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A sermon shared at the Suttons Bay Congregational
Church
August 5, 2018
Scriptures: Exodus 4:18-24, John 2:13-16
Those of us who serve as itinerant
preachers face a unique challenge. If the full-time pastor slavishly follows
the lectionary, then we know which biblical texts have recently received
attention from the pulpit. But if the regular pastor does not do so—and, in my experience, many of the best don’t, preferring
to allow the Spirit to move more freely through their preaching—then we bear
the risk of addressing this week the
same scripture you heard about last week.
This risk becomes the stuff of nightmare when the
full-time pastor is a brilliant and gifted preacher like the Rev. Robin Long Carden.
I shudder over the idea of sharing a sermon with you and then having you turn
to each other and say: “Well, how interesting to hear the same sermon we heard
last Sunday, except this time in its rough draft form.”
Most people facing such a challenge
would look for a solution, but, being a law professor, I went in search of a
loophole. I quickly saw a way out of the dilemma: choose a biblical text that,
for one reason or another, no sensible
person would make the centerpiece of his or her sermon. This approach makes it
much less likely that the full-time pastor will have addressed the text
recently, or, perhaps, ever. And that brings me to today’s reading from the
book of Exodus.
This text—culminating in the verse “The
Lord met Moses and tried to kill him”—abounds with problems and puzzles. Let’s
start with this one: “Tried to kill
him?” It had always seemed to me that if God decided to kill you then going on
the lam did not present a viable option. You might recall that Adam and Eve,
after their unfortunate decision-making about a certain serpent and a certain
apple, did their best to hide from the Lord—but to no avail. It had never
occurred to me that in our final days we might say: “My time is coming, but
fortunately I’m going into a witness relocation program.” “Tried to kill him?” That’s a doozy of a textual problem.
This morning, though, I want to
focus on a different problem posed by
this passage—a problem we also find in today’s reading from the Gospel of John.
It is this: in these passages, God and Jesus get angry. Indeed, they get violently
angry—with God harboring murderous thoughts and Jesus throwing tables around
in a place of worship. Given all of our talk about the holy centralities of
love and compassion and forgiveness and peacemaking, what are we to make of
these texts?
Of course, these passages posed no
problem at all for our theological precursors, the Puritans, who viewed God’s
wrath as an obvious and necessary precondition for his judgment. In the middle
part of the Eighteenth Century, Jonathan Edwards preached a famous sermon that
exemplifies this way of thinking and had a memorable title: “Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God.” As you might imagine, things do not turn out well for
the sinners in that sermon, which had such rhetorical force in its day that
members of the audience groaned and moaned and called out to Edwards to save
them. I hope not to see any similar behaviors this morning.
Some Christians still think of wrath
and vengeance as being central and defining characteristics of God. And the
concept of an angry God has continuing utility for those who favor the
persuasive force of the blunt instrument. In one of her books, the Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber
remembers—and laments—growing up in a church that portrayed God as an angry
dude “with a killer surveillance system.”
Many of us, though, see an irreconcilable tension
between a God who is long on love and a God who is short on temper, a God whose
peace passes all understanding and a God whose rage defies all enduring, the
God of the Beatitudes and a God of bad attitudes. Wrath seems inconsistent with
the clear commands of the gospels—to love, to show compassion, to forgive—all
of which require us to put our irascibility aside.
Indeed, throughout the gospels Jesus instructs us to
let go of our anger and to make peace with its target. In chapter 21 of
Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says: “You have heard it said that ‘You shall not
murder,’ but I say that if you are even angry
with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment.” In chapter 5 of
Matthew, Jesus declares that—even though we might be right in the middle of offering
a gift at the altar—if we remember that we have a quarrel with someone then we
must immediately drop everything and go make peace with that person.
These texts, however, can leave us with yet a different dilemma. We might read them as
setting an expectation we cannot possibly achieve—to go through life without ever
becoming angry. The artist Gilbert Stuart, who painted one of the most famous
portraits of George Washington, said that our first president had “a tremendous
temper”—but “had it under wonderful control.” I don’t know about you, but I’m much
better at the tremendous part than the wonderful part.
We might also object that some occasions and events seem
to call for an angry response, and
that the absence of outrage can be morally
soft and downright dangerous. Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel observed that “the
opposite of love is not hate—it is indifference.” We may think that anger sometimes
serves as an essential catalyst to move us out of indifference and into action—particularly
action that demands resolve, courage, or self-sacrifice on our part.
Now, an old adage warns that a sermon should not raise
more issues than it can put to rest in about fifteen minutes. The bad news is
that in my remaining time I cannot possibly provide answers to all of the
questions I have posed. The good news is that I never actually thought I had
the answers, anyway. I do, however, have a few hunches about what these texts
are trying to tell us that I will share with you for what they’re worth.
Let’s begin with a proposition of exquisite
obviousness. While the fully realized Kingdom of God may have no place for
anger—because nothing will occasion it—we have not yet arrived at that blissful
state. If you think we have, then I commend to your attention the past week’s headlines
of any major newspaper.
No, we exist in the world as we find it, which will routinely
give us good and abundant reasons to experience anger, unless we have fallen
prey to the dreadful indifference that Elie Wiesel warns against. In many
cases, we’ll be able to direct that anger toward states of affairs rather than people—toward poverty, oppression,
inequality, violence, and so on. But let’s be honest: in some cases we’ll feel
anger toward the people who cause,
enable, and facilitate those states of affairs.
These texts from Exodus and John have some things to
say about this, and to get at them we will have to focus on a few common
elements that these stories share and that need teasing out. In both texts, the
conduct that arouses divine anger is hypocrisy.
When we read the passage from Exodus in its broader context, this becomes
clear. After the part that I shared with you, the text goes on to reveal that Moses
had set about fulfilling the Lord’s commission to spread the faith without first
bothering to put his own house in order by having his son circumcised. That is what made God so angry.
Similarly, those who sold animals and changed money in
the temple presented themselves as helpmates in a house of prayer. In reality,
though, they had transformed that holy ground into a place of profit and a “den
of thieves.” That is what made Jesus
so angry.
Notice that neither God nor Jesus felt content to
condemn hypocrisy as an abstraction. They plainly and unmistakably experienced
anger toward the human beings that
embodied the offense. These texts make no bones about it: God was really,
really angry at Moses and Jesus was really, really angry at the merchants in
the temple.
This may not seem very godlike to us. As decent,
civilized human beings, we tend to see anger as a lack of self-control that can
lead to embarrassing outbursts and tantrums. Perhaps you’ve noticed that we
don’t say that someone “misplaced” their temper—as if they will find it again
in short order. Rather, we say that they “lost” it, as if something has gone that
the person cannot recover—which may be true. We all know people who lost their
temper and lost something else right along with it: their dignity; their
credibility; someone’s trust; a job; a relationship; perhaps even their life.
And, whatever justifications may exist for getting
angry, we worry about the corrosive effects of remaining in that emotional
state. Even assuming that anger is occasionally an appropriate place to visit,
no one should live there. To borrow an image from the old Native American
story, if we constantly nurture our anger then we end up spending our days
feeding the wrong wolf.
Again, though, our two texts for today offer us some
guidance. Let’s return to Exodus and to a part of the story I didn’t share with
you earlier. Remember where I left you: God is angry with Moses, so angry he has decided to kill him.
What happens next? Well, Zipporah, the wife of Moses, intervenes and
circumcises their son. The text then rather blandly adds: “And so God let Moses
alone.” God was angry, furiously angry, about a situation—an outrageous act of
hypocrisy. But once the situation was addressed—by someone, by anyone, not
even by the offending Moses—the Lord
let it go.
As complex as that passage from Exodus is, the story
of Jesus in the temple may strike us as even more problematic. As with God in
Exodus, Jesus became wildly angry when confronted with grossly hypocritical
behavior. Now, as an aside, It may be worth pointing out that this is not the
only passage where Jesus rages angrily against hypocrisy: in other texts, he
addresses the Pharisees as a “brood of vipers” and when his beloved Peter
contradicts him Jesus says—we can assume not warmly—“Get behind me, Satan.”
We may struggle to reconcile these harsh words with
the preternatural capacity for love that we ascribe to Jesus Christ. If,
however, we reflect on our own emotions and experiences I think we can
understand what’s going on here. A number of years ago, I heard an interview
with an actor who played Jesus in a film version of the Gospel of Matthew and
who talked about his initial puzzlement over these bouts of name-calling. He
said that his breakthrough came when he recognized in these texts the voice of
a frantically anxious parent who saw his beloved children headed down a dark
and destructive path. I recall as a teenager coming home very, very late one
night—okay, it was technically the next morning—and being on the receiving end
of my mother’s wrath, her love and concern wildly radiating from her in the
form of unmediated outrage.
But the story of Jesus in the temple is more
complicated than those other passages. In this story, Jesus goes beyond calling
people out for their hypocrisies. And this story does not end with Jesus and
the moneychangers strolling off together into the sunset, hand in hand. Rather, it ends with Jesus chasing the
offending parties from the premises.
Even here, however, the text offers a subtle clue
about anger and what we should do with it. As you know, some translations of
this passage leave the reader with an image of Jesus fashioning a whip out of
cords and then taking that whip to the backs of the moneychangers and
merchants. Indeed, the art of the Italian Renaissance includes numerous
paintings that portray the scene just this way.
Even brief reflection on that interpretation, however,
should prompt us to question it. Does it make any sense that these tough,
corrupt merchants and moneychangers would sit idly by and watch Jesus make a
whip out of cords that he would then use to beat them? Given that they
obviously outnumbered him, why didn’t they just overpower Jesus and take the
whip away? And, most importantly, why would Jesus—who repeatedly rejects and
rebukes acts of physical violence throughout the gospels—suddenly embrace it as
an acceptable alternative here?
Well, it turns out that the language of this text
allows for a very different interpretation as well, one much more closely
aligned to our image of Jesus and our understanding of his view of violence. As
some scholars have noted, a close look at the words employed here strongly
suggests that Jesus used his handful of cords to usher the oxen and sheep from the temple, which had the
predictable effect of causing their owners to chase after them. In other words,
Jesus did not turn his anger into violence—he turned it into a strategy, a
course of action that would interrupt the otherwise uninterruptible offending
conduct without physically hurting anyone.
So don’t miss the similarities at work here: These stories
from Exodus and John both confront a reality of human psychology: we will get
angry. They both acknowledge a moral principle: sometimes that anger will be a
justifiable reaction to a set of circumstances. They both incorporate a
theological premise: we are made in the image of God, so God too must
experience anger—just as God experiences love and suffering. Indeed, I would
submit that God experiences anger precisely
because he experiences love and suffering. And both stories ask: what can
we learn about our anger from what
the most powerful force in the universe does with its anger?
In the same book I mentioned earlier, the Rev. Nadia
Bolz-Weber reminds us of God’s remarkable power to make something from
nothing—and God’s fondness for doing so. She writes:
“[We] have a God who created the universe out of
‘nothing,’ that can put flesh on dry bones ‘nothing,’ that can put life in a
dusty womb ‘nothing.’ I mean, let’s face it, ‘nothing’ is God’s favorite
material to work with. Perhaps God looks upon that which we dismiss as nothing,
insignificant, and worthless, and says ‘Ha! Now that I can do something with.’”
As much as I love this passage, I think
she may have understated things.
After all, the energy that we
experience as anger often comes to us as less
than nothing, as a destructive force. Anger can fill us negativity, with
bitterness, with gloom. Anger can put us in a pit—and will happily leave us
there if we don’t claw our way out. “That ain’t nothin’,” as the saying goes.
That is a lot worse.
And yet, these stories tell us, if
we will just give him room to work, God can transform that less-than-nothing
into something good, something important, even something sacred. God can
transform our anger into effort, our anger into change, our anger into
contribution, our anger into compassion, our anger into grace, our anger into
justice, our anger into the power that fights against the very things that made
us angry in the first place.
The lesson of these stories cannot be that God demands we never get
angry. That would mean God expects something of us that He himself does not do.
That would presumably make God a hypocrite and, well, these passages tell us in
no uncertain terms how God feels about hypocrisy.
No, I think these passages bring an
entirely different message. They call on us to take our anger and surrender it
to God’s transformative alchemy. They tell us to let him make something out of
the less-than-nothing that we have to contribute. And they reassure us that, if
we do this, then we will find that even here—even here—God will answer us and say: “Ha! Now that—that—that less than nothing—that, I can do something with.”
Praise
God that it is so.
Amen.
