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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Righteous Indignation |
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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. |
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Not-so-righteous indignation. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Dealing with anger |
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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. |
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1. Deny it's there & bottle it up |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 |
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2. Express it in a harmful way |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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3. Nurse it into bitterness and resentment |
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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. |
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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. |
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Dealing with anger in a positive way |
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So how can we deal with anger in a way that's
positive, that allows us to be angry without sinning? |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
