The Gift of Anger

Mark 3:1-6; James 1:16-21

I was asked to preach on anger this summer by a member of our congregation. I immediately thought of my pastoral care professor in seminary who was – and is – the expert in the field of Christians and anger. His name is Andrew Lester, and he is presently a professor of pastoral theology and pastoral counseling at Texas Christian University's Brite Divinity School. He has written several books on the topic including The Angry Christian: A Theology for Care and Counseling; Anger: Discovering Your Spiritual Ally; and Coping With Your Anger: A Christian Guide. I owe a lot of my understanding of what the scriptures say about anger to him.

In America there is a Christian culture that insinuates that anger is somehow unchristian, and probably sinful. I call it “the gospel of nice.” Christians think they are always supposed to be nice. That means to many people that Christians are not supposed to get angry. This “be happy always” attitude used to be personified by Robert Schuller, the smiling Crystal Cathedral minister. But he is retired now, and the Crystal Cathedral has hit hard times. It is bankrupt and sold the building to the Roman Catholic Church. Today the gospel of nice is represented by Joel Osteen, the pastor of the largest church in America in Houston, Texas, averaging more than 43,500 in attendance per week. He is always smiling, happy and perpetually nice. I can hardly stand it! Christians don’t know how to think or feel about their anger. So that is what I want to address this morning. I have three points today.

I. First, anger is HUMAN. Let me quote Andy Lester in his book, The Angry Christian. “Anger has its origins in creation, not our sinfulness … Anger is connected to embodiment and is a basic ingredient in the imago Dei, actually a gift from God." This is where I get the title for my message this morning. Anger is part of the human condition. It is not sinful in and of itself. It is neither demonic nor disobedient. It is natural. It is physiological. When you get angry, pay attention to what you are actually feeling. Before you start judging yourself for how you are feeling, just notice what anger is. It is energy – physiological energy. It is tenseness in the body – perhaps different parts of the body. That is why we have expressions like “burning with rage” or “white hot anger.” For me anger is energy in my chest, neck, shoulders and gut, but it consumes your whole body pretty quickly. It is part of what it means to be a human animal, like when an animal gets angry – when a dog barks or growls. I remember Andy Lester drawing a diagram on the blackboard demonstrating his theory that all anger is a response to a real or perceived threat. It is fight part of the “fight or flight” response that is natural to all mammals. It is physiological energy designed for our physical survival as a human species.

Anger is also psychological. It is more than just our body reacting to physical danger. Our minds get ahold of it, and that is where the problem begins. Rather than just letting anger come and go we hold onto it, dwelling on the reason for the anger. Anger as physiological energy is neutral – neither good nor evil. But when our minds get ahold of it, it can be used for good or evil. It is a very powerful emotion, and therefore a potentially dangerous emotion. This is why so many Christians are afraid of their anger. Anger can get out of control, and we can do things in the heat of anger that we would never do in our normal state of mind. We use the word mad for anger for a reason; it can make us temporarily insane in the sense of crazy. The Roman poet Horace said, “Anger is a short madness.”

Jude and I saw the movie Bernie a couple of months ago at the Red River Theatre in Concord. It is the true story of a gentle lovable man named Bernie Tiede, (played by Jack Black) an assistant funeral director in the small town of Carthage, Texas. He was the epitome of niceness, and everyone in the town loved him. But he got into an unhealthy relationship with an elderly widow named Marjorie Nugent, (played by Shirley McLaine) who was the most hateful character you can imagine. No one liked this woman, but Bernie befriended her out of kindness. But after being verbally and emotionally abused by her for years, in a moment of uncharacteristic rage he killed her. The film stars a lot of the real life residents of that town who defended Bernie’s action. Even though the evidence was irrefutable that he murdered her, they did not want to charge him with a crime or punish him. In fact the District Attorney had to move the trial out of the county just to get an unbiased jury. He was convicted  of murder, by the way, and is serving a life sentence.

Bernie was momentarily consumed by his anger, and it caused him to do something completely out of character. That is the danger of anger. It can be used for bad. We know that and have seen that in our own lives and in other’s lives, and in churches. Churches can be angry places when Christians do not understand own their own anger or know how to control it and use it for good.  It can get the better of us.

II. This brings me to my second point: Anger can be SINFUL. It is not inherently sinful. It is just an emotion. But what we do with the emotion can be sinful. This is why we find biblical warnings about anger. The apostle Paul says in Ephesians, “Be angry, but do not sin”; and do not let the sun go down on your wrath.” He is telling us that it is alright to be angry, but do not let the anger fester and turn into sin. Anger becomes sin when it is extended beyond its natural lifespan. It is natural for anger to rise up in us. We can’t keep anger from happening. It is not healthy to suppress anger. That is what Bernie did and it eventually exploded in a murderous rage that destroyed a woman’s life and his own life. And Bernie was a respected member of the Methodist Church in town and sang solos in worship. But his anger turned into sin because he let it build up for months and years.

This is why forgiveness is so important and plays such a central role in the Christian gospel. Our faith is all about forgiveness. Forgiveness is the defusing of anger. It is about us being forgiven by God and using that experience and divine power of forgiveness to forgive others. Forgiveness is letting go of anger. It is forgetting the reason for the anger. Anger is like trash. If anger is not properly disposed of in a timely manner it begins to stink. It rots and stinks, and everyone in the vicinity can smell it. We have all known perpetually angry people, and it is terrible. That is why it is so important to cultivate an attitude of forgiveness.

Forgiveness happens by the power of God at work in our lives. When we feel forgiven by God we can forgive. In fact we can’t help but forgive others if we know that we have been forgiven our sins. I would go so far as to say that if we cannot forgive then we need to examine our lives to see if we have really experienced the forgiveness of God. That was Jesus point in his teaching of the Lord’s Prayer and the words that come immediately afterwards in the gospels where Jesus adds: “¹⁴ “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. ¹⁵ But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

We should we quick to forgive, for our own sake and for others. Also we should be slow to anger in the first place. This quality of being “slow to anger” is often mentioned as an attribute of God in the OT as well, and it is good to cultivate it in our lives.The apostle James says in our Epistle Reading according to the NIV “¹⁹ My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, ²⁰ because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.” We cultivate this quality in our lives by being aware when we become angry. When anger arises we can either be conscious of it or unconscious. If we are unconscious of it, it can be dangerous. It can cause us to say and do all kinds of things that we may regret for years to come. The best thing we can do is by mindful of the arising of anger in our bodies. As soon as we begin to sense ourselves becoming angry, stop and notice it. That is all we have to do; that is enough. That puts just enough distance between us and our anger so that it does not carry us away. And it will likely subside of itself like a wave that comes and goes. If it doesn’t subside, then at least we have slowed it down. We have been slow to anger.

III. This brings me to my third point. Anger may be DIVINE. I have described how anger can be bad. The converse is also true; anger can be good. There is such a thing as righteous anger. Some things we ought to be angry at. I am angry when children are abused; I don’t feel guilty about being angry at that at all. In fat I think there would be something wrong with me if I were not angry at something like that. I think we ought to be angry at injustice. We ought to be angry that evil people can destroy the lives of innocent people. I am angry at violent crime that take the lives of innocent bystanders. I am angry at tyrants and dictators who oppress their citizens. Anger at things like this is a good thing.

God gets angry at such things. We see the wrath of God running as a theme throughout the OT and NT. That is a good thing. I know that some people have problems with the idea of a God who gets angry. We think that God ought to be the perpetually Nice Guy. Our discomfort with Godly anger comes out of the Greek idea of an immutable impassive Deity. Or it comes from our own discomfort with our own anger. We don’t want to taint God with such a strong emotion. But that is our problem, not God’s. By definition God does not sin. We don’t have to worry about God losing his temper and doing something he will regret. That is not going to happen. So we do not have to be afraid of the idea of an angry God.

Now along this line I have to give a warning when it comes to connecting God and anger. Some people have a very distorted view of God. Some people’s God is perpetually angry and inspires people to do terrible things. I think that Islamic terrorists and suicide bombers have a distorted view of God – a hateful, vengeful deity who inspires his followers to hate and kill in obedience to him. That is not the God of the Bible. Some people will take passages in the Bible out of context and try to make a case that the Biblical God is evil. There was a movement in the early Christian centuries called Marcionism that believed that the OT God was an hateful, evil, violent God and the NT God was a good, loving, forgiving God. There are Christians today who still hold that distinction between the two testaments. But that is not true. It is the same God in the OT and NT. God gets angry in both testaments and forgives in both Testaments.

Jesus gets angry. The example often given is when he takes a whip of cords and drives the moneychangers out of the temple. But there are other examples. In our Gospel lesson for today it says that he got angry at the Pharisees for criticizing  him for healing on the Sabbath. They did not care at all about people who were suffering. All they cared about were their religious rules. So our passage says in verse, “He looked around at them with anger, being grieved by the hardness of their hearts….” The hardened hearts of religious people made Jesus angry. This was not the only time he got angry at the Pharisees; he got angry at them on many occasions. He got angry at Peter and rebuked him. He got angry and cursed a fig tree on one occasion; but he wasn’t irrationally mad at a tree, it was a symbol. He was mad at the moral barrenness and fruitlessness of God’s people. Jesus got angry, yet it was not sin. It was righteous anger.

The question then becomes can we be righteously angry, and I think I have already answered that with the answer yes. We should be angry at the things that Jesus gets angry at and that God gets angry at. But we have to be careful because we are not Jesus, and we are not God. We can deceive ourselves. Our anger can easily be distorted by our sin, so it is very important that we be slow to anger, quick to forgive, and never let anger linger and settle into bitterness, resentment, or revenge.

In conclusion anger is part of what it means to be a human being made in the image of God. It is part of being human. To suppress it is to deny a part of our humanity. We get angry, and it is alright. It is natural to be angry. But human anger has been distorted by sin, so anger can also be sinful. So we need to be careful. Aristotle wrote: “Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.” I see anger like firearms. Guns can be good when used for good purposes – for protection of others, self-defense, sport, or to provide food. But guns can also be bad when used for bad purposes. In any case they are always dangerous. They can be discharged accidently and cause unintended harm. The same with our anger. Be careful how you use it. It is a gift and can be used to combat evil, and injustice. Or it can injure the innocent and backfire on ourselves. So be angry when appropriate, but be careful. As the apostle Paul says, “Be angry, but do not sin.”