Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Please pray with me.
Guide us, O God, by your word and Holy Spirit, that in your light we may see light, in your truth find freedom, and in your will discover your peace through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Today's reading is From Matthew, chapter 5, verses 21 through 26.
You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, you shall not murder, and whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.
But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment. And if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council. And if you say, you fool, you will be liable to the hell of fire.
So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go.
First, be reconciled to your brother or sister and then come and offer your gift.
Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison.
Truly, I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny. This is the word of the Lord.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Good morning.
You know, when Pastor Matt invited me to preach on this passage concerning anger as a part of the Sermon on the Mount series, I see you laughing there, Matt.
I had a vision in mind of what I was going to preach on.
I was going to talk about how Jesus calls us to deal with anger.
You know, the kind of anger you feel when someone hurts you or insults you, or when someone cuts you off in traffic, or when you get passed over for a promotion, or when you feel burned out and snap at anyone in your vicinity. I know no parents in the room feel like that. Ever.
In preparation for this sermon, I decided to try a little experiment and count how many times I got angry in a day. And notice how I reacted.
I strongly recommend that you do not partake in such an experiment unless you want a harsh dose of reality.
I was confronted by just how many times I could get angry in a day.
And at first I noticed the little moments of anger, you know, the annoyances, the little frustrations.
But then what really struck me was the deep well of anger that I felt vibrating in my core.
And perhaps you felt it, too.
I am angry at the injustice that won't seem to let up.
I am furious at the violence toward innocent civilians.
I am outraged by the dehumanization of people.
I am fed up with the vicious words and actions directed toward Immigrants without regard for their humanity.
And every time I open my phone, that anger and outrage flares so hot.
So when I sat down to write a sermon concerning anger, I felt guilty.
Here I was preparing to preach from the pulpit on anger.
All the while, I had a deep well of anger burning inside me.
But then I thought, well, it's righteous anger, though, isn't it?
I am angry about important things.
Surely that's acceptable.
I mean, I feel like I've been taught that righteous anger isn't just acceptable, but maybe even necessary in the face of injustice.
So surely Jesus doesn't mean all anger.
I tried really hard to find a caveat in Matthew 5.
I searched through as many scriptures on anger that I could find.
I didn't find any exceptions, any caveats, any footnotes.
And that made me uncomfortable.
I think the discomfort is exactly where Jesus wants us this morning.
Because what Jesus is doing here is not regulating an emotion.
He is shaping a people.
As Jesus is teaching about righteousness on the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is not judging whether anger is good or bad.
He is showing what any and all anger, no matter how right it feels, can do to us and to our relationships and anything that comes between us and God or us and our neighbor. Jesus takes very seriously.
This is what the Sermon on the Mount is all about.
It is about giving us a larger vision for what righteousness and true discipleship look like.
Jesus shows us how the heart of the law is not about not doing specific actions, but about our disposition toward God and towards our neighbor.
After all, the law can be summed up with the two greatest commandments, to love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor as yourself.
And then in Matthew 5, Jesus shows us exactly what this kind of righteousness looks like.
Jesus doesn't explain this in theory. He shows it to us in practice.
Jesus takes the command of traditional righteousness, you shall not murder, and radicalizes it.
He takes righteousness all the way back to the root cause.
When I hear do not murder, I think, well, that's an easy one. Guess I'm righteous.
I can go ahead and take that one off the list.
But Jesus doesn't let us get off that easy.
If we want to be righteous, if we want to live like Christ, then we have to go back to the root, to the anger.
Because Jesus isn't about just correcting actions.
He's shaping the kind of people that we are.
And Jesus dresses anger in a way that is frankly, shocking.
He says that if you are angry, you are liable to judgment.
Harsh, but okay.
Then he says, if you so much as insult a brother or sister, you are liable to counsel.
Insulting someone is enough to send you to court.
Ouch.
I think all of us are guilty of that once or twice.
Then he says, if you even use an everyday insult like you fool, you will be liable to the hell of fire.
That feels a little overkill, doesn't it?
But I think Jesus wants us to be shocked.
Not so that we fear a guilt inducing finger wagging God, but so that we pause long enough to see what anger is doing to us and to our relationships.
Because you may know that anger has a way of training us to see the world in black and white, in right and wrong, in us and them.
And over time, that anger causes us to lose sight in the humanity of our neighbor.
Jesus takes anger this seriously because Jesus takes reconciliation seriously.
God's judgment is not about condemnation, but about setting things right.
As theologian Thomas Long puts it, judgment is God's repairing of all that is harmful to humanity, is the burning away of all that is cruel and spirit killing in order that we may breathe the air of compassion.
Jesus says in verse 24 that reconciliation cannot wait.
He says, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, go even before you come to the altar, even before worship. Because our love for God is indivisible from our love for one another.
And that's actually why each week at Knox, and we did it this morning, we pass peace with one another.
It is not just greeting each other.
Obviously that's part of it. We want to say hi, but it's also a conscious act of obedience to this command.
We are asserting that our love for one another is as important as our love for God.
And so we are reconciled together before we worship.
But passing the peace is not all that Jesus calls us to.
Jesus challenges us as his disciples to take stock of how we speak, how we relate, and how we treat one another in anger.
Friends, anger is like a check engine light warning us that it is time to pull over and see what's under the hood.
Not to judge ourselves, not to shame ourselves, but to pay attention.
We can feel anger, but we don't get to stay there or leave it unchecked.
And I'll tell you, that's part of what makes discipleship so costly.
Being angry is easy.
Love requires a lot more of us, and in today's world, it feels like a lot more.
Many of us find ourselves drowning in a sea of content beyond just everyday things that can drive us up the wall, like traffic, insurance companies, the endless cycle of sicknesses.
We cannot get through a day without the bombardment of rage inducing headlines, videos and stories.
In fact, it's so pervasive that the Oxford University Press's word of the year last year was rage bait.
The official definition of rage bait is online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative or offensive.
Why would anyone do that?
Because it's effective.
It works.
If content makes you angry, you spend longer with it, you share it more often, and you come back quicker to the social media platform.
As human beings, we are wired to pay more attention to things that feel unfair, dangerous or offensive because it's a survival mechanism.
Our survival depends on our quick response to threats.
And anger is that alert signal that there is a threat.
And so we jump on it.
It's how we've been taught to survive.
But the problem with rage bait is not just that it makes us angry, it's that it shrinks our ability to see complexity, nuance, and most importantly, the humanity of others.
Anger leads us to othering, to insults and to words and actions that dehumanize.
It feeds the line drawn between neighbor and an enemy.
And in the kingdom of God there is no such line.
In the last few years, many of us, and myself included, have found ourselves pulling back from relationships that feel painful or exhausting with people we deeply disagree with.
Often we tell ourselves that this distance is justified to because it aligns with our moral convictions.
And sometimes walking away really is a loving, faithful choice, especially when a relationship is abusive or unsafe.
But even so, many of us have stood on the pedestal of righteous anger.
I know I have for a long time.
But Jesus Sermon on the Mount does not leave room for pedestals.
When we place ourselves and our righteousness on a pedestal, we can no longer see the humanity of our neighbor, especially not our enemy.
In his book Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, he who can no longer listen to his brother will soon no longer be listening to God.
He who can no longer listen to his brother will soon no longer be listening to God.
Jesus does not invite us onto a pedestal.
He calls us to live in the posture of life. Love.
And yet love doesn't mean passivity.
We look to Jesus life to see what anger and righteousness look like.
And now the image we often reach for is Jesus turning over the tables in the temple. Righteous anger.
But there's another image.
In Mark 3, the Pharisees watched Jesus carefully to see if he would dare heal a man on the Sabbath.
Jesus responds to the Pharisees. Is it Lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save a life or to kill.
They were silent.
Then Mark tells us, Jesus looked around at them in anger.
He was grieved at their hardness of heart.
And then he said to the man, stretch out your hand.
He stretched it out, and his hand was healed.
Jesus anger doesn't close him off.
It moves him toward healing the suffering.
Jesus was angry, but he wasn't just angry.
Our emotional repertoire needs to be more than just anger.
You see, we name the emotions beneath the anger.
Because anger is often a secondary emotion. There is something deeper beneath it.
And so we pay attention.
Maybe it's fear, maybe it's sadness, maybe it's powerlessness.
We acknowledge that we are grieved by the state of the world, by things being so far from how they should be.
We name our fear, that we are scared about what is to come.
We are scared for the safety of our friends, of our neighbors, and of strangers.
And then, out of that anger and fear and grief, led by our love for God and our love for neighbor, we move toward compassionate action.
We offer healing, and we open paths to reconciliation.
We serve as the hands and feet of God in a world so in need of experiencing the fullness of God's love.
This way of holding anger, honest grief, aware and oriented toward love, is the way the early church was taught to live.
Paul wrote to the Ephesians, I beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called.
With all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
He goes on to say, be angry, but do not sin.
Do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.
The cost of discipleship, Paul reminds us, and Jesus before him, is that we seek righteousness while laying down our rightness.
We can feel anger, but we cannot let our anger turn another human being into the enemy.
Our anger must always be shaped by love, by reconciliation, by the fierce insistence that our neighbor's humanity still matters.
And that's costly.
It cost Jesus his life, and it costs ours too.
I know it feels overwhelming.
I know it feels like we are drowning in outrage. And like anger is the only thing strong enough to meet this moment.
But, friends, Christ calls us to something deeper and something that is, quite frankly, harder.
When you notice your anger, pause, take stock of it.
Listen to what it is protecting.
Name the grief beneath it.
Name the fear beneath it.
Name the love that refuses to let the world stay broken and then move toward the need, toward healing, toward your neighbor.
Because we can repost rage inducing stories until our fingers go numb and still miss the people who are actually hurting inside those stories.
Here's one step you can take right now.
Join Knox's immigration team, Join the Missions Committee or support a local organization serving those in need.
We can't change everything at once, but we can act in love.
We can be present, be generous, be courageous.
The world does not need more outrage.
It needs more Christ.
So let us be his disciples.
People whose anger does not consume us, but is transformed into love that repairs the world.
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, Amen.
