“Fuck around and find out”
One Sunday afternoon, a year or two ago, I sat on the front stoop of the rectory, tired after a morning’s work, to read the papers.
I was also on a stake-out to see who the scofflaw was who parked his vehicle squarely in the red zone in front of the fire hydrant.
Soon enough, a buff-looking bro in a tight t-shirt and slicked back hair, his girlfriend by his side carrying shopping bags, unlocked the car doors.
Still wearing my clerical clothing, I approached and asked if he was in the habit of parking in front of fire hydrants.
“Yeah, sometimes,” he said, cockily.
That was neither the answer nor the tone I wanted to hear.
Let’s just say that the situation escalated.
I lit into him. In a profanity-laced tirade I mocked his intelligence, his common sense, and his selfishness.
He mocked my concern and my priesthood, and he cautioned me to “step off, bro.”
Having expressed myself nearly fully, and not wanting a fistfight, I dismissed him with a toss of the hand, a flip of the bird, and one final f-off.
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My dictionary defines anger as “a strong feeling of displeasure or hostility.”
It goes further by listing synonyms, anger being the most general word.
Rage and fury imply intense, explosive, often destructive emotion.
Wrath seeks vengeance or punishment.
Resentment suggests a smoldering due to a grievance.
Indignation is righteous anger at something wrongful, unjust, or evil.
That Sunday afternoon, I was a full-throated thesaurus.
Rage and fury, wrath and resentment and indignation – I had all the angers.
And when it was over, I was not at all proud of myself.
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“You must understand this, my beloved:” Saint James wrote, “let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger, for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness” (1:19-20).
Ain’t that the truth!
God’s anger, scripture and tradition have always held, is always holy, always righteous, and always just, because God only gets angry when provoked by human injustice and human sin – acts which are contrary to God’s will.
Human anger may be holy and righteous and just if it is provoked in defense of others, especially sins against the poor, sins against the oppressed, and sins against the powerless.
But human anger is always clouded by our own sense of what is right, moral, and just – which may or may not be God’s sense of what is right, moral, and just.
“Do you think, Mr. Lincoln,” someone asked during our Civil War, “that God is on our side?”
“I should rather hope,” our theologian-president answered, “that we are on God’s side.”
Human anger, all too often, is not on God’s side.
Many biblical writings claim such anger is incompatible with wisdom.
In one instance, Jesus equates such anger with murder (Mt. 5:21-22).
Saint Paul famously writes that love is not angry (1 Cor. 13:5) and that anger is a sin (Col. 3:8; Eph. 4:31). James says that it is sordid and rank and wicked (1:21).
And early Church theologians named anger as one of the seven afflictions or sins called deadly.
My anger that Sunday afternoon – my rage and fury, my wrath and resentment and indignation – was unquestionably sinful.
And, more than that, my anger likely got in the way of the man changing his mind about parking in front of fire hydrants.
It may have impeded his conversion of heart – created a stumbling block – which, especially coming from a priest of the church, is scandalously sinful.
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And yet, anger, like other emotions, is an intrinsic part of what it is to be human, and in that sense it is a gift from God.
God knows that we will be angry.
Righteous anger, aligned with God’s purposes against sin, carried out with the aim of love and the conversion of its object, and not left to fester but quickly resolved, such righteous anger is good.
Saint Paul writes, “Be angry, but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Eph. 4:26).
And Jesus says as much when he teaches us to settle our conflicts quickly (Mt. 5:23-25).
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We live in an angry world.
So many of our conflicts are fed and fueled by rage and fury, by wrath and resentment and indignation.
We see this plainly in much of the discourse between partisan opponents.
Sometimes this even happens in church congregations and denominational bodies.
So many people seem to think that they can shout and insult and belittle others into agreeing with them.
It doesn’t work, and it keeps us bound in the bonds of sin.
This kind of anger only makes room for the devil to work his will, writes Saint Paul (Eph. 4:27) – and these days we’re certainly keeping the devil busy.
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God doesn’t want us to live this way.
God gives us holy words of scripture to protect us from anger gone awry; to help us discern whether we are on God’s side when we are angry; and to apply our anger in ways that seek our own conversion, as well as that of our opponents, with understanding and grace and reconciliation as our goal.
You’ve heard many of these holy words quoted in this sermon.
God gives us the scriptures.
And God gives us God’s Son, whose death on the cross was the once-for-all sacrifice that turns God’s righteous anger from us.
Here is how one contemporary theologian puts it:
“The most difficult experiences of anger we face are those where we cannot shake the conviction that we are justified in feeling angry and the prospect of revenge seems right and sweet. It is the cross that allows us, no, demands of us, that we put down our weapons and let go of our anger. There God’s righteous anger against us was appeased. Now he calls us to the same kind of forgiveness, so that our relationships are ruled by grace and kindness rather than bitterness and revenge. For we worship the God who is slow to anger, and rich in mercy, the Father of compassion and the God of all consolation” (Richard Gibson in The Consolations of Theology. Eerdmans, 2008, p. 26). †
Fr. Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP
15th after Pentecost, Proper 17 – September 1, 2024
All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco
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