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| 10 Pentecost 13 August, 2006 The Rev. Robert C. Granfeldt |
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Funny thing. In preparing for today’s sermons, as usual, I checked out a number of
resources. Looked at the readings individually, and used a couple of my favorite
resources about them; and then I looked at some commentaries on the Propers for
the day – on all the readings, as a set; as a whole. And I saw an interesting thing.
When I looked at each of the readings, separately, I found what one would expect:
separate and unconnected commentaries on each of the lessons.
The Deuteronomy lesson is about the deliverance and the promise of the Lord – how
the Lord brought them out of bondage in Egypt, and led them through the wilderness
for 40 years, to humble them, to show them their place in relationship to God, and to
prepare them for the blessings ahead.
The Gospel commentaries are similar; again, about deliverance, though not from
bondage in Egypt but about God’s will for salvation, and Jesus’ offering himself as
the sustenance that leads to eternal life – the bread that comes down from heaven.
But when taken as a whole, looking at all three of the lessons for today, the
commentaries mostly seem to focus on the second lesson - the one from St. Paul’s
letter to the Ephesians! And within Ephesians, they tend, as well, to focus on just one
aspect of what Paul had to say: Anger!
Kind of strange, I think. With three, long lessons, covering a lot of different things, it’
s a little strange that any number of commentators would see anger as the unifying
theme – when it’s really only one part of one of the three lessons!
But maybe what it tells us is not so much about the lessons – but about ourselves.
Maybe the commentaries focus on anger because they’re human beings, like us, and
of all the problems people deal with in themselves, one of the biggest – perhaps THE
biggest – is anger.
Anger.
A perfectly normal phenomenon; a normal feeling.
Go ahead and be angry, St. Paul tells us. There’s nothing wrong with anger.
Everybody gets angry.
But, Paul tells us, don’t sin!
Don’t let you anger become, for you and in you, sin.
You recall, I hope, all I’ve said on any number of occasions about the meaning of sin.
How sin consists not in breaking rules or breaking laws, it consists of wandering off
the pathway that God calls you to walk. It consists of walking in a direction that leads
to your becoming something – someone – other than the person God created you to
become, someone less than God wants you to be.
That’s when anger becomes sin.
Anger becomes sin when we let it dominate us.
But oddly enough, for most people that doesn’t mean when we lose our temper.
There are, indeed plenty who can’t control their tempers, and those people have
more than a problem with sin; they need help. In fact, building on studies of instances
of what has long been called, “road rage,” the mental health professions have come
up with a new diagnostic category – Intermittent Explosive Disorder – to describe
people who, at times, are taken over by temper and become destructive. That goes
beyond sin to illness.
But Paul’s talk about anger and sin is for us – for you and me. It’s about those of us
who don’t handle our anger well – or don’t handle it at all; those of us who give into it
and vent it on others, when the anger is really OURS; but even more frequently it’s
for those of us who keep a hold of it; who don’t let it go, at all; who hang onto it and
let it fester. Either way, it’s for those of us who let our anger harm our relationships
and hurt those around us – hurt, especially, those we love.
It’s not easy to learn to deal with our anger, and few people ever really do! It takes
work. It takes awareness. It takes practice. It takes time to “let all bitterness and
wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away” from us. I’m certainly still
working on it, and I’ve got a long way to go. I suspect most of us do. The remedy as in
most human problems, is first to recognize the problem, and then to work on it – for
as long as it takes; even a lifetime!
But, you know, in addition to walking more closely in the way the Lord would have us
walk, there’s a bonus in it for those who learn to manage their anger as St. Paul
would have us do.
The bonus is that once we learn, we’re freed! Freed from the negative effects of
anger, certainly, but free in another way, too!
We’re freed up to enter into the righteous anger we’re called to! The kind of
righteous anger our Lord showed us when he ran the money changers out of the
Temple! Righteous anger toward injustice and cruelty, toward unfairness and bigotry,
toward hatred and inequality.
I suspect there’s not a person among us who doesn’t need to work more on the way
they handle their anger.
But the real fun – and the real payoff – comes when you begin to get a handle on that
destructive anger – ‘cause then you get to be angry, as Paul tells us, about the BIG
stuff! And we get to do it in the Name of the LORD! Amen
resources. Looked at the readings individually, and used a couple of my favorite
resources about them; and then I looked at some commentaries on the Propers for
the day – on all the readings, as a set; as a whole. And I saw an interesting thing.
When I looked at each of the readings, separately, I found what one would expect:
separate and unconnected commentaries on each of the lessons.
The Deuteronomy lesson is about the deliverance and the promise of the Lord – how
the Lord brought them out of bondage in Egypt, and led them through the wilderness
for 40 years, to humble them, to show them their place in relationship to God, and to
prepare them for the blessings ahead.
The Gospel commentaries are similar; again, about deliverance, though not from
bondage in Egypt but about God’s will for salvation, and Jesus’ offering himself as
the sustenance that leads to eternal life – the bread that comes down from heaven.
But when taken as a whole, looking at all three of the lessons for today, the
commentaries mostly seem to focus on the second lesson - the one from St. Paul’s
letter to the Ephesians! And within Ephesians, they tend, as well, to focus on just one
aspect of what Paul had to say: Anger!
Kind of strange, I think. With three, long lessons, covering a lot of different things, it’
s a little strange that any number of commentators would see anger as the unifying
theme – when it’s really only one part of one of the three lessons!
But maybe what it tells us is not so much about the lessons – but about ourselves.
Maybe the commentaries focus on anger because they’re human beings, like us, and
of all the problems people deal with in themselves, one of the biggest – perhaps THE
biggest – is anger.
Anger.
A perfectly normal phenomenon; a normal feeling.
Go ahead and be angry, St. Paul tells us. There’s nothing wrong with anger.
Everybody gets angry.
But, Paul tells us, don’t sin!
Don’t let you anger become, for you and in you, sin.
You recall, I hope, all I’ve said on any number of occasions about the meaning of sin.
How sin consists not in breaking rules or breaking laws, it consists of wandering off
the pathway that God calls you to walk. It consists of walking in a direction that leads
to your becoming something – someone – other than the person God created you to
become, someone less than God wants you to be.
That’s when anger becomes sin.
Anger becomes sin when we let it dominate us.
But oddly enough, for most people that doesn’t mean when we lose our temper.
There are, indeed plenty who can’t control their tempers, and those people have
more than a problem with sin; they need help. In fact, building on studies of instances
of what has long been called, “road rage,” the mental health professions have come
up with a new diagnostic category – Intermittent Explosive Disorder – to describe
people who, at times, are taken over by temper and become destructive. That goes
beyond sin to illness.
But Paul’s talk about anger and sin is for us – for you and me. It’s about those of us
who don’t handle our anger well – or don’t handle it at all; those of us who give into it
and vent it on others, when the anger is really OURS; but even more frequently it’s
for those of us who keep a hold of it; who don’t let it go, at all; who hang onto it and
let it fester. Either way, it’s for those of us who let our anger harm our relationships
and hurt those around us – hurt, especially, those we love.
It’s not easy to learn to deal with our anger, and few people ever really do! It takes
work. It takes awareness. It takes practice. It takes time to “let all bitterness and
wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away” from us. I’m certainly still
working on it, and I’ve got a long way to go. I suspect most of us do. The remedy as in
most human problems, is first to recognize the problem, and then to work on it – for
as long as it takes; even a lifetime!
But, you know, in addition to walking more closely in the way the Lord would have us
walk, there’s a bonus in it for those who learn to manage their anger as St. Paul
would have us do.
The bonus is that once we learn, we’re freed! Freed from the negative effects of
anger, certainly, but free in another way, too!
We’re freed up to enter into the righteous anger we’re called to! The kind of
righteous anger our Lord showed us when he ran the money changers out of the
Temple! Righteous anger toward injustice and cruelty, toward unfairness and bigotry,
toward hatred and inequality.
I suspect there’s not a person among us who doesn’t need to work more on the way
they handle their anger.
But the real fun – and the real payoff – comes when you begin to get a handle on that
destructive anger – ‘cause then you get to be angry, as Paul tells us, about the BIG
stuff! And we get to do it in the Name of the LORD! Amen
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| Calvary Episcopal Church, Rockdale |
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