Choosing Anger | Psalm 137 & Ephesians 4:30-32

Transcript is automatically produced. Errors may be present.

Good morning friends. My name’s Alex. I’m one of the pastors here. If you are visiting it’s a delight to have you here today. And if you came angry, you came on the right week. So welcome. We are gonna land today very much in the idea of choosing anger. I did not pick this subject ’cause I’m about to drive 17 hours with my kids.

There may be some anger, I dunno maybe from them. But it is a subject that actually more and more needs to be processed. I would suggest more and more as you live more year. There’s a theory floating around that as people age, they either move in one of two directions. Some people move distinctly towards bitterness.

Towards angst for the many years. I have some family stories around that subject. My own grandmother lived a very hard life, but sat the last six, six years in her wheelchair holding onto the sides to the point that her hands almost became claw, like just going over and disappointments and angst. Some other people rarely choose the other path, which is to become over their lives more and more forgiving, more and more generous to those that may have heard them.

This is a overall introduction right now. This passage, oh, sorry. This. Oh, that’s not me. Someone find, there we go.

Okay, I got it. Don’t touch it.

The, this is a quote from Ronald Rahe writes a lot about second half of life, how things change when you get to the age of about 35, 40, and how we begin to process in different ways. He says this, as we age, we need to forgive. Forgive those who have hurt us. Forgive ourselves for our own mistakes, for not being better than the people that hurt us.

Forgiving life for having been unfair, and then forgive God for seemingly not having protected us. All of this so that we do not die bitter and angry, which is perhaps the greatest religious imperative of all. That doesn’t mean that all of those people are necessary to necessarily to blame, but it does mean it’s certainly possible as you age to have a certain sense of angst against everyone on that list.

We have people that we’ve come across that maybe did us harm. We ourselves may have hurt people and may have feel we let ourselves down that we were no better than the other people. This world can be hard and unfair. Things happen and they seem to have no purpose. Some people seem to be bad people and seem to live long and prosperous lives.

Others seem to be good and some tragedy seems to be before them. And sometimes there’s this question that just lurks as to God, what are you doing about all of this? As Ronald Rohe says, somewhere, we must wrestle with all of those things. And so for that reason I called the first week, choose anger the second week, choose forgiveness, and the third week choose reconciliation.

There’s something about stories to me where people respond to mistreatment with an anger, which is over the top and almost comical. In my hometown of Sully Hall, just around 20 years ago, there was an advertisement that appeared in a local paper. It was for a Porsche nine elevens, a true story that has been sold for $2,000.

About $95,000 less than it was worth. The advert also let you know that it came with a high-end wine collection located in the trunk of the car. As you can imagine, many people applied to buy this car just lists and lists of people put their name down instantly. The backstory was this. It was been sold by a lady who had bought the car primarily for her husband who had decided to disappear off into the world with different people.

Enough said about that, and so as a revenge moment, she listed his price car for just $2,000. Now that story could be flipped by gender. It could be navigated around all sorts of circumstances, but it just shows how sometimes our natural response to a moment where we’ve been hurt is to do something outlandish, to take revenge, to jump in, to make it happen.

War process that response A and others during the course of the day. But first, we’re gonna turn to a Psalm that I was going to read or going to ask Peter. To read, but it ends in a particularly brutal fashion. So if you have the scriptures in front of you, turn to Psalm 137, not 139. That’s a nice one. 137.

Not long ago, someone asked me to preach on my favorite Psalm. My problem with that question is this. What do you need the psalm for? Psalms are fundamentally different. Some of them are joyful. 1 3, 9. 23. It’s a songbook of joy and celebration, and sometimes they’re not joyful and celebratory.

Sometimes they provide a particular moment where we can deal with some angst. Walter Erman says, this relationship with God is not immune to the surprises, the costs of our daily life. And this Psalm represents a moment. Where we need something deeply powerful to deal with a situation that we’re facing.

There are Psalms, I would say, for life’s unwelcome stories. This is one of those Psalms, so let’s read it together. Verse one and two, by the Rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept when we remembered z. For those of you that were here the week we did Lamentations as a whole, this is the other side of the coin that text.

These are the people that have been taken to Babylon in the midst of a moment where Jerusalem is destroyed. The Babylonian army sweeps in and almost wipes them off the face of the earth. And here the survivors, the captives are in Babylon. Remembering their hometown, remembering what they’ve lost there.

On the poplars, we hung our hearts. Verse three. For there, our captors asked us for songs. Our tormentors demanded songs of joy. They said, sing us one of the songs of Zion. Those that have taken them, prisoner asked them to sing. Sing songs that you would’ve sing, sung in your homeland. Sing songs that you would’ve sung in your moments of joy.

Sing your Psalm one, three nines your 20 threes, your one oh threes. All of the ones that are high and beautiful moments. Sing those songs. It’s torture. It is torment. It is right there in white. Verse four and five. How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land? If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill.

May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy. These are the first moments of the Psalm or remembering a sorrow, the psalm In this moment of sadness, this moment of struggle, this moment of angst begins. With grief, perhaps you’ve noticed that some of the songs that move you most profoundly are primarily driven by grief, by sadness.

We hear songs that are written in a moment. That’s just awful. And we notice those songs, the philosopher Soren Kier guard said this, what is a poet and an unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.

People flock around that poet and say, sing again soon. That is May new suffering torment your soul. But your lips be fashioned as before for the cry would only frighten us. But the music that is blissful when we say to these people again, we’re essentially saying, may new sufferings before you. And so we can joy in the music.

But then the psalm takes a sharp turn it, it moves towards anger, it moves towards a conversation around injustice. Verse, wherever gone. I’ve lost some verses. No, not there. Huh? Does anyone have a, could someone pass me my bible right there? Or I’ll read them to you somewhere? Someone stole my verses. It’s probably me.

Thank you very much, Connie.

I dunno who put this slideshow together, but it’s not up to scratch. Oh wait. I did

remember, Lord, what the mites did on the day Jerusalem fell. Tear it down, they cried, tear it down to its foundations door to Babylon, the ones that destroyed the city. Doomed to destruction. Happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.

What is that doing in scripture? H, how does that belong there? How do you process that? Imagine if Peter had stood up there and read this psalm, and we are left with a choice when he says, this is the word of the Lord, and we say, what? Thanks be to God for that. How do we be thankful for something like that presents this most brutal of images to us unless we accept?

Th this is just a moment where a human being has experienced the very worst of life and has no recourse, but to wish it on the person that did it to them. As we look at the language of these psalms, which are known as Imprecatory psalms, hopefully you’ll start to see they have far more purpose than just outlandish language and statements like this, but there’s a reason behind it, a reason that may actually be useful to us in some of ammo broken moments.

I would suggest a natural response to anger, to our own anger is to wonder when truly awful things have been done to us. How can I ever forgive? How can I let that go? Now, if you’re further along this Jesus journey than some of us, maybe you’ve already said I just forgive because I’m told to forgive.

But what if it’s more complicated than that? And what if you’ve experienced the very worst of life and you don’t know how to let that go? This is Simon Eisen Hall. He’s a Jewish man who was alive during the second World War. He was taken to a prison camp and his duties while he was spending time in that prison camp were to do the grounds of one of the local hospitals.

He talks about how he noticed that when he saw the graves of the Nazi soldiers. They had a sunflower buried on them. Wasn’t like a practice everywhere. There was a practice in this area. There’s a remembrance picture of joy at someone lost and he would look at these graves covered in sunflowers and he would wonder, he’d think about the mass graves dug for his own people, had they just piled in with nothing to remember them.

And as he would work, the grounds, his resentment, his anger towards everything that had been done to his people would grow. And then there came a moment where he was invited or asked by one of the order as a nurse to come with him into the hospital. Automatically his senses were up. He knew that this was a time to be nervous when you were taken by yourself anywhere as a prisoner of war.

But she led him through the hospital into a room. And in that room there was a young man bandaged, almost from head to toe, had the uniform of a Nazi storm trooper. He sat there with the man and the man began to tell him his story, how he’d been a part of the Nazi regime from the earliest moments he was bought through Hitler youth, and then on into the armed services, how he’s one of the best.

And he told him about a time where he was. Asked to go and get some Jewish people out of a house when they got there, they wouldn’t leave the house. Talked about how they barricaded the door and set fire to the house when people tried to escape. Men, women, children, he shot them. And now he was finding himself in a moment where he was about to die and he needed forgiveness.

He did some Jewish person, any Jewish person. To forgive him, to release that burden off him so he could die in peace. Simon Vaha sits on the bed and he’s left with this moment where he’s asked to give forgiveness for things not done to him, but done to his people. He’s given in a moment a picture of all of the at atrocities, all of the things that led to those mass graves all over the place, and he’s left with a choice.

What do I do with that? So Simon Vais, whos sits and then finally stands up, walks out of the room in silence. The young man died the next day. Unforgiven the end of his life. For years, Simon Weisen Hall contemplates this and eventually, after so many years of this moment coming back to him, he writes to a hundred faith leaders of all sorts of different backgrounds.

What did I do? Should I, did I do the wrong thing? Why does this still come back to me so often? And of the a hundred leaders, most of them said, you can’t be expected to forgive for that. It’s an atrocity. It’s awful. You can’t be as expected to forgive for something that was done to other people and not to you, but just one or two brave souls wrote back and said this.

Perhaps your own conscious conscience is giving you the answer. Perhaps something in you suggests that to forgive in that moment without understanding all of the repercussions of that would’ve been the best gift of all, both to you. And the young man lying in the bed, however complicated anger and forgiveness gets, it seems like that is what Jesus calls us to.

This is his teaching in Matthew chapter five, verse 21 and 22. We’re actually gonna come back to this passage on week three ’cause he goes on to talk about rec reconciliation. But in 21 and 22, he simply talks about forgiveness, anger. You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, you shall not murder.

An easy command to obey. When you think about it, perhaps the easiest. Just don’t kill anyone. Just make sure they’re still alive when you leave them, whatever happens. Just keep that in mind. Breathing people is what we want. Anyone who murders will be subject to judgment, but I tell you, this is a classic rabbinic formula.

They would set a problem and then they would go and explain how they saw it from their particular nuance. But I tell you, anyone who is angry with a brother and sister. We’ll be subject to judgment. Jesus talks about anger in the same breath as he talks about murder, and I actually am okay with that ’cause I am rarely angry.

One of the things my wife and kids will tell you is that I never yell. I don’t really get to a pitch above this. I don’t like fighting usually because I’m like, I’m probably loose. I’m not exactly. It’s not my skillset. So I guess. Let’s be aware of that. So I get to read this teaching of Jesus and come away with a certain sense of, oh, great.

Okay, fine. This is probably for all of you guys here, who I’m sure do get very angry at different points, but when Jesus talks about anger, he doesn’t talk about it in the way that I hoped he would talk about it. Jesus has a couple of choices for words in Greek or as translators, at least to do. First word is the word I’m thinking about right now.

Thumos angry. The passion of anger aroused in a moment. For those of you that love to yell and shout, this is your word. This is the one word he could choose. It’s as a picture image. It’s a storm. It’s an explosion. It’s a big like moment of anger. It’s this picture, anger inside out. It’s that emotion, but that’s not the word sadly for me, that Jesus uses this word or gay.

Maybe flip the words and think of ogre, angry bitterness, a settled state of anger and that I can definitely struggle with. This is the gradual bitterness of years. The irritation, perhaps of those closest. To you, the ones that use the passive aggressive terms, the ones that lean in that direction that I can definitely do.

Another picture, image for this is perhaps to swell this slow, gradual growth of anger. The language that one of the commentators on this passage, one of the best commentators on Matthew Dale Bruner uses is this. It’s whoever is nursing a grudge. Whoever’s holding on to something year after year.

Do you ever have one of those conversations where someone does something and something just jumps out of your mouth like, like it’s old, it’s been held for a while. You’ve been holding this back. Something happens in a relationship. Maybe someone does something that displeases you and you say, yeah, you remember 20 years ago when we were such and such a place, you did this.

Like, where did that come from? You? You’ve been saving that one. Up for this moment, haven’t you? You’ve been holding it ready to go. Ready To unleash this kind of language that Jesus used is nudges towards a word that certain psychologists have used. John Guttman Institute particularly, which is this word contempt, anger like this leads to this moment of contempt where you genuinely have come to believe that you may be better.

And then the people around you, the people that you find yourself in conflict with, happens to couples, and it’s one of the examples that he uses that most often lead to divorce, that when he sees contempt, the rolling of the eyes, the look that suggests, man, you are not a person. You are much less than me, aren’t you?

That is the kind of anger that Jesus is talking about. It’s not talking about the explosion, just the slow bitterness. Of years. The words give us a particular clue as well as the language that this is what he’s thinking about. Again, anyone who says to his brother and sister rocker, it’s an insult of a particular kind.

It’s a foolish person. Again, he uses another example is answerable to the court. Anyone who says You fool will be in danger of the fire of hell. We don’t have to time to go through what he means by the fire of hell there, but. He certainly suggests that anger in the life of a follower of his is a serious thing.

So supposing this is me thinking through this from my own perspective, supposing we’ve decided Jesus is right, that anger is a damaging thing to each of us. And supposing we’ve decided we don’t want to be angry. What do we do? And as I processed this and read and listened to other people, I thought, there’s really three options it seems.

If I want to get rid of anger, the first is to get even, is to sell the Porsche. It’s to do what I feel I need to do that will make it even, and then I don’t have to be angry anymore. Can settle things once and for all. Someone’s done something to me. I can do something back to them and we’ll all move on together, and there’s all sorts of language that suggest this might be necessary.

Macbeth talks about this process of examining all these option stars. Hide your fires, let the lights see my black and deep desires. This process of imagining how you might go about taking your vengeance in the can of Monte Cristo, just a stunning book written a couple of hundred years ago. The count answers a question about a jewel.

I would fight a jewel for a trifle, an insult for a blow butt, and return For a slow, profound, eternal suffering, I would render the same worry possible. An eye for an eye. A tooth. For a tooth. As the orientalists say. Samson in the scripture, demonstrates what it is to get even to take the justice into your own hands.

With the jawbone of a donkey, I have piled them into heaps With the jawbone of a donkey, I have slain a thousand men. And now he’s done that he can stop. It’s fair. Again, we have reason. There’s a reason that we have Proverbs like this. Revenge is a dish best served cold. We have lyrics of songs like Nancy Sinatra, and these boots are made for walking, and that’s just what they’ll do.

And one of these days, these boots are gonna walk all over you. Revenge. Rocky Ku and the Beatles. Rocky came equipped with a gun to shoot off the legs of his rival. His rival, it seems, had broken his dreams by stealing the girl of his fancy. Her name was McGill. She caught herself lil, but everyone knew her as Nancy.

It’s the deliciousness of revenge with the idea that once you’re even, everything can continue as it once was. There’s another option. You could pretend it’s okay. You just hide it deep. You could say that’s not what followers of Jesus do. We aren’t angry people, but there’s a problem there. ’cause maybe you shouldn’t feel like that.

Or what if you feel like that? Do you just bury it deep? Is that the answer? Just hold it down tight. Then there’s a third option with anger. You could give it to God, you could hold it up. And you could in an attempt to let it go, just give it to him. This is why I think this is the best option. Let me give you my pitch for why I think this is how you do what Jesus taught us.

’cause Jesus tells us not to be angry, but he doesn’t in that moment. Help us understand why. This is why I think giving it to God is the best option first. Simply that getting even, which doesn’t work, does it. No one’s ever found a way to extract exactly the same amount of suffering that one person gave to us in return.

We see it in macro levels of World Conference, some com world politics. Someone does one thing and the other person does the other thing, and then it builds and it builds, it keeps going back and forth. Seesaw, they bombed us, so we bombed them and it goes on and on. Even doesn’t work.

It doesn’t ever happen and it doesn’t work for more reasons than just no one can ever figure out what’s equal. It doesn’t work because of this. There’s usually something deeper than anger. Supposing that getting even could help us not be angry. Or help us supposing we could ever get even. If our anger is caused by something else, then we’re still left with that first problem.

I love this picture of an anger iceberg. It’s got the idea of angry at the top, but as always, with an iceberg, it’s got the 90% underneath and it starts to tap into some of the things that might cause us to be angry. And perhaps you’ve noticed that in the moments you feel most angry about something there’s a narrative behind it.

I was embarrassed, scared, overwhelmed. Stressed, guilty, trapped, annoyed, exhausted, anxious, envious, disappointed, lonely, offended, uncomfortable, worried, and insecure hurt. We got all sorts of things that go behind that. If you need another pitch for emotionally healthy spirituality, that’s exactly what this does.

It starts to tap into what’s going on under the surface when we have all of these big emotions. Usually there’s something deeper than anger, but we don’t know what that thing is. We don’t know what’s causing us to feel the way we cause In this psalm that we just read, we already saw it at the top of the story.

It’s the hidden emotion of sadness. But even behind that, it’s something else because for the people we looked at that Psalm 137 crowd, it’s not just sadness, it’s our old friend. Shame again. There are people that whose way of life has been destroyed, has been wiped out. They even talk about it in Lamentations chapter five that we read just those few weeks ago.

The elders have gone from the city gate. The young man have stopped their music. Joy has gone from our heart, said dancing has turned to mourning. The crown has fallen from our head. Woe to us for we have sinned. Because of this, our hearts are faint because of these things. Our eyes grow dim. There are people that were a people and now we’re not a people.

And they’re just ashamed of themselves. And the shame makes them sad and the sadness makes them angry. And it builds and builds. In our Psalm, the true emotion is shame and nursing. Our anger. Getting even can’t heal that first problem, that first brokenness only. Only God can do that. No getting even can ever get you there.

Nothing the other person can do, can ever get you there. Only God can do that. There’s all sorts of things under Angry Francis Bacon once said, A man who study at the revenge keeps his own wounds green. And the moment that we decide we’re going to try and get even we just continue the thing deep within us.

But pretending doesn’t work either. Pretending doesn’t help because you feel how you feel. The writer Kurt Thompson once said, remember that emotion is not a debatable phenomenon. It’s an authentic reflection of our subjective experience, one that is best served by attending it. You feel how you feel because of something that’s going on within you.

Maybe deep down the root cause is that word sin. But actually maybe if you’ve just been really deeply hurt, maybe it’s actually something else. Maybe it’s betrayal, embarrassment, shame, all those sorts of questions. Somewhere. There’s been a metaphor used over the years around anger and how we might nurse it.

It’s the one on the picture that we started with. It’s the cactus. When we decide we’re going to hold on to that sense of anger, of bitterness, of contempt. We’re holding onto a cactus that’s doing us more harm than it’s doing anybody else, but it’s something to hold onto and so we can’t let go. Have to keep holding it, can’t release it, but actually ultimately letting it go is the only answer.

Giving our anger to God is the start of a journey towards forgiveness with the potential even of reconciliation at the end. And I think that’s what Paul is talking about when he talks when we read the passage that Peter read and do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God with whom you are sealed for the day of redemption.

Get rid. Of all bitterness, rage, anger, brawling, slander, along with every form of malice. Now, you might not yet get to the third part, which is be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, and just as in Christ, God forgave you. We’ve still got two weeks left. That’s where we’re going.

But the first part, get rid of, or bitterness, rage, anger, brawling, slander, along with every form of malice. That’s our focus. Now, how do we get read of that? And that’s what Psalm 137 is a style of Psalm is trying to do. It’s taking this anger and doing something with it so you don’t do the thing that you’re writing or singing about.

Maybe you say certain things to God so you don’t do them to other people. A direct, sad, deepest anger. Towards God. This is another example of an impre. Every Psalm not suggesting you should do this, and I don’t think scripture is either, but it’s this one. Psalm 58, break the teeth in their mouths. Oh God, Lord.

Tear out the fangs of those lions. Let them vanish like water that flows away. When they draw the bow, let their arrows fall short. This writer could have done all of those things to the people that have done them harm, or at least. Tried to, but instead he comes and says, God, you, you do this. So let’s imagine it for a moment like this.

I have four kids, two daughters. Two daughters are an age 10 and 13, where I share a room. They can land up against each other regularly. And so sometimes what they’ll do is this, one of them will come running up to me. And say, dad she did this. Now you need to step in and you need to do this to her in return.

And usually have all sorts of ideas, creative ones about how I, as the judge maker can bring about the peace. And I say, go talk to your mother about that. No, I don’t. I don’t. What do I do in that situation? I sit and I listen to all of the ways that they have dreamed up, what vengeance might look like to them, and as how I, as a benevolent ruler of the house might fix the problem.

What would make it even, what would make it fair? Ground them. Send them to their room, take their tablet away from them. All the long list of things. And as a good parent, what do I do? I listen to their ideas, but do I do what they say? Absolutely.

In the end, I probably don’t. What I do is I listen to all of the things that they think should happen, and I say to them this, okay, leave that with me. I’ll make a decision on how best to handle this situation. And ultimately that as people who cannot control what is done to the other person has to be enough.

Think in ary. Psalms give us language in the midst of our anger, having decided that we want to move beyond it, having decided that we can’t possibly really get, even having decided that it’s probably not our best to just try and pretend it doesn’t exist, to move on from it. We come and we bring it to God and God responds as a good parent response.

I’ve heard you. You can leave that with me Sometimes that’s all we can do with anger. That’s the moment. I think when anger can surface and be trusted to God, our journey can start. We can’t move straight to forgiveness. Some of us have been dealing with bitterness, anger, contempt for longer than we’ve been alive.

It’s so deep rooted that somewhere all we can begin with is this. God, I am sometimes a deeply angry person. I don’t know how to fix myself. This person drives me nuts. My colleagues drive me nuts. My family drives me nuts. I don’t know what to do with all the things that I’m holding. If you’ve ever sat there wondering, why do I keep responding like this?

Maybe you’ve just been pretending it doesn’t exist, and the invite of these psalms is to say, God, you know this about me. You know how deeply wound and tight anger is. In me and all I can do is say to you, God, this is how I feel. Now. You decide. You decide what the justice is. I’ll trust it to you.

Jesus. Thank you for examples from Psalms that have some language that actually sometimes just causes us theological problems if we’ve been left. With this idea that we can just pull out a scripture and say, that’s what God says. I don’t think you’re saying that we should do what’s at the end of Psalm 137, but I do think we get to see some people who have experienced life at its very worst

to really need you to take the justice into your own hands and then need the courage to let you. Decide what happens. I think in this room, there’s some of us that would own to anger. Maybe the first kind we just blow up, we explode. Maybe the second kind we try and bury it deep, but somewhere perhaps we’re angry at someone else for what they’ve done to us or haven’t done for us.

Perhaps we’re angry at ourselves. For not being better than those people. Perhaps we’re angry at this world life ’cause it hasn’t been fair. Some things we’ve tried have failed. Some dreams we’ve had have never come true.

And perhaps were, if we’re honest, angry at you because you didn’t make life fair, and all we can do is come to you as the God of the universe. And we can trust you with that sense of anger. We can lift it up to you perhaps with some of the most colorful language we’ve ever used, and we can say, God, you decide and trust you to be, just without saying it’s okay, without saying everybody’s just free to carry on their lives as it once was, that person may never move home.

They may go to jail, but somewhere we don’t have to hold that cactus buries. It spikes deep into us. Just so we’ve got something to hold onto, we hand it to you. You have a judge. Amen. We’re gonna stand,

worship team are gonna lead us. There’s people dotted around that would love to pray for you. Takes a lot of courage to put your hand up and say, I’m really wrestling with anger. I’ve had to do that multiple times in my life. They would love to just pray a word over you. Everyone else is focusing on Jesus, who you don’t need to worry about that.

There’s no pressure. If you decide to stay in your seat. Doesn’t mean you’re not loved, not forgiven, but if you’d someone just to pray with you. For everything you’re experiencing. Perhaps a relationship that’s really like constantly at each other because of anger, perhaps some broken friendships. If you’d like to move in the direction of forgiveness, maybe even reconciliation.

You’re invited.