What Are YOU Going to Do About It?

In the English language, "mad" can be either angry or insane.

On July 8, 1741, 38-year-old Jonathon Edwards stood in the pulpit of the Congregational Church in Northampton, Massachusetts and preached what is now the best-known sermon in American History. Edwards was already well known as a preacher of aesthetic theology; he saw God’s love and purpose everywhere in the wonders of nature.

But the sermon he preached on this day, the sermon now included in American anthologies of literature, the sermon that has largely defined our popular impression of God, was called “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God's hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.

Edwards, preaching a revival sermon that helped spark the First Great Awakening, viscerally described a God who is angry, a God who holds us accountable not only for our devastating ignorance of the welfare of creation as of our brother and sister human beings, but also accountable for our willful ignorance of God’s self. His intent was to prompt his listeners to utterly abandon themselves to God’s loving care, erasing all fear.

But the phrase “Angry God,” burned and burrowed itself into our communal psyche until we began to flee this angry God instead of what made God angry.

God’s not alone in this. We have inherited our maker’s capacity for anger.

No matter how much philosophy may want to talk about how we should or shouldn’t get angry, scripture recognizes that we do. In the bible, people get mad.

When the people he’d led out of Egypt built a golden calf to worship as soon as his back was turned, Moses was mad enough to break the first stone tablets with God’s commandments. Can you picture Moses and God together on the mountain, shaking their heads at the denseness of “some people,” (all people?) and re-inscribing the law?

In the ancient, early days of Israel’s political formation, Young Jonathon got angry with his father Saul for treating his beloved friend David unfairly.

In his later years as king of Israel, David’s downfall seems to be that he can’t bring himself to get angry with his errant adult children as they begin to play havoc with each other’s lives and with the kingdom itself.

Jesus was angry with his community’s leaders when they stood by silently and let a man with a useless hand suffer instead of reaching out and helping him; when they were more worried about obeying the established “rules”. The man with the withered hand was more valuable to them as a chance to catch Jesus breaking a rule than he was as a potential productive member of society,

Jesus got mad enough at Peter to call him “satan” when Peter got after him for getting down to the heart of what was to come, the consequences f all this disturbing feeding, and healing, and teaching.

The wisdom book of Proverbs is full of advice about the virtues of patience and soft words, but the fact remains, people get mad.

“Inglorious Bastards,” one of the most critically acclaimed films playing, and a box office pleaser explores a devastating intersection of abusive institutional power and imagined angry response. It’s a “could-a, should-a, would-a” film.

WE don’t want to be angry, we know that anger, especially sustained anger, is unhealthy, one of the major stressors. WE don’t want others to be angry with us. But we now that the best way to “manage” anger induced stress is to resolve, not avoid, the anger. We carry unresolved anger, aware or unaware, forward in our lives. We know that the rate of sudden cardiac death increases when the population is collectively stressed, (CNN 2-24-09 citing Rachel Lampert). And we know that over 60% of the US poplulation reports being angry and irritable on a daily basis.

And a study published last spring by Rachel Lampert demonstrates a link between electrical signal disruptions induced by anger and arrhythmia in patients with existing heart conditions.

“Other studies have also shown that if you ask patients about what happened before a heart attack, they'll most frequently say they were angry, said Dr. Charles Raison, psychiatrist and director of the Mind/Body Institute at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.” (CNN ibid)

And, as Jonathon Edwards embedded in our imaginations, the God who made us in God’s own image gets angry too. The worship book of the psalms lists the seven things that make God mad too. If anger really is wrong, what do we do with God’s wrath?

Proverbs 6: 16-19: There are six things that the LORD hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that hurry to evil, a lying witness who testifies falsely, and one who sows discord in a family.

God’s anger is a response to our sin. Its not God’s character. It’s not who God IS. God is love. In the beginning it is love. In the end it is love. That love is resolved that each and all experience God’s care and is angered when we prevent it.

Injustice causes God’s heart to skip a beat.

So what’s deadly about anger?

Was it wrong to be angry in the aftermath of 9-11?

Is it wrong for a parent to be angry when they can’t access the same basic health care that their neighbor or boss or teacher or pastor’s family has?

Is it wrong for one of my colleagues to grow irritated when in one public dinner after another he is asked for more coffee, peas, pasta because he is a big black man?

Is it wrong for another to become angry when each time he moves to a new parsonage, police cars follow him home until well-placed parishioners call and ask them to stop? He is from the Caribbean.

Shouldn’t my Korean friend be angry when the bouncer at a bar tells him to go find when that likes “Chinamen?”

The seven deadly sins were listed, with the best of intentions, by the church in its early decades as an institutional power, the only remaining effective institutional power, during the chaos of the disintegrating Roman empire. “calm down, keep your head, work together,” were life saving words in that time.

What the philosophers who created the western Vice/virtue lists recognized, and what our Buddhist friends call our attention to, is that passions can drive and misshape us; especially when they are driven by fear, greed, pride, insatiable appetites for more or a need to feel superior.

What scripture and Judeo Christian experience show us is that passions can also align us with the heart of a God who is resolved that each and every one of God’s creatures experience the blessings of divine love.

We underestimate God’s anger at our peril.

And glimpse the results of our actions- in backlashes from imbalance of power, Uprisings, downfalls. The furious power of nature disturbed by careless stewardship of our physical resources..

At the same time, we are constantly underestimating God’s love, a love that is as patient as a wise grandparent who won't let us go too far.

Instead of fearfully trying to tip the cosmic scales in our favor, shouldn’t we be trying to both please God and become our best selves by eliminating the causes of righteous anger so that real love can flourish? Anger can be a wake-up call, and instrument.

Anger can sever us from God and others or anger can move us back into God's embrace, toward God's purpose.

What Are You Going to Do About It?