The Perils of Anger
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
August 9, 2009
So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbours, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labour and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
Do you remember how Andy Warhol once said that everyone gets 15 minutes of fame? How are you doing on your 15 minutes? I had part of mine back in 1981 when I was televised on ESPN. I was a senior in college, and was playing on my college’s varsity lacrosse team. We were playing the North Carolina State University in a game that was being televised across the country by ESPN.
We were so excited about playing on national television, even if national television meant that only three people in Arizona, two in Montana, ten in California, and six in Massachusetts were watching. Hey, it was still nationally televised, and I even had some classmates from high school tell me that they saw the game on television the next day in Arizona. Over the years a few others told me that they saw me, too.
In the game, we were playing a North Carolina State team that we had beaten the previous two years, so we were pretty confident that we could beat them. We came out pumped up, ready to show a national audience what we could do. We were playing so well that,… well,… at halftime we were losing something like 10 to 3. In other words, we were terrible. We weren’t playing as a team, but as a bunch of individuals running around without purpose. What would you expect the coach to do in situation like this one? When the Steelers are playing poorly, what do you hope the coach will do to get them playing better? Most of us want the coach to get angry and yell at the players, hoping to motivate them to play better. That’s exactly what our coach did.
He came into the locker room at halftime and, gesturing wildly, yelled at us. He threw a water bottle. He overturned a table. He blistered us up and down, telling us that we were playing like a bunch of high schoolers. We were stunned. The real question is what did his tantrum do to us. Did it motivate us to play better? I can tell you this: we stormed out of that locker room, onto the field, and promptly managed to play even worse in the second half, eventually losing 23 to 11. The game wasn’t that close. By the fourth quarter the other team was putting in the second team. My one chance on a national stage, and it was completely embarrassing.
I learned a lot about anger in that game. I learned that sometimes anger gets you what you want, but if you’re not careful it also kills what you cherish. Looking back at that game, what we really needed was for the coach to come in at halftime and to calmly point to the three things we could do to improve. He needed to tell us that we weren’t out of it, but that we could overcome the deficit by doing this, this, and this. The funny thing is that normally that’s what the coach would have done. He rarely yelled us like that in a game. Practices? Now that’s a different thing, but in games he mainly stayed calm. The point, though, is that his anger and tantrum didn’t help. In fact, I think they stripped us of all of our confidence. We were worse after his tirade that we were before.
We all get angry at times, and we all act out of anger at times, but does that make our anger helpful? The apostle Paul realized that anger can be helpful, but often at a high cost. Anger is very much like vinegar. In small doses is can add flavor and spice things up. Think about an angry comedian or an angry song. They can be fun, but only in small doses. Think about how a small dose of anger can give us a bit more focus and help us accomplish a task. A small amount of anger can help us, but the more anger we pour into our lives, the more it makes life bitter, acidic, and corrosive, just as too much vinegar does.
A little bit of anger can motivate us to solve problems, but over time too much anger corrodes relationships, workplaces, families, and eventually the soul. If you want to understand why anger makes people bitter and corrodes relationships, you have to start with what really causes anger. When you get angry about something, do you know why? Anger is a biological, emotional reaction to threats. We’re built biologically to get angry when something or someone threatens us. We get angry when someone threatens to, or does, steal something from us. We get angry when someone tells us something that we don’t want to hear. We get angry when someone denigrates, diminishes, or dismisses us. We are built to get angry whenever someone hurts us. We are built to lash out when someone says or does something to upset us. The reaction of anger is biological, built on all sorts of hormones that kick in whenever we feel threatened.
This gets to the heart of why anger can be helpful, and why it can also cause people to become bitter and corrosive when they act too often on their anger. The more we give in to anger, the more we live as subjects of our bodies, rather than of our minds or spirits. You see, the goal of Christian spirituality is to free us from becoming slaves to our bodies by allowing us instead to be guided by our spirits and by God. Too often we live as slaves to our bodies, rather than letting our bodies be guided by our spirits.
C.S. Lewis was right. We are amphibians who live simultaneously in the physical and spiritual realms. And like amphibians who begin life underwater, but are eventually meant to live in the world of open air, we are born as physical beings, as animals, who are meant to rise above our physicality to live as embodied spirits. Over the course of life we are called to mature in a way that lets the spiritual guide the physical.
Now, I am not saying that you should never get angry. It isn’t a question of whether or not you get angry. It’s all a question of what you do with your anger. Paul says, “Be angry but do not sin.” He’s saying that there are times when anger is appropriate. It’s normal, for instance, to get angry with children when they do something wrong, or refuse to follow our guidance. We are charged with helping them to grow up, to learn responsibility, and to guide them on how to live. Flashes of anger tell them that what we are saying is important. The problem is that too much anger with our kids can become oppressive. We shut them down. And it can lead us to become abusive.
Also, anger in the workplace can be good in very, very small flashes, as long as the anger is focused on how to get people to work better together. The problem is that too often we have bosses, co-workers, or others in the workplace for whom anger is a permanent condition. People like that kill initiative and creativity. They kill productivity. They kill people’s spirits.
There are also times when the Spirit guides us to be angry. There are times when it is appropriate to be angry for God when we see injustice. It is appropriate to be angry when we see someone being mistreated. It is appropriate to be angry when we see the poor and hungry ignored. It is appropriate to be angry when we see abuse. Jesus modeled this anger when he went into the Temple, overturned tables, and shouted that we shall not turn God’s Temple into a marketplace.
The problem is that too often anger can control us, and when it does it ends up tearing life down rather than building it up. That’s what happened when our coach yelled at us. I see the same thing happening right now regarding the healthcare debate. Everyone on both sides of the debate are so angry that they are no longer building up a system, but tearing each other down to the extent that they very well could stop the efforts at both health care reform and universal health care. I see the same kind of anger tearing apart marriages and families. When couples become permanently angry at each other, it corrodes the marriage, sometimes to the point at which it can’t be saved.
Paul’s whole point is that we need to focus our lives on what builds up, not what tears down. Over time uncontrolled anger tears down. So what do we do to overcome anger? Well, I have three basic rules to letting go of anger:
1. Build a peaceful center: too often we have a tumultuous center. We aren’t centered in our lives because we let everything around us control us—our schedules, our tasks, our expectations, our demands,… everything. Part of letting go of anger means becoming more centered, mentally and spiritually, in a way that enables us to let things go. We do this by simply slowing down and creating space for God in our lives. In fact, that’s part of what Sunday worship is meant to do. It is meant to slow us down for at least one hour a week so that we can have a center. Of course, too often we feel we are too busy for this.
2. Put things into perspective: Another reason we get so angry is that we blow things out of proportion. We turn things that are relatively minor into major mountains that overwhelm us. If we are getting angry a lot, are we are guilty of taking things out of perspective.
3. Pray: Regular prayer overcomes anger, both by putting us into a more spiritual state before we get angry, and by helping us when we get angry. Regular prayer centers us, but praying when we are angry short-circuits anger. Try it. Next time you find yourself getting overly angry, take a breath, slow down, and pray. It makes a difference.
Let me close with a story that captures all of this. A number of years ago there was a young woman named Julie who was just plain angry. I’m not sure why. It might have had something to do with her parents’ messy divorce when she was twelve, and her father’s aloofness. Whatever the reason, she tended to get angry at people very quickly and easily.
She seemed to lack a sense of focus throughout her life, which eventually caused her to drop out of high school. With no diploma and an angry attitude, it was hard for her to both get and hold a job. She struggled. Eventually her father managed to get her a job at a local hardware store with an old classmate of his, a man named Frank. It was a match made in Hell. Frank was an angry man who tended to treat his workers terribly, which was why he always seemed to be looking for new clerks. He and Julie clashed from the moment she came into the hardware store.
The very first day she asked him what time he wanted her to come to work. He held up one hand, spreading his fingers out. The problem is that he had lost his pinky and ring finger many years before. So she didn’t know whether he meant be at work at 3 p.m. or 5 p.m. for an evening shift. With an irritated voice, she asked, “What does that mean? 3 or 5?” Frank lashed back: “It’s obvious!” Then he walked away. Julie visibly rolled her eyes and cursed Frank under her breath.
Still, they worked together for over a year. She stayed because she didn’t know if she could find another job. He kept her because he didn’t want to look once again for a new worker. Both were miserable. In fact, Julie noticed that whenever she drove to work her stomach would swish and swirl around, intensifying as she got closer to the store. It was becoming unbearable. She also felt that she had no one to talk with about it. Her father and mother wouldn’t understand her quitting a good job. Her friends were mostly away at college. She felt trapped.
Everything began to change one day as she was driving to work. Her stomach was flittering around as normal, but a thought came to her mind: Pray for Frank. The thought wouldn’t go away. So turning off the radio she started to pray for Frank. It was uncomfortable because she was not a churchgoer, nor had been since she was a little child. But she prayed for him the whole way to work. She noticed her stomach calmed a bit as she did so.
Frank was as miserable as normal that day, but whenever Julie started to curse him under her breath, she stopped said a short prayer: “God, if you are there, be with Frank.” For a week she prayed for Frank every morning on the way to work. Eventually she started praying for him on the way home. Every morning and evening she would pray for him. Slowly she noticed a difference. Frank seemed to be getting nicer, even if was only in small ways.
One day Frank stopped Julie in one of the aisles and said, “Julie, I need to say something to you. I know I’m not the nicest man in the world, and I haven’t treated you very well. I wish I were different. I had to start working at age twelve, and while everyone else was playing with friends, I was always working to help support my family. I never really learned how to get along with people. And I resented never getting to play, to have fun, and to be normal. So I started taking it out on others. I’ve done that to you, and I’m sorry.” Julie was stunned. What just happened?
Over then ensuing months, Frank changed toward her. She changed toward him. Slowly they became something like friends, teasing and kidding each other, acting almost like father and daughter. As this happened, Julie noticed that that the reservoir of rage within her was evaporating. She was actually becoming something that looked like,… I don’t know,… happy. And she kept praying, even joining a church.
A few years later Frank died. He had never been married or had children. When his will was read, Julie was shocked. He had left everything, the store and his house, to her with a note saying that she was his family. And it all happened because Julie made a decision to pray.
So, what do you do with your anger?
Amen.
