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Sermon Preached at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, March 14, 2021, at 8:00 A.M. and 10:00 A.M.
By Stephen Galleher
From the Epistle of St. Paul to the Ephesians:
“It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn’t know
the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled
disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same
boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy
and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this
on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus,
our Messiah.”
(Ephesians 2:1-6)
ON ANGER
In this late winter and very early spring, recovering from the beginning of Daylight
Savings time, I suggest we try our hand at having a bit of “fun,” if fun is the right
word—by examining the Oscar winner of sin, perhaps the ugliest of human failings—that
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behavior that separates us from our God and from ourselves, operating against our
birthright, a birthright of freedom and happiness. You’re probably thinking I am talking
about PRIDE: from which all other sins flow. This pride, which our theology tells us,
goes back to the time of great innocence, the First Man and the First Woman and their
thinking that they could take one tiny bite of a forbidden fruit and blame it on the snake.
No. This morning, I want us to look into anger. Wrath, resentment, rage—call it by many
names, it’s all the same. Behind pride, behind almost all of the seven deadly sins, lies
anger—grrr: not getting what I want.
What is anger? Anger is a human emotion all right, with perceptible molecular
structure—it can turn our faces red, churn our stomachs, tighten our nerves, and race our
hearts. Anger ranges all the way from a small irritation, as when we are peeved that the
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wind is messing our hair, to socially organized rage, with hired murderers, called war,
which the human race still in its perversity accepts almost without question.
Anger can even seem normal and justifiable. It is universal throughout the animal
kingdom. Dogs bark and lions roar, not just to get a bone or to strut their stuff but to
indicate that they are not in the best of moods and may just have you for dinner. We, too,
raise our shackles when attacked—and sometimes it’s more than our pride at stake.
Anger is our biological defense mechanism. It gets the adrenaline flowing to ward off
danger and prevent injury or harm.
Anger, too, is a motivator against injustice. Shouldn’t we get angry at all the terrible
things people are doing to one another? Don’t we admire the fire in the belly of the
prophets and social reformers?
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Yes, perhaps so. But how much milk of magnesia do we need to alleviate the bile
and dyspepsia over all the things that can anger us? I have my doubts about so-called
justifiable anger. Aren’t we just looking for loopholes to bless our petty annoyances and
fretfulness? Let’s look for a moment longer at the many faces of this ugly phenomenon.
Anger is so entrenched in part because it can feel so good. Of the Seven Deadly
Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick our wounds, to smack our lips over
grievances long past, to roll over our tongue the words we form to tell somebody off, to
savor to the last toothsome morsel the pain we have received and the pain we plan to give
back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. We nurse our anger to keep us warm. It
makes us feel so right. But this feeling right exacts an awful price!
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So, anger confronts us with the question that confronts all forms of pride. Just how
happy and free do we want to be? Are we really happy nursing that resentment over
something that has long since passed? The person who offended you may be dead and
playing pinochle in heaven while you get bloated and ugly on anger and self-pity.
Buddha said it also: “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of
throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned.”
So, what is this anger, really, that harms us more ultimately than the one we are
angry at?
Anger is a form of impatience. Why doesn’t the deliveryman come when he said he
would? Why doesn’t my Amazon package come in two days as promised. I need it; I
want it. Darn!
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Impatience is a form of self-centered frustration. Have you ever hit an inanimate
object, say a wall, when you kept dropping the same thing or you couldn’t fix something
you had taken apart? Do you find it easier to curse aloud when there is no one else
present, because you don’t want anyone to see you acting like the child you still are? I
won’t ask for a show of hands on this one, I promise.
And sometimes we take out our frustration and impatience on ourselves. The
deepest form of this anger is depression—deep anger, unexpressed anger, something that
can simmer and remain buried for years.
Anger is born of fear or great, tear-wrenching pain. Anger is about tears and fears.
The next time you see an angry person, ask yourself: What is that person afraid of?
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Watch someone’s expression in traffic go from fear to anger—in such instances I’d say
that fear and anger are the identical emotion.
Or ask yourself a similar question of that angry person: When was that person hurt?
Look at the effect it is still having on him or her. Child abuse, whether physical or
psychological, leaves tears and scars too deep for words. Just as we see a mean dog bark
because it is former owner beat it, so, too, those hardened criminals serving hard
time—many of them are scared children who have to be incarcerated for their own and
our protection. Anger is about fears and tears.
Is anger justified? Sure, sometimes, if you want to call it that. Have you noticed
when you are angry you are so self-righteous—completely right, completely
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uncompromising. How many justifiably angry people sit in jail right now? That’s where
licensed justifiable anger can get us.
Ask yourself, what are you most afraid of today? Where is the fear that drives it? Or
better still: where is the hurt, the pain that is evoking all that rage?
Anger has no sense of humor. It’s all about me, me, me and mine, mine, mine. The
ego is bound to get bruised and battered and angry, because like the plant in “The Little
Shop of Horrors,” it can never be satisfied. The ego can never get satisfied, so naturally
it’s going to get angry. What do children do when they get what they want? They cry and
stomp their feet.
So, what about our anger? Anger is not love. Yes, we get mad at our loved ones. My
wife, now ex-wife, once said to me, “I wouldn’t nag you if you weren’t so naggable!”
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But it is very hard to think love and be loving when you are angry. To paraphrase Paul:
“Anger is impatient; anger is not kind; anger is self-centered, arrogant and rude. It insists
on its own way. It results in irritation and resentment. It rejoices in wrongdoing (“look
what you did!”). It does not bear all things. It does not live and let live.”
To those who carry a burden of anger, who fret in their tiny cells of anger, God says,
“Come out from your cells! Fear not, for I have overcome the world.” The answer to fear
is faith, faith that there is a God who holds us like the weeping children we are and says,
“It’ll be okay, son; it’ll be all right, girl!”
The big question, of course, is do we really want to get rid of our anger? No one can
do it for you! Live and let live. Stop being frustrated that people aren’t behaving the way
you want them to, since you can’t behave yourself as you want to half the time! Cut
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people a break. Step aside and let someone go ahead of you in line. Pull over and let the
angry driver behind you go around you!
The way out of our prison of anger is the grace of a God of love, a God in whom we
live and move and have our being. God is the only one who will not disappoint us. We
may question God, get mad at God, but God is such a co-dependent, he’ll never say
“enough”! Only, “come on back, honey!”
In conclusion, if we could just quit seeing the enemy in other people. We are our
own worst enemies. Come on, let’s love ourselves a little more. Wake up! Look at your
enemy as a lonely child just like you, full of fear, ready to burst out crying at any
moment. Looking at our brothers and sisters like this will take the sting out of your
resentments. It will help us begin to see one another as God sees us, as children of light,
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destined for love. I close with these beautiful words of the Christian mystic, Meister
Eckhart.
Apprehend God in all things,
For God is in all things.
Every single creature is full of God
And is a book about God.
Every creature is a word of God.
If I spend enough time with the tiniest creature—
Even a caterpillar—I would never have to prepare a sermon,
So full of God is every creature.
Amen.