Poolesville Presbyterian Church
08.30.2015; Rev. Dr. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: James 1:17-27
LISTEN TO AUDIO HERE:
Anger has been on my mind lately, occupying the attention of my soul, consuming my heart.
It’s not that I think there’s no place for the feeling of anger. We are created to have the capacity for anger, to respond to broken things and threats with ferocity.
It’s that it’s hard to miss how much anger there is out there, simmering and aimless and without seeming connection to anything in particular.
I can’t help notice that there is always something to be angry at in this internet age, always a reason to be upset and full of fury at the inherent injustice of this thing or that thing. There can always be something that we find offensive, is always something out there to stir our sense of offense. It’s a big wide world, filled with billions of people, and somewhere out there, someone is always doing something that we find horrible.
If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention, or so the saying goes. But I’m paying attention to anger, and how much anger there is out there, and I find myself wondering: if we notice that there’s a dangerous level of anger in the world, is that something that we’re supposed to get angry at? I’m angry at the anger, we’d say, but then we get trapped in a self-referencing recursion error, and that kind of programming error can lock up the system of your soul.
That desire for vengeance, the rage-driven setting right of all things, never ever has to go away, until we’re all walking around always angry, like Bruce Banner in that Avengers film--well, the last Avengers film I bothered paying money to see in the theater, anyway.
That can be problematic, because as a lens for seeing the world, as a primary operating paradigm for structuring our self-understanding, anger warps and bends our perceptions. It is a funhouse mirror, warping both our sense of ourselves and our sense of others, only the house ain’t quite so fun. Because anger is always right, always completely right, and the object of anger is always completely wrong. This is useful when it’s you and your pointed stick standing between a leopard and your children. You don’t worry so much about the leopard’s motivations, it’s cute widdle hungry kittens, or about how sharp and pointy the leopard’s teeth and claws are. You just feel the rage, and that is all you feel.
That blindness helps with leopards and marauding bears and the guy who calls you insisting that he’s from the IRS and you’ll be under arrest unless you send him your credit card information. It can be less helpful in human social relations.
It was mindless, unseeing anger--fermented hatred, fortified by the toxic poison of racism--that drove Dylan Rooff to the pointless, horrific church shooting in Charlotte. It was the same anger, carefully nurtured until it defined every interaction, that lead Vester Lee Flanagan III to fire seventeen shots at three other human beings, and to feel justified in doing so. He claimed to have been inspired by the Charlotte shooting, and he was, because he and Dylan Roof are the same person, driven by the same dark spirit.
It was that same rage, that same blind feeling, that lead a father to shoot his young daughter three years ago before turning his gun on himself, so angry with his ex-wife that he’d destroy their only child Alexis, her name was, and she was just going into middle school with my sons, and I watched as one of the elders from her grandmother’s church quietly scrubbed her blood from their driveway with a bristle brush, five houses down from our own.
When allowed to define every we see, everything we do, and everything we are, anger becomes toxic.
The Book of James is all about seeing, and being, and doing, and it has valuable things to say about anger.
This “letter” is more an essay or sequence of essays that establish the most essential nature of the Christian ethical life. Ancient tradition suggests that the book was written by James, the brother of Jesus. Modern historical-critical scholarship has taken a hard look at that claim, analyzing the text more carefully, paying attention to implicit context, deconstructing theological assumptions, and the linguistic cues that lie within the most ancient codices.
The modern scholarly consensus: yeah, it’s probably the brother of Jesus.
James is essentially a book of Wisdom. As wisdom literature, it concerns itself with how we human beings should act if we’re to get along in the world.
Wisdom teachings are found elsewhere in the Bible, in Proverbs, and in Ecclesiastes, and in Job, as well as in a number of the Psalms. Those books teach the basics of how to live, and particularly how to live so that you are playing well with others and doing well for yourself. They teach that life is to be enjoyed, and that sustained enjoyment is best found in moderation, and in attending to what James alternately calls the “royal law” or the “law of liberty,” which means nothing more or nothing less than loving your neighbor as yourself. (Jas 8:2)
From the foundation of radical love, James teaches that the wise do not speak without careful self-examination, first considering the impact of their words.
That is why James attends to the challenge of human anger. “Be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger, because your anger does not produce God’s righteousness.”
We’re sure that it does, of course. Our anger convinces us that it does, but that’s only because our anger lets us to ignore the wisdom that shapes and creates healthy relationships. Anger is really not all that good at listening, unless by listening you mean listening carefully to find a vulnerability to exploit. Anger is not great at keeping silence, unless it’s just sitting there fuming.
The boundary line between righteous anger and self-righteousness is so very easily crossed.
Yet we know that Jesus got angry on more than one occasion, and we know that anger is necessary part of human identity. How do we find our way to righteous anger, then?
I think that test, honestly, lies in the advice James gives. We must check our anger--just as we check our whole selves--against the law of liberty. Is our anger concerned about our own interests, our own pride and social position? Then it ain’t righteous, honey. Is our anger something that rises quickly and daily, triggered by anything and everything? Then it’s a sign of something wrong in us, something we need to deal with.
Righteous anger is anger that cares about the other, and places the integrity of that relation . It is anger that allows itself to be reined in and bridled by love. It is an anger that says, this thing is destroying us. This thing is tearing us apart. It is an anger whose intent is healing, and that does not seek to harm anything other than brokenness itself. It is the fire that tempers like the blacksmith’s furnace, and restores, as fierce as the arc of a welder’s torch, as bright as a surgeon’s laser.
Where anger rises in us, we need to check it against that measure. Is it just the ambient rage of a culture that has lost any sense of purpose or meaning? Is it just our own animal frustration? Or is it an anger that checks itself, that has as its goal and purpose the building up of Kingdom?
Wherever anger rests in you, wherever it speaks, measure it against the wisdom that rises from love.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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