Hilton Head Island, SC – January 19, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Ephesians 4:25-32; Matthew 5:21-26
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment.” - Matthew 5:22 (RSV)
Is a young man who walks into an elementary school and shoots several children and some staff members angry, or is he mentally deranged? How about someone who kills members of his family in a sudden rage? What about a soldier or sailor who constantly gets into fistfights?
Surely there are different kinds of anger. Someone who is pounding a nail and misses, hitting his thumb, is likely to become instantly angry. He is angry at the pain, and angry at himself for doing such a foolish thing. But by no means is he necessarily a constantly angry man --- unless he is constantly angry. A woman who becomes angry at a bridge partner has a different kind of anger from one who gets angry at a store clerk. A parent who gets angry at a child on a regular and predictable basis is different from a parent who on rare occasions illustrates frustration and even anger with the child’s behavior.
Most anger is normal, whatever “normal” might mean. You are normal, and I am normal, but probably everyone else is at least a little abnormal. Thank heavens for us, we tell ourselves. Anger is not a problem in itself; it is how we deal with our anger which determines whether or not we have a problem with it. But I suspect nearly everyone has at least a few issues with anger.
We have all known people who seem to be smoldering all the time. Any little thing can set them off. Those folks may well have what has come to be called a continuous “anger-management problem.” We have also known people who occasionally fly off the handle and then it is over moments later. We say to ourselves, “Well, that’s just Bob; that’s just Susan.” We may even know people who seem never to get angry. They are very rare, however. And it might never be known at the deepest level how that is even possible. How can anyone keep from ever getting angry?
The Bible says a lot about anger. My biblical concordance lists more than two hundred usages of the words “anger” or “angry.” Apparently the writers of the Bible thought it was a common human tendency which needed to be addressed, and they frequently addressed it.
One of the best-known of the thousand-plus proverbs in the Book of Proverbs was the first verse in our responsive reading for this morning: “A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger” (Proverbs 15:1) What a wise observation that is! Sometimes people will say something that really gets under our skin. A liberal Democrat asks a conservative Republican, “How on earth can you watch Fox News?” That is like waving a red flag before a bull. But the best kind of answer would be a soft one; “I do it because I like Fox News, and that’s all I’m going to say.” A conservative Republican says to a liberal Democrat, “Well, your President isn’t going to get anything done on gun control, or the debt ceiling, or a budget, or anything else.” A soft answer might be, “You may be right.” And indeed that may be right. A harsh word would be, “If so, it’s because you Republicans will keep it from happening!” And that would probably stir up anger.
Too often we speak when we should be silent, or we react instantaneously when we should carefully think before we say anything. Or we say mean-spirited things when we don’t really intend to be mean spirited. The tongue can be as sharp as a stiletto if we allow it. Some anger is just a bad habit. People allow a natural irritability to take control of them. There are some people, especially males of our species, who use profane language all the time. Likely in all such cases it is simply a bad habit they have allowed themselves to adopt. They make life unpleasant for everyone around them, and they show themselves to be linguistically sadly impoverished. Furthermore, they betray themselves to be what psychologists would call, in a very technical term, “nincompoops.” It is not hard to get angry at people who use bad words with no discernible anger within them, but who possess a glaring paucity of useful verbiage. In other words, if anyone truly feels a necessity to employ explosive pejoratives, let it be only when there are no other words to convey such dire thoughts or feelings. “Button your lip” might be another way of expressing that notion.
On the other hand, sometimes anger is the only way to deal honestly with differences we have with other people. Those who are politically oppressed may have no choice other than to voice their anger to their oppressors. “Righteous indignation” is righteous, after all, isn’t it? As the cinematic network newscaster said in one of the most memorable lines from any movie, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” What happened after that, however, was beyond being extreme.
In his letter to the Ephesians, the apostle Paul gave a string of advice about many things to the Ephesians. Here is some of the advice he gave: “Be angry, but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil” (Eph. 4:26).
Is Paul saying that anger is a sin? It sounds like it, doesn’t it? But how can anger be a sin? It’s an emotion, isn’t it? Isn’t it an instantaneously-engendered emotion or feeling, or an internal attitude which may be nurtured and nourished over weeks or months or years? Yes, anger can be an emotion given instant birth by something which bothers us, but it also can be given a home in our hearts for many years, if we allow it to find a refuge there. But either way, some anger, possibly even all anger, is an illustration of sin. If that is true, it means we permit something to infect our hearts and minds when we have the ability to prevent it: “Be angry, but do not sin.” Anger is bound to find itself within most if not all of us, but we must not allow it to become the occasion of sin. And one of the best ways for that to happen is to obliterate our anger by the time we go to sleep every day. “Do not let the sun go down on your anger.”
Marriage counselors often tell couples to douse whatever anger erupts between them on any given day before they fall asleep. It is excellent advice. Not to do so is to allow anger to fester. And festering anger is like a skin infection; if it is not dealt with, it inevitably it continues to fester, and it is bound to get worse. If we permit anger to take control of us, then – in the words of Paul – we give an opportunity to the devil. Un-addressed anger becomes an emotional infection within us, a self-induced malignancy.
We delude ourselves if we think anger is exclusively an emotion or feeling, and not a sin. It is a sin, if we do not properly deal with it soon after it manifests itself. Anger is one of the most anti-social and dangerously interpersonal expressions of human behavior. Almost all of us feel angry from time to time, but the very existence of our anger is no excuse for maintaining it within ourselves. We need to talk it out when we become angry with someone, and if an agreement cannot be reached over what caused the dispute, then it behooves us as would-be Christians to forgive the other and move on, even if we’re certain we’re right and they are wrong.
Jesus spoke of this in the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew chapters 5 through 7 are a collection of proverbial or parabolic sayings of Jesus which were clumped together by the Gospel writer. He probably did not say all of these things at one time, but they are collected into one sermon, and thus they are all the more memorable to us because of it.
Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said to the men of old, ‘You shall not kill, and who ever kills shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother shall be liable to the council, and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ shall be liable to the hell of fire” (5:21-22). Holy cats! Those are very strong words, to say the least. When it says “the council,” it is referring to a religious court, perhaps like a miniature Spanish Inquisition or a 17th century Puritan ecclesiastical judicial commission. Jesus’ frightful words are mitigated somewhat by the footnote, which notes that other authorities say, “Whoever insults his brother without cause shall be liable to the council.” That makes a considerable difference. It’s one thing to be angry with a proper cause, and quite another to be angry without cause. But on the other hand, that is still just a footnote. What did Jesus really say? In this as in everything else, no one can be absolutely certain.
Whatever were Jesus’ words in the original context, he surely intended for us to take anger very seriously. The severity of the punishments to which he alludes should clearly convince us of that. Anger is not a minor matter; it is a major one. Anger leads to interpersonal disruptions, as well as to institutional or national disruptions. It is spiritual “hazmat”: hazardous material.
In the first stages of the Iraq War, Saddam Hussein managed to stir his people to such a heightened pitch of anger that they convinced themselves they could defeat the coalition of nations which quickly demolished the Iraqi army. It was a disastrous miscalculation, and it will take Iraq many years to recover from the folly of Saddam’s decision to wage war. But is it also equally possible that war occurred because the President of the United States was personally irate because Saddam Hussein had years earlier ordered a failed assassination attempt on his father?
In the events which led up for many years to the American Civil War, anger increased on both sides, until it became evident peace could not be maintained. It took generations to overcome the bitterness which resulted from that terrible conflict. There are still some people, both in the South and the North, who smolder over the anger they feel because of hostilities which are now a full century and a half behind us, but which they refuse to bury.
However, it is in interpersonal anger where individually we can most clearly observe the ill effects of anger. I would be surprised if there is anyone here this morning who cannot think of two or more people you know who have not spoken to one another for years because of an ancient grudge over a major or minor dispute. Maybe it was colleagues in your work, or neighbors, or possibly members of your family, or you yourself. Anger in families can be particularly disruptive, and its ripple effect can cause interminable problems for everyone else in the family as long as the issues remain unresolved.
Anger is more likely to erupt in men than in women. Were it not for testosterone, no species could propagate itself, but because of testosterone, far too much animosity is also propagated. Men seem far more adept at wrath than soft answers. In that regard, many of us show ourselves to be members of a sadly defective gender.
The great Beaufort County author Pay Conroy portrays anger very well in most of his stories. In his novel South of Broad he is the narrator, as he is in many of his other books. And in this one, set in Charleston, Leo nurtures a lifelong low-flame fury against his mother, who constantly holds it against him that he is not his older brother Steve, who committed suicide at age ten. Leo believes her overpowering personality was a factor in Steve’s decision to end his very young life. Of course Leo could not be blamed for not being Steve, and his mother did not blame him, exactly. Nonetheless she led him to know that because Leo was not Steve, he would always be inferior in her mind. That made him continuously angry. Further, Leo never seemed capable of letting it all go. He never stopped speaking to his mother, but often when he did speak, it was with an ever-sharp Conroyan (Leoian?) tongue.
The American Indians had a saying we have all heard: Never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins. It means that we should try to see things from the viewpoint of others before we take issue with them. Much of our anger is the result of deliberate or unintended misunderstanding. We fly off the handle before we know all the facts and circumstances. The actions of others greatly irritate us, but do we pause to ask ourselves why they do what they do?
Here is one of the most important things to consider regarding anger: when we sense it coming on, does it really need to be expressed? And if so, how should it be expressed? For most of us, most of our anger is fortunately of short duration. That kind of irritation should probably never even be voiced. Sublimate it, and quickly forget it. But if something is really bothering us, and it continues to gnaw away at our inner being, it may need to come out into the open. However, nuclear explosions or bunker-busting bombs of anger accomplish nothing, and are guaranteed to do serious damage. Anger may be used a tool, but it should only be employed in proportion to the size of the problem. And even when the problem is a big one, big explosions are probably likely to make the situation worse, not better. For anger to accomplish anything positive, it must be controlled.
Ultimately, anger is a common human phenomenon which requires uncommon restraint to be successfully managed. People who frequently blow up like the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park are not taken seriously. It is when very temperate folks are driven to intemperate anger that people really pay attention. But even then, it does no good to try to immolate anyone by our wrath. Not only is that unproductive, it is also foolish and unloving.
Anger is a burden God does not want us to carry around like an anchor. God means for us to live in love and harmony with one another. He did not create any of us to become constantly moving volcanoes. It is inevitable for people to have differences with one another, but it is God’s will that we calmly and sensibly work out those differences. Anger is a terrible instrument for dealing with anger. Soft answers turn away wrath. Soft tongues accomplish far more than sharp tongues. Sharp tongues cut; soft tongues heal.
An observation, and a question: Anger happens. What happens next?