Sermon: The Rev. Canon Charles LaFond – "Anger", February 13, 2011
Matthew 5:21-37
The work of being a Christian is the work of becoming our best selves. We are so over stimulated with words and images that we, as a culture sit in life like an over-caffeinated gangster facing our front door with a gun in each hand – ready to blast anyone who enters.
But God has created us and God has an image of what we can become. We further believe that God is available through prayer, through the Eucharist and through our friends and mentors so that we can be formed like clay of a potter’s wheel – into the form we were intended to become. The worrisome thing about this formation is that I quite like to treat the Bible as a buffet – picking and choosing what I do and what I leave to saintlier people to do. And anger is a hard thing to give up. Anger and coffee and butter and onion rings. When I am wronged, I quite like to warm myself by the fires of my own resentments. I hold my mistreatment like Gollum holds his presssssioussss ring. Stroking it with the satisfaction that I am right and that my anger is miiiiiine. Then this Jesus comes along and tells me to forgive and to let go of my anger for my own wellness and well as for the wellness of the world. Well, I am not quick to respond.
“…if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment…” says the Gospel. Jesus gets angry in scripture and so too does God. But Jesus’ anger is over the mistreatment of others and not for the mistreatment of himself. That seems to be the dividing line. Jesus seems to be less concerned with having anger and more concerned with what one does with it. As Jesus models the expression of anger, Jesus has anger for justice and not for personal passion.
Anger for others propels us to change systems. Anger for ourselves must be put back on the shelves of life’s supermarket. This is hard, because if you are anything like me I want revenge and not reconciliation. The question on the table of our Spiritual lives is to what kind of anger are we giving ourselves over?
Jesus got angry. A great example is in Mark’s gospel, Mark 3: verse five,( not today’s Gospel, but we will get to it!) Jesus is in the temple with priests and lawyers who are trying to trick him. He wants to heal a man with a withered hand. When he calls to the man he senses what the priests and layers are thinking and asks them the question they were thinking: will Jesus blaspheme God by healing (working) on the Sabbath? When Jesus challenges their judgment of him – their holding of the law as higher than kindness and goodness, our scripture says “He looked around at them with anger…” Jesus then heals the man just to infuriate the establishment (this is one of my favorite moments in all of scripture! ) The next thing the priests and lawyers do is begin the plans to kill Jesus twelve chapters later. In Mark’s gospel, Jesus’ anger begins the process towards his death and the priest’s anger ends the process.
It is hard, therefore, to tart up the gospel with valentines as all sweetness and light when central to the gospel is Jesus’ anger at what the Roman empire and the religious leaders are doing in their smug, self-satisfying and self-serving oppression of the people Jesus loves and has come to liberate – one way or another.
In a June, 2010 article in Science Daily, research on brain activity in the context of anger has disproven earlier theories about what happens when we get angry. It used to be thought that, based on limited pictures of activity in the human brain, we humans tended to pull away from a person or persons with whom we were angry. In recent, more accurate brain imaging, the area of the brain which seems most active is NOT the area indicating withdrawing – rather the area which lights up like a Christmas tree is the area of the brain associated with advancement towards the person or persons with whom we are angry.
"Normally when we get angry we show a natural tendency to get closer to what made us angry to try to eliminate it," concludes the author of this study. Eliminate. Anger will easily lead to violence – in streets and in kitchens – in parliament and in marriages. When we are angry, we feel there is injustice and we feel that the injustice will end if the perpetrator of the injustice will go away – not realizing that the source of our anger can be transformed rather than be annihilated and may be there for our conversion into our best selves.
We just saw this work itself out in Egypt. What happened to the crowds when the Egyptian President Mubarak refused to leave his office in a speech widely reported to bring the opposite decision? The crowds swelled and moved from the square – down the street to the President’s Palace in peaceful protest. It was only when the massive crowds got close, that the president fled to his seaside villa and a new regime was announced – an announcement which may change the course of the history of democracy.
It is humbling to see a few hundred thousand Muslims acting in such a Christian way when only a few hundred years ago, Christians were ripping through the middle east murdering and pillaging in the Crusades – angry and murdering for Jesus.
The question on the table of our Spiritual lives is to what kind of anger are we giving ourselves over?
So what does this mean in our own lives?
In his book Made for Goodness, Desmond Tutu, reminds us that the practice of daily prayer – a specific time set aside every day to face God and face ourselves is essential to the kind of decision-making we need around anger – to know when to fight and when to forgive. God wants to help us with our anger but God needs us to stop, turn and listen in order to make us new. Tutu reminds us that Jesus used the metaphor of the shepherd to remind his followers that they have a way to differentiate their voices and wrong voices from God’s voice.
In the time in which Jesus lived the sheep that belonged to a village were penned together over night. In the morning, each shepherd would come to the enclosure’s gate and call for his sheep and lead them to pasture for the day. The sheep could distinguish between all the shepherd’s voices and would ONLY follow their shepherd’s voice. In our daily lives when adrenaline rises in our body like the mercury in a thermometer and anger courses through our veins and rushes into our minds like water from a crumbling dam, God is there to channel our anger so that we can be our best selves.
God stands ready in our lives to use our righteous anger for the poor and the marginalized to change systems and the anger we generate from self-righteous indignation God reforms from acid to acceptance and from the killing advance to the kind withdrawal into that warm, soft lap in which He strokes our hair and tells us that all will be well, all things shall be well. All manner of thing shall be well.