I want to talk today about the danger of anger; or more accurately about the temptation to let our anger consume us. Now let’s face it, every one of us will experience anger from time to time, some more than others. Some of us are probably more prone to anger due to our emotional makeup, but all of us experience it as a normal part of life. So the question is what are we going to make of it? How are we going to deal with it.
I wonder what your family was like when it came to dealing with anger. I know in my family, my parents rarely if ever openly expressed their anger. My father was fairly easy going in a Victorian sort of way. My mother was, like many of her generation, a peacemaker who’d avoid conflict if at all possible, and who’d prefer to forgive rather than confront. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t get angry. They just showed it in more subtle ways. By a cutting remark. By a short reply. By a quiet expression of indignation perhaps. It may be too, that they expressed anger at each other in private when we weren’t around to hear them. Well, what that’s meant for me is that I tend to be similar, to be slow to lose my temper. But sometimes it means I repress my anger until it gets to the point where I explode. Or else I take it out on people in more subtle though no less harmful ways.
But you may be different. You may have come from a family where anger was expressed loudly. Where wrongs were protested against vehemently. And that may have affected how you in turn express your anger, just as it has with me. You may be the type who explodes if someone wrongs you, or if you see some injustice being carried out. You might even have developed the habit of expressing your anger in a way that’s not helpful outside the family context. On the other hand you may have learnt to express your anger in a way that’s actually healthy; that helps you get it out of your system before it does any harm.
Today we’re going to think about what we do with anger. How we deal with anger in a way that’s positive and that perhaps overcomes the shortcomings of the habits we learnt as children.
The first thing we need to do though, is to understand the types of anger we might experience. You see anger isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In the first reading today we read, "Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger" (Eph 4:26 NRSV) It’s quite clear from that, that anger itself isn’t sin. We’ll see in a moment what might make it sin, but of itself it isn’t necessarily wrong. So what types of anger do we experience. Well, it seems to me there are 2 basic types of anger: Righteous indignation and not-so-righteous indignation.
Righteous Indignation
So what are some examples of righteous indignation? When you get angry because you see someone being bullied; if someone promises to do something for you and they don’t do it; if someone steals your car or breaks into your home; if people are left to starve in third world countries because western countries want to preserve their quality of life or multinational companies want to preserve their profit margins. These are all examples where anger is right an proper. There’s no doubt that when Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple he was angry. In explaining what Jesus has done, John quotes Ps 69:9 "Zeal for your house will consume me." He was angry because the money changers and animal merchants were stopping the Gentiles from worshipping God in freedom.
Not-so-righteous indignation.
But there’s another type of anger, of indignation, that isn’t quite so righteous. This probably takes 2 forms. The first is where we get angry because of circumstances that are out of our control. We look at others, perhaps and think that they’re better off than we are and we feel angry about it. Something bad happens to us or to someone we love and we get angry - probably at God. I knew a woman once who had suffered a great loss some forty or so years before, and she was still angry about it. Now if you asked her who she was angry at I doubt she would have been able to tell you. But I think she was angry at God. Because he’d done it to her.
Or perhaps your comfort is disturbed. Like the other night when someone rang me up just after I’d turned the light out and was getting ready to go to sleep.
Sometimes we’re angry at a category of people. At teachers, at politicians, at ministers, at business people. If you’re a woman, your anger may be directed at men in general, because of the way you’ve felt devalued or downtrodden just because you were a woman.
The other form this sort of indignation takes is anger because our pride is hurt, or because we feel insulted, or someone we love has been insulted. This is the sort of anger that derives from pride rather than a desire for justice. The only real hurt is to our self-image, or to our nose that’s been put out of joint. So when a friend decides to go out with someone else just after they’ve turned down an invitation from you, you feel slighted and you get angry. Someone suggests your sponge cake could be used as ballast in an ocean-going yacht or your new hairstyle wouldn’t have been our of place in the eighties, and you feel anger at them. Because your pride has been hurt.
Now I hope it’s clear that this sort of anger, whether it comes out of dissatisfaction with our lot in life, or out of wounded pride, is something we need to deal with in a different way to the righteous anger we feel over injustice or evil.
Dealing with anger
Well, it’s easy enough to talk about the different types of anger we feel, but how we deal with anger is much harder. Here we come across 3 main temptations to deal with it inappropriately.
1. Deny it’s there & bottle it up
There’s been a tendency in the past to see anger as a negative emotion. Because it’s so often expressed in a harmful way: someone taking an automatic rifle and shooting a dozen people; a father suffocating or poisoning his children then taking his own life; road rage; physical abuse, etc., some people have come to think of anger as something to be avoided altogether. Certainly as something that a Christian wouldn’t express. I’m told this is a particular problem for women. Girls are socialised against fighting and anger. They play cooperatively. They work hard to resolve differences. They learn at an early age to compromise. They’re taught to maintain relationships at almost any cost. So they grow up being afraid to rock the boat. And those who do rock the boat are called names: shrews or Jezebels or nags. So we get this artificial picture of a choice between the good woman and the shrew. We feel the choice is no anger or destructive anger. As a result, when a godly woman feels anger, the temptation is to deny it’s there. To bottle it up. To ignore it.
But of course what happens if you bottle up something that’s inherently explosive is that you simply increase the power of the explosion. You hide it away for a while, but then it pops out at some inopportune moment. And the chances are that when it does pop out it’ll be directed at someone totally unrelated to the source of the original anger. You see the mind is an interesting organ. If you convince your mind that you shouldn’t be angry at someone: your father or mother, your minister, your husband or wife, or whoever, then your mind will take you seriously. But it won’t forget the feelings of anger. What it’ll do is this, it’ll find an occasion later on, perhaps when you’re more tired than usual and therefore less able to control your emotions, and it’ll find someone else, who seems safer, to dump your feelings on. I’m sure you’ve all seen this happen., It might have been you expressing the anger, or you may have been the victim. And when it happens you say, "Where did that come from? That was so out of proportion to what just happened." Where it often comes from is the anger you repressed against someone else some time ago even years ago.
The other thing that happens to people when they deny their anger is that it expresses itself in the more passive, and therefore more acceptable, form of depression. If you speak to psychologists who deal with people suffering from depression, they’ll tell you that a common cause is anger that’s been denied. So rather than denying it, we need to take notice of our anger and see what it’s trying to tell us so we can find healthy ways of dealing with it
2. Express it in a harmful way
The second temptation with anger is to express it in such a way that it hurts the one to which it’s directed. We give it all the force we can muster, we lash out in such a way that it becomes destructive. If you’re the hot-blooded type, the temptation is to let the heat of the moment control your mouth rather than your brain. And of course what happens then is that those hasty words can cause irreparable damage to those you love. Have you noticed how you seem to get most angry with those who are closest to you? So we need to develop the habit of holding off expressing our anger until the heat drops a bit.
I heard about one family that had a time-out whistle. When one family member got upset at another he or she would blow a whistle. What would happen then was that the aggrieved party would explain what they were angry at and the other would have to listen without interrupting until they were able to explain verbally why the first person was angry. The result of this process was that the anger was resolved and the possibility of bitterness was taken out of the equation. So each member of the family was allowed to be angry without sinning.
Of course sometimes we appear to avoid this particular temptation but are actually just deferring it. We make a mental note to fix it later. In fact what we do is virtually the same, except that we do it in our minds rather than directly to their face. We decide that we’ll get even later. We begin to make plans to exact revenge, to even the score. But again the result is destructive rather than positive.
3. Nurse it into bitterness and resentment
The third temptation is similar, except that we don’t necessarily have any plans to redress our loss. We simply stew on it. We let it sit and fester like an open wound. Then what happens is that our anger turns into bitterness. We refuse to forgive and we’ll never forget what that person has done to us. I can think of so many people for whom life has become a chore because they’re still holding on to anger they felt years ago. There are people around here who are angry towards God and the church because of some perceived wrong that happened 25 or 30 years ago. I know one person who won’t set her foot inside a church because God let her mother die.
But the problem with letting anger stew and fester is that it begins to affect the other relationships we have. It begins to affect our general outlook on life. And bitterness once it has taken root is a difficult weed to remove from our lives.
Dealing with anger in a positive way
So how can we deal with anger in a way that’s positive, that allows us to be angry without sinning?
Well, I’ve already talked about biting our tongue, counting to ten, holding off expressing anger until the heat of the moment has dropped a little. That’s a good starting point.
But what then? If it’s righteous anger we’re feeling, then there may well be a place for expressing our anger, but there are other things we can do as well.
One thing we need to do is to recognise our anger for what it is and ask ourselves what our anger is telling us that’s important to us. What is it that’s at stake here? What have we lost that we’re upset over? Even who is it that we’re really angry at? The person towards whom we’re directing our anger may not actually be the real cause of our anger.
Then we need to recognise that most anger comes out of a relationship. And some relationships can handle anger more than others. So think about how much anger your relationship can handle and temper the expression of your anger accordingly.
Finally, recognise that we decide how to deal with our anger. No-one else. We can nurse it into bitterness or we can deal with it.
Jesus spoke very strongly about anger and bitterness. He likened words of anger directed at someone in an unhelpful way to murder. He once talked to Peter about how to deal with someone who had wronged him. Do you remember what he said? He said he had to forgive his brother or sister 70 times 7. In other words, there was never a point at which he could stop forgiving those who had wronged him. So one of the answers to anger is to offer true forgiveness. Do you remember the story of Corrie Ten Boom, who met one of her captors some years after being in a German concentration camp. Here was someone who had done dreadful things to her, against whom she felt tremendous anger of the righteous kind. Yet God gave her the grace to be able to offer that man forgiveness and love.
There may be occasions when we can’t tell a person how angry we are. They may be dead, they may be out of our reach for some reason. They may be in a position of authority that prevents us saying what we think. In that case we need to let go of our anger. To offer forgiveness even before it’s asked for. You see, our example is Jesus who even as he hung on the cross, prayed to God for forgiveness for his torturers.
So here’s what we can do when anger hits us. We can deny it’s there and suffer the consequences in our own lives later on; we can express it in a harmful way, we can nurse it into bitterness, or, we can deal with it with honesty and love, offering forgiveness where forgiveness is needed, so that our relationships can be healed rather than damaged.
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