4 Lent
March 26, 1995
Lent is a time to be shocked. It’s a time when our relationship to God is tested, when our religious understandings need to be re-examined, and re-ordered. Lent is a time when we meet a radical Christ, a Jesus that we have never seen before, never met, mostly because we haven’t wished to look at those parts of ourselves that are common. And therefore, we fail to recognize those parts in the Son of God.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start with you and what you have brought here to church – your attitude, your feelings, your mindset. For let me say at the very beginning, what you bring often colors what you hear. When I say, as I usually do at the start of church: “Prepare yourselves to meet the Lord,” what is it that goes on inside your head? Do you begin to think: ‘I’ve got to feel religious now. I’ve got to put away or censor some of my feelings?” If so, what emotions have you brought to the table this morning?
Most of us, if we were to be perfectly honest, expect that we can generate or bring good feelings-feelings of joy, happiness, togetherness, to the table. And for some, this is so. But what about our other feelings? Have any of you brought what we often think are negative emotions – anger, sadness, resentment, rage? Yes, rage. How many of you have brought rage here this morning?
I’ll wager not many of you would raise your hands. I’d also wager it’s because most of us have been taught that anger and rage are not Christian feelings. Let’s face it, most of us have been taught, carefully taught, that if one is a Christian – if one is Christ-like – one must be nice with good feelings, at least on Sunday, toward the world in general.
Stanley Haurwise, a theologian from Duke, once told a group of us (in a tongue-in-cheek way) that after 2000 years of theological reflection and passionate probing, his own Methodist church has come to the conclusion that God is nice. And that we were meant to be nice, too.
But let’s not put the heat on our Methodist brothers and sisters. Most mainline pulpits have given subliminal messages that God is nice and therefore, we ought to be nice, too. Is it any wonder that we come into church and try to think nice thoughts as we prepare to meet God?
I want to introduce you this morning to a different kind of Savior. I want you to meet a Jesus who is not particularly nice and who doesn’t advocate good feelings. As a matter of fact, I want you to come into contact with an angry Jesus.
I’ve been re-reading the Gospels this Lent, and I’ve been simply amazed at how many times we encountered an angry Jesus The religious leaders made him angry, the politicians angered him, the Pharisees, the Sadducess, the hypocrites, the preachers, and even his disciples were constantly the objects of his anger. But let’s be specific. Take our Gospel this morning. If anyone has illusions about Jesus being meek and mild, being nice and long-suffering, a reading of the Gospel should dispel those thoughts. Here we are presented with a furious Jesus cleansing the temple, tossing out those who had been buying and selling. He does not reprimand or simply scold them. He drives them out. If you have a picture of Jesus as being gentle, tranquil, and even-handed, consider what he does to the money changers. He overturns their tables.
It’s like an old Western with the sheriff coming in, reaching over and knocking the poker table to one side, with the money, cards, and players rolling all over the floor. And then saying: “Get out of town before I drag you out by your boots.”
You can say all you want about the rightness and wrongness of the act, but don’t tell me that Jesus was not very angry and that he didn’t let it be known. I challenge you to re-read the Gospels and to keep count of how many times Jesus is depicted as being angry. I think you will find that a number of teachings grow out of angry confrontations.
So what can we learn from an angry Savior? The first and very obvious point is that Jesus was not hesitant to be angry and to reveal it. Most of us instinctively know that if you stuff your anger, it’s going to destroy you. Denial is a more devastating emotion than expressing something. I have a friend who is always telling me, however crudely: “Roger, it’s better to spit than to swallow.” But let’s go a step deeper in understanding the importance of an angry Jesus as a role model.
One of the most effective insights from psychology in the past half century is the theory of co-dependency. Co-dependency means that some of us relate to people in such a way as to give into and encourage people in their problems. We stuff our own feelings in order to receive the other person’s approval. We deny our emotions in order to have peace at any price.
The classic example you’re all familiar with is of the married couple where one partner has a chronic drinking problem and the other is forced into being nice in an effort to make their home life run smoothly. We’ve learned (some of us the hard way) that this rarely works. It simply maintains the addiction.
One thing we can say about Jesus is that he was able to tell it the way it was. He was never a co-dependent. He reveals his fury against the religious establishment; he makes it clear that he is the enemy of the religious leaders. His anger shows us his deep despair and utter frustration over a people who have lost their sense of compassion and humanity. He never put up with the addictions of his day.
Good people, the world about us does not lack for things to be angry at – only for lack of anger. Jesus was mad a great deal of the time, and for a good reason. He never tolerated the intolerable. Jesus never felt that ignoring the injustice was the better part of discretion. Jesus never turned his back on a problem because strategically it was more important to keep peace. What we are being introduced to this Lent is a Savior who was mad as heck about the conditions of his day.
The second thing we might learn as we focus on an angry Jesus is that he used his anger as a springboard in his relationship to God. Let me be more specific, Jesus finds that God becomes more intimate with his God when he expresses emotions like disappointment, frustration, and rage. And so the Lenten questions for each one of us today are: “Does your God allow you to have forbidden emotions, and can you use them as a way to come closer to your heavenly Creator?”
I learned this lesson a number of years ago in Connecticut from a lovely woman named Carla. Carla was a faithful churchgoer, a former Vestry person, and a former head of the women’s organization. I was visiting Carla in the hospital. She had just had a radical mastectomy. Carla had gone into surgery with the understanding that she would only have a small lump removed. She had come out with this total mastectomy, and she was devastated. After a while, I asked her if she wanted to pray. She said, ‘No.” She was so angry with God that she didn’t feel it was any time to come in contact with God. Somehow, I was led by the spirit to say: “Good, let’s be angry with God together, and you speak to God, and I’ll be with you and listen in.” Well, she did pray. A short and very angry prayer. She told God just what she thought of the whole situation. After a while, we just sat there, not saying a word. And finally, she said: ‘You’re not going to believe this. You know I’ve been going to Church since I was an infant. I’ve worked in the church as long as I can remember, but that’s the first time I’ve felt that I truly spoke to God and that I was listened to. . .:’
So what about yourselves? What do you bring to the table this Lent? What emotions, what attitudes, what feelings do you have about yourself, and about Jesus? What kind of God are you prepared to meet? Maybe, just maybe, this Lent we can begin to be truthful about ourselves and about God.
Years ago, clergy had a custom of leaving a printed card at the door when they called on someone who was not home at the time. The card read: “The Rector called today and was sorry to find you out.” I like that. We come to church to be found, but we don’t want to be found out. That’s why Lent is such a challenge. Come, be prepared to meet the Lord with all your emotions. Come be found and found out. AMEN.