Takoma Park Baptist Church, September 8, 1991 (this version); preached in slightly different form at Luther Rice Memorial Baptist Church, Silver Spring, MD, July 30, 1978; Calvary Hill Baptist Church, Fairfax, VA, August 6, 1978; Forest Heights Baptist Church, Oxon Hill, MD, Sept. 9, 1979; Hillcrest Baptist Church, Hillcrest Heights, MD, Sept. 23, 1979; First Baptist Church, Gaithersburg, MD, April 27, 1980; First Baptist Church, Upper Marlboro, MD, Dec. 28, 1980; First Baptist Church, Rockville, MD, April 5, 1981; First Baptist Church, Wheaton, MD, August 9, 1981; Greenbelt Baptist Church, Greenbelt, MD, August 16, 1981; WHBC Radio, Washington, DC, August 30, 1981; Calverton Baptist Church, Silver Spring, MD, May 1, 1982; First Baptist Church of Camp Springs, MD, Feb. 12, 1984; Takoma Park Baptist Church, Washington, DC, September 29, 1985
In September each year I bring at least two messages on prayer. Messages about prayer are appropriate at any of the year, of course; but it seems to me that in 5eptember life gets more hectic as we move back into the rhythm of school and job and all the rest.
In hectic times, the best way to confront the hurried pace of life is to stop, and wait, and listen, and pray. This, above all times, is a time to pray.
Now the two messages I have planned for this fall deal with a strange theme: "angry prayer" Angry prayer. But do not dismiss that as inappropriate or as tasteless until you have faced the issue. Stay with me on this business of angry prayer this week and the next, and I think we’ll grow.
These messages are based on two episodes in the life of David, King of Israel, as recorded in the Second Book of Samuel. These episodes both center on the ark … that is, the ark of the covenant, not Noah’s ark. No beasts here except the one in the pulpit!
The ark of the covenant - what was it and what was its significance? The ark was a large wooden box, ornately decorated and mounted on two long poles. This box had been carried around by the people of Israel for several generations; wherever they had wandered, it too had gone. When they had gone into battle against their enemies, it too had been carried into battle. When they conquered the land of Canaan and crossed over the Jordan, the box, the ark went along.
Some said the ark contained the original stone tablets of the Law as given to Moses. Others guessed that the ark contained the very bones of Moses the lawgiver. No one really knew, and no one was about to open it and see, because the ark was believed to be holy. The ark was seen as the embodiment of God Himself. And therefore it was not to be touched, it was not to be tampered with; and, in fact, some believed that the very presence of the ark brought you either blessing or curse, as God willed. Why? Simply because, in the minds of the people, this box, this ark, represented God Himself.
Now if you had asked then whether this box was actually God, of course they would have denied that. But still, being in the presence of the ark was like having God in your possession. And once when the army of the Philistines, their bitter enemy, captured the ark, it was said that the "glory", that is, the presence of the Lord had departed Israel.
You could just about say, then, that this ancient ark, this box, embodied God Himself. I hope you have that picture, because that will be crucial to understanding what happened with David, and it will be important for understanding why sometimes we pray in anger. We want to understand, this week and next, what is involved in angry prayer.
Follow the first of these two stories with me: II Samuel 6:1-15
It must have dawned a beautiful clear day, this day for which the King of Israel had made such elaborate plans. It looked like a fine day for an expedition which could open up a whole new chapter in the history of his nation.
King David had been in such a long, long journey. He had started out as just a shepherd boy wandering the hillside. He had first been noticed when he and his little slingshot took out a very big target named Goliath. And his musical talent also commended him to the court of the old King, Saul.
What a long, long journey, though! To have to face the undisguised hostility of old Saul; to lose his best friend, the King’s son, Jonathan; then to have been proclaimed king over a part of the nation and to have fought and bled and suffered to unite the people and to defeat the Philistines and all the others …David had come a long way.
But now he is approaching the zenith of his career. He has taken the old Philistine city of Jerusalem and has begun to rebuild it and to fortify it as his own capital. It will be the capital of a united and strong nation. It will be a glorious city. It lacks only one thing: the ark, the ark of the covenant.
David sees that the ark of the covenant, the symbol of the presence of the Lord Himself, needs to be brought to Jerusalem and needs to be enshrined there. It will pronounce, "finished" on all that he has tried to do. It will assure the people that God is in this whole thing. It will tell the world that David is here to stay.
And so the ark must now be moved from its isolation in the countryside. It must be brought to the royal city. The king and his aides and a grand escort of 30,000 soldiers were to bring the ark up in triumph. A new cart was supplied by the farmer Abinadab in the village of Baalejudah; and nothing would do but that the sons of Abinadab, two strapping young men named Allio and Uzzah, must drive the cart. And drive they did, with Allio proudly leading the way, Uzzah walking alongside the oxen.
Suddenly … who knows how it happened? One of the oxen stumbled. The cart began to skitter off into a rut in the road, and for one heart-stopping second it looked as though the precious ark of the Lord would fall off and would slide down into the dust.
What do you do when you see something like that about to happen? By instinct you just throw up a hand to stop it; and that’s exactly what Uzzah did. What else would you have expected him to do? Uzzah stretched out his hand to steady the ark, and the next thing anyone knew there was Uzzah lying in the dust. Uzzah, who only tried to help, is dead. The ark is safe and sound, but a young man is dead.
Some of you will want to raise questions about that. Most of us will have a hard time understanding what happened and why it happened. I am not going to drive down that road this morning. It’s a worthy question. But it’s not where I’m headed today.
What I want you to see is David: David’s reaction, David’s responses. The text says, "David was angry because the Lord had burst forth with an outburst upon Uzzah". David was angry. David was angry at whom? At God. Angry at God.
I
The key question is, ’’Why was David angry at God?" What is really wrapped up in the King’s anger at almighty God? What’s going on here?
I’ve already mentioned what the ark was: it was the very embodiment of God. People believed that if you possessed the ark, in a sense you possessed God. You had His blessings right in the palm of your hand.
And, furthermore, I’ve already pointed out that for David getting the ark up to Jerusalem represented the crowning achievement of his career. He just knew that that ark could do wonders for him politically. He would be known as God’s protector, God’s number one servant.
Put these two things together … the meaning of the ark, David’s great expectations … and then look at the dust of a country road where the ark of the covenant hangs teetering on the edge of a farmer’s cart, and on the road below it lies the lifeless body of the farmer’s son, and what do you see now? You see the shattered dreams of the King. You see the ruins of an ambitious life. You see David’s grand plan for himself come crashing down. It isn’t going to work. And he is angry. He is angry with God.
David is angry, I’m saying, because he has discovered that you cannot force God into doing what you want Him to do for your own ambition. David is angry at a God who will not let you use Him, make a pawn out of Him, for your own benefit. David is angry, and we too get angry, because we think we’re doing God a favor, when all along we are trying to get on His good side so that He will do us a favor. And when that doesn’t work, we get angry.
One person prays for success in business and even gives his tithes to the church, expecting that God will bless him with abundance. But then that business dries up; dead Uzzahs clutter his account books; and he becomes angry with God. He’s tried to carry the ark, and it won’t work.
Someone else wants a successful career, wants to be recognized and honored above everyone else. He prays for that, he goes to church to be seen by the right people, he gets himself put on various boards and committees, trying to earn heavenly brownie points. And then he wakes up after twenty or so years to the fact that he is not outstanding, he’s just ordinary; she’s not at the head of her profession, she’s just a foot soldier. And we become angry. Angry at ourselves, yes; angry at the world, maybe; but, ultimately, angry at God, who will not be used for our profit.
The principal issue with the rage that lies deep inside a good many of us is that we have tried to be good folks in order to earn God’s favor. That really means, however, that we have tried to use God, we have tried to manipulate God, we have tried to force God to give us what we wanted. And the failures, the dead Uzzahs in our lives mock us and make us angry.
II
So what do we do with that anger? How do we work out a solution to that anger against God? Watch again what happens with David. Listen to this sequence:
Verse 8, "David was angry because the Lord had burst forth". Verse 9, next, "David was afraid of the Lord that day". And verse 10, finally, "David was unwilling to take the ark of the Lord into his care … instead David took it to the house of Obededom".
Do you catch that sequence? David is angry; David is afraid; so David sets the ark aside. First anger, then fear, then isolation, then withdrawal, separation from God.
I believe that that is the key to this story. We get angry at God, and then we catch ourselves. We’re afraid to be angry with God. We think there’s something wrong with that and dangerous about that. And so what do we do? We shut down. We set God aside. Either we quit praying or, if we keep on praying, we cover over our real feelings. We won’t tell God how angry we are. We just let all that anger and all that fear implode, we let it explode inside. Then usually we let it out on somebody else: our family, our co-workers, somebody else. Our rage so often is a rage against God, but because we’re afraid to tell Him how angry we are, it spills out all over everybody else. All because we will not use the power of angry prayer. Angry prayer.
John Killinger in his little book, For God’s sake, Be Human, tells about a pastor who every Sunday tried to hurry his family along and get ’em to the church on time, and it just never went right. On one particular Sunday morning everything was going wrong -- the wife’s hair dryer was in the way, the kids were fighting, he knew that one of his power deacons was going to be looking at his watch to see what time the pastor arrived, and the climax came when his wife’s cat (which he had never much liked anyway) got up on the dresser and sent his tie tack flying under the bed. This dear brother was so overcome with anger that he scooped up that cat and threw it across the room, so that it landed between the wall and a hot radiator, from whence it sang something other than "Sweet Hour of Prayer"!
Two hours later, of course, the cat-flinging preacher was in his pulpit, oozing pious noises and promising sweet nothings to his people. He said, "Oh, when I am in Christ, I have a great peace and calm. I have a feeling of love and of charity for everyone and for everything." But there was a dissenting voice from about ten pews out, "Don’t you believe this old hypocrite; you ought to see what his peace and calm did to my cat!"
We have learned to play the piety game! We have learned to cover over our feelings and never tell our God how angry and frustrated and disappointed and guilty we really feel. We’ve learned to say all the sweet meaningless things. But then we lash out in anger at others, even cats … and why? Let the hymn writer tell you, "All because we do not carry everything … everything … to God in prayer." Even angry prayer.
How much healthier the telegram sent by one of this century’s great Christians to a friend whose eleven-year old daughter had died of leukemia. Said the telegram, "God’s going to have a hell of a lot to answer for." Does that shock you? All right! But if you are angry, say so! Angry prayer.
David was angry, David was afraid, David was unwilling to take the ark of God, the presence of God, with him. He shut himself off. And suffered the seething corrosion of spiritual cancer for three long, terrible months.
III
But then: Listen for the good news. Listen for the word of hope.
One day "it was told King David, ‘The Lord has blessed the household of Obededom and all that belongs to him, because of the ark of God.’ So David went and brought up the ark of God from the house of Obededom to the city … with rejoicing; and when those who bore the ark of the Lord had gone six paces, he sacrificed an ox and a fatling. David danced before the Lord with all his might … So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet."
I wish we knew more about this. I’d love to know more about how David sensed that the time was right. Clearly it has to do with the fact that Obededom out there in the village found the presence of the ark to be a blessing, and David must have felt, "Can I have that too?" I wish we knew more about the dynamics here.
But this much we can say: that a gracious God is always ready to reconcile. A merciful God is always standing by, waiting to love us and to heal the gap between us. That for sure we can say.
And something else I believe we can say: that when David acknowledged his anger for what it was, when David was able to say, "Yes, Lord, I am angry with you, because you wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it ... " I believe that when that happened, at the end of months of waiting and struggling, then the stage was well set for David and David’s God to come back together.
You see, if you can be brave enough to pray an angry prayer, if you can tell your God exactly what you think and what you feel, and then if you can wait, and wait, and wait some more, then a gracious God who loves you and wants nothing more than to be by your side will send you a signal. And you will be forgiven and welcomed home. You will be His and He will be yours.
And like David, on that day, you will dance and shout and sing with all your might. First, be angry, honestly; and then wait. Then at last comes the joy.
Paul Tournier, the great psychiatrist and Christian counselor, tells in one his essays about the first time he tried to pray for a solid hour. He says that he set his watch on the table and began to pray, and after what he thought was a good while, checked the watch. Only ten minutes had passed! Several times he did this, just struggling to stay with his prayer for an hour. And, says Tournier, when the sixty minutes had passed, he felt nothing, only fatigue: no sense of blessing, no sense of relationship with God at all, just sixty minutes of drudgery. But then, Tournier says, on a whim he fell on his knees for one more minute – just one more minute after the sixty – and in that one moment felt God flooding into his life in a fresh, cleansing, exciting way.
The hour of struggle had been the necessary prelude for that one moment of spiritual joy. For David the three months of waiting the necessary prelude for the dance of celebration. For you, for me, there is an ark in our lives. There is some way we have tried to use God and force Him to do something for us, and it hasn’t worked. We’re angry. We’re upset. We haven’t said so to God, but our friends and our family know there is something wrong with us. There’s too much rage in us. But we just haven’t laid it on God, not yet.
Then how much longer will you wait? How much longer before you lay the truth at God’s feet? How much longer before you begin to pray and pray honestly, even angry prayer? How much longer before you lay your self open before a loving God who only waits out there for you to make up your mind to accept the love He has to give? How much longer before you can begin the dancing and the singing and the celebration? How much longer? Why not now? Why not now to receive the assurance of His presence?
Confess that anger. Admit that blind ambition. Give Him all that is in your heart, even your rage, "and He will surely give you rest by trusting in His word. Only trust Him, only trust Him, only trust Him now." And receive the blessed assurance that in the end, nothing, nothing, can separate you from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
