Do any of you all ever get angry?
Take a moment to think about a time when your blood was boiling, when the fiery rush of anger welled up in you…
What did that feel like?
Where in your body do you experience anger?
Take a breath and remember what that felt like.
Maybe the experience of anger is something you haven’t known for a long time. Or maybe there is anger at someone or something simmering under the surface of your life right now.
“Be angry…but do not sin,” the writer of Ephesians advocates, “Do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil.”
The text doesn’t say – “Don’t ever be angry,” but it instead is realistic: “When you are angry – don’t let it be an opportunity to sin.”
Anger is a doorway in our lives, that when we walk through it poorly, we’re tempted to do harm to our relationship with ourselves, others, and God.
I imagine that many of you recently have been watching athletes from across the globe gather to compete in the Olympics.
When I watch folks sprint or swim or wrestle or leap or play a myriad of sports – I am curious about what drives them in all the months and years of training and competition?
What simmers beneath the surface, fueling the fire of their dedication and passion for their game?
I played soccer in college and was a center defender. I was just like US Women’s National Team soccer star Naomi Girma, except without the pin-point accuracy passing, calm collected leadership, and impeccable sense of positioning and timing.
My bread and butter was more going into crunching tackles and challenging any and all headers. I tried to play right up to the effective edge of anger, wanting to crush my opponents.
But all that changed after I got a concussion my junior year and it took a couple months to get back to headache free days.
I couldn’t play soccer the same after that ever again, I needed to do something different with my anger. That difficult journey became my invitation to gentleness with myself and others, what Ephesians might call being “tenderhearted.”
The book of Ephesians encourages believers who are finding a new identity as part of the family of God in the church. It is written to people who have gone through baptism and are figuring out what it means to live as part of the body of Christ.
And our text for today is filled with practical advice:
If your hands are prone to taking what isn’t yours – do something useful and helpful for others, particularly those in need. If you’re prone to cutting others down with your words, try instead to build others up, speaking to them words of grace.
We’re encouraged to do something edifying and uplifting with our emotions because when we express bitterness and wrath and wrangling and slander, we grieve the spirit of God, God’s heart aches, Ephesians tells us.
But when we walk in love, we do something useful with all of these emotions we experience.
We’re invited on this journey to live in love, not because any of us are robots capable of turning on the switch of compassion at will, but because God in Christ has loved us first, and forgiven us first.
Because God chooses, loves, and forgives us – we can then be “imitators of God, as beloved children,” Ephesians says.
And we can both imitate God and also still experience anger.
Because there are things that God also gets angry at.
God’s heart aches when bombs rain down on God’s beloved children and when God’s beloved children fund and make and drop those bombs. God is mad at a self-centered society that consigns some people to sleep in their car or in the woods by an overpass, while others live in homes filled with empty rooms. God is angry when we God’s beloved children get so focused on ideas of success and so distracted by bright shiny things, that we forget to spend time with one another and with God.
We too have things for which the healthy emotional response likely is anger:
When dear loved ones die and people suffer with illness, we might be angry at the injustice of what they are facing. When others let us down, when family members don’t show love as we’d wish and friends don’t reach out, and when we don’t live up to our own expectations, we might feel anger that our relationships aren’t as we’d hoped they’d be.
Anger can flash over us whenever our deep sense of how things ought to be feels violated.
But our call, as people brought into the peace of Christ through baptism, is to let God’s love in us do something productive and edifying and useful with our anger, and with all of our emotions.
So whenever we might have that gut-feeling, that pit in our stomach that something isn’t quite right – we don’t have to let that feeling fester or bottle it up or turn it against ourselves in self-loathing or turn it against our friends and neighbors in a vicious cycle of drama and blame.
Instead, we can, as the writer of Ephesians says, “Let no evil talk come out of [our] mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that [our] words may give grace to those who hear.”
Sometimes the hardest thing of all is to resist speaking direct cutting words back to ourselves. But because God loves and forgives every single one of us, we can extend gentleness, kindness, forgiveness, and curiosity not only to others but also to ourselves.
I’m not trying to turn the good news of this Ephesians text into some kind of shallow self-improvement message. Jesus lived and was killed and rose from the grave and dwells with us in the Spirit – not simply so that we might be a little bit nicer people and maybe cuss less.
That would be a boring world and an anemic gospel. Rather, the practical advice of Ephesians invites us to become more like the God who made and redeems us.
Doing something useful with our hands for somebody in need is an invitation to be co-creator with God in a shared labor of love.
When we dare to use words of grace and we don’t allow bitterness and slander and wrath to have a voice in our lives, we speak alongside God’s own eternally forgiving Word.
In my own experience of getting a concussion, becoming more tenderhearted didn’t mean that I had to give up on playing soccer. It just meant that I had to learn to play more calmly and creatively, redirecting my passion in other places than reckless tackles against my opponent.
Similarly, when we dwell as members of Christ’s body through baptism – the full range of human emotions also remain with us, anger included. And God welcomes and redeems all of who we are.
So now, I’d invite you to take a breath with me… in and out… and ask yourself:
What emotions am I caring in me right now? Am I feeling happy, sad, bored, angry, surprised?
Take another breath, in and out… Is there a more specific word or words you’d give to a feeling you’ve had today? Is there a place or sensation in your body associated with it?
Take another breath….. In and out…. And ask yourself: How can I invite God to walk with me in those emotions? How can I be an imitator of God right now with what I’m experiencing?
Please pray with me:
God, thank you for making each of us ensouled bodies and embodied souls.
Thank you for the wide-range of feelings that come and go in our lives.
Thank you for perplexity that leads us to be curious about ourselves, others, and You.
Thank you for the grief that moves us to care.
Thank for the indignation that causes us to pay attention and to work to make your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.
And most of all, God, thank you for your love, a love that we feel and experience and are called to live out in imitation of you, because you have loved us first.
So today, as beloved children, made in your image, we ask that your spirit of love would walk with us, that you would use all of our emotions and all of our lives, to build others up and to give you glory.
We pray all of this in the name of Jesus the Christ,
who snored and roared, whistled and whined,
moaned and groaned, laughed and joked, sighed and cried,
all out of love for this world and for us.
Amen.