Scripture can be found here…
On Thursday morning, I woke up. My first mistake was looking at social media before I’d had my coffee. There, I saw a video. It was clip of something taking place on an airplane. A woman was filming, so that you could see her chair, and the man behind her, who was punching her chair repeatedly… fast punches, the way you would hit a punching bag. It seems the woman had reclined her seat, and the man—who was in the back row, in a seat that doesn’t recline, was angry about it. Angry enough to punch her seat repeatedly.
The headline accompanying the video said, “This is dividing the internet.”
And it was. There were those who felt the man was absolutely in the right, because the woman had invaded his space by reclining.
There were those who felt the woman was completely within her rights to recline, and the man was essentially committing assault.
And then there was a small but vocal minority, saying something along the lines of, “Don’t blame the man or the woman; blame the airlines, which force us into these Lord of the Flies situations.”
Folks, I know Jesus talks about four different things in this morning’s passage from the Sermon on the Mount—he talks about Anger, Adultery, Divorce, and Oaths.
And, if I could give you a sweeping observation on how he talks about them, I believe he goes straight to the relationships that undergird the law, that are its foundation—our relationships with God and with one another.
But today, we’re going to focus on anger, because I believe we must. As children of God living in the year 2020, anger is the toxic cultural stew we are all swimming in. It seems, everyone is angry. Somehow, we must come to terms with that.
Jesus begins with a motif he uses for all four topics. “You have heard it said…” be begins, and then be pivots: “But I tell you…”
Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said… ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’” Then, he tells his listeners, that if they are angry, or if they insult someone, or if they so much as say, “You fool!” to someone… they are subject to the judgments of both God and humans.
We experience this as a shocking leap, but I don’t know why. Jesus is always asking us to do hard stuff. This is the same Jesus who says, “Go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and… then come, follow me” (Matthew 19:21); and “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23); and also “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). Jesus is always asking us to choose the narrow way, the harder way, the one that makes us sigh, and wonder why we care what Jesus has to say anyway.
Now, what Jesus is doing here is something that is well-known in Jewish tradition. He is “drawing a fence (or a “hedge”) around the law.”[i] The rationale is that, in order to keep from sinning, we avoid what in my Catholic childhood we called “the near occasion of sin.” The logic goes, I am more likely to murder someone if I allow my anger to get the best of me. So, in order to ensure that I do not murder, I observe a more strict prohibition, one against anger.
And this is what Jesus is doing with all four of these topics, by the way—he is showing us that narrow way that keeps us from the more grave trespass upon our neighbors.
So, don’t be angry—simple! Amen. That’s the end of the sermon.
Yeah. I know. It can be incredibly hard not to be angry, not to respond in anger to any number of things. But let’s think about what those things are. What makes us angry?
I’d break them down into three distinct categories: Anger at injustice; anger towards people we know; and anger towards people we don’t know.
For those of us who follow Jesus, it’s hard to make a case that we shouldn’t feel this kind of anger, that we shouldn’t express it. Later on in this gospel, when faced with an injustice—when money-changers in the Temple were profiting off the misery of the poor—Jesus showed us that one appropriate response is flipping over tables while you’re citing scripture.
If we are trying to be part of the good in this world, injustice alarms us when we see it. It may even make us angry. Each of us probably has a list of the things that horrify us, from human rights violations at home and abroad to the persistence of racism, sexism, systemic poverty, and homophobia and transphobia.
There are many creative ways to flip over tables, and thus channel our anger into good works. When I was a commissioner to the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s 223rd General Assembly, we joined in a local effort to remedy the injustice of cash bail, which is so devastating to poor people. We took an offering, and raised $55,000.00 for the purpose of helping people who were in jail awaiting trial for nonviolent offenses. Members of the Assembly marched down to the St. Louis Justice Center, to bail out as many people as we could.
Steve Garnaas-Holmes writes this week:
If you love the people of the world
and know them as your siblings,
if you care, you will clearly see injustice
and you will be furious.[ii]
If the only fury we experienced were anger at injustice, we know the answer. Channel that anger. Do what we can to right the wrong. Find like-minded people and work together to help ease the suffering of our fellow human beings.
But injustice not the only thing that makes us angry. Look at Jesus’ examples: We might be angry with a brother or sister. Someone hurls an insult. Someone calls someone an unkind name. Someone has been wronged. Someone is suing someone.
I would break these down into two categories: anger between people who know one another, and who are in relationship with one another; and anger at people we don’t know but who, because of the way our world is fashioned now, is more and more prevalent. Because we live so much of our lives online, communicating with one another through social media like Facebook and Twitter, we have to address the anger that crops up there.
Jesus tells us what to do with the anger we have towards people who are our loved ones, our neighbors. Go to them. Speak with them. Try to be reconciled to them.
That poem I quoted earlier continues,
See how the Teacher turns our mind first
from being wronged to having wronged others.
First sweep your house of your own demons.
Seek forgiveness and be reconciled to those you have wronged
before you make demands of those who wrong others.[iii]
In pre-marital counseling sessions I always, always talk with couple about anger, and fighting. I urge them to do the hard thing, and try, in the midst of an argument, to give the other person something they need—if they need to be alone for a bit, give them space. If they need to keep talking, give them reassurance that you will talk. Giving one another just one little thing that is just a little hard to give, goes a long way towards that precious big thing: reconciliation.
Jesus is pretty clear that we should place a priority on this. Don’t let the sun go down on your anger. Leave your offering envelope and do it before church. Work it out before the date of that court appearance, even if you’re already on the steps of the courthouse. You have heard that it was said, do not murder; but I tell you, even the death of a relationship can be a kind of murder. Even if that relationship is on life support, can we find a way to whisper in that person’s ear that it doesn’t have to be this way? Can we figure out how to apologize? How to bend?
The last kind of anger I’ll talk about is a kind that is probably far more prevalent today than it has ever been in history. An author I admire is the recipient of that it frequently. Nadia Bolz-Weber is a tall, tattooed Lutheran pastor who doesn’t shy away from the saltiest of language. (I’m going to substitute other words for the salty things she says, but you’ll probably get the drift.) This week, she Tweeted:
Someone just sent me a [Direct Message] mocking my looks followed by “get cancer.” My 1st thought: [Forget] you. My 2nd thought: dang. That’s so much pain.[iv]
So much anger—between people who support different political parties or persons, between people who disagree about what constitutes injustice in this world, even between people in the same churches who disagree on how to be good followers of Jesus!—so much of this anger has, as its root, deep pain.
Bolz-Weber quotes Franciscan wise man Richard Rohr, who said, “You can tell a lot about someone by what they do with their pain. Do they transform it or do they transmit it?” She suggests, maybe a good antidote to our own anger in this kind situation is to find a way to have compassion for the other person. To understand that striking out at people you don’t even know probably means you’re hurting inside.
Yelling at people on the internet, or cutting them off with your car, or maybe gesticulating rudely when they cut you off, or even punching their seat in an airplane—that’s transmitting your anger. Bolz-Weber says, she’s trying to transform her anger into compassion.
But, she says, “Don’t be impressed.”
“The thing I must always keep in mind whenever I attempt to feel compassion toward someone is that I’m doing it for me, not for them. I know that’s selfish. But my heart can’t take any more [forget] you, any more contempt for [those people], any more self-righteousness…
“So what do I do?
“Option 1:
Transmit my pain, as Richard Rohr calls it. Take my hurt and pass it like a basketball either back to the person who hurt me, or to someone more convenient – like that guy who is driving too slow in the left lane, or maybe my partner.
“Option 2:
Transform my pain, as RR calls it. Perhaps I remember that no one who feels well-loved, who is a psychologically integrated person, and who has a happy life would ever choose to send someone a direct message telling them they look like a freak and should “get cancer”. Someone has hurt them and I know what that feels like.
“I’m never going to get this right. But holy [God], option one feels like poison and option two feels like freedom.”[v]
Sometimes, as I’m writing a sermon, it occurs to me: Am I preaching to myself? Maybe I’m the only one who needs these words of Jesus today, and the rest of you have already come to terms with the role of anger in your life. But if I’m wrong, I pray that each of us might be able to do the hard and holy work of letting God’s mercy saturate us. I pray that we might let compassion ground us in all we say, and in all that we do. I pray that we might lose our taste for the poison of transmitting our anger, and whet our appetites for the freedom of transforming it. I pray it all, in the name of the One who is our Teacher, and our Healer, and our Hope.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] In halakha (Jewish law) this is known as “khumra” (plural, “khumrot”).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khumra_(Judaism).
[ii] “Rage,” Steve Garnaas-Holmes, “Unfolding Light,”
https://www.unfoldinglight.net/reflections/x3aacahgt3x7l4kfzrnsyjtzwbbwbl.
[iii] Garnaas-Holmes, ibid.
[iv] Nadia Bolz-Weber, “I’m dabbling in compassion… but only a little bit. Don’t be impressed,”
[v] Bolz-Weber, ibid.