Journey into Holy Anger 3.7.21

Journey into Holy Anger (A Sometimes Deadly Could Be Sin)
by Griff Martin
A Sermon for the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith
On John 2:13-22
For the Third Sunday of Lent 
March 7, 2021

*This document comes from an oral manuscript.

Now Incarnate and Present God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and breathing reality we can all together experience. Make us attended to your presence here in this space and in these words God, for if we are aware of your being here then nothing else will matter, but if we are not aware of your being here then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Christ and the Comforter.

One of my favorite kitchen tools is the pressure cooker, I watched a lot of Top Chef cooks use it and was always most impressed but also a bit fearful of this pan, it looked a bit dangerous and there are lots of testimonies of bad experiences using one. Then were gifted one and I tried using it, it’s incredible and makes the best beef stew and carnitas I have ever had, however the rules about pressure are real… if you release the pressure too soon nothing cooks and the meal is ruined, release it too late and you have a disaster on your hands and release it with built up pressure and you have a 911 call. There is a right moment to release the pressure for every recipe, too little or too great are both disasters.

Which is the exact same lesson for our topic at hand this morning, anger. 

Let’s begin today by confronting a few of the biggest myths about this important issue we are addressing today.

First off, anger is not a sin. Anger can certainly lead to sin but anger itself is not sin, it’s an emotion and feeling, a very important emotion that like all emotions deserves respect and attention and deserves to be fully felt, it’s the difficult truth that feelings are for feeling even though all of life has taught us that feelings are to be controlled, numbed or avoided -- we heal feelings by feeling them. So anger is a feeling not a sin. 

You don’t even have to do a lot of theology here to prove that anger is not a sin, it’s ‘1 plus 1, apples to apples.’ If we believe God to be perfect, thus sinless, then why is God described so often as an angry God? Also theologically the deadly sin is not anger, the sin is wrath and those are very different. 

Second probably a lot of what you learned about anger was wrong and needs some course correcting. For instance if you identify female you were probably taught that females should not get angry, it’s not prim and proper and you are to be sugar and spice and all things nice, you don’t get angry, you get even. This is a lie, angry women change the world and angry women are saving our world right now. Thank God for angry women, daily. I pray for more of them because we need them and we need to raise them. On the other hand if you identify as male you were taught anger was your foundation and your right and that our superpower is our anger and we did not develop other crucial feelings, again a lie -- angry men have done a great deal of harm in our world, anger as the only driver is destructive. And if you are coupled you were probably taught don’t go to bed angry, which is a horrible lie, sometimes you might say I love you through gritted teeth but sleeping and resting is key to proper and good resolution.

We don’t have a good handle on anger as a people, half of us are given permission to have way too much of it and the other half is taught to stuff it down and none of us were taught the truth of anger. That anger itself is holy. 

Anger can actually be a gift and anger can be a calling and anger is certainly part of Jesus following, just pay attention to our text today. We are in the Gospel of John and John rearranges things, John is very willing to play with the timeline of Jesus to help us see things in a certain way, John is a poet, they have license for that freedom.

So where as most Gospels put this angry Jesus flogging the temple story as one of Jesus’ last acts. John puts it front and center. John opens his story by telling us two things about Jesus: he was the type of Savior who turned water to wine at a wedding and the type of Savior who experienced righteous rage and tore things up to bring about his kingdom. I like that about a Savior. 

John tells us that it’s almost time for Passover which is a major Jewish feast day, a feast day that reminds us that our God delivers us from captivity, that God is outraged and angry about folks being enslaved and treated as property, that God’s sense of justice always begins with everyone being treated equally and that means welcomed and included as well as equality in terms of politics and finances. And this was a capstone in Judaism, a must celebrate festival.  So as a faithful Jew, Jesus will be part of the feast. 

When Jesus arrives at the temple he finds folks selling cattle, sheep and dove and others exchanging money. It’s the last part about exchanging money that is a big clue here. Judaism requires sacrifice of cattle, sheep and dove but the religious leaders of the day had found a perfect fundraiser: refuse the sacrifice folks bring because it’s not good enough but still require the sacrifice, sell acceptable sacrifices at a good price for you, refuse to accept Roman coins which folks would have had and require them to have temple coins, provide a money exchange where again you can make a profit, and then they can buy the required sacrifice. 

And that whole system should be enough to make your blood boil, at least it was for Jesus.

So pay attention to the next words, “so he made a whip of cords…” He is not Indiana Jones with a whip ready at his side, no this is a premeditated act of anger. This is anger and performance art at its best. Jesus walks in, takes it all in (no doubt he has heard of these unjust practices but he has to see it, being witness to injustice is a calling), and then the way I picture it, he sits down in the middle of the courtyard, right in front of those selling and exchanging and he begins to fashion a few cords into a whip. At first no one notices, it’s a busy place full of people and animals, so many people travel so far to get there and they are exhausted, but something is different, the way he is braiding the cords together. People being to notice, and elbow one another to point this out, by the time the sermon is ready to begin it’s almost silent. 

And then he stands, there is the noise of the whip, there are overturned tables and there is shouting about his fathers house, there is rebuke and there is holy zeal. Make sure and play this text out, listen to this text… hear the whip snap, hear the silence, hear the coins hitting the ground, hear the wooden table hit the floor. See the faces of shock, see some run in fear, others run in guilt, others run because they want out and others applaud because someone was finally been brave enough to say what needs to be said. Someone was brave enough to be angry with the anger of the Lord. Feel the air in the room before, during and after the event. Like a hurricane followed by winds of spring fresh air. 

And God said it was good. God smiled, this is my Beloved with whom I am well pleased. 

And there is a lot that we need to listen to in this story and there is a lot that we need to follow in this story. Because there is a lot in our world worth being angry over. Finding something to be angry over right now should not be an issue, in fact right now the sin might be not being angry enough.

I mean, do you need a list…. How many of our neighbors don’t have proper food or medical care, how many folks who need mental health resources are forced to live on the streets, racial injustice, white supremacy, the way we care for creation, a Hunger Games type vaccine rollout, an electric grid that failed us all and put lives at risk because it prioritized profit over people, actually all the ways our world puts profit over people, a city water system that failed us all even after it had failed us just a few years ago and had not been fixed, climate change that brought the storms here, sexism and gender inequality, homophobia, transphobia, all the ways we are divided as a people today, the ways we talk about one another and treat one another, the ways social media have robbed us of relationships and even civilized conversations, a terrifying debt as a nation that we are passing onto our children, disease, divorce, debt, depression… if you don’t have something you are angry about today, then you are not paying close enough attention to reality. 

What is yours? And don’t say all of it, all of it is a cop out, the folks who have made the biggest difference in our world have been the folks who found the one thing that made their blood boil, that put tears in their eyes and then they devoted their all there. We would all be best if we choose one thing and started there with everything we have knowing that it’s all going to connect somehow, some of us work here and others there and eventually we all work our way right into the Kingdom of God. So find your issue -- what is it in our world today that makes your blood boil, puts tears in your eyes and makes you want to do something, give something and speak out? That is your calling, this is where your holy anger is needed.

So what would Jesus have us do?

First we get close enough to the pain that we can feel the pain. Anger from a distance is not safe. Jesus did not just hear about an issue and then make a statement, write a Facebook post and send a monetary donation, that is not Gospel. Jesus found a communal issue in which he could personally know. Jesus did not believe in drive by compassion projects, he was boots on the ground. Jesus believed in and lived in the "you get all the way in," "you go the hot center of it all," that you have to love people up close and loving people means being close enough that you can feel as much of their pain as possible. 

And don’t do what is so easy for us to do at First Austin, take this on the head level. You certainly need to become well researched with your calling and that includes reading and studying as widely as possible, not just with folks who agree with you. But it’s not just knowing an issue, it’s knowing the folks that are impacted by the issue. Let’s say your choose something related to the climate, do you know farmers who are being impacted by this, do you know some of our neighbors for whom these weather patterns are making already impossible living even more impossible, are you spending enough time outside in your own garden and seeing what is changing? 

Then we breathe and plan. Jesus was so smart about his actions, the making of the whip took time and allowed his blood to come down from the boiling point, note I did not say holy temper, I said holy anger. Jesus stopped to take a few deep calming breaths to make sure that whatever he did was going to be proactive in the situation and not reactive. If you are looking for the difference there, a temper is always reactive and only adds to the mess, holy anger is proactive.

Then we are loud with our actions and we make it personal. Once Jesus had let his blood cool and he was in the place of anger not temper, by then he had a plan. Because he could have really done damage and ruined things, but note in this entire episode, no one is harmed, no one is bullied, no one is called any horrible name, nothing is profane. Jesus chooses a few simple actions that would get some attention… imagine being in that courtyard and hearing a whip snap, then seeing a table flipped over and then hearing his voice, “This is not how it is supposed to be,” and then seeing people take off running and others applauding. It’s a moment of awe, truly.

Even better he has made it personal, “in my father’s house.” He made it personal, but not too personal. Remember one of the first lessons we learn in our book, our primary job is we are our brother's keeper. And I can’t think of any justice issue, any issue worth getting angry over that you can’t speak about it without using language of “my brother, my sister, my sibling.” 

And then he continued the work, in the rest of John’s Gospel everything Jesus does is to help continue cleaning out his father’s house, to continue making the world the world that God desired. This was not a symbolic piece, Jesus was committed to this work and he kept on doing it. That is critical -- if it’s worth getting mad about, then it’s worth staying mad until things change. 

And we do it all with grace and hope and love. Nothing Jesus did that day kept folks from saying he was good, he was hope and grace and love. Okay, maybe those who were profiting off the system and he just broke that, they probably weren’t the biggest Jesus fans, actually we have evidence of that when they kill him. But for most people what he did only further showed who he was…. That is what anger can do.

And that is why it’s not only okay to be angry, it’s good to be angry if we can handle it right. Anger has to have proper portions -- you don’t want too much and you don’t want too little. There is a right amount of angry. A good question you might ask to find this right amount: is my anger distressing to those around me or is it healing the world? And then a good follow up, am I using my anger to heal the world?

Your anger is not something to be afraid of or ashamed of, it’s not to be shut off or shut down, your anger is part of the way you change the world. It’s holy and it’s good and God needs it. 

So go find your righteous rage and create some holy havoc, Jesus is counting on you to do so; after all, flipping tables makes more room in the church. Amen and Amen.