"Anger Management"
November 13, 2005: 26th Sunday after Pentecost
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, co-pastor
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.newlights.org
Introduction to Scripture:
I had every intention of writing some sort of stewardship sermon or perhaps an early Thanksgiving sermon for you today. Mark and I did our worship planning this week focusing on the Parable of the Talents from Matthew 25. But as events unfolded over the last several days and with the inspiration of several long conversations with friends, I began to find my mind slipping away from Matthew and settling instead on another scripture suggested by the Revised Common Lectionary for this morning, from the first chapter of the prophet Zephaniah. So if the hymns and anthems this morning don't seem quite on topic, that's my fault, not Mark's.
Zephaniah's is a short book, only three chapters long, sandwiched in between Haggai and Habakkuk in that section of the Bible called "the minor prophets"—hardly prime literary real estate, there in the shadow of the majors, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. Near as I can tell, only two passages from Zephaniah have made it into the Revised Common Lectionary. That's just two passages out of three years' worth of suggested readings, four readings a week.
Though we have very little independent data to go on, it appears Zephaniah was written in the southern kingdom of Judah some time in the 7th Century B.C.E. In the opening inscription, the author claims a connection to King Hezekiah, a religious, social, and political reformer who worked to recall the Jewish people to closer relationship with Yahweh God. But according the author, those golden days did not last long. When Hezekiah's son Manasseh came to the throne, he busied himself with undoing all his father had done. Second Kings, chapter 21, tells how Manasseh rebuilt the shrines of the Canaanite gods, Baal and Asherah and Milcom, which his father had torn down, how the king became the cause of much bloodshed, even perhaps reinstituting child sacrifice in the land, starting with his own son. In the wake of this moral breakdown at the highest levels of government, the author of Zephaniah says, society turned from reliance on God to reliance on wealth. "God is irrelevant," many were saying. "When times are bad, cash is king."
The opening verses from Zephaniah before us this morning describe God's anger with the situation of God's people in Judah. I warn you: they are not easy listening. They are not the sort of thing we read a lot here at United Church on the Green. But they captured my thoughts this week, and I pray that with the help of the Holy Spirit, the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts here together may help us to find where God's word of life illumines even these challenging words.
Scripture:
Zephaniah 1
The word of the LORD that came to Zephaniah son of Cushi son of Gedaliah son of Amariah son of Hezekiah, in the days of King Josiah son of Amon of Judah. I will utterly sweep away everything from the face of the earth, says the LORD. I will sweep away humans and animals; I will sweep away the birds of the air and the fish of the sea. I will make the wicked stumble. I will cut off humanity from the face of the earth, says the LORD. I will stretch out my hand against Judah, and against all the inhabitants of Jerusalem; and I will cut off from this place every remnant of Baal and the name of the idolatrous priests; those who bow down on the roofs to the host of the heavens; those who bow down and swear to the LORD, but also swear by Milcom; those who have turned back from following the LORD, who have not sought the LORD or inquired of God. Be silent before the Lord GOD! For the day of the LORD is at hand; the LORD has prepared a sacrifice, God has consecrated God's guests. And on the day of the Lord's sacrifice I will punish the officials and the king's sons and all who dress themselves in foreign attire. On that day I will punish all who leap over the threshold, who fill their master's house with violence and fraud. On that day, says the LORD, a cry will be heard from the Fish Gate, a wail from the Second Quarter, a loud crash from the hills. The inhabitants of the Mortar wail, for all the traders have perished; all who weigh out silver are cut off. At that time I will search Jerusalem with lamps, and I will punish the people who rest complacently on their dregs, those who say in their hearts, "The LORD will not do good, nor will he do harm." Their wealth shall be plundered, and their houses laid waste. Though they build houses, they shall not inhabit them; though they plant vineyards, they shall not drink wine from them. The great day of the LORD is near, near and hastening fast; the sound of the day of the LORD is bitter, the warrior cries aloud there. That day will be a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of trumpet blast and battle cry against the fortified cities and against the lofty battlements. I will bring such distress upon people that they shall walk like the blind; because they have sinned against the LORD, their blood shall be poured out like dust, and their flesh like dung. Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to save them on the day of the Lord's wrath; in the fire of God's passion the whole earth shall be consumed; for a full, a terrible end God will make of all the inhabitants of the earth.
Sermon:
In recent weeks, I have found myself hobbled in my conversation at clergy gatherings, dinner parties, even just over coffee with friends or at the barbershop. Increasingly, I find myself shying away from all but the most innocuous of topics, not because I'm afraid of giving offense or putting my foot in my mouth—though I do that often enough—but because I have been so hurt, so confused, so frustrated by current events. So much seems to be going so wrong just now, from the local to the national to the international, at home and abroad. The wars, the injustices, the criminal greed, the natural disasters and the response to those disasters, the civil unrest and the response that that unrest—it's not that I don't know what to say; rather, I am afraid that if I start talking about it all, I'll never stop. I'll just keep talking and talking and talking until I am burned up, or poured out completely, ashen, empty. I am that angry.
Because that's what I am, of course: angry, though I was raised never to say that. "Hurt, confused, frustrated," okay, maybe even "disappointed" if things we're really bad, but never "angry." Mine was a profoundly Protestant upbringing, so we never talked about it in terms of the Seven Deadly Sins of Roman Catholicism, but the same message was conveyed just as effectively in our own, simpler way: Simply put, nice people don't get angry, and angry people aren't nice. Jesus said we should turn the other cheek, after all, and love our enemies, and Jesus was the nicest person ever (forgetting that whole ugly incident in the Temple with the money changers and the whip). Besides, anger is indulgent, showy, prideful. An angry person attracts attention to himself, embarrassing others with their public display of emotion, and that's just, well, impolite—the real deadly sin of Protestantism.
Of course people in my family got angry. Everyone does. I got angry. But we almost never talked about it. Yet despite our remarkable powers of denial, anger would occasionally erupt or bubble up or simmering slowly for hours, days, weeks—we all had our favorite styles. It was terribly painful and embarrassing when it did, of course, but we did our best to ignore it. Then, incredibly, like some kind of sideshow act, we would swallow it down, down where it hurt even more and longer. Still we smiled away, because... nice people don't get angry, and angry people aren't nice.
Because many of us are afraid of anger. We believe Yoda, that little green Jedi master and theologian of Star Wars fame, when he tells us that anger is step on the path to the "dark side," that "anger leads to hate" and "hate leads to suffering." It makes perfect sense to us who've been hurt so often by angry people in our lives—angry neighbors, angry lovers, angry co-workers, angry children, angry churches, angry strangers. And of course we have to acknowledge that we've hurt others, in turn. We've known the same anger in ourselves, scary anger, anger that strikes out or strangles or burns.
We've been hurt by images of an angry God, too, all-too-pervasive images in all-too-many Christian communities: a fearsome Old Testament God, plaguing the Egyptians with darkness and death or consuming the city of Sodom in a fiery holocaust; or, if you prefer, a more New Testament image of our Heavenly Father raging like the Great Santini, his anger restrained only by the undeserved intervention of Jesus on our behalf. American Christians—Catholic, Protestant, and Evangelical alike—have spent centuries internalizing the image of ourselves offered by New England's own most famous preaching son, Jonathan Edwards, that we are all "sinners in the hand of an angry God," a God who can destroy us, and should, but for some ineffable reason of God's own, hasn't... yet.
So, in our particular progressive family of the Christian tradition, we've sworn off anger altogether. Intent on fashioning a "kinder, gentler" Christianity, we've tried to swallow the sort of images Zephaniah gives us this morning, images of a God seething with anger over a world gone wrong. Deny, deny, deny. "Just keep smiling and turn the page," we've told ourselves uneasily, "and this, too, shall pass." Or we've gotten angry about the anger itself, not the abuse, and argued that the God of Jesus cannot be same God describe in such passages, particularly in the Hebrew Bible, a dangerous reductive path, and so easily anti-Jewish. So we've tried to excise these passages—and there are many of them—from our experience of God altogether. We choose instead to blame what we, from our privileged, mature point in the history of human psycho-spiritual development magnanimously label the "ignorance" of our Biblical ancestors in faith for the primative idea of a God who <gasp!> gets angry.
But let's not rush to project our particular issues onto God, shall we? There is a point at which the "hermeneutics of suspicion"—a tool, a way of reading which really does help us expose and disarm those who would use scripture to limit our experience of the grace of God—there is a point at which that helpful tool can get twisted into an unhealthy hermeneutics of paranoia and pride. There is a point at which, if we give in to the tyranny of human failings, if we let that painful dance of action and reaction color our perception entirely, we will begin to see only more of the same ol' same ol'. We will keep ourselves from experiencing God in a new, liberating, life-giving ways.
So, what if instead of letting our limited, painful experience of life shape our experience of God, we let God be God and shape our understanding and our lives accordingly? I want to be clear: I don't mean to downplay our suffering—not at all—but instead of clutching it too us sooo tightly, can we instead give it up and let the power of God refashion and redeem it for us in ways that lead to more abundant living? Dare we let God be angry? And if so, just what is it that ticks God off so? And how does God's anger compare with our own?
Along these lines, the Hebrew prophets have a great deal to teach us about the anger of God. Listen again to these challenging words from this morning's reading. In these verses, Zephaniah would have us hear God saying:
I will stretch out my hand against Judah... and I will cut off from this place every remnant of [the idols of] Baal and the name of the idolatrous priests.. On that day I will punish the officials and the king's sons and all who... fill their master's house with violence and fraud.. A cry will be heard... for all the traders have perished; all who weigh out silver are cut off. At that time I will search Jerusalem with lamps, and I will punish the people who rest complacently on their dregs, those who say, "The Lord will not do good nor will God do harm." Their wealth will be plundered... Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to save them on the day of the Lord's wrath.
Similar verses are found throughout the prophets, both major and minor, from Isaiah to Malachi; in fact, they are the heart of the prophets' preaching. What ticks God off? Over and over again the answer comes through loud and clear: God hates injustice. God hates it when those in power pretend to rule in God's name, but seek only their own selfish ends. God despises the abuse of God's people, particularly the weakest and most vulnerable members of society, the widows and orphans, the resident aliens living among us. As the prophet Amos puts it so pointedly, God's wrath burns hot when the poor are bought and sold for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals (Amos 8:6).
God hates it when those in power in this nation or any other claim God's blessing on their petty projects of persecution. God despises the ongoing abuse of God's people—here, or in France, or in Israel, or in Sudan, or anywhere else—because of their religion or their skin tone or their bank balance or their age or the object of their affection or their immigration status. God is disgusted with the tactics of terror and exploitation. And God's wrath burns hot when we, in this country, continue to prosecute a war "conceived in deception, pursued in arrogance, destined to undermine the moral credibility of our nation," as our UCC general minister and president, John Thomas, put it (September 24, 2005), rather than undertake the truly heroic work of building lasting peace for all people.
For prophets like Zephaniah and Amos and Ezekiel and, yes, Jesus, God's anger is not an embarrassment. It is a sign of God's intention to change the world, redeem the world, recall the world to the image of God. And since God is God, and God will accomplish just whatever God wills in the world, God's anger is born not of fear of failure or even a desire to punish, as is so much of our anger. As the author of First John reminds us, "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love" (4:18). God is love, perfect love. No, God's anger is a pure, a righteous anger, born of God's deep and abiding love for all of creation, the love of the mother who hates her child's taste for sin, of the father who cannot abide his child's addiction to injustice.
And God's perfect love never waivers—that's where these Biblical prophets lose their focus, sometimes, and where we all too often lose ours. God's love for us never waivers, even when we are acting our very worst. It really is a case of "love the sinner, hate the sin," except of course that God does a much better job of that than we do. Our human sin claimed even the life of Jesus, God's Beloved, yet God raised Christ in love for us as a sign that sin, injustice, inhumanity cannot stand against the resurrecting grace of God.
Even Zephaniah, after two chapters of this vivid poetry of God's anger, cannot leave it there. Zephaniah wants us to remember that God's relating to creation, to us, never ends in anger, but in salvation, in transformation:
Wait for me, says the Lord, for the day when I arise as a witness... At that time I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech, that all of them may call on the name of the Lord and serve God with one accord... They shall do no wrong and utter no lies, nor shall a deceitful tongue be found in their mouths... Sing aloud, O daughter; shout aloud! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter! The Lord has taken away the judgments against you, the Lord has turned away your enemies. The king, the Lord, is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more. (Zephaniah 3:8-15, selected verses)
I remain uncomfortable with my own anger. That is just part of my psyche and my upbringing. But the witness of our faith is that anger is very much a part of the human life we have received as a gift from God. The Psalms, for instance give voice to our human anger, as well as our joy and sorrow and confusion and thanksgiving. And wisdom teaches us that, like the rest of our human gifts, anger can be both a blessing and a curse. Like nitroglycerin, it can be used to blow stuff up or to heal hearts. But to deny our anger, to swallow it, simply because is it difficult to deal with is to risk letting it grow wild and unchecked within us until it— or fear of it—poisons all our relating. In the voice of our loving, just, and, yes, sometimes angry God, the prophets offer us a model for expressing our anger in love, for the transformation of ourselves and our world.
In the righteous anger of even Jesus—who, lest we forget in our rush to "nicen-up" the gospel, did run the money changers of out the Temple (John 2:13-16), did curse the hypocrisy of the religious and political leaders of his day (Matthew 23:1-36), did instruct us to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us (Luke 6:27), it's true, but also recognized that his teaching was also a word of challenge that would cause division in the world (Luke 12:51)—in the life of Jesus, God shows us a different way of managing our anger that will not tie our stomach up in knots, or our souls. It may not always be polite, but it is always respectful of the dignity of persons. It may not always be nice, but it never seeks the diminishment of the other but only their liberation in love. It tends always toward the transformation of sinful systems and the increase of abundant life among all God's children.
These are indeed trying times. Just pick up a newspaper. Just pick an issue, pick a side of the aisle, and like the bumper sticker says, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." But if we take up this godly, righteous anger as our guide, we can face these challenges without fear of being "poured out" or "burned up." Instead, like the burning bush of Exodus, we will shine with God's reflected light and heat, a beacon in the darkness, a boon to others on the journey, and a blessing to the most vulnerable among us. Individually we will become prophets like Moses, like Zepahaniah, like Jesus—real patriots of the kingdom of God. Together, we will become the prophetic church God is calling us to be, an engine of love, justice, and peace. We will become what activist-songwriter Holly Near prophesied back in 1979, "a gentle, angry people, singing for our lives," and for the life of the world. May God grant us this gift.