Sermons

In 1998 we moved into a new home. Not a new-to-us home, a newly built home. It made me nervous. Every ding, scrape was as if we were ruining the house. When something went wrong, it caused a lot of anxiety; it was supposed to be pristine, perfect.

This foolishness collapsed on our first Thanksgiving in the new home. The stove broke.  Brand new Jenn Air stove with a grill top and downdraft fan just didn't work.  The turkey was ruined, the meal was something an imaginative child could use as inspiration for a memoir in the future. 

Kathy called the number on the warranty card.  After a long time on the phone, she spoke to me in a whisper with her hand over the phone, "they will get us a new stove in the next two weeks, there is a delivery fee, and an installation fee."  She looked as sad as the meal.  I said, "let me talk to them."  After a brief conversation, I hung up.  Kathy said, "what happened?"  I said, "the stove will arrive tomorrow, no delivery fee, no installation fee, and they are sending us a fifty-dollar gift card."  "How?" She said.  "I used my unhappy-to-be-me voice."  "Ohhh," was her response.

Perhaps you have this voice.  The voice that clears the decks, sends migratory birds in a different path.  For me it is not a shout or a rant, it is just a very clear, focused anger which leaves little room for interpretation, negotiation.  This voice gets things done, sets things into motion.  I think the phrase of common parlance is "kicks butt and takes names."

If you are not the target of this voice, the chances are you admire such focused, clear anger and what it can do.  You might not only admire it, but also encourage it, trust it.  Anger in our culture is a trusted confidence.  We use strong words with anger like right and justification.  "You have a right to be angry" or "your anger is justified."  That we do not debate such claims is a measure of the confidence we have in anger.

When I did research for a little book on anger, two surprises emerged.  The first was that there was little to no research, especially in terms of philosophy or theology, on the topic of anger.  Paul said, "be angry but do not sin."  Someone said, "don't let the sun go down on your anger."  And some delusional person said, "married couples should never go to bed angry." It was as if Western culture said, "well, that will do it.  Nothing else need be said."  For all our questioning and critiquing and inquiring, this seemed a bit thin.  Surprised me.

The second surprise was how angry people get if you question anger, threaten the trust we have.  People got angry when I shared the Buddhist perspective that anger is one of the chief poisons of the soul.  Anger, desire, delusion poison the soul.  Ruin it. To suggest that anger was a poison, a bad thing, oh my!  Really torqued off some people. Which in turn made me curious.  Why did anger have such power?  How could it be beyond question? 

In the Gospel of Matthew Jesus simply says, "don't be angry."  And then he implies, anger destroys your life, jeopardizes all things.  What is more, in Matthew, the direction, "don't be angry" is the first teaching of Jesus where he instructs his disciples.  Don't be angry is the first direction he gave for discipleship.

A curious aside.  When the King James Bible was translated, the teaching of Jesus "don't be angry" was amended.  The Westminster divines added a line or qualified the teaching of Jesus.  After the instruction "do not be angry" they added "without just cause."  While this is not the source of our confusion or confidence in anger, it is a great example of how we see it.  Don't be angry, unless you should, unless you need to, or if you feel justified.  The inserted qualification pretty much says, nah, I was kidding, you can be angry. 

In our lesson today from Luke, he is mirroring Matthew in that the first direction being offered in the Gospel is about anger.  Luke makes anger the first question of discipleship, the first step as it were.  To do this he crafts a powerful and complete picture of anger. In our lesson today we can see all three forms of anger. 

While anger has many, many triggers—lots of things get us angry, rile us up, there are three primary forms from whence anger comes.  The primary forms are threat, surprise, and disappointment. Threat is the easiest to see. Simply driving a car in New Jersey where your life is threatened by others weaving in traffic, going too fast or slow, people reading their phone on Route One.  Soon enough you are shouting and honking, swearing or making hand gestures.  Anger emerges from threat.

Surprise and disappointment can be a bit more subtle.  But when things are not how you believed, when the world is not how you thought, when your core definitions of justice, truth, fairness are called into question, we get angry.  You can hear it when people say, "I was shocked!"  Or "can you believe they would do this?"  When the things we trust and believe are questioned, challenged, we get angry.

Disappointment is the same, but the opposite.  Surprise is about the past, how things are or have always been but then are not; disappointment is that things in the future didn't happen, expectations are not met.  We are "let down" or feel hurt because what we hoped for, dreamed of, imagined didn't turn out. 

Luke's account of Jesus in his hometown has all three of these in very provocative expressions. 

First and foremost is that Jesus is not what people expected of the Messiah.  This is the carpenter's kid.  How is he the one who sets the captives free?  I can remember when he was just an odd kid.  The people of Nazareth were a bit disappointed.  This was too much to take in, too far to reach.  This didn't fit in the box of their hope.

Next, Jesus shocks them.  He recounts the stories of the widow of Nain and Naaman the leper.  Each story is a poke in the eye.  Jesus challenges the trust the people have in God.  You think God is fair, God is just, God is on your side, well, not really.  All the people dying during three years of famine, the one to be spared is a foreigner?  All the sick and the suffering people in the land, the one the prophet heals is an enemy general?  In other words, your definition of God is wrong. If you shock people with such claims, they tend to get angry.

But what is key to this is the third form of anger: threat.  Jesus says, the kingdom of God is here the captive are set free the poor hear the good news the hungry are fed, and this is happening right now with me.  The boy-now-a-man has been touring and teaching, healing and working miracles, and the hometown folks say, "no.  We know you.  Prove it."  That Jesus not only doesn't back down, but challenges their faith, surprises and shocks them, but that he does so without fear, this is so threatening they seek to kill him.  They fall into a rage Luke says.

This account of Luke is a catalogue of anger.  He has all three forms: disappointment, surprise, and threat. And then, as if that were not enough, he implies in the most artful way the path of freedom.  Jesus passed through them.  Jesus walks through rage.  He moves beyond it.  There is a sea of rage threatening his life, we can see anger in all its forms, and Jesus walks through, moves on.

For us and our time, the idea of moving beyond anger is either nonsense or threatening.  How can you move beyond anger?  Like Jesus in Nazareth, it seems other worldly, some sort of mind trick.  He just passes through their rage. The Seinfeld show offered this question in the character of Lloyd Braun and his mantra, "serenity now."  When something makes you angry, you simply say, "serenity now."  Of course this leads to madness and rage.  Suppressing anger, like suppressing any emotion, is not a good thing.  Thank you, Dr. Freud. What Jesus teaches and Luke crafts so well is not suppressing anger, but going past it, moving beyond.

I don't possess many skills, but one of my greatest abilities is to offend Methodists.  I am not sure why.  It's a gift I suppose, making Methodists angry. 

One such Methodist was in my office.  He was a Methodist pastor and he was angry with me.  He shouted and raged.  I apologized for offending him the week before.  (I was right, but I apologized anyway.) He started again and raged some more.  I apologized again, suggesting my lack of tact was lamentable.  When he started down the path of anger a third time, I suggested to him that two apologies for one offence was already more than enough, he got even angrier and stormed out.  It’s a gift.

I offer this anecdote of Methodist rage because it is such a clear example of the use and abuse of anger.  My clergy colleague was angry, and he was abusing me with his anger.  He threatened with his tone, he derided with his disappointment, he sought to injure me with his shock.  He was someone who trusted anger, who used it to intimidate and coerce.  Having studied anger for a few years, he was like an open book, a textbook example of how to abuse anger.  He is not unique in this.  We all do it.  Give people a piece of our mind?  No.  Intimidate them with anger, yes.  Coerce them with guilt, yes.  We all abuse anger.

Yet, he was also a clear example of what it means to move beyond anger and to use it in a way that is not abusive.  He didn't mind you.  At least not that day in my office he didn't.  But if he had moved beyond it, he would have been led to ask, why am I angry?  What has threatened me, shocked me, disappointment me?  If I were to guess, his answer would have been embarrassment.  He was afraid of it.  When we disagreed in a meeting, I didn't back down, concede.  What he claimed wasn't true.  I knew this and said this. This embarrassed him.  I know this because in his rage he kept circling back to the theme of "in my church" and "in my meeting."  His anger was triggered by the fear of embarrassment.

If you move beyond anger, the trust of it, the confidence, if you move beyond the belief that anger gets things done, keeps people in line, if you move beyond the abuse of others, you will find its great use: anger uncovers our fears.  This is its true use.  Nothing is more powerful to expose and display our fears.

When you get angry, pause.  Wait.  Don't suppress anger.  Serenity now mantras are bad.  No.  Feel the anger.  Let it arise.  Trust it as your emotion, your feeling. Resist the temptation to abuse others with it. Don't coerce, don't shame, don't rant.  You are not justified in those no matter how much you believe it.

In the pause, in the waiting, ask of your anger, what threatens me, what am I afraid of?  Trust me.  All of a sudden the red of rage becomes a soft blue because you have moved beyond anger, you are beyond its poison. In this you have taken a step on the path of discipleship. You are following Jesus beyond anger.  Amen.

Speaker: Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

April 14, 2024

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