| The Sins He Died For: Anger
Sermon by Brigid A. Boyle April 4, 2004, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Matthew 27:1-24
“Let him be crucified!” On this Palm and Passion Sunday, only days before the darkest we know, when the story moves us along in ways that are perhaps predictable but still powerful, the mob’s cries of “Crucify him!” stick in our throats. The words hold such anger as to terrify. How much easier it might be to consider, on this Sunday, the little ways in which we betray him? The things we do to deny him or we forsake him? The ways in which we flee from him? How much gentler this week might be were we not to consider these angry cries, “Crucify him!” This week though, much to the disappointment of those who would favor and easy faith that would skip happily along from Christmas to Palm Sunday to Easter and round again, is not meant to be easy. And it is not meant to be gentle. So it is, then, that on this last Sunday of Lent, with the words “Let him be crucified!” in hand and in heart, we take on another of the seven deadly sins, Anger. Wrath, or anger, says Webster’s, is a “strong feeling of displeasure and belligerence aroused by a wrong; wrath; ire.” It has it its root, a Latin word, angere, which has to do with choking or strangling. It is the emotion that makes us want to do something physical. If not choking or strangling, perhaps hurling something across the room or even clenching the fists so tightly as to make the fingers ache. On the one hand, we, as Christians, typically don’t particularly like anger. Some of us were taught that anger itself was a bad thing for the faithful, the very opposite of the virtues of love, patience, gentleness, and forgiveness. The good believer never raises her voice in anger, and the faithful man never lets the sun go down on his anger. What’s more is that we have great difficulty with the idea of God as an angry God; we breathe a sigh of relief that the God of the Old Testament-that jealous, angry God who punished the second, third, and even fourth generation of those who sinned- stayed in the Old Testament. But even when we get to the New Testament, it seems somehow wrong for us to think of Jesus as someone who lost his temper and even was decidedly wrathful on a number of occasions. For some reason, the artists' renderings of Jesus usually seem to beatific, benign, and bucolic: Jesus praying in the garden, hands clasped in earnest prayer, eyes rolled earnestly toward heaven; Jesus holding the little lambs and leading the adoring sheep; Jesus presiding graciously at his Last Supper, with the beloved disciple resting at his shoulder. It seems as though we want an all-loving, all-compassionate, gentle Savior, just as much as we want our world and our lives to be safe from suffering, sorrow, tragedy, and rage. But the truth is, our lives are not safe from any of those things and, certainly, we Presbyterians are not strangers to rage. To the point, the story is told of an old Quaker farmer who owned a beautiful Ayrshire cow he loved to milk at the end of his daily chores. One evening the cow became rather cantankerous. First, she flicked her tail around the farmer's face. Then she kicked the bucket a bit. In patient tenderness the old farmer gently moved the cow's leg back and went on milking, never uttering a single complaint. By-and-by the cow stomped her feet angrily and plunged one hoof right in the pail, upsetting most of the milk on the floor. So quietly the old farmer, without anger or cursing, stood up and set his milking stool against the wall. He walked around the cow and stood facing her. Firmly he took her two horns in his hands and looked into her big eyes. "Cow," he said very softly, "thou dost know I love thee very much! And, cow, thou dost know that because I am a Quaker I would never get angry with thee or curse thee!" She began to chew her cud contentedly. "Cow, thou dost also know that because I am a Quaker I would never beat thee or abuse thee. But one thing thou dost not know, cow, is this -- I can sell thee to a Presbyterian!" Presbyterians seem to have a special relationship with anger. We are heirs to a passionate past, with hot-tempered John Calvin and even hotter-tempered John Knox and their full of fiery sermons, along with the righteous zeal of our Puritan ancestors. Presbyterians are typically those who are opinionated and passionate, both of which pride ourselves on. Typically, we are a fabulously feisty bunch, at times given to shaking things up and making great things happen, but also, at times, given to be stubborn, angry and bitter. My guess is that there are some of both in these pews this morning. But the difficult thing about anger is not so much that the mixed messages we all learned about it, and even not so much the truth that we all are angry now and again, it is that anger itself, it seems to me is not necessarily all-bad. Martin Luther said he never preached better sermons than when he was furious about something and God knows much change for the better in the world has been motivated by an angry fire in the belly of those who would take action. “The corridor of anger has a particularly seductive, self-deceiving twist,” writes Mary Gordon. “More than any of the other sins, anger can be seen to be good, can perhaps even begin by being good. Jesus himself was angry, brandishing his whip and thrillingly overturning tables: coins, doves flying, the villainous sharpsters on their knees to save their spoils. It would seem to run in the family; by far the angriest character in the Old Testament is God … Of all the sins,” she continues, “only anger is connected in the common tongue to its twinned, entwined virtue: justice. ‘Just anger,’ we say. Impossible even to begin to imagine such a phrase made with the others: try as you will, you can get your mouth around the words, ‘just sloth,’ or ‘just covetousness,’ to say nothing of the deadly breakfast cereal that sticks to the ribs for all eternity, ‘just lust.’” So there is an anger, on the one hand, that is what we call just, a good anger, if you will. On the other hand, though, all anger is not necessarily good, the story of this week as case in point. So what are we to do with anger? As the sin which cannot and should not categorically be condemned, how are we to understand anger as a deadly sin? On this Sunday when the complexity of anger is right before us, when we feel the anger in the words, “Crucify Him!” from the tops of our heads to the tips of our toes, but also when we feel the anger generated by rail bombs in Madrid and increased Klan activity in Richmond and hundreds of children abused and neglected in Philadelphia and so much more, when we feel anger in the face of all of that from the tops of our heads to the tips of our toes, what is the preacher to say about anger? About the sin of anger? What makes anger sinful or sin, I think, is more than a simple designation of just anger or unjust anger. This is so partly because it would leave the judgment about our own sin up to us, but also because I think what sometimes begins as a just anger has a way of twisting and turning itself into the anger Pope Gregory had in mind when he catalogued anger as a deadly sin. The ancient Greeks used two words, and two metaphors, to talk about anger, which seem to be helpful here. The first, thumos was described as being like the flame that comes from dried straw. It is the anger which quickly blazes up and which just as quickly dies down. The second, orge, described a more long-lived anger. It is the anger of the person who nurses his wrath just to keep it warm. Like unto a smoldering coal in a fire which will not die down, this is the anger over which a person broods and stews. At its best, thumos is the kind of anger that flashes up in the face of injustice or unfairness, and compels us to do something, to write the letter to the senator in hopes of changed policy, to rail at the school board in hopes of improvements in education, to be honest with the colleague in hopes of creating a better workplace, to tell the parent of the sibling or the spouse how we really feel in hopes of getting on with live and love. And then, like a flame on burning straw and dies as soon as its fuel is gone, so the anger seems gone. The situation might still need changing, there is work yet to do, but the anger no longer controls. At its best, thumos is what we would call just anger, the kind of anger that motivates us to harness the energy of our outrage to help others, to right wrongs or to change unjust practices. Orge, on the other hand, is the anger that lingers, that never really goes away. Surely it can begin in the same manner as the other, a wrong done, justice denied, pain inflicted, but this anger takes on a life of its own, and as it does, by and by, it seems to lose its connection to whatever sparked it to begin and to become more and more a part of a person’s constitution. Gordon describes it, “This is the deadly power of anger: it rolls and rolls like a flaming boulder down a hill, gathering mass and speed until any thought of cessation is so far beside the point as to seem hopeless. It is not that there is no cause for the anger; the heavy topsoil of repressed injustice breeds anger better than any other medium. But the causes are lost in the momentum of the anger itself, and in the insatiable compulsion to destroy everything so that the open maw of rage may be fed.” This is the anger that winds its way, wearing different faces sometimes, into every part of our lives. It is the anger which shows itself as frustration with the co-worker who will never be good enough, the friend who will never be supportive enough, the children or parents or siblings who will never be loyal enough, the church which will never be as good as it once was. Often masking itself as righteous indignation, this kind of anger is oddly enticing, clutching itself ever so tightly to our own convictions of our unassailable rightness. Frederick Buechner describes it as the anger that lets us lick our wounds, smack our lips over grievances long past, roll our tongue over at the prospect of bitter confrontation still to come, and savor the last toothsome morsel both in the pain we are given and in the pain we are giving back. It is the deadliest kind of anger. It is the most sinful kind of anger. When Dante wrote about the seven deadly sins in his “Purgatorio,” he grouped all of the seven deadlies as sins against love. The sin of anger he categorizes as a form of misdirected love. I think what he was talking about was this second kind of anger, call it orge, call is slow burning, call it a flaming boulder, call it an insatiable appetite. Whatever we call it, as the sin misdirected love, anger directs us from love to bitterness, from hope to despair and from life to death. Many of us know such anger. If we dare to be honest, we know it in ourselves. If we dare to be honest, we will see it in ourselves this week, as our hearts will be turned from love to bitterness and we will betray him, from hope to despair as we will deny him, and from life to death as we will forsake him and flee from the foot of his cross. Like those who once waved Palms and shouted Hosanna, and then found themselves in the crowd shouting, “Crucify Him!” we are those whose anger takes us places we never thought we would go. We are those who have been consumed with rage at the one who challenges us. We are those whose wrath toward all that would shake up our understanding of the world is just a scratch below the surface. We are those whose frustration with anything that we cannot control is real. We are those who are no strangers to the sin of anger, my friends. Our broken lives bear witness to its deadly power. But the thing about the sin of anger is this: Forasmuch as we convince ourselves it is right and justified, forasmuch as we blow on its coals to keep it warm and glowing, forasmuch as keeping it alive keeps us alive, in the end, anger is a road not to life at all, but to death. The lip smacking, pain-savoring meal might be a feast fit for a king, but the chief drawback is that we are wolfing down ourselves and the skeleton at the feast is us. In this week ahead, may we leave the death dealing meal of our anger, and gather instead around the table at another feast with another King, that there we might feed on the bread of life and the cup of salvation. There may our misdirected love be redirected to this One who takes the anger of the world upon himself, for our poor sakes, and so makes us free. Thanks be to God. Amen. |