Sermon by Pastor Seth - September 4, 2024
Sermons
Necessary Anger
If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Likely a familiar refrain taught in an effort to instill the habit of kindness, at its core is a message of restraint — to not give in to the temptation of letting the anger or judgment we feel towards someone on the inside be expressed on the outside. Self control is a fruit of the spirit, after all; we must be wary of what comes out of us, especially when we are angry.
When it comes to speaking or acting out of anger, scripture seems quite clear. “Refrain from anger and forsake wrath!” Psalm 37 says. “Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger,” James 1 teaches. “Anger resides in the lap of fools,” Ecclesiastes 7 admonishes. “One who is quick tempered displays folly,” Proverbs 14 reminds us. According to scripture, anger is something best left unspoken and overall avoided.
In our passage this week, it seems that Jesus would not only agree, but even takes it one step further — likening the anger one feels in one’s heart towards another to that of the act of murder itself. It’s not enough to not saying anything if you have nothing nice to say; it’s not enough to refrain from acting upon one’s anger. Rather, Jesus appears to be dramatically condemning the very emotion itself.
As we hear from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 5, I invite us to consider: is it ever okay to be angry?
Congregational Response
- Resounding yes
- Righteous anger vs. aggressive violence
- Emphasis on reconciliation and restoration of relationship
- Checking our motivation
- Anger gives voice to injustice
Theological Reflection
At the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in Storrs, Connecticut, 1981, Audre Lorde gives the keynote speech entitled, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.” In a charge for solidarity that moves beyond the self-centered paralysis of white guilt and the discomfort of voicing outrage, Lorde makes a case for anger. In her opening statements, she remarks, “My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life.” She goes on to say, “Once, I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.”
With blunt passion, Lorde calls out society’s prohibition of anger for women specifically: the systemic silencing of patriarchal dominance suppressing all but the expression of smiles and niceties — anger the forbidden fruit, a dangerous bite that will cast you out from the garden of acceptability with a target on your back. She speaks to the experience of people of color in particular, drawing from interactions she has had with white individuals, who paint her in the racist trope of another angry Black woman:
“Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you,” one white woman told her. In response, Lorde reflects in her speech, “But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change?”
It is often this threat that keeps us in fear of our anger and the anger of others — demonizing outrage by chalking it up to hatred and disruption of the status quo. “When we turn from anger,” she says, though, “we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar.“ There is a difference between anger and hatred. For Audre Lorde, whereas “[hatred’s] object is death and destruction…[anger’s] object is change.” In other words, it is in the pursuit of change where we find anger’s usefulness.
When Jesus speaks against anger, he is not telling the woman who is told to be silent to not be angry. He is not telling the father whose son was crucified by authorities at the end of a barrel to not be angry; he is not telling the trans woman assaulted within an inch of her life to not be angry; he is not telling the profiled teenager wrongfully convicted, the gay man denied entry, the survivor of abuse to not be angry. He is not advocating for the emotional suppression of the wronged or betrayed, the bullied or beaten, the cheated or cast out or the ones who stand in solidarity with those who are, whose anger is a lament over suffering and a plea for justice to be done. No, that is necessary anger, anger based in a refusal to believe hate and violence and disregard should have the final say. Let’s be clear. When Jesus seemingly places the disposition of anger within the same category as committing murder, he is referring to a specific kind of anger.
The Greek word used here implies a form of anger that is maliciously persistent, intentionally stoked within the heart which builds and festers and curdles into contemptuous hate. It is a consuming anger, a deep and long-lasting loathing that seeks nothing but the continued kindling of its flame and the murdering of relationship — not only with others but, I would argue, with oneself as well. When we become lost in fury, desiring nothing but the destruction of another even if it means our own destruction, our anger comes to define us leading naught but to disconnection and forgetfulness of our identity as a child of God. This kind of anger is not interested in change or justice or reconciliation; only revenge and retribution, anything it can do to keep the cycle going in a hellish internal feedback loop. It is an anger that, perhaps, would never have grown so enveloping if what lay beneath it was tended to from the start.
Jesus discusses two more instances that will incur judgment: insulting another person and also calling them a “fool,” which basically meant to destroy their reputation. He goes from talking about a malignant anger that we feel on the inside to unacceptable ways in which this anger is expressed on the outside by intending to cause harm. Then, immediately, he devotes the rest of this teaching to the importance of reconciliation with those who have been harmed. He does not tell the one who has been wronged to get over it; he tells the one who has wronged to make it right. The only way for this reconciliation to be possible is by speaking out against wrongdoing in the first place, and it is our anger at the injustice that gives us permission to do so.
Anger in pursuit of constructive change is a tool for connection and dare I claim an expression of love. It says that I love myself and others enough to not be okay with what has happened and to hold our treatment of one another accountable. Anger in pursuit of destruction, though, is nothing but a weapon of mass disconnection. It is this disconnected anger that Jesus finds problematic — anger that was never given a voice to speak in the first place, rotting away inside and checking out from relationship all together.
There is a difference between the anger that refuses to see another as human and an anger that loves the humanity of another or of oneself enough to know that something must change. Anger and love need not be mutually exclusive. It is only when the former is no longer in service to the latter that its usefulness withers into hate.
May our anger be a witness to our love as justice demands our action, living not in fear of feeling but in pursuit of a peace that only comes when no one is left unheard.
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