George A. Mason
15th Sunday after Pentecost
12 September  2004

“Anger and Anguish”
Jer. 4;5-8, 18-28

He was “the elder statesman of American hate,” the obituary said. Richard Butler died this week in Hayden, Idaho, not far from where he created the Aryan Nation for white supremacists. Mr. Butler was an aeronautical engineer by trade. He served in the U. S. Army Air Corps during World War II, where he became an admirer of Adolf Hitler. He spent most of his life seeking to separate the races, because he believed God had made white people to rule and blacks to serve them; he also thought Christians were meant to conquer the Jews. He and his followers incited racial and religious hatred, all the while claiming the blessing of God on their cause. He died in his sleep at age 86, thus proving, I suppose, that there is no final justice in this life after all.

I report this to you this morning with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I am glad he is dead and hope his ideas follow him to the grave. On the other hand, I am aware how little anguish I feel in my anger toward people like him. I feel morally superior to him. I believe God is on my side in this struggle. And while I am happy to see him dead, I wish he had suffered on his way to hell

Now, there’s my confession. Anyone else like to take a turn?

How should we feel about people like that? Is it okay to be angry, or are we just supposed to be nice to everyone because we are Christians? The prophet Jeremiah says that God gets angry. He tells us that God is bringing judgment upon the nation of Judah and the city of Jerusalem.  The fierce anger of the Lord has not turned away from us, he says.

So I guess it is okay to be angry if you are God. And since we are created in the image and likeness of God, it must be okay for us to be angry, too. In fact, if we can’t get angry at the evil of a race-monger like Richard Butler; if we can’t be outraged by a Mesquite preacher kidnapping his 12-year-old stepdaughter and wanting to marry her; if we can’t get disturbed by the injustice of Wilmer-Hutchins kids being deprived of an education; and if we can’t flash white with rage over Russian children being killed by terrorists in a school gymnasium, then there is something spiritually wrong with us.

Anger is not the problem with us; apathy is. Anger comes from love; it means we care, and it motivates us to action on behalf of what is right. Apathy comes from indifference; it is uncaring, and it leaves wickedness in the world unchecked.

If we are going to reflect the character and values of God in the world, we will have to enter the arena of conflict from time to time and let our anger move us to action. We will have to take up the prophetic role, as Jeremiah did, and put ourselves into the position of being ridiculed and reviled and rejected by people who will not listen to us or like what we have to say when they do listen. We will have to risk ourselves and speak.

At the end of Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear, with dead bodies lying across the stage, all because no one but his daughter Cornelia had the courage early on to speak the truth to her father when his ego was running amuck, the Duke of Albany summed things up: The weight of this sad time we must obey;/Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

The writer D.H. Lawrence—he of Lady Chatterley’s Lover fame, don’t you know?!—said of his work what all of us ought to want our work to amount to, whether it be writing or preaching or parenting or teaching or selling or music-making: … The world is not a stage—not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches ... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That’s what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that’s what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it—if he wants a safe seat in the audience—let him read someone else. [Thanks to Casey Boland for passing this along, reference unknown.]

Twenty-five years ago, when the conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention was heating up, a Fort Worth pastor, Cecil Sherman, saw more clearly than most what was happening. He understood that the leaders of the conservative movement were not merely arguing their theological positions; they were trying to purge from all SBC institutions, agencies and schools anyone who differed from them. His closest friends who taught or led these institutions told him to be quiet; they said he was more of a problem for stirring things up than those who were out to get them. They said he should let them handle things, that his sounding the alarm was undermining their ability to do their jobs. He told them that the day was coming they wouldn’t have jobs. They would all be fired if they did not cooperate with the insurgents. And so it came to pass.

At the state convention meeting in Waco more than a decade ago, I was the first to speak on the floor in support of a proposal to pull Baylor out of the convention’s control because of fear of a takeover by fundamentalists there, too. I referenced the fact that my alma mater, Southwestern Seminary, was suffering from the pressures of the new regime in Nashville, that a once- creative and progressive educational center had been handcuffed by the ideology of right-wing evangelicals. My former professors and friends there were irate and treated me like the enemy. Most of them are gone from there now, either fired or forced out. Some are doing their best but are really just holding on until retirement.

Jeremiah ran into this very thing with Judah. The people had developed a sense that they were invulnerable no matter what, that God was on their side, that nothing could happen to them no matter how they lived their lives. Somehow they thought that being the chosen people meant that God was locked into protecting them against their enemies. Jeremiah reminded them that their chosenness had to do with their special mission to reflect the character of God in the world and to bear that light to the nations. It had to do with demonstrating God’s concern for building a human community where everyone was valued and had something to offer, where the most vulnerable were still treasured and looked after, where love of neighbor was a spiritual duty, not an ideal never practiced. When God’s missional people started acting like the nations, though, and not like ambassadors of God to the nations, God’s wrath was kindled against them, and Jeremiah was filled to the brim with it.

But look at what God does with God’s anger. God does not move directly from anger to action. God does not act out of rage. God does not lash out at the people to prove divine authority. God inspires a prophet to feel the very heart of God and to speak the words of God from the heart. It is hard to tell in this text where God is speaking and where Jeremiah is. My anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain! Oh, the walls of my heart! My heart is beating wildly; I cannot keep silent … Who is speaking God or Jeremiah? Yes.

The problem with so many of us inside the church is that we no better know what to do with our anger than those outside the church. On this 9/11 weekend we remember how Muslim extremists used religious justification for murdering thousands of civilians in New York and Washington, D.C. They did not make the move that we must make with our anger if we are going to reflect the ways of God, and it brought devastating horror and needless pain. They moved from anger to action instead of first passing from anger to anguish.

Anguish comes from the same root word as anger—both of them meaning grief or sorrow. It is this profound move in the heart of God that allows God not only to respond to human evil with judgment but still not to make a full end of it. God feels the pain of it all, and God asks us to do the same. Jeremiah is our model of how.

The great 20th-century rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, said of this prophet, He was filled with a blazing passion, and it was this emotional intensity, which drove him to discharge God’s woeful errands.  The ultimate purpose of a prophet is not to be inspired, but to inspire the people; not to be filled with a passion, but to impassion the people with understanding for God. Jeremiah’s inner condition was a state of suffering in sympathy with the divine [suffering]. … Jeremiah hated his prophetic mission.  To a soul full of love, it was horrible to be a prophet of … wrath. [The Prophets (Perennial Classics, 1962), pp. 130-77 passim.]

After 9/11, too many would-be prophets in the church rushed to tell Americans that this was God’s judgment for its sin. Some of them were right-wingers who claimed that our acceptance of abortion and homosexuality was being punished, just as they had told us to expect. Left-wingers were telling us that God was judging our capitalist system that oppresses third-world peoples in the interest of controlling their oil and preserving our way of life. Some were too quick to justify going to war, and others seemed amazingly close to justifying the actions of the terrorists, as if they were agents of God to humble America. I am always struck by how much people claim to know the mind of God at such times with such clarity. Jeremiah himself seems reticent to recite the list of sins that brought about God’s judgment. But the bigger point is that both kinds of false prophets failed to make the move from anger to anguish. They were too quick to speak from some lofty position of righteousness instead of suffering the weight of the tragedy the way Jeremiah does.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was speaking at Trinity Church just blocks away from the World Trade Center when the planes hit the buildings. In the aftermath of the disaster he felt the ash-grey dust of the streets choking his breath in the streets. He watched as some wrote notes in the dust that they knew would not last, but they wrote out of anguish nonetheless. And he remembered Jesus in the moment when some religious leaders were ready to stone a woman for her sin. Jesus stooped down and allowed his anger to turn to anguish. He sympathized with accuser and accused alike. He wrote in the dust for a time that must have seemed an eternity. When he finally came up to speak, it was not clichés he spoke; he had fresh words to say: Let those who are without sin cast the first stone.

In his mediation on the terrorist attacks, called Writing in the Dust, the archbishop reflects upon Jesus’ way, which is Jeremiah’s way, which is God’s way, which must become our way: Jesus hesitates. He does not draw a line, fix an interpretation, tell the woman who she is and what her fate should be. He allows a moment, in which people are given time to see themselves differently precisely because he refuses to make the sense they want. When he lifts his head, there is both judgment and release. [Eerdmans, 2002, p. 78.]

We would do well today to examine ourselves anew. Do we feel the anguish of God in our bones over the evil in the world and in ourselves? If we do, we will speak from the heart and feel the pain of our words, even if they are words of warning or judgment. But in the end, we are no prophets of God unless our judgment ends in mercy. May it always be so among us!