Psalm 137; Matthew 5:21-24 The Habit of Anger" Sermon preached March 16, 2014 Opening It's an old

story, but a good one. Former Yankee and baseball manager Billy Martin told it in his autobiography Number 1. Martin says he and Mickey Mantle were doing a little hunting down in Texas. Mickey had a friend who would let him hunt on his ranch. When they got there, Mickey told Billy to wait in the car while he went and checked in with his friend. Mantle's friend quickly gave them permission to hunt, but he asked Mickey a favor. The fellow had a pet mule in the barn who was going blind and he didn't have the heart to put him out of his misery. So he asked Mickey to shoot the mule for him. Mickey agreed. On the way back to the car, he thought he would have a little fun with Billy Martin. Reaching the car, Mickey pretended to be angry. He scowled and slammed the door shut. Billy asked him what was wrong, and Mickey told him that his friend wouldn't let them hunt. "I'm so mad at that guy that I am going out to his barn and shoot one of his mules!" Mantle said. He drove like a maniac to the barn. Martin protested and said, "We can't do that!" But Mickey was adamant, "Just watch me," he shouted. When they got to the barn, Mantle jumped out the car with his rifle, ran inside, shot the mule and killed it. As he was leaving he heard two shots,and ran back to the car. He saw that Martin had taken his rifle out, too, and smoke was curling from the barrel. "What are you doing, Martin?" he yelled. Martin yelled back, face red with anger, "We'll show that son of a gun. I just killed two of his cows!"1 That's a funny story. But we know that anger isn't often funny. Sometimes it turns downright deadly. To others. And to us.

Anger is natural Now before we think about anger as a deadly sin, we've got to recognize a few things. First, anger is as natural as breathing. Anger is hard-wired right into our brains; it's part of the flight-or-fight response that we have to danger. When we are threatened, our nervous system tell us to run, or to fight. And to help us fight, we get angry. Anger is an instinctive reaction to threat or opposition, and neuropsychologists have determined that anger begins in the limbic area of the human brain, the most "primitive" part of our brain. And the thing about the seven deadly sins - they are both common and deadly because they are part of our physical makeup. The challenge and burden of being human is that are at one and the same time, part of the animal kingdom, and yet made in the image of God. The physical reality is that we have natural tendencies that can lead us to sins like gluttony, lust and pride - but at the same time we have to master them, or we cant live in community with one another and we will eventually destroy ourselves. Anger can be a good thing Second, anger can be a good and proper response to some situations. Now when I was younger, I was taught Christians were always supposed to be nice. No matter what the circumstances, a Christian was supposed to smile and be nice. You could be wronged, insulted, taken advantage of, and the proper response was a smile and being nice. I don't buy that anymore. Christ doesn't call us to be doormats who smile while people take advantage of us. For instance, if someone is spreading gossip about you; or if someone has stolen from you; or someone is treating you with contempt, then anger is a natural and proper response. It's proper too, to be angry on behalf of other people - like if you see someone

beating a child in Wal-Mart; if you learn about human trafficking; if you read anything at all about North Korea. Anger is an appropriate response to those kinds of situations, and is even helpful because anger is a great motivator - it can get us off our rear ends. Anger is positive when it is linked to constructive action to right a wrong.2 As one ancient monk put it, anger is the prelude to compassion. How common anger is But - most anger is not based in compassion. And these days it seems everybody's got a grievance; everybody's angry in this country. This country is stuffed full of people who sputter with righteous anger - as one columnist put it, America is angry at Washington, angry at the press, angry at immigrants...angry at traffic, angry at people who are well off, angry at people who are poor, angry at blacks and angry at whites. The old are angry at the young, the young are angry at the old. Suburbs are angry at cities, cities are angry at suburbs, and rustic America is angry at both wherever urban and suburban intruders threaten the peaceful rustic sense of having escaped from God's angry land. 3 I think were seeing the development of a culture of grievance. Part of it, I think, is cable news - hour after hour of angry people insulting, belittling people they disagree with. Part of it, is the sense of entitlement in our culture - me first - where people do things like drive like crazy people, weaving in and out of traffic, running red lights, because where they have to go and what they have to do is more important than safety on the road. Part of it is a decline in civility - I dont much like going to the movies anymore because people talk during the movie, or what really sets me off, bring babies who start crying. Seems to me, theres an awful lot of anger in our culture. Seems to me, we as a

society are developing the habit of anger. What Jesus taught And when you get into the habit of anger, well, then you're falling into the kind of anger Jesus warned against. You see, based on the grammar of the text, Jesus was not warning us about the occasional flashes of anger we all have, nor was he warning about anger over injustice. Remember Jesus' own actions - he was like the Terminator in the Temple when he walked in there and saw how God's temple had been corrupted. No, Jesus was talking about a habitual kind of anger. A habit of anger where we nurture a constant, abiding anger against a person, or group of people, whom we feel have done us wrong. A habit of anger where we develop a hair-trigger temper that explodes at most everything that annoys us. A habit of anger that becomes a permanent part of our personality. When you move from being angry, to becoming an angry person. And this infects not only individual people, but whole cultures. I dont know how much attention you pay to the news from Iraq anymore, but there are still frequent suicide bombings that are killing hundreds of people a month. Thats a SunniShiite conflict that goes all the way back to the 8 th century and started over who was the rightful successor to the Prophet Mohammed - and those ancient grievances and hatreds are passed down from generation to generation And that sort of habitual anger is deadly But lets bring it back home - the family is the target of a tremendous amount of habitual anger.

Perhaps you have horrified yourself by taking out your anger on your spouse or children. During the day someone or something has made us angry, and when we're with the people who love us the most, something trivial - a child's bad grade on a test, a spouse's teasing, sets us off and kaboom! We holler and sputter and fuss. Thats just part of your personality, you say? Well, Im reminded of the time John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was talking with a man who said he had a really bad temper and the man sighed and said, I guess my temper is just my cross to bear, and Wesley looked him in the eye and said, Your temper is your wifes cross to bear - its your sin! And what damage that anger does. In one of his books Robert says that in the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, some villagers practice a unique form of logging. If a tree is too large to be cut down with an axe, the natives cut it down by yelling at it. Woodsmen with special powers creep up on a tree at dawn and suddenly scream at it at the top of their lungs. They continue this for thirty days. The tree dies and falls over. The theory is that the hollering kills the spirit of the tree. According to the villagers, it always works.4 A quaint belief of some pre-scientific villagers. Not us though - we yell at our wives and husbands and children and whoever else happens to set us off. And that, too, kills the spirit. Of the people we supposedly love. And of other people of gentle spirit who get blasted by our anger. Habitual anger that turns into a hair-trigger temper destroys relationships, indeed, when turned on children and people of gentle spirit, can destroy them. Habitual anger cuts us off from other people, and from God. And just like it is in cultures, the habit of anger is passed down through families. We pass on our pathologies to our children, because they learn from our behavior. And the same applies to the habit of anger. Philip Yancey wrote of a friend whose marriage was going through some

rough times. One night his friend George exploded. He pounded the table and floor and screamed, "I hate you! I won't take it anymore! I've had enough! I won't go on...No! No! No!" Several months later George woke up in the middle of the night and heard strange sounds coming from the room where his two-year old son slept. He went down the hall, stood outside his son's door, and shivers ran up his spine. In a soft voice, the two-year-old was repeating word for word, with precise inflection, the argument: "I hate you...I won't take it anymore...No! No! No!" George realized that in some awful way he had just passed on his pain and anger and unforgiveness to the next generation.5 What we want when we get angry Now, lets go a little deeper and think about what we want when we get angry. At one level, we want the person to stop doing what they are doing, or we want the situation to change. We want our boss to stop demeaning us in front of other people; we want our spouses to be considerate, leave the toilet seat down, clean up after themselves. But further down, when we get really angry, we want to punish that other person. We want them to suffer because of what they are doing to us. When we yell, or when we look at someone with a long cold stare and then withdraw emotionally, we are trying to punish them, hurt them, deprive them of something. And if we are angry long enough, that person becomes our enemy. And we are the righteous judge and jury that convicts and sentences them. We sit up on the bench dressed in judicial robes of righteousness, usually forgetting the times we have done things just as stupid or mean, and in our self-righteous indignation, we decide on a way to make that person pay. And in a way, anger can feel really good. That delicious sense of outrage that someone has done you wrong, or even better is righteous indignation where you are worked up into a lather of fury over other peoples wrong-doing. It feels so good because theyre so wrong and youre so right - we get to point the finger and say, Shame, shame! and position ourselves on the side of the angels.

And habitual anger usually leads to two results First, it often leads to thoughts, and then plans, to get revenge. And it's only a few small steps from habitual anger to hatred and then to imagining violence, and then to violence itself. But in a lot of cases, we dont act out our anger. We instead allow our anger to burrow its way deep down inside us, and find a comfortable, permanent home there. And it eats away at us, like acid. So - what's down in there? Is there long-buried anger simmering inside you? I can still get angry over things that happened twenty years ago. What's down there in the basement of your soul? Anger at the parent who wasn't there when you needed him or her. The preacher who violated your trust. The co-worker who betrayed you. The spouse who cheated on you. Have you buried anger down in the basement of your soul? The habit of anger Jesus warned us about - it doesn't have to be on a conscious level to harm you or others. It can be buried down so deep that the only way you know it's there is because of a bitterness that has infected you; or a sluggishness of mind and body that comes from diverting your mental energy to keeping your anger bottled up. This habit of anger, at its extreme, will eat you alive. How to be healed of anger I suspect the reason many of us keep this anger buried is that we're ashamed of it. Ashamed to let other people see it; ashamed to admit it to ourselves, and ashamed even to admit it to God. And when we lock it away, our anger cannot be healed. But the very kind of anger I think some of us feel is found in a surprising place. A place you wouldn't expect it. Right in the Bible, that's where. Take a look at your bulletin insert - printed there is Psalm 137. It's a mournful, sad psalm, written by one of the exiles the Babylonians carried off after the destruction of Jerusalem. Now look at the last four verses: Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem's fall, how

they said, "Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!" O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock! You think you have anger inside? The psalmist was so angry at his captors that he wanted someone to bash out the brains of Babylonian babies. Now that's ugly. But some of us have the same stuff locked up in the basements of our souls, locked away from the grace and healing power of God. But the psalmist took his anger, and put it right in his prayer, this psalm. The psalmist gave it up to God, in all its ugliness. We must do the same. God can handle our anger. Because when Jesus hung on the cross, he took into himself all the foulness and hatred and sin and pain - and anger - of the whole human race - took it into himself - so we could be healed and forgiven by turning to him. Take your habit of anger, get it out, give it up, bring it to God, confess it, and ask God for healing. You might as well be honest with God; he knows if you've developed the habit of anger, and if you don't - well, your relationship with God will suffer. You will suffer. As will those whom you love. If the psalmist put his anger on display before God like this, so can we. There is no emotion so ugly that God can't deal with it; there is no hatred so deep that God cant heal it, there is no habit so stubborn that God can't break it. Lets give it up folks, give up our anger to God. And be healed of a deadly sin. Amen. Endnotes 1. Dynamic Preaching, March 1991, p. 3. 2. The Living Pulpit, p. 33. 3.Quoted in Peter Gomes, The Good Book, p. 62. New York: William Morrow & Co, 1996

4. Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned In Kindergarten, p. 17. New York: Ivy Books, 1986. 5. Christianity Today, August 16, 1993, p. 28.