Sunday, February 20, 2011

Righteous Anger

Delivered on February 20, 2011 at Church of the Redeemer in Camden, NC and Church of the Good Shepherd in Nags Head, NC.

Last week I talked about the seven deadly sins and how Jesus did not possess them. Although he was flesh, he did not sin, because the seeds—the roots—of sin were not inside him. Jesus had no pride, anger, envy, greed, gluttony, sloth, or lust in his heart, so he was incapable of committing sins like adultery or murder. What we do is ask Jesus to replace those roots of sin in our hearts with his beautiful attitudes—his beatitudes—and he does.

Well, this week, I want to go a little bit deeper with anger, because you have to be blind to not read that God gets angry quite frequently in the Old Testament, and we can see that Jesus also gets angry, too. Mark 3:5 says, “And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart.” Jesus also quite violently throws out the moneychangers from the temple. The movies have him howling with rage. Well, does God have the sin of anger in his heart or not? Well, the best way to answer this question is to look at what it means to be angry as a human being and compare that with what it means to be angry as God.

Anger, as seen in humans, is a character defect. In other words, it is part of original sin, like corrupted DNA that we are born with. It contradicts reason. It is in conflict with wisdom. And it is only appropriate when we judge something or someone righteously. When we wrote myths about Greek gods and goddesses, we gave them human anger, which is why they seem like jerks, making people sick, making them suffer, and creating random natural disasters, like petulant children. That's how we know the Greek gods are made up stories—because their anger resembles our anger, with rarely any righteous anger of proper judgment. The human kind of anger is anger with resentment.

Now let's look at our God—Yahweh. Even though words like jealous and angry are used to describe him, Yahweh's anger is always—ALWAYS—a righteous anger of proper judgment. Anger and jealousy are human words assigned to something we don't truly understand about God. The word “wrath” is a better word, but it has become corrupted to mean something that God may arbitrarily do to someone. I was just walking along, minding my own business, when suddenly a jealous, angry God unleashed his wrath on me!

The best words are righteousness and holiness, but we think of those two words as being passive. We picture Yahweh just sitting there, being all righteous and being all holy. He's not actively doing anything. He's maybe glowing really brightly, but we tend to think of him being alone in a room, maybe like a glowing man, thinking to himself, “I know I'm right.” Have you met a person like that? They know they're right all the time, and so they are always alone. They have no friends, because nobody wants to hang out with someone who is always right! Then you got the phrase “holier than thou” that we throw about. That's not a positive statement to say about someone! When you say someone is holier than thou, you are saying that they think they are always right and always acting like a goody-goody, and nobody wants to hang out with a goody-goody!

Our thinking needs to change about these words—righteousness and holiness. They are active words and they are very dangerous to us, because most of the time, we are not righteous nor are we holy! What happens when unholy people are caught in the same room with a holy God? Like an ant under a magnifying glass. We will burn up instantly. Ashes. And then the ashes will be burned up to nothing. God actively burns us to cinders. He incinerates us.

That's why the Hebrew word for Anger is much better than the Greek word for anger. The Hebrew word for anger is OFF, and it means literally to burn! It also makes me laugh, because I think of my four daughters crawling all over me until I cannot take it anymore and I shout, “OFF!” I picture a massive God with all these dirty little human beings crawling all over him, and he finally shouts OFF! And he literally burns them off of himself.

Here is what we think: God gave us all these rules to live by, and when we break them—which we always do, because, hey, we're human—he gets angry with us and punishes us. Here is the truth: God loves us and wants to have a relationship with us. The problem is, he's righteous! He's holy, and we're not! He loves us so much that he wants us to be in his presence, but he knows that he will burn us to cinders, if we are in his presence, so he gives us commandments to obey, so that we will be righteous, too, so that we will not burn up in his presence. The problem is, we are steeped in sin, and we cannot obey these commandments, and so we burn anyway. Read the Old Testament. God is burning up people left and right in that book. He burns up the unbelieving nations outside Israel, and he burns up Israel, too, because even though they have the law in their hands, they cannot obey it either.

Well, there's good news. God has given us a way to be in his presence without burning up. That way is Jesus Christ. We don't have to be righteous. We don't have to be holy, because Jesus takes on our sin—our unrighteous anger, our unholy anger, our resentful anger—and he give us his righteousness, his holiness. All we have to do is ask him to change our hearts.

I touched on what we ask for last week. When we have one of these root sins in our lives, we ask Jesus to take it away and replace it with one of his beatitudes. The antidote for anger is meekness. The beatitude is “blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Meek? Really? Meek people are going to inherit the earth? Do any of us believe that? Not in this culture. Not in this age. Neitzche, the German philosopher whose teaching provided a philosophical base for Hitler’s ideas about world domination, said this statement is the most seductive lie in all history. He said, “The truth is, assert yourself. It’s the assertive who take over the earth.” To us, meek equals weak. Wimpy. But that is not what meek means. It means strength under control.

Meekness means self-control. It means keeping our tempers under control. It means controlled and balanced, getting angry at the right things and at the right time — getting angry at things like injustice, but not angry at frivolous things like personal insult. Meekness is anger without resentment. A meek man is angry on the right occasion with the right people at the right moment for the right length of time. That’s meekness.

Booker T. Washington, the great scientist who faced prejudice all of his life because of his race said, “I will never allow one man to control or ruin my life by making me hate him.” See, when you say, “You are making me so mad” — which I say all the time, and I know everyone in this room has, too — you are admitting the other is controlling your emotions. The other person has power over you. The moment you start retaliating, seeking revenge or trying to get back, you give up control of your life. You are no longer in control. You are reacting, not acting. Jesus says the meek person knows how to let it go.

Jesus describes a meek person in our Gospel reading today. “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.” Now, knowing what Meekness is, we realize that Jesus isn't describing a pushover here! He is not describing a doormat! He is describing people who possess strength under control. These are the people who will “inherit the earth.” These are the people who are in control of the situation. The world is theirs. The person who has control of his emotions is not controlled by the world around him. If you are a meek person, you are not a victim. You control your choices.

Viktor Frankl, the famous psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz said, “They took my clothes, my wife, my children, my wedding ring. I stood naked before the SS. I realized that they can take everything in my life, but they cannot take away my freedom to choose how I will respond to them.” That’s the freedom you always have. So, how do we react? How do we choose to react when people are hurting us? Jesus is saying blessedness belongs to people with self-control. You are saying, “Well, I guess that leaves me out.” It doesn’t have to because we know someone who can give us that self-control. For the Christian, it’s not just self-control, but it’s allowing God’s spirit to be so in your life that he controls your reactions, that he helps you not to react.

God has given us, through his son Jesus Christ, through the word of God, direction as to what is right and what is wrong. Jesus is happy to take on our human, resentful anger and give us in return his meekness, his righteousness, his holiness. Ask him to make the switch. Better yet, nail your anger up on that cross today. In just a little bit we will be praying for healing. Some of you may want to come up here and ask God to heal the anger in your heart. Together, we can ask God to take the anger in your heart away and replace it with meekness.

1 comment:

  1. Righteousness and holiness being active words... good stuff! *taking notes*

    Two thumbs up!
    Peg

    ReplyDelete