Texts: Psalm 44:22-26; Mark 3:1-6
Speaker: Joel Miller
What do we do with our anger?
The theme of this worship series is “Rise Up! Take Courage!” It matches the current theme of Central District Conference. When the writers of the worship guide sat down to choose the weekly subthemes, they decided to start where they imagined many folks are starting these days. With anger. Actually, rage. Week 1: “Voice your rage,” as it says on our bulletin cover. Well, this is week three for us. We’ve been cherry picking the resource for our own schedule. This Sunday, we picked the angry cherry.
If you’re feeling angry, or enraged, about anything in the world these days, anything in your life, this Sunday is for you.
It’s not a very churchy thing, to emphasize anger. Not many folks head out to worship on a Sunday morning, thinking, I hope I return home a little angrier than I am now. But let’s risk it. Consider, now, something about which you are angry. Feel the temperature rise a bit within you. Hold that thought as carefully or firmly as you need to.
Are we there? Everyone still OK?
What do we do with our well-founded anger?
Well, if you’re the Psalmist, you direct it at God.
When the poet in Psalm 44 says, “Because of you we are being killed all day long,” the “you” being addressed is God, the Lord, Yahweh, the Divine Spirit from which all reality flows – who/which/that supposedly cares about justice and mercy.
So why, the Psalmist cries out, all this suffering? It’s because of You, capital Y – You.
In the two verses that follow, the Psalmist manages to accuse God of being lazy, sleepy, dismissive, disinterested, and/or forgetful.
Psalm 44, verses 23-24, from us, to You, capital Y:
Rouse yourself! (lazy) Why do you sleep, O Lord? Awake (sleepy) ! Do not cast us off forever (dismissive). Why do you hide your face? (disinterested) Why do you forget our affliction and oppression? (forgetful).
Strike 5, You. Are. Out.
Just in case the situation is still unclear, the Psalm ends with a status update, and a final plea:
“For we sink down to the dust; our bodies cling to the ground. Rise up, come to our help. Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love.”
It’s a cry of lament, despair, anger. It could be coming from underneath the crush of any of the empires that brutalized the Jewish people. It could be coming from the streets of Sudan, the rubble of Venezuela, the devastation of Gaza, the working poor of the US.
Depending on your theology, directing your anger toward God may feel appropriate, even necessary, or misplaced.
There are plenty of examples of this throughout the Psalms. The book of Job is an extended meditation on the suffering Job’s outcries and accusations toward God, and Job’s friends’ not-so-helpful counsel against it. It fits with an enduring teaching within Judaism that one of the tasks of prayer is to alert God to suffering. To remind God of God’s commitments and hold God accountable. The whole Exodus story heaves into action because of a loud groan from the enslaved Israelites. Exodus 2:23-25:
“Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.”
It’s almost a step by step reverse of the Psalmists’ accusations: God heard. God remembered. God looked upon. God took notice.
That probably doesn’t, and shouldn’t answer all our questions and anger, prayer, suffering, and Divine involvement. It does offer an initial response to the question of What to do with our anger. The groan, the crying out, the angry prayer, could be a first step in the direction of relieving suffering.
Anger also shows up in Mark chapter 3. It’s the Sabbath, and Jesus is at synagogue. So are some Pharisees. So is a man with a withered hand, as Mark describes it. So are a lot of other people. Jesus has the floor, and he calls the man with the withered hand forward. He comes forward. Jesus turns to the congregation with this man by his side. Jesus asks: “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” Seems like a bit of a leading question. But it had no set answer. The question of how to honor the Sabbath was one of ongoing debate. Nobody that morning says a thing. With Jesus, and the man, and the question. Right there. Mark writes “But they were silent.” Then Mark writes something that doesn’t show up any other time in his or any other gospel. He explicity says that Jesus got angry. “Jesus looked around at them with anger.” The only time that particular word is used to refer to Jesus in the whole Bible is not because of something bad any individual did. It is because a whole group of people were silent. They did nothing. Not even a word.
I can almost hear Jesus reciting that Psalm back to the congregation: Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep? Why do you forget?
Jesus doesn’t even touch the man. He just tells him to stretch out his hand. Which he does. So Jesus has given his own answer to that question of doing good on the Sabbath, and a certain kind of answer of what to do with anger. He directs it toward healing. It’s too much for the Pharisees. They go out and start to plot against this upstart Galilean.
What do we do with our anger?
What even is our anger? Where does it come from?
The writer David Whyte, one of my favorites, offers this meditation on Anger. He write:
“Anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for…What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it.”
(AGAIN)
“Anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for…What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it.”
And then this, from David Whyte: “Anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here; it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it.” (Consolations, p. 13,14,15)
There is much to love about this view of anger. It’s nice when someone has already written the punchline of the sermon for you. What I especially appreciate is how this image of the internal living flame aligns with theological imagery of the Divine in us.
The Psalmist directs their anger of suffering and injustice toward God. Which is to say that the inner living flame of compassion within the Psalmist, which is God, directs this purest form of care back toward God, thus awakening God from sleep. Jesus has anger rise up within him at the silence of the crowd when they are given the opportunity to side with healing. Which is to say, Jesus demonstrates a heart more compassionate and a body larger and strong enough to hold this essential living flame of vulnerable care, without being overcome by its more violent expressions. Which is to say, when we allow the hot flame of anger to burn in this way, we allow Divine compassion to help us remember, to rouse us, and we become candles of this essential living flame. Which is to say that anger, understood in this way, might be God’s way of waking us up.
But it does have its risks. Flames can consume and destroy, and, as we experienced this past week, they can cloud the skies and make it hard to breathe.
Not many people come to church to get more angry, but perhaps we can learn better together how to tend the flame. How to honor what David Whyte calls this essential living flame. To cry out like the Psalmist to a God who seems to be sleeping, and in doing so, to awaken and activate that of God within us. And, in the spirit of Jesus, to harness anger toward healing.
By God’s grace may we learn what to do with our anger.