Preacher: Pastor Liz Miller
Date: March 24, 2019
Text: Mark 11:15-19
We’ve been exploring forgiveness these last few weeks, and one of the hardest parts of forgiveness to talk about is anger. Anger often comes after someone is harmed or hurt and before we can even think about forgiveness, we have to deal with those feelings of anger that are present. We might feel anger when someone asks for our forgiveness or expects it when we aren’t ready to offer it. Anger might consume us and make it difficult to move past. Anger might rise up every time we think about the past, inhibiting our ability to shift toward the future. We all experience anger, but it is a feeling that we struggle with how to talk about, what to do with, or how to move beyond.
Most of us experience anger in one of two ways: we either quickly shut down our anger instead of expressing it, or our anger comes on so strong it turns into an eruption. I grew up in a family that did not express our anger. When there was a hint of conflict, we solved it with the silent treatment or leaving the room and spending time alone until the negative feelings passed and we could all pretend it didn’t happen. Despite the popularity of this style of anger management, it’s not actually effective. The anger doesn’t magically disappear. It lurks there, turning into a slow simmering resentment. Or it manifests into something else, causing us to snap at someone unsuspecting or manifesting in our bodies through stress, aches, and ails.
I learned to avoid and deny anger from my family, who learned it from the families they grew up in, and it’s only been as an adult – with a lot of amazing therapy – that I’ve been able to learn to express my anger instead of keeping it balled up inside me. After years of practice it is still incredibly difficult! I don’t so much show my anger by yelling or waving my arms and stamping my feet. Instead I calmly say, “I would like you to know that I am angry right now.” It’s far from perfect, but it’s a start! It feels liberating to at least acknowledge there are things that make me angry. Only then can I begin to address them.
On the opposite spectrum, some of us grew up in families where anger was so quick that it came out as an explosion of yelling or hitting or actions that scared and hurt the people nearby. Sometimes anger is so fast and furious that it is hard to understand what (if anything) prompted it. This isn’t healthy either. When anger turns into a violent stream of words and actions, there is no room for processing what is happening behind the anger and no hope of resolving the anger.
This type of anger is also the result of not having the skills equipped to address the underlying issues, causing it to explode and consume the person it resides in and trickle over into the people in closest proximity. This type of anger becomes a mask that hides the issues behind it, and becomes just as problematic as shoving it down and not expressing it as all, often with more obvious harm and trauma to others. As our own Arlene Camponella says, “A glass of wine can be a good thing, but too much is corrosive.”
It is challenging to find models of healthy anger. What does anger look like when it is expressed properly? What is the purpose of anger? How can we tend to our anger during the journey of forgiveness or reconciliation? This is something we don’t have a lot of role models for in our culture today. Even in the Bible, our holy texts, it’s difficult to find a story that involves anger that doesn’t end with, “And then they slayed all their enemies.”
This story of Jesus in the temple is one of our best examples of what constructive anger might look like. Jesus had plenty to be mad at in the temple that day. Folks could not make an offering in the temple with their regular coins because they had the face of the Roman Emperor on them, so money changers exchanged them for other coins, charging a fee along the way. And other people were there selling doves at primo prices, making that type of offering inaccessible to low income worshippers. We talked about this passage earlier this week in Edgewood’s forgiveness class and Dalisa Madaski pointed out that “Without meaning to, these practices were keeping people separate from God. And nothing is supposed to keep us separate from God.”
In addition to the folks who were taxing the poor, Jesus saw others come in who had done terrible things during the week and expected a quick trip to the temple would absolve them of their sins. Think of a loan shark or an inside trader coming to worship, leaving feeling good about themselves, and then returning to that same work the next day without any change. Jesus sees all this, and he is angry.
He was not condemning the people, but he was condemning their actions. He starts flipping over tables and kicking people out, holding them accountable for these actions. This story is often called “cleansing the temple” but to be honest, it would have felt a little scarier than cleaning house. If you’ve ever been in a store or restaurant when a ruckus is raised and someone is kicked out, you begin to get a sense of how anxiety provoking and unsettling the scene would be.
What I appreciate in how Jesus’ anger is expressed is both that he doesn’t physically attack any people, and he teaches people about why he is angry. The text says, “He was teaching and saying, “It is written!” He grounded his anger in specific shared beliefs that he felt had been betrayed and he sought to explain his anger to the people around him so that they might also understand. Instead of mindlessly blowing up, Jesus used his anger as a teaching moment, so that the temple and the people who went there might be transformed for the better.
This is the crux of how our anger can and should be used: we are called to understand what is eliciting the response in us, and then use it to work toward change. So when we hear stories of people’s land being occupied by military powers, or families being turned away and mistreated at our borders, or people using their privilege to abuse our already broken education systems and we get angry at what we see and hear – we are called to tune into that anger, understand why it is rising up, and then use it to move us to action to work against the systems of military oppression, to send resources to activists and agencies at our borders, and to work to reform our education system. Our anger is what plants seeds that turn into social justice movements. Our anger is what compels us to give a damn about our neighbors and our communities and our world.
On a personal level, anger is the emotion that allows us to stand up for ourselves when someone has wronged us or abused us. Anger helps us find our voice and speak our truth. Anger helps us pack our bags when we need to get out of an unsafe situation. Anger can be the beginning of a conversation, the beginning of a transformation in a relationship, and the beginning of a new way of being together – but only if we allow ourselves to feel it, seek to understand it, and then do something about it.
Audre Lorde is one of my great teachers about anger. She used her writing and her activism to transform the oppression and pain she experienced in the world as a black, lesbian, feminist woman. In a speech she gave a feminist conference in the 1980s, she addressed why and how she did this in a speech called, “The Uses of Anger.” She said,
“Anger is loaded with information and energy…..If I participate, knowingly or otherwise, in my sister’s oppression and she calls me on it, to answer her anger with my own only blankets the substance of our exchange with reaction. It wastes energy…Hatred and anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change…When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar.”
I especially love and resonate with the reminder to listen to other’s anger. If someone shares their anger with me, at some way I have wronged them, the opportunity for transformation not only lies within them, but within me. Imagine if we stopped being afraid of anger and started tending to it in compassionate and powerful ways that recognized its role as a change agent.
Imagine if someone came to us in anger and instead of responding defensively, we honored the courage it took to express their pain, and opened our hearts to how we might be able to receive their experience and allow it to inform and transform our relationship. I believe that when we talk about difficult things like forgiveness and reconciliation, we must acknowledge and understand the role anger plays in that process – opening up avenues for new types of relationships and when that anger is misused, abused, or ignored, it prevents us from moving toward that forgiveness and reconciliation.
For those of us who have learned unhealthy models of dealing with our anger, and I’m sure that is most of us at one point or another, all is not lost. It is a learnable skill, not an innate ability that you either do or don’t have. My favorite example of this is a comedian and podcast host, Marc Maren. He has hosted a very popular podcast for the last ten years, twice a week interviewing celebrities, public figures, and even President Obama.
Marc Maren is incredible to listen to because he is very honest about his own struggles and ups and downs in life. For listeners who have tuned in all ten years, or like me have gone back and listened to his early episodes, you can see that he has been on a transformative journey that was guided by his developing empathy through other people. He start by being angry at the world and blaming everyone else for what went wrong in his life. Then he became angry at himself, spiraling into shame for all he had done or didn’t do to other people or for himself. And finally, after years of reflection, he came to reconciling his anger to understand what he could do with it in the world. His anger is in balance with his other emotions, has allowed him to be more vulnerable, and has opened up a new chapter in his life where people in turn open up to him, find inspiration in his life and work, and makes a positive difference, small as it may be, in the world.
When Jesus went into that temple, he paid attention to his anger. He called on others to listen to it, and then he explained where it came from and why it was present. He used it to transform an injustice and help people move closer to God. We are called to do likewise. To pay attention to our anger and what makes us angry. To tend to the wounds underneath it and understand its origins, how it feels in our bodies and spirits.
And then use that anger – use it to transform injustice. Use it to find your voice and speak out. Use it to build a bridge to someone you long to reconcile with instead of shutting yourself off. Forgiveness cannot happen if we deny our anger and allow it to simmer in the background. For too long anger has either been abused or ignored, and that hasn’t worked out so well. May we begin to see our anger as an agent of change and as an opportunity to be in the world and together in a new way.
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