek to Jerusalem to offer their sacrifices in the Temple. They were required by Jewish law to sacrifice a cow, or a sheep or a dove…depending on their economic circumstances. Of course, you couldn’t travel all those miles and drag such an animal with you. No, you bought your sacrificial animal in the Temple courtyard. Unscrupulous businessmen were there with livestock in hand, which they sold at exorbitant prices. There were also what they called money changers in the Temple courtyard. The Temple tax – a lot like our per capita dues – was only allowed to be paid in Temple currency. In other words, if you were a Jewish person living in Rome – and you came to Jerusalem for the Passover – you could not pay your Temple tax in Roman currency. You had to have Temple currency. The money changers were there to make the exchange. The catch was that for ten dollars of Temple currency, it might cost you about a hundred dollars in Roman currency. Do you see the problem? Do you see why Jesus was so upset? These unscrupulous individuals…were making a profit at religion’s expense.
Jesus was upset about the fact that they were taking advantage of the humble people of God. His anger was aimed at protecting the powerless. That’s not where our anger is usually aimed, is it? Our anger is usually aimed at protecting ourselves, or our feelings, or a perceived violation of our rights. For us, anger typically protects the status quo of our egos. It’s far, far easier for us to get angry…than it is for us to trust that God will work things out.
Perhaps, of all things, the passage that Scott read a moment ago gives us some insight on how to deal with our anger. Let me set the scene for you. The Babylonians conquered Jerusalem in 587 B.C. A group of people from outside of Jerusalem – a group of people called the Edomites – delighted in the fall of Jerusalem. They encouraged the Babylonians to utterly destroy the city. What’s more, when persecuted Jews tried to sneak out of Jerusalem during the siege, Edomites actually captured them and sold them to the Babylonians as slaves. Now do you understand the Jews’ strong dislike for – and anger toward – the Edomites?
Listen to the last few verses of the 137th Psalm. It reads, “Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites, the day of Jerusalem’s fall, how they said, ‘Tear it down! Tear it down!’ Happy shall be they who pay you back for what you have done to us! Happy shall be they who take your little ones and dash them against a rock!”
Happy shall be they who take your little ones and dash them against a rock? That doesn’t exactly sound very Christian, does it? But listen to this. The psalm does not say that THEY are going to dash Edomite children against a rock. The psalm simply says that if we have a just God who runs the world as he should, then God ought to even the score. The Jews have been the victims of injustice…and they want God to set things right.
Anger is a natural response to injustice in the world. Anger is an acknowledgement that the world is not the way it is meant to be. Yet that anger should be expressed in conversation with God. As the apostle Paul wrote in the book of Romans, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” Vengeance, acting out our anger or even our righteous indignation, belongs to God, not us. In other words, our anger ought to be given to God as an offering when we come to that place in our lives where we are unable to fix that which afflicts us.
But there’s one more thing. Demitrius Hewlin was one of the boys who was killed in that awful school shooting in Chardon. Phyllis Ferguson was Demitrius Hewlin’s mother. In an interview with ABC News, she was asked what she would say to the shooter. She replied, “I would tell him that I forgive him…because, a lot of the time, people don’t know what they’re doing. That’s all I’d say.”
Anger is one of the seven deadly sins. The holy virtue that counteracts anger is forgiveness. Forgiveness prevents repercussions. It leaves the consequences in God’s hands. It keeps a person from reacting to the anger that seethes inside them, which clearly breaks the cycle of anger. You see, if Demetrius Hewlin’s mother lashed out, then someone else would lash out in return, then she would lash out again…It thus becomes a vicious and unholy cycle. Forgiveness breaks the cycle of anger.
A little more than ten years ago, our nation was devastated by the events of nine-eleven. Not long after that I preached a somewhat controversial sermon on forgiveness. I said something to the effect that we should forgive those who hurt us. Because if we retaliate we are likely to find our nation in a holy war that will not end. I received a couple of unsigned, nasty notes after that sermon. Someone clearly did not agree with me. To them forgiveness, in that situation, was incomprehensible.
Then I remember how swept up our nation was in the aftermath of Charles Carl Roberts’ killing of those five little Amish girls in Lancaster County. We were all amazed at how the Amish community forgave Charles Carl Roberts, and then invited his family into their circle of mourning. The Amish people forgave the killer of their children and it made national news.
You see, we believe in – and we admire – forgiveness. It’s when it touches a bit too close to home that we object. It’s when we are asked to forgive something ourselves that we become upset. Yet here’s the point. When we are wronged, and we lash out in anger, it only invites reprisal. When we are wronged, and we forgive, we give peace a chance. Give peace a chance. Amen.
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