How to Handle Anger
Tag: sermon on the mount
Worship Resources for Epiphany 6A based on Matthew 5:21-37
Call to Worship
Jesus said, “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.”
Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
We do our best to love others.
Sometimes we become angry, even with those we love.
Holy God, teach us how to handle anger.
Teach us how to speak the truth in love.
Prayer of Dedication
Holy God, we dedicate our offerings in service of love and justice. Amen.
What’s Up with Pastor Todd 2-14-20
What’s Up with Pastor Todd 2-14-20
Handling anger is difficult to do well. Buddhism, for example, identifies anger (along with greed and ignorance) as one of the “three poisons.” In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “everyone who becomes angry with his brother is liable to judgment.” Anger is a human emotion. We feel it, often before we’re consciously aware of it. Anger “overcomes” us, floods our neurotransmitters, narrows our vision, sets our hearts racing, “boils” in our guts. It activates the “fight or flight” response in the most primitive parts of our brain. Anger can be incredibly destructive whether we express it outwardly in hurtful words and actions or turn it inward where it manifests as depression, bitterness, and physical ailments. So how do we handle it?
Although I doubt they intended to, my family taught me that anger was scary and shameful. They didn’t teach me this explicitly. Like all children, I learned my lessons on anger by watching my caregivers (who, in turn, learned how to handle anger from their caregivers.) We were a Dutch immigrant family that tended toward emotional reserve. As an adult I can see that there was a lot of anger under the surface. I’m grateful I didn’t witness any physical violence or verbal abuse. Instead rage seethed underneath and manifested as physical absence, cutting remarks, alcoholism, infidelity, lying, and other passive-agressive behaviors. This disconnect between how we as a family presented ourselves publicly as happy and healthy and the chaos churning behind closed doors created its own challenges for me as I became an adult.
As an adult I’m still very much learning how best to handle my anger. For me, meeting the reality of anger begins and ends with awareness. It was a huge shift for me simply to admit that I’m incredibly angry . . . for all kinds of reasons. These days most of my anger is in the form of “moral outrage.” I anger myself when I notice my own failings as a Christian. I notice loving churches that have so much to offer their communities “hiding their light under a bushel” while mean, vengeful, and bigoted Christians spread their message far and wide and I get very, very angry. Mostly I’m exhausted by the moral outrages of our current politics, but when our government puts children in cages or when 26 first-graders are gunned down in their classroom and politicians cry “2nd amendment” or when I notice the casual, day-to-day violence and racism that implicate all of us who vote, pay taxes, and work for the improvement of our communities, my anger flares up, and I say something.
Just creating the psychic space where anger can come into view increases the likelihood that I can engage it productively. It’s become a joke around our house when I’m moping and acting out of sorts for my wife to say to me, “Now Todd, use your words.” Just saying “I’m angry” opens the door for conversation that can create the conditions whereby anger, which is simply a form of psychic energy, can be directed toward fixing a situation that is not as good as it could be.
Anger arises in the context of love. Mr. Rogers put it this way, “It’s the people we love the most who can make us feel the gladdest and the maddest! Love and anger are such a puzzle!” Jesus’ command to “love your neighbor as yourself” is the context for his teaching on anger. This week at First Congregational Church of Granby we will stand close enough to the flame of anger to benefit from its warmth and energy yet at a respectful enough distance that none gets burned.
Know Your Why
What’s Up with Pastor Todd 2-7-2020
What’s Up with Pastor Todd 2-7-2020
When I was a kid, we had our own slang. Now that I have kids of my own I find myself in the role of deciphering the distinctive, sometimes confusing languages of their tribes. “Salty” is a term my youngest, Olivia, likes to use. From context clues I gather it means something like “annoyed,” as in “I was salty with my professor because she gave a list of assignments for the week on Monday but then added more on Wednesday.” “Salty” can also be used in the context of disagreeing with something someone said in class, a friend forgetting a birthday, someone undeserving getting recognition. When Olivia uses it, “salty” isn’t particularly angry, resentful, or mean, but I think that has more to do with Olivia, who is a naturally happy and loving person, than with the term itself, which, according to the Urban Dictionary, is more along the lines of “angry, bitter, resentful.” For Olivia, “salty” is along the lines of “feisty.”
“Salty” as a term for angry, upset, “suddenly enraged,” is actually throwback slang first used in 1938 and associated, not surprisingly, with sailors, who had a reputation for gruff, rowdy, and drunken behavior.
The other common use of “salt” as an adjective comes from our Scripture text for this Sunday. In his Sermon on the Mount Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt should become insipid, by what shall it be made salty?” From this famous text we get the phrase “salt of the earth.” I hear people use this term to describe folks who are humble, have moral integrity, and are generally considered “good people,” “pillars of the community,” whose goodness often goes unrecognized. While I think there’s some of that meaning in the text, it certainly doesn’t capture all of it.
To get the rest of the meaning, we need to look at the rest of the sentence: “You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt becomes insipid, by what shall it be made salty? It is no longer of any use except to scatter outside for people to tread upon.” “Insipid” means “dull, boring, flavorless, weak, vapid, spiritless.” Yes, “salt of the earth” has to do with humility, moral integrity, and all of those things we tend to like as Christians. But I hear Jesus giving a sharp, dare I say, “salty” warning to his followers against dullness, irrelevance, blandness, a kind of false humility that is really just acquiescence to the status quo. It’s a form of spiritual laziness that views the church’s role as being “chaplains to power,” reassuring the wealthy and spiritually satisfied that everything is “OK.”
I am super grateful that my children are faithful Christians and dedicated churchgoers. I don’t attribute that to any special example that their parents set, other than that while they were living at home, we brought them to church every week. If you asked them, my guess is that they would agree with many young people that the church is too often “insipid, boring, and irrelevant.” And, by the way, it has little to do with whether a band is used in worship or video clips or anything like that–though these things can help. The reason my children are still engaged is that church provided the context in which they could build authentic relationships with “salty” Christians, that is, feisty Christians who had some flavor, some fire, who were not satisfied with the status quo but who risked their personal comfort to stand up against injustice, who viewed the church not as a social club where “we take care of our own,” but as a social movement whose purpose is to change the world.
Room at the Table
What’s Up with Pastor Todd 1-29-20
What’s Up with Pastor Todd 1-29-20
This Sunday is Communion Sunday. The Scripture is the opening statement of the most famous sermon of all time: Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. We’ve come to know this opening statement or “introitus”–as scholar Hans Dieter Betz calls it–as “The Beatitudes.” The name comes from the Latin word beatitudo or “blessed,” which is repeated nine times in this opening statement: “Blessed are the poor in spirit . . . Blessed are those who mourn . . . Blessed are the meek . . . Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness . . .” and so on. The heart of Jesus’ message is blessedness. What does this have to do with Holy Communion?
The connection between Communion, where we are invited to participate in the body of Christ broken and the cup of the new covenant poured out, and the Beatitudes is in the categories of people Jesus singles out to bless: the poor in possessions and poor in spirit, the grief-stricken, the meek, the hungry and thirsty–whether physical or spiritual sustenance, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted. These are the blessed ones. Conventional wisdom tells us that the rich, the happy, the strong, the satisfied, the well-connected, the well-thought-of, the folks with perfect bodies and amazing Instagram feeds–these are the blessed ones. Jesus teaches otherwise. The path of blessing is not the path of perfection. It’s the path of connection.
And Jesus practiced what he preached. Scripture shows us that Jesus loved to hang out with the left out and left behind. The Gospel of Mark tells us that one day as Jesus “sat at dinner in Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were also sitting with Jesus and his disciples—for there were many who followed him. 16 When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they said to his disciples, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 17 When Jesus heard this, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners” (2:15-17). The scribes of the Pharisees were what we would call “well-connected” in that ancient culture. They benefitted from privilege, “social capital,” we sometimes call it. Perhaps some of it earned, but like much of what determines our station in life to this day, my guess is their self-perceived superiority was mostly an accident of birth. The well-connected scribes were upset that Jesus wasn’t playing by the rules that dictated that Jesus’ primary attention should be going to them. Instead, Jesus went out of his way to connect with the otherwise disconnected. As far as Jesus is concerned, there is room at the table for everyone, and he made it his business to make sure everyone was there, even tax collectors and sinners.
Years ago when I was conducting interviews for my book Reconstructing Church: Tools for Turning Your Church Around, I asked a church member what she thought was key to our success in growing the church. She said, “Before you came, it was like, ‘You’re welcome if you come.’ Now it’s like, ‘We want you here.’” One of our marketing slogans in the UCC is “Whoever you are, wherever you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here.” It’s a nice sentiment. But there’s a huge difference between a welcome that says, “If you show up on Sunday morning we won’t treat you like dirt even if you look, talk, or love in ways that make some of us uncomfortable” (which, it’s important to note, is an improvement over being explicitly racist, bigoted, or homophobic) and “We want you here, and we’ll prove it by getting up out of our pews, going out into the community, eating with you, drinking with you, listening to your hopes and dreams, and then creating a church that reflects your experience.”
That’s the connection between Communion and the Beatitudes: it’s a welcome that says, “We want you here.” Communion is the ritual that reminds us of Jesus’ central teaching. The broken bread and poured out cup teach us that the path of blessing is not about conforming to some arbitrary, often unspoken ideal of what is proper, normal, or respectable; it’s not about adopting conventional ideas of who is worthy of love and who is unworthy, whose voices should be listened to and who should keep quiet; the path of blessing is not about being well-connected or having it all together; the path of blessing is not about perfection; it’s about connection.
What’s Up with Pastor Todd 11-26-19
What’s Up with Pastor Todd 11-25-19
A print of bricolage artwork that hangs on the wall of my church office speaks to my understanding of hope. It shows two sparrows with twigs in their beaks flying above a jumble of houses and buildings, some tipped over. The landscape is jagged clump of fragments above which float fluffy green-gray clouds and an orange sun that looks a bit like a basketball. (I don’t know what the weird, brown, rock-looking things in the sky are. Giant meteors?) It’s not a particularly attractive piece. I bought it primarily for the quotation at the top: “. . . We are not in the least afraid of ruins . . . We carry a new world here in our hearts . . . .”
The quote is from Buenaventura Durruti. I didn’t know who Durruti was when I purchased the print from a funky little craft store in downtown Providence. At the time I was pastoring a dying congregation through a major transition, and the words along with the image resonated with me. The congregation knew that things were falling apart. They saw all the empty pews every Sunday. And they were afraid. Their fear, however, just made things worse. The more they tried to control the situation, the faster things deteriorated. Part of my job was to help the congregation calm down, step back, and accept that things would never be the way they were. The spiritual practice of simply sitting in the ruins of what once was creates a space in which a new world can arise. Later I learned that Durruti died fighting Facists during the Spanish Civil War. Key to Durruti’s struggle for a more just world was the ability to courageously face the ruins while carrying a new world in his heart.
The sparrows in the bricolage remind me of Jesus’ teachings on fear. In the Gospel of Matthew he says: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father . . . So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows” (10:29, 31). Durruti also found courage in Jesus’ words, specifically the promise that “the meek shall inherit the earth.” Durruti could face the ruins because he trusted the promises.
Once in a while as I work with a church in transition a member uncomfortable with change will say, “You are ruining my church.” That is 100% untrue. All I am doing is facing the falling apart that is already underway and inviting others to do the same. Why? Because I am committed to living not some fantasy world where nothing ever changes but in the reality that a new world is possible if we get out of the way long enough to let God bring it forth.
A new world is absolutely possible. It can’t be controlled. It can’t be manufactured. It emerges on it’s own timetable and in it’s own form. Our job as Christians is to observe and nurture it. That is difficult to do if we allow either despair or anxiety to take over.
Hope is the theme for the first Sunday in Advent. The difference between Biblical hope and false hope is that Biblical hope courageously faces the impermance of every human endeavor. There are always ruins to face because always somewhere something is falling apart. Biblical hope as opposed to false hope trusts not humanity’s ability to create the world we long for but in God’s ability to keep God’s promises and our ability to cooperate with God’s work in our world. In the immortal words of songwriter Leonard Cohen:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in
Maybe your new world isn’t in some far off place at some far off time. What if it’s shining through the ruins right now? Will you notice it? Will you nurture it? Will you, even now, celebrate the abundance to come?
Todd Grant Yonkman 