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Anger: "The Hardest Sin To Let Go"

Seven Deadly Sins Sermon Series—Anger
March 16, 2008—Palm Sunday
Matthew 21:1-11, 27:15-23

When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of
Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and
immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them
to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will
send them immediately.” This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the
prophet, saying, “Tell the daughter of Zion, Look, your king is coming to you, humble,
and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” The disciples went and
did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their
cloaks on them, and he sat on them. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the
road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The
crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of
David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest
heaven!” When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is
this?” The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”

Now at the festival the governor was accustomed to release a prisoner for the crowd,
anyone whom they wanted. At that time they had a notorious prisoner, called Jesus
Barabbas. So after they had gathered, Pilate said to them, “Whom do you want me to
release for you, Jesus Barabbas or Jesus who is called the Messiah?” For he realized
that it was out of jealousy that they had handed him over. While he was sitting on the
judgment seat, his wife sent word to him, “Have nothing to do with that innocent man,
for today I have suffered a great deal because of a dream about him.” Now the chief
priests and the elders persuaded the crowds to ask for Barabbas and to have Jesus
killed. The governor again said to them, “Which of the two do you want me to release
for you?” And they said, “Barabbas.” Pilate said to them, “Then what should I do with
Jesus who is called the Messiah?” All of them said, “Let him be crucified!” Then he
asked, “Why, what evil has he done?” But they shouted all the more, “Let him be
crucified!”

Here we are, at the end of the road, so to speak, in terms of our sermon series on the
seven deadly sins, and some of you, I suspect, are ready to be rid of it all. Well, I am
as well, to be honest, mostly because these sermons have been awfully confessional
for me, and I am tired of having to confess to a new sin each week, and I am sure you’
re tired of hearing them. And of course, the reason why I’ve shared with you my own
struggle with each of these sins is because I don’t ever want to speak “down to you”
from this pulpit, as if I was brow beating you with stuff you ought not to do, rather than
admitting that all of these sins are stuff we all should strive to minimize in our lives—the
less gluttony, greed, lust, envy, pride, sloth, and anger, we have in our lives, the better
we’re all off, so to speak. And that last one, that last deadly sin, anger, is what I’m
going to be sharing with you today, in the context of Palm Sunday, that day that begins
Holy Week. And its one of the few sins that I haven’t had to deal with too much
personally, meaning that I’m someone that is fairly evenly-tempered—anger is not
something I struggle with, usually, or at least not having a flash of anger, or a sudden
outburst of anger. Most of my anger is more of the smoldering kind when I do have it,
but there was a moment years ago at the beginning of my ministry that I really lost it
with a church member, something I am not very proud of. It’s a long story, but after a
tumultuous relationship between me and this person, I just came unglued in a meeting
that was actually meant to reconcile us, and I have to tell you that I was probably lucky
that I kept my job after that less than splendid moment. A lot of folks had struggled with
this particular person, but for some reason she just pushed a button I really didn’t know
I had, and at that moment all reason went out the window, and I still cringe every time I
think about it.

And, of course, that is the problem with anger, isn’t it? That reason tends to go out the
window when we lose our cool, and explode in a fit of rage and fury. We simply don’t
have the capacity to think something through when our blood is boiling and our
emotions have captured us, making us hostage to forces we often didn’t realize we had
within us. Joseph Stittler tells the story of a young man who was walking home through
the park during a transit strike that took place a few years ago. “It was late and he was
alone. In the middle of his trek, he saw someone approaching him on the path. There
was, of course, a spasm of fear: He veered, the stranger veered. But since they both
veered in the same direction they bumped in passing. A few moments later the young
man realized that this could hardly have been an accident and felt for his wallet. It was
gone. Anger triumphed and he turned, caught up with the pick-pocket and demanded
his wallet. The man surrendered it. When he got home, the first thing he saw was his
own wallet lying on the bed. There was no way of avoiding the truth: He had mugged
somebody.” The Anguish of Preaching (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966),10. (Told
by Charles L. Rice, The Embodied Word, Preaching as Art and Liturgy (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1990), 130-31. I mean, that’s what anger does to us—it doesn’t allow
to put our thinking caps on and really think things through. We do so much harm in
those burst of anger, those fits of rage, and our prisons are full of people whose
moment of anger delivered them to the jailhouse doors.

But I tell you this much: I think most of the angry, volatile moments we experience or
see others act out have roots that are deep—rarely does anger just come out of no
where, in the sense that there is probably some underlying rage in that person that
rarely gets expressed. I think of the people gathered outside Pilate’s palace, the same
crowds of people who probably greeted Jesus in the first part of our reading for today, I
think they didn’t just cry out of their most recent disappointment that this Jesus of
Nazareth didn’t get the job done by kicking the Romans out of Israel—I think the
disappointment was deep, and had its roots in a million disappointments, of which
Jesus’ failure to be the kind of Messiah he was “supposed” to be was the latest. It’s
rare that rage comes out of nowhere, and it was certainly the case with the crowds
outside of Pilate’s porch that late afternoon thousands of years ago. All the indignities,
all the failed dreams and humiliations of being an occupied nation, all of that burst out
on that day, in that crowd, perhaps the same people who had cried out Hosanna as
Jesus had passed by only days earlier. All of that gets wrapped up in that moment, and
we have only to look to Good Friday to see what a wreckage life becomes when we fail
to deal with the slow burning anger and rage we have failed to deal with in our lives. It
certainly contributed to Jesus’ death, and it can contribute to our death, emotionally, if
not always literally. If we can’t make peace with the ways that others have disappointed
us, failed us, or failed to lived up to our expectations, at least from our point of view,
moments like this one we heard from our Scripture today are likely to be part of our
stories—moments in which our anger overtakes our ability to think something through,
to hold back our fists and fury towards someone or something that has broken our
hearts. Their anger at Jesus for not being who they wanted him to be, well, it probably
cost Jesus’ his life.

And disappointment in others isn’t the only reason we sometimes lose our cool—
sometimes we misunderstand each other, we get the messages crossed up and we
misinterpret what is being said to us. One time I was driving and these young kids
passed me and starting making gestures to my car, and I thought they were making fun
of my old and very unattractive car…I knew my tires were fine, and I wasn’t having any
car troubles, so I thought they were just mocking me. They drove on, and when I finally
stopped for some gas, I realize that they had been trying to tell me that my gas tank lid
was open and the cover was hanging against the car! Mary Rose O’Reilly tells the
story of friend of hers in her book The Barn At The End of The World. She writes:
“One of my Quaker friends - a woman who, like me, has quite a struggle with anger -
once told me about sitting in Quaker meeting across from a man she assumed to be an
emissary from the National Rifle Association. [The Quakers are known for their non-
violent beliefs]. He wore a shirt that read "Support Your Right to Bear Arms." The
proclamation made her furious. She stewed all through meeting, building up quite a
stomachache, by her own admission. Later, in the fellowship hall, she discovered that
she had misread the man's shirt, which proclaimed instead the comic takeoff, "Support
Your Right to Arm Bears." O’Reilly continues “So much of our anger is based on this
kind of misunderstanding. It's our interpretations and constructions that cause so much
pain in our own gut and in the outer world where we act out our misapprehensions.” It’
s the same way with the Jesus in our Palm Sunday texts for today—they misunderstood
what kind of Messiah he had come to be—one that wasn’t going to meet violence with
violence, as the people of occupied Israel wanted so much from their Messiahs. If we
can’t check our anger, if we can’t pull back from our rage and get perspective, the
effects can be devastating for us, beyond the simple misunderstanding you find in a
misread t-shirt in a worship setting.

But effects of our anger don’t just fall on our shoulders, of course. They fall on our
family’s shoulders—they can permeate the air we breathe, and soil we grow in, so to
speak—ask any child that has grown up in a home where anger is the fuel that keeps
the dysfunction going on in the household. Anger can poison our relationships with our
spouse, our children, our community, our work—everywhere can be tainted with the
spoken or unspoken rage we carry within us. If we don’t deal with it, it can ruin our lives
and cast a shadow upon all the good we might be or become in this world. Arthur H.
DeKruyter tells the story of the musical team of Gilbert and Sullivan who were doing
very well together until they bought a theater. "Then Sullivan decided it ought to be
recarpeted. So he bought the carpet, but Gilbert intercepted the bill. When he got the
bill, he was very angry and hit the ceiling. He took Sullivan to court because he felt that
as long as Sullivan had ordered the carpet without consulting him, he should not have
to pay for it. It all wound up in a great lawsuit. There was so much anger that neither
one of those men spoke again as long as they lived. When Sullivan wrote the music, he
sent it by messenger to Gilbert. Gilbert would pen the words and send it by messenger
back to Sullivan. Then, when they would have their wonderful performances, they would
each come from opposite ends of the stage to take their bows, but they never looked at
each other. They never said a word to each other again as long as they lived." Our
anger, and our inability to move past it, whether it be just anger, or unjust anger, well, it
can swallow us up alive. You and I all know people whose rage and anger has
consumed them, anger that has stayed with them since they were children, or stemming
from some injustice done to them decades earlier. And we know how that anger, that
disappoint seems to define them as people…and its just painful to watch, especially if it
should happen to someone we deeply love.

And yet, there is a sense in which anger has its place in life, and that it isn’t always bad
and it isn’t always a negative thing. Anger, of course, can make us get up and do
something, make a change in our lives, or in a difficult situation at work. There is a time
and a place for anger, because, as is obvious in the real world, there are some real
things to be angry about—I know the health care crisis gets me angry, and our country’
s foreign policy sometimes gets me going—I suspect you have your own issues that
ignite your own angry, maybe the very opposite of what makes me angry. It does us no
good, however, not to do something about what we’re angry about, and the way we do
it is to find people who are willing to be angry together and to gather up our anger in
order to help change the world. “In one of Elie Wiesel's stories, Four Hasidic Masters
and Their Struggle Against Melancholy (1978), Rebbe Barukh proposed the idea of a
community of creative anger to one of his students: "I know there are questions that
have no answers; there is a suffering that has no name; there is injustice in God's
creation _ and there are reasons enough for man to explode with rage. I know there
are reasons for you to be angry. Good. Let us be angry. Together." (As quoted in
Robert McAffee Brown, Elie Wiesel: Messenger to All Humanity (Notre Dame, Ind.:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1983, 202-203) The kind of anger that is willing to
change the world for the good, that gathers with other people angry at the injustices of
the world, that is OK, that is a good thing, as long as that anger is something we can
put down at the end of the day—rage carried into the night, into the early morning,
when we stew and fester with it, even rage at what must be raged against, well, it can
wreck us a human beings and have horrific consequences for others—just ask Jesus
about how people’s festering and misplaced rage can find the wrong target. The writer
of Ephesians says that we should “be angry, but do not sin; do not let the sun go down
on your anger and do not make room for the devil.” (4:26) If we cannot let go of our
anger enough to enjoy the pleasures of life, something as simple as a good night’s
sleep, or even the joy of welcoming a great man into the city, then we know it’s the kind
of rage that will destroy our lives and probably the lives of others. The personal effects
of that anger that cannot be laid down, that cannot be let go, even for an evening, even
for sleep, that is the anger of the murderous mob who gathered in Jerusalem, with the
Savior of the world before them, and raged and screamed to Pilate, “Crucify him,
crucify him!”

I said last week that the solution to the particularly spiritual sin of sloth was to do what
we wish to become, to act in a way that imitates the kind of person we want to be, and
then to let our hearts catch up to our actions. If we do enough, if we change the way
we live our lives, even before our hearts catch up to our actions, then it will come, the
change will come for us. I do believe that, and I think that’s true for anger as well. If we
can put that anger, just or unjust, true, or believed to be true, if we can put that anger
down for one night, put it down for one moment, and then do it the next night, and the
next moment, and the one after that, then sooner or later, we become the calm we want
to be in the face of what we believe has been done to us or to those we love. When we’
re calm, we can do what God wants us to do, which is to change the situation, whether
that be us that must change—and it could be us, after all, as hard as that is to admit—
or it could be about changing the situation that caused our anger in the first place. We
miss so much of life, like love, like joy, like happiness, like resurrection itself, when we
stew within our rage, our anger. And even though there is more than enough wrong in
this world for us to rightfully explode with rage, there is even more that is worth
celebrating and loving and being present with in our lives. To be lost in our anger, well,
we’ll miss all the good stuff, just as those angry crowds thousands of years ago in
Jerusalem missed the great life, the great love of the universe that was standing right
before them. Amen.