Unrighteous Anger

a sermon for St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Ada, VA
August 30, 2009, 13th Sunday after Pentecost
The readings: Song 2:8-13; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23; Psalm 45:1-2, 7-10

“Anger” – it’s such an unassuming sounding little word, and yet seems to be everywhere these days. If it’s not in your face, then it’s simmering just below the surface, ready to boil over.

And the Road Rage crisis on our highways is a great example of how the simmering anger so many people live with can erupt in the blink of an eye. You make one wrong move on the highway – not driving the way Joe Schmoe thinks you should drive, or *gasp* making an error in driving judgment – and the next thing you know, you can find yourself part of a road war… whether you want to be or not.

I did a quick internet search for “road rage accidents” and got thousands of stories. When you read them, you just shake your head and think “what is wrong with these people?” A car and a pickup are driving down the road, the pickup passenger throws a beer bottle out the window that nearly hits the car. At the stop light, the car driver tells the pickup passenger that they almost hit the car with the bottle, and the next thing people are out of their cars, the car driver is beaten and hit on the head with a bottle, and one of the pickup passengers is stabbed by the car driver, and several people are on the way to the hospital.

Here’s another: A motocylcist gets frustrated with a motorhome travelling at 55 mph, so passes it, pulls in front, and slams on its brakes. The motorhome couldn’t help running over the cyclist, who was dragged for 75 feet under the motorhome, and died at the scene.

Or this: angry commuters in California forced the highway department to completely close a stretch of road they were widening, because of at three incidents of motorists angry about the possible delay. Two of them hit the highway flagman in order to drive through the construction zone when it wasn’t their turn, and a third also shot the flagger with a BB gun as they drove through. All because they were angry about the delay – so now everybody gets to take a nice long detour until the project’s finished.

We live in an angry, angry world, where the angry people spend their time justifying and explaining why they’re angry – and why it’s okay for them to indulge that anger. Here are some examples:

There’s not enough money, not enough leisure time, too long of a drive to work, the boss makes unreasonable demands, if the kids are still at home they don’t listen and if the kids are grownups they never call. We’re overweight and under-exercised, or dealing with painful health problems. The spouse isn’t making me happy any more, or the ex isn’t abiding by the terms of the divorce settlement. “Nobody understands how hard it is to be me! If they did, they’d get angry, too!”

When you focus on those difficult things and hold onto them, they build up pressure that makes a person frustrated, irritated, irate, stressed, enraged, exasperated, annoyed, infuriated or just plain riled up. We have become a nation of angry, angry people, most of whom think that getting angry is OK – as long as I’m the one getting angry!

The reading from James gives us a different message, though, doesn’t it? “Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness.” And let me just repeat that last bit because it has the key: your anger does not produce God’s righteousness. It can’t. The only thing your anger can produce is your righteousness. Your righteousness is also known as self-righteousness, and we all know self-righteousness isn’t a good thing. One definition I found said that self-righteousness is “hypocritically pious - a feeling of smug moral superiority derived from a sense that one's beliefs, actions, or affiliations are of greater virtue than those of the average person.” Definitely not a Godly was to think!

And isn’t that just where road rage comes from, and a lot of other rages, too? From that smug sense that your way is better than all the other drivers, that you drive better, and that your driving superiority entitles you to punish or chastise drivers who offend your sense of what’s right on the road. It’s also self-righteousness that goads people into other sorts ofbad behavior in public places - the sense that “I know the right way and they aren’t doing it right and it’s my duty to tell them”, or “my errand is more important than any one else’s in this line, so I’m entitled to make a fuss until I get to my turn.”

“My anger” produces “my righteousness” which inevitably leads to bad behavior.

We can see this going on in our gospel reading, too. The Pharisees are criticizing Jesus disciples because they haven’t completed the customary ritual handwashing before they ate. It’s not that the disciples hands were necessarily dirty, it’s just that they hadn’t completed the stylized ritual washing meant to cleanse from contact with anything ritually unclean. The Pharisees speak from a sense of smug moral superiority and the sure knowledge that they know better than the average person. The Pharisees are self righteous to the core. And their anger and irritation that Jesus’ disciples are not following Jewish customs does nothing to bring about God’s righteousness in the world.

The Pharisees are angry because their self-righteousness has been offended, because the rules they’ve spent their lives supporting are not being followed. They’re not angry because they’re particularly worried about what God would think, and Jesus knows it. He calls them on their hypocrisy when he quotes from Isaiah: “this people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”

So there we have the problem. We are filled with anger from our offended self-righteousness. We’re not so much concerned that God’s will has been contradicted but that our will has been contradicted. Just like the road rage driver isn’t angry because the governments driven rules have been broken: but rather because his or her own ideas of how traffic should behave have been broken.

We may honor God with our lips, but our hearts are often far away. So how do we fix that? What’s the cure? How do we get our hearts and lips in agreement? The cure is righteousness – not self-righteousness but God’s righteousness, and “righteousness comes with the unity of word and deed.”

Miriam Webster says that to be righteous is to act in accordance with divine or moral law; to be free from guilt or sin. So, to be righteous we need to actually follow God’s law, not just hear it then do something else So you are righteous when you hear God’s Word, you learn God’s word, and your responses, your deeds, are in accordance to that word.

James speaks to this also. He says, “be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.” James is saying that what you hear and how you respond have to be in sync. Then he goes on to compare the doers with the hearers, using the idea of what happens when you look at a mirror. Now, I don’t think his meaning is particularly clear, so let me explain what’s going on here.

When you look at yourself as reflected from God’s word, you see yourself and all your shortcomings - all the places we don’t measure up to God’s standards, all our sin. It’s like a woman looking into a mirror and seeing that her hair’s mussed up, her makeup is uneven, her shirt’s buttoned crooked, her slip’s hanging out, and there’s a great big run down the front of her stockings. When you hear what God expects, when you consider his word, his law, you realize you’ve got a lot of things wrong.

Now, the person who only hears the word is like a person who looks in the mirror, sees all of the fashion flaws, but continues on their way, fixing nothing. They put their shortcomings and problems out of their mind, forgetting them, instead of putting any effort into fixing them. In just a very short time, it’s as though they never saw that mirror in the first place. For the person who only hears, any notion that they have sin or shortcomings or issues to work on quickly fades to a distant memory.

On the other hand, the person who hears and does the word is like a person who looks in the mirror, sees the fashion errors, and stands there fixing themselves up. Our woman gets out the comb, touches up the makeup, straightens up her clothes, and plans a trip to the 7-11 to pick up a new pair of pantyhose. What she see inspires action, and her actions help her remember where the problems are, what needs fixing, where things tend to get askew. Responding to what God’s Word shows you about your life helps you remember where you tend to sin, how you often go astray, so you can be vigilant.

So what about all that self-righteous anger? What we do with that? How do we overcome the tendency to road rage, or food store frustration, or phonecall fury? Here’s another word from James: “your anger does not produce God’s righteousness, therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and wickedness and welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.”

When we look in the mirror of God’s Word, when we own up to the ugliness in ourselves that we see there – the anger and other “evil intentions of the heart”, that ugliness will motivate our doing! Because what is the gospel, the good news, if not the message that Jesus Christ came to save sinners, sinners who peered into the mirror of God’s Word and saw the ugly reflection that greeted them. Sinners who saw the ugly truth and yet found that they – yes, even they - could be forgiven. Just as they are. Fashion flaws and all.

The forgiveness available to us as repentant sinners will fill us with such relief and joy, that we can’t help but go out and do something about it.
Amen.