Sermon Title: - “What You Need is an Attitude Adjustment”
Mort and Mindy had been married for three years. Lately, they'd been having some trouble controlling spending. They'd bought a house and weren't prepared for all the little extra expenses that come with a mortgage. Both had agreed to cut back and not spend anything for non-essentials without consulting the other.
The Visa bill came and there, plain as day, was a $37.53 charge at the sporting-goods store, Sports World.
"Mort," Mindy cried, "What's this bill for $37.53 at Sports World?"
"Oops", Mort confessed, caught red-handed. "They were having a summer sale on fishing lures and my birthday is coming up. I thought I'd just save us some money."
Mindy stood there mortified, furious. "How could you do this? You know how tight things are! Don't you care about our future? Don't you want children? Don't you want them to go to college? I thought you loved me."
Our lesson from Ephesians says, "Be angry, but do not sin. Do not let the sun go down. on your anger."
Anger is one of those messy emotions that is too misunderstood by Christians. As people devoted to peace and people committed to harmony and forgiveness, anger is one of emotions that makes us uncomfortable.
Let's look at Mort and Mindy for example. Mindy is mad, really angry at Mort. Some of her anger is justified. Mort did agree not to spend money without talking it out. Their future together is in some way in jeopardy, but realistically, $37.53 is not an outrageous expenditure. But Mindy feels that Mort has betrayed her, gone back on his word - there is a breech of trust.
More than that, Mindy's anger is causing her to look at Mort in an entirely new way. He is now not the beautiful lover she knew 5 minutes before, but an ugly Benedict Arnold, sinfully self-indulgent, willing to sell out their future for some fishing tackle. He is blameworthy, responsible - he is morally weak just like the crack-heads on T.V. who cannot stop. Mindy has slipped behind the judgment bench and passed over into the role of moral appraiser and judge. Now, because injustice has been done, and no confession offered or atonement made, Mindy is going to punish Mort. So she tells him to sleep on the couch.
"Be angry but do not sin", the writer of Ephesians says. Do not let the sun go down on your anger."
The Bible is trying to remind us that anger can easily become a dominating force and emotion. We can easily lose our perspective and become judgmental - thereby taking God's place. The Bible also says, "Judge not, lest ye be judged - for the measure you give is the measure you get. Do not try to remove the speck from your brother's eye until you have removed the log or beam from your own eye."
Mindy has forgotten that a big part of their present predicament is that she wanted to have a new dining room table and living room suit to go with their new house. She also overlooks, very glibly, the closet floor filled with shoes compared to the mere three pair of sneakers that fit under Mort's side of the bed. And it had been her idea to go out to eat last night, even though it was her turn to cook. Mindy hasn't taken a very accurate or fair inventory of her own issues. Like Mort and all of us, the speck in someone else's eye seems so much larger than the log in our own.
Anger is sometimes justified. And failure to get angry can be itself a sin. Take for example the man who is walking with his aged mother down the streets of the city and a gang of street brats start to taunt the tease the old lady - menacing her, stealing her pocketbook.
We would wonder what's wrong with him that he could let his mother be treated so crudely and not attempt to protest or protect her.
We let the big textile plant dump its toxic waste into the stream that our kids play in however, and even though the situation is comparable to the one I just described, we say or do nothing.
Sometimes anger, righteous response is a appropriate response. Anger can motivate us to protest conditions and seek justice for ourselves or for those who are powerless. Sometimes, God demands ranger from us as aan appropriate response and calls us to make a prophetic witness.
Jesus often displays the right kind of anger in the Gospel's witness. In the Book of Mark, we read, "Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. And they watched him to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath, so they might accuse him. And he said to them, It is lawful on the Sabbath to do good or harm, to save life or to kill?' But they were silent. And he looked around at them with anger. Grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.'"
Jesus was angry at their hypocrisy. They had become a distortion of faithfulness in their attempts to follow the law faithfully. They would condemn him for the "work" of healing on the Sabbath, yet they were only too eager to work on the Sabbath for his destruction. Their work being their plotting and scheming to kill him. Anger sometimes is the appropriate response to injustice and hypocrisy.
But the Bible sets limits on our wrath. “Do not let the sun go down on your our anger”. The Bible insists that we should not give vent to our anger. Our anger must be disciplined like all our powerful emotions.
Mort and Mindy need to talk things out. Mort did act wrongly, but Mindy's wrath is out of proportion to his offense. By kicking him out of bed, she is breaking the covenant they made in marriage to work things out and to be forgiving.
Failure to forgive, to keep our anger forever, is serious business in Jesus' eyes. Jesus told us not to come to the communion table if we had something against someone - festering anger or hatred. He told us to leave the table and go be reconciled before we could return and eat the body of the God of peace in peace.
Some times, the people who hurt us or anger us are not so easy to forgive. Sometimes, it takes yeas to forgive someone. Sometimes, forgiveness only comes after years of praying for it. That’s okay. So long as we are discontent and dissatisfied with our anger, and are actively seeking its resolution, we can have our peace and our communion.
The tail-end of our lesson from Ephesians reminds us that because God’s last word on u s is forgiveness in Christ, it must be our last word on others.
In Jesus’ Name, Amen
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