The Seven Deadlies - Anger

Ephesians 4:17-32 (NRSV)
Now this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer live as the Gentiles live, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart. They have lost all sensitivity and have abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.
That is not the way you learned Christ! For surely you have heard about him and were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus. You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.

I don’t know what your experience of this sermon series on the Seven Deadly Sins has been like, but I have found that each week, as I began to explore the sin that is coming up, I have said to myself, “Oh…that’s mine. That’s the one that I’ve got to deal with.” So the first week, I was certain that the besetting problem of my life was pride. But then last week we talked about envy and how insidious it is and how deeply it works into the fabric of our lives and I said, “Oh, no. Envy is definitely my problem.” And now, it’s anger. Anybody want to raise your hand for this one? I’m ready to.

You know there are a lot of folks who feel that this may be our country’s greatest sin. We live in an angry society. When people in the rest of the world think of the United States they think of guns and the largest, best-quipped military in the world. While we pray that these are never used unjustly, to many people these are signs of aggression and unchecked anger. And we know how often we face tragedies like workplace shootings and school shootings where anger spirals out of control. Our sports like football and the swagger of basketball are brash and “in your face.” Our entertainment is built on anger as well. TV shows like Survivor and The Apprentice are built on the drama of people becoming vengeful and trying to “eliminate” the competition. Rap music is full of aggressive and violent images. And our movies like The Patriot, Kill Bill, and any Jean Claude Van Damme film are bloody celebrations of revenge carried out by innocent people who were terribly wronged.

Of course anger can take less obvious forms as well. There is the quiet destruction of anger turned inward. How often have we heard about a long-suffering victim of abuse turning to drugs or alcohol or self-mutilation to try to cope with anger they can’t express? Or perhaps the anger turned inward becomes an ulcer or a heart condition or obesity or depression, which someone once described as anger without enthusiasm. Or maybe we express our anger is some passively aggressive form.

A wife and husband were discussing their anger once as part of a marriage enrichment exercise and the husband said, “You know, when I get mad with you I go chop wood. Somehow, just getting out there with an ax just really helps me let go of my frustrations. How do you deal with your anger?”

The wife said, “I usually clean the toilet.”

“Clean the toilet? How does that help?”

“I use your toothbrush.”

There are some healthy and unhealthy ways to deal with anger, obviously. But some of us have a hard time accessing that anger and I’m one of them. I remember going through my internship and chaplaincy training in seminary and what I heard over and over again was, “Alex, you’ve got to find some way to get in touch with your anger. You never get mad. That’s not healthy. You’ve got to sense when you’re feeling upset and express it.” You know, that really made me…angry. (So I guess it worked.) But I came from a family where it wasn’t O.K. to be angry and it was an emotion I had to come to terms with and learn to at least understand how it was affecting me.

Will Willimon, the United Methodist bishop of the North Alabama Conference, writes about a time when he was talking to woman whose husband had left her with no warning after only two years of marriage. He asked her, “Are you angry that your husband did this to you?”

She said, “No, I’m not really angry just hurt.”

“Not angry?”

“No, just hurt.” She was a bit like me. Didn’t think it was acceptable to be angry.

So Willimon, who was her pastor, said, “You know, I think you’ve got a right to be angry with him. And maybe angry with God, also. 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,” she said. “Just hurt.” Willimon said that he decided then and there that anger suppressed and denied could do some devastating things.[i]

But if Christians are confused, it’s because we’re getting some mixed messages about anger. If we go to the Bible, it seems that there is some confusion about what God asks of us. It even seems like God is confused. On the one hand there are some clear indications of how devastating anger is to our relationship with God. Jesus’ teaching about anger in the Sermon on the Mount is so strong that there is no room for questioning. This is from Matthew 5, verses 21 and 22: "You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, 'You shall not murder'; and 'whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.' [This was from the law we find in the Old Testament.] But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, 'You fool,' you will be liable to the hell of fire.” [NRSV] Now if you read that in the King James Version of the Bible, you will see that it says, “if you are angry without cause,” but the earliest Greek texts of Matthew don’t have that phrase. It was probably added by people who wanted to soften what Jesus was saying. But there is nothing soft about Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. He wanted us to hear clearly that it wasn’t just adultery but lust, it wasn’t just theft but greed, it wasn’t just murder or hateful acts, but anger itself that was the danger to our souls.

Robert Thurman says, in his book called Anger, that what Jesus seems to say here is that anger is not natural to us as human beings. We have a tendency to view it that way. When my growth group was telling me to get in touch with my anger…when Will Willimon was trying to get his parishioner to ‘fess up to her anger…there is an assumption there that this passion is so natural to us that we need to express it somehow. But that is not what Jesus says here. Thurman says the assumption here is that “the human’s nature is social, made for cooperation and tolerance and gentleness, and anger is therefore a harsh distortion of that nature.”[ii] Anger distorts who we are and makes us less than we are supposed to be.

It’s for the same reason that the Bible tells us that vengeance…do you know the rest of this quote?...it comes in several versions in the Bible, but you most often hear it from Romans…”Vengeance is…mine, says the Lord, I will repay.” [Rom. 12:19, NRSV]. Don’t give into your own anger and desire to harm others. It is God’s role to execute justice because God knows how easy it is for us to have our ideas about what is just perverted by our own anger.

Think about Star Wars. If you’ve seen the movie series you know that this is the reason Anakin Skywalker becomes the evil villain Darth Vader. He is motivated, initially, by a sense of justice. As a young child taken into the care of wise teachers, we see his promise and potential and the hint that he might be “the One” who will restore balance to the universe. But the more he experiences slights and frustrations the more he gives into dark temptations. The scene in which we know he will go too far comes in Episode II, or, if you are as old as me, Episode V since it’s the 5th movie released. Going back to his home planet he discovers that his mother has been kidnapped by Tusken raiders, these strange sand people of the desert. When he discovers her she is in very poor condition and dies. In his anger Anakin takes vengeance himself and slaughters all of the Tusken people in the camp. He comes back and says, “I killed them. I killed them all. They're dead, every single one of them. And not just the men, but the women and the children, too. They're like animals, and I slaughtered them like animals. I HATE THEM!”[iii] Once Anakin has given in to his hate, there is no question what he will become. The words of Anakin’s wise master Yoda from Episode I haunt him, “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”[iv] Once Anakin becomes Darth Vader, there is suffering for everyone.

But I said that we Christians have some mixed messages about anger. We know how destructive anger is, but we also hear in the Bible that it’s OK to be angry. When Paul writes to the Ephesian Christians in the passage we read this morning he says, “Be angry…but do not sin.” That suggests that there is a kind of anger that is acceptable to God. In fact we are even encouraged to be angry, though Paul is quick to put it in the context of a community where people build one another up. Just a few verses later he tells the Ephesians not to store up bitterness and wrath and anger. It seems that flashes of passion are to be expected, but the Ephesians should temper them with the more important goal of being a faithful community known for its love and truth. This is why Paul gives that famous admonition that we should not let the sun go down on our anger, which is not just good advice for married couples, but for everyone.

It’s not just Paul who gives us these mixed messages, though. It’s Jesus, too. The other passage we read this morning has Jesus going into the Temple and, in a fit of righteous rage, throwing the moneychangers out. This is not the “softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling,” Jesus. This is the Jesus who will not be satisfied until the earth conforms to the vision of God. Here anger is put at the service of the kingdom.

This is the God we know from the Hebrew Scriptures…the God whose anger burns against injustice, who knocks down Babel’s tower and smites Egypt’s firstborn…the God who destroys Sodom and Gomorrah and will not tolerate the prophets of false Gods. This is an angry God and one that we have a hard time reconciling with our understanding of what is just and right. What do we do with a God like this?

When I finally got in touch with my anger, I really related to this vision of God. Looking around me at the injustices I was seeing in the inner-city in Dallas, I discovered a prophetic voice. I was angry at a city that let miles of public housing go unoccupied while homeless people filled the streets. I was angry at neighborhoods that were torn up by internal divisions that sapped their ability to deal with the real issues they faced. I was angry at families that let drugs and violence tear them apart so that children came to me with nowhere else to go and suffered scars that they would carry for the rest of their lives. I was angry at probation officers who called the youth they worked with “throwaway kids” and angry at churches that wouldn’t claim them as their own.

I was really angry and it made me a great student. After a year out serving in the streets of Dallas, I came back to seminary for my last year with what I thought was a clear mind and many an ax to grind. I knew what God wanted and I was ready to fight for it. My papers that year were filled with passion and fire and a desire to change the world to look like God’s kingdom. And I wasn’t wrong. I was right.

Martin Luther, the first Protestant, worked pretty much the same way. He was a volatile guy and he believed that anger was an ally for him. “I never work better than when I am inspired by anger” he said, “for when I am angry I can write, pray, and preach well, for then my whole temperature is quickened, my understanding sharpened, and all mundane vexations and temptations depart.”[v] Have you ever felt like that? Like when you get mad suddenly you can see exactly how things ought to be. But how trustworthy is our vision then? It’s really easy for our vision to be clouded by the anger. It’s really easy for us to justify horrible things. It’s really easy for us to do great damage. As Will Willimon notes about Martin Luther, the same anger that led him to such great work that really did change the face of Europe, also led him to justify horrible actions against the poor and against Jews. I felt that same blindness when I was writing in seminary. Anger, in our hands, is an untrustworthy instrument.

This is the great temptation in righteous anger. We do know it can be dangerous, but it is very easy for us to believe that we can harness it for good. We know that we can use it on behalf of others, on behalf of God, and so bring about the kingdom. But for the same reason that vengeance is God’s, so we need to recognize that what we are really expressing in work on behalf of the kingdom is justice, not anger. Billy Graham says that this is what Jesus means by blessing the meek in that same Sermon on the Mount. “The word ‘meek’,” he says, “actually means that you become controlled by the Spirit of God. As a wild force tamed, so the Spirit of God can tame your tongue and tame the passions of you soul, if you surrender your heart and your life to Jesus Christ.”[vi] It is not about getting rid of the passions but putting them at the service of God and claiming the passions that are from God.

I need to say a word, too, about another way we get distorted by the sin of anger. There is a sense in which our culture has accepted anger as a means of self-expression. The rap singers and the TV shows I mentioned at the beginning of this sermon are really not so much angry at the world as they are saying, “Hey, look at me! If anger is the thing that will tell you who I am and make you look at me, I’m going to use it.” Since we have accepted as a society that anger is unavoidable, that we must be in touch with it, that it is some force that can only be managed but not eliminated, we have accepted that people will use it to express themselves. Used this way, anger is once again another expression of that root sin of pride, which sees the whole world as curved in upon me. Anger is about my frustrations, my hurts, my need to express myself in ways that will make you (and maybe God) know that I will not be ignored.

So what do we do with this anger? How do we release ourselves from its grip? Well, first, by acknowledging that we are in its grips. Whether we express anger by lashing out physically and striking someone else, or by turning it inward in depression, we are in its grip. Secondly, we can follow Jesus’ teaching that leads us beyond acts of anger to the workings of our minds and souls. Hateful acts have their origin in the way our minds work and in the attitude we have toward the world. When we can learn about how we give anger reign over our bodies, our reason, our lives perhaps we can understand the truth that what goes on in our heads can be as damaging to our souls as murder. I don’t think we can do this alone. I think this is the work of prayer and it is the work of community. If we do not have brothers and sisters in Christ with whom we can share these dark struggles of our souls, we will not be able to move beyond the grips of anger. You need a small group. Perhaps this is a Lenten discipline for you!

Finally, we have to nurture within ourselves the life which we know in Christ. There was righteous anger in Christ, but there was also compassion, patience and love, even for those who were far from God. He sat with prostitutes, tax collectors, Pharisees and lawyers, all of whom could have led him to righteous anger.

Once when James and John, two of his disciples, faced a crowd that rejected them, they came back to Jesus and said, “Hey, you know when this happened to Elijah, Jesus, he called down fire from heaven on the people who rejected him. Can we do that?” But what did Jesus say to them? “No. You don’t know what manner of Spirit you are of, because I came not to destroy lives but to save them.” [Luke 9:54-55].

Jesus knew how easily our anger turns to violence, hatred and exclusion. God knows how much damage we do to ourselves and others when we don’t confront our anger. And God knows, because God did it, that the answer to the world’s injustice is not anger but forgiveness.
The author Jack Miles says, “To this day, few of God’s creatures, including the vast majority of Christians, treat their enemies as Jesus treated his—allowing them to put him to death while praying only for their forgiveness, never for the defeat or their humiliation. But Christianity has never been able to suppress the scandal of how its version of the epic of God’s wrath ends. It ends when the lion becomes a lamb, and nothing in the Bible, absolutely nothing, is more disturbing than this.”[vii]

It’s disturbing because if we conform to the image of this God that we know in Christ, we have to change. The world has to change. Wrath doesn’t have the last word. Love does. And what would we look like if we stopped nursing our anger and embraced God’s radical love? What would you look like? Maybe there’s a Lenten transformation for you. Thanks be to God.

[i] William Willimon, Sinning Like a Christian: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005), p. 71.
[ii] Robert A.F. Thurman, Anger, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 43. Thurman says this in reference to Seneca whom he sees as being in line with Jesus’ thoughts in this passage.
[iii] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0121765/quotes
[iv] http://www.ericdavid.info/default.asp?id=70&newsaction=newsdetail&articleid=70
[v] Martin Luther, Harper Book of Quotations, 3rd ed., ed. By Robert I. Fitzhenry, (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), p. 36, quoted in Willimon.
[vi] Billy Graham, Freedom From the Seven Deadly Sins, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1955), p. 29.
[vii] Jack Miles, “If God Smites, Why Can’t We?”, www.beliefnet.com/story/112/story_11216.html.