COMPULSIONS OF THE FALSE SELF: ANGER
Texts: Romans 12:14-21; Ephesians 4:25-27; Matthew 5:21-24

Last week I preached on the deadly sin of Envy and spoke of its musical sound: The descending minor third (f to d) which is the interval the basketball crowd sings when an opponent misses the entire basket. (Jonathan plays.) “Air Ball!” And the cross-cultural musical line that is a derisive jeer, whatever words you use: ffdgfd. (Jonathan plays.)

Today’s deadly sin is Anger, and it too has its musical line: The augmented 4th (c to f#), what musicians call the tonus diabolicus, the devil’s tone. It is devilishly hard to sing, and it screams in anger and anguish. Mendelssohn uses the musical line three times in his Elijah with the words, “His curse is upon us.” (Jonathan plays interval.) Sometimes life feels just like that. (Jonathan plays a chord with augmented 4th.) The trick is moving from there to here. (Jonathan plays a resolution.)

I

Sometimes anger comes from the true self. This is not the deadly sin of anger. Other times it is a compulsion of the false self - - and so becomes a deadly sin. This is an important distinction because naming anger as one of the seven deadly sins has fed into what Andy Lester calls the “anger-is-sin tradition,”1 a false and sometimes debilitating identification. Sometimes anger is the healthiest reaction we can have in response to harm or threat of harm or to patterns of injustice and evil.

The “anger-is-sin tradition” has been particularly harmful to women and to other social groups and peoples who live in relative powerlessness. It has been a way to keep them in their place and has robbed them of the energy for personal and social liberation, the good energy of justice where love and anger are joined.

Anger is a gift given to us in our good bodies to respond to conditions harmful to us. Anger can be a “spiritual ally,” says Andy Lester in his major pastoral theology of anger, The Angry Christian. Here is his definition of anger:

Anger is the physical, mental, and emotional arousal pattern that
occurs in response to a perceived threat to the self characterized by the desire to attack or defend.2

It is part of God’s natural defense package given to us. Current brain research tells us that anger comes from two pathways, the so called “feeling brain” (amygdala) and the “thinking brain” (neo cortex). It is in other words a highly complex human operation. Lester is careful to use the phrase “perceived threat.” Sometimes the threat is not real at the moment, but the body goes into high alert.

So anger is a call to reflection and discernment: To self-knowledge and testing what is real.
In our Ephesians text Paul quotes Psalm 4: “Be angry but sin not” (Ephesians 4:6). This is pretty good theology and psychology. Anger itself is not sin but can become the occasion of sin. “Be angry but sin not.” The rest of Psalm 4:4 says: “Commune with your own hearts on your beds and be silent.” This means to me: Anger is first a call to reflection, to inner spiritual work. Now, if someone is about to hit you with a baseball bat, disregard this psalm. Instead turn to Isaiah: “Run and do not be weary.”
 

II

It is interesting in light of the prevailing anger-is-sin tradition that God is pictured in the Bible as a passionate God whose anger is aroused in response to sin, injustice, betrayal and evil. It is the God of Greek philosophers who described God as passionless, apatheia, beyond emotions, changeless, unchanging.

And it is more than a little interesting how often Jesus is pictured as aroused with anger - - though the later Gospels tend to airbrush these anger episodes away.

Jesus gets angry at disease and what it does to people. He weeps with anger at Lazarus’ death. He gets angry at religious leaders who care more about keeping sabbath laws than helping a person who needs healing. Mark 3:5 says, “He looked around at them with anger...grieved at their hardness of heart.” Matthew (12:12-14) and Luke (6:9-11) airbrush the anger away.

Jesus gets angry at those who try to exclude children and says of those who would harm children: It would be better for them if they had millstones placed around their necks and were thrown into the sea.

Jesus gets angry at his disciples for falling asleep while he prays for his life in Gethsemane.
Jesus displayed anger at the corrupt temple system of sacrifices and turned over the tables of the money-changers in the temple. He fashioned a whip and drove the money-changers and their animals out. “Take these things out of here!” he said. “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace” (John 2:16). “My Father’s house is a house of prayer and you have made it a den of thieves!”

He called Herod a fox and called religious leaders “white-washed tombs” who laid heavy burdens on people and robbed widows’ houses.

I would say our Lord was in touch with his anger.

There are times the true self should be angry.

But Jesus also warned against the misuses of anger: Calling someone “fool” or raca, which we do not know how to translate, but we get the point!

He warned against taking revenge and returning evil for evil. Bless, do not curse your enemy, he said. And he made the restoration of broken relationship so important that he taught if we are in the Temple ready to make our offering and remember we have something against another, leave church, go make peace, then come and make your offering.

So, to recap: Anger itself is not a sin. We are called to befriend it, make it our spiritual ally. We can bring it to church and offer it to God; we can integrate it and become more whole and healthy. Anger helps restore ego boundaries which have been damaged by another’s trampling of our bodies and personhood. Anger can be part of the good energy of justice.

But it also can become a deadly sin, and it is to the sin we now turn.

III

Frederick Buechner captures the problem:

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back – in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is your self. The skeleton at the feast is you.3

Anger is pictured in tones of red. We “see red.” A cartoon character when angry turns red.
Mary Gordon says anger settles in the mouth.4 The pursed lips, the clenched jaw, the grinding teeth. We shout obscenities. We refuse to eat. The opposite of the angry mouth is the generous mouth.

The Hebrew language has two words for anger. The phrase “slow to anger” as in, “the Lord is slow to anger,” means literally “long of nose.” - - the opposite of flared nostrils. The other is to “burn” or “grow hot.” So we think of anger in degrees of heat. Boiling mad, hot-headed. No wonder the Parson in Canterbury Tales calls anger “the devil’s furnace.”

What animal do we associate with anger? Many have been used, but none predominate. Why? Perhaps because the creature that most typifies the deadly sin of anger is, as one has put it, “a figure riding on a camel, the most vicious of animals.”5 Is not the human animal the only one who harbors hatred and kills for sport?

How do we picture anger? Pieter Bruegel painted anger in 1558 as a man with a knife in its mouth, a vial of poison in its hand, while the other arm is in a sling, injured in previous battle. Anger is deadly.

IV

There are different forms of anger. Powder-keg anger, the kind that instantly blows up - - like the French soccer star’s head-butt in the World Cup finale. There’s crock-pot anger that simmers and stews.

There’s the anger that turns cold in bitterness. One has said, “Hell is not fire, it is ice.” Sometimes anger turns the heart to ice.

There’s ideological anger: The anger adopted by political and social groups who become anger factories. (Even churches can become anger factories.) We paint the world in black and white, divide the world into children of light and children of darkness. A person is no longer a person but a Capitalist or Communist, a Fundamentalist or Liberal, a Zionist or Crusader or Fascist, or Male Chauvinist Pig. Nations become the Great Satan or the Evil Empire.

Islamic radicals see themselves as instruments of God’s righteous wrath, avenging angels. And there are Christians in America who are ready to return the favor. Churches and temples and mosques can be anger factories.

Martin Luther King described the dehumanizing of our enemies and said, “There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us.”

We have learned how constantly aroused anger can hurt our bodies. Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh have discovered that stress increases the stickiness of blood platelets. This increases your blood-clotting ability, which if you are a gladiator in ancient Rome may be good but not so good if you’re in an office all day. These sticky platelets latch onto fatty deposits in the arteries and increase the risk of heart disease.

So when you began to feel your anger surging ask: Is this worth sticky platelets?

Then there is the anger we turn inwards, which causes depression and stomach problems. As someone wisely said: We can swallow more anger than we can digest.

Can you remember those moments when you no longer just had anger but became your anger? Writer Mary Gordon recounts one episode when she was preparing for a dinner party:

It was a hot August afternoon. I was having ten people for dinner that evening. No one was giving me a bit of help. I was, of course, feeling like a victim, as everyone does in a hot kitchen on an August day. I had been chopping, stirring, bending over a low flame, and all alone, alone! The oven’s heat was my purgatory, my crucible.
My mother and my children thought this was a good time for civil disobedience. They positioned themselves in the car and refused to move until I took them swimming....
I lost it. I lost myself. I jumped on the hood of the car. I pounded on the windshield. I told my mother and my children that I was never, ever going to take any of them anywhere and none of them were ever going to have one friend in any house of mine until the hour of their death.... I couldn’t stop pounding on the windshield. Then the frightening thing happened. I became a huge bird. A carrion crow. My legs became hard stalks; my eyes were sharp and vicious. I developed a murderous beak. Greasy black feathers took the place of arms. I flapped and flapped.... The taste of blood entranced me. I wanted to peck and peck forever.
I became that bird. I had to be forced to get off the car and stop pounding on the windshield. Even then I didn’t come back to myself. When I did, I was appalled. I realized I had genuinely frightened my children.... My son said, “I was scared because I didn’t know who you were.”6

When we become our anger we are unrecognizable, even to ourselves. People can become their anger, their resentment, their bitterness. Their injury and its justified anger become their identity. The true self is lost to sight.

But there is a “hidden wholeness” inside us, a healing waiting to happen.
The sin of anger is a daily, hourly temptation. But there are helps for us. Anger can be a spiritual ally instead of a deadly sin. Sue Monk Kidd recognized at one point the value of anger in confronting sexism and injustice, but it needed to be a “transfigured” anger, a fire you can cook with, not to burn a house down with.7

V

Here are 10 quick guidelines. Ten helps.

1) Recognize your anger. It comes in many forms. It is sneaky. Learn to recognize it.
2) Own your anger. It is yours. Take responsibility for it.
3) Yield your anger to God. This yielding prays: God help me with my anger so it becomes spiritual ally and not an enemy. It prays: I leave final judgment and just desserts to you.
4) Reflect on your anger. It can be a spiritual diagnostic tool. A fever in the body tells us something is out of kilter. So does anger.
5) Find a safe person and place to talk about your anger.
6) “Demobilize the body.” Don’t act on your anger while the body is in full throttle. So Thomas Jefferson said: “When angry count ten before you speak. If very angry, a hundred.” And I’d add, if very, very, very angry go work a Sudoku puzzle.
If you have chronic, daily anger problems (aimed in or out), find some regular physical exercise or stress relaxation. (That’s why I started running.)
7) Settle anger issues as soon as possible and productively. “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger,” Paul says. This is to be taken seriously not literally. “Right now” may make things worse. Settle a grievance as soon as possible. If not today, arrange a time with the person tomorrow or soon thereafter.
8) Revenge and retaliation are never productive. Jesus is clear here.
9) Learn creative, nonviolent ways to confront hurt and injustice, and evil. Nonviolence does not mean passivity. Anger can be a godly energy for justice if your means and methods match your goals. You can’t kill for Jesus, murder for justice, torture for democracy, lie for truth. In Jesus’ kingdom the means must be consistent with the ends.
10) Practice forgiveness. At the heart of healing is the forgiveness we receive and the forgiveness we give, all set in motion by God’s great forgiveness.

It is a process, a daily spiritual practice. It is not accomplished instantly. It is not accomplished alone, but with the help of God’s Spirit. It may come slower than we want, but it is coming, coming from God forever, as we learn to breathe in and breathe out God’s mercy.


1  Andrew Lester, The Angry Christian: A Theology for Care and Counseling (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), p. 115.
2   Ibid., p. 4.
3  Wishful Thinking (New York: Harper Row, 1973), p. 2.
4   Mary Gordon, “The Fascination Begins In the Mouth,” The New York Times Book Review, June 13, 1993, p. 3.
5  As cited in William May, A Catalogue of Sins (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), p. 86.
6  Gordon, op.cit., p. 31.
7  Dance of the Dissident Daughter, p. 186.