Be Angry but Do Not Sin

A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on August 11, 2024 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: Ephesians 4: 25-5: 2

One thing everyone today talks about is stress. What people are generally referring to is the experience of people having vocal expectations about things that need to be delivered to a high standard in a short space of time and are competing with other similar things. But they may also be saying they’re facing issues they can’t resolve, either people or circumstances, and the challenge is at times too much.

One way, perhaps the most common way, we respond when things are too much, is anger. If I were to ask you, ‘Are you an angry person?’ I wonder what you’d say. My answer would be, we all get angry. Some mostly experience silent anger, internalised and unspoken. Some shout and scream, and use strong words in a loud voice, making quick judgements that hit home. Some lash out, and become violent, finding no words, and their physical flailing connects with either an object or a person. But all of us experience anger when we find ourselves in a triangle between something profoundly wrong, for which there is someone to blame, and our powerlessness to put it right.

I want to reflect for a moment on each side of this triangle. What makes us angry are things that are profoundly wrong. Most obviously, it’s monstrous that a billion children in the world lack nutritious food and clean water. It’s terrible that people are imprisoned for doing nothing illegal, or discriminated against because the powerful can’t deal with their difference. More subtly, we get angry when someone misrepresents, misunderstands, disrespects or ignores us. But we also get angry when we hammer our thumb instead of a nail, watch our football team play badly, or shrink our favourite shirt by washing it on too hot a setting.

When we search intently for someone to blame, we can look for an individual culprit, like the dog that soiled the carpet; we may identify a group such as the bourgeoisie; we perhaps turn inward in a self-directed anger we usually call guilt; or we go cosmic and blame God. It’s seldom possible to disentangle anger from blame. Somehow anger rampages until it identifies a culprit and then wrestles with how to enact punishment or force restitution. Not to do so is to become resigned to a bad state of things, something anger refuses to do.

But the third side of the triangle is the most pervasive. Anger is almost always a symptom of powerlessness. Global child poverty is terrible; but the problem is so big, and we are so small. False imprisonment is cruel; but the people with the power aren’t interested in changing anything. Our favourite shirt is shrunk; but there’s no way of returning it to its original size. Our impotence is almost as infuriating as the issue itself. And what makes us angriest is the contrast when things designed to empower us have the opposite effect. Thus we scream at the laptop if it crashes when we’re composing a document we haven’t saved, because we think computers should solve everything. And we pummel the dashboard when we’re trapped in a traffic jam, because we think a car should give us limitless freedom.

In this morning’s passage from Ephesians we read, ‘Be angry but do not sin.’ This is telling us something important, but somehow surprising. It’s saying anger can sometimes be a good thing; that suppressing it can sometimes be unwise and even unfaithful: yet that anger can also lead us down the wrong path. I want to tell you two stories that I think help us navigate this narrow route between anger as fuel and anger as poison.

The 2017 film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a study in anger. Mildred is grieving the rape and murder of her teenage daughter seven months earlier. She rents three disused advertising hoardings on the road into her town and posts on them, ‘RAPED WHILE DYING,’ ‘AND STILL NO ARRESTS?,’ ‘HOW COME, CHIEF WILLOUGHBY?’ The film portrays the way these billboards affect every relationship in the town. The police chief starts by opposing them but ends by paying for them to stay. Mildred herself turns out to have had a complicated relationship with her late daughter and is not averse to resorting to violence to settle her disputes. The film isn’t about violence against women, and it isn’t about a righteous mother’s lone struggle for justice. It’s about a powerless person’s successful channelling of appropriate anger amidst a network of complex and unfulfilled professional and personal relationships. What stays with you are Mildred’s fiery eyes fixed on her purpose, from which nothing will divert her.

Let me contrast this with another story about anger. Herman Melville’s epic 1851 novel Moby-Dick centres on Captain Ahab, who lost half his leg in an encounter with a vast white whale. The sea captain assembles a crew. His vessel travels halfway round the world, and has nine encounters with other ships. Finally it spots the celebrated white whale, known as Moby Dick. There ensues a violent confrontation between the whale and the ship, which results in the death of every crew member besides the narrator; Captain Ahab’s quest ends in the destruction of himself and everyone and everything around him. This is a portrayal of anger as all-consuming idolatry: Captain Ahab becomes pathologically obsessed with slaughtering the whale, even though no harpoon big enough has yet been invented. No level of catastrophic outcome is sufficient to sway his determination, which ends in total disaster.

Out of these two stories and the words of Ephesians we can construct the beginnings of an approach to anger. Let’s look at three responses.

The traditional opposite of anger is meekness. Meekness incorporates an awareness of our own limitations and shortcomings, a humility that doesn’t rush to blame, a sense of irony that anticipates the true story is invariably different from how it appears, and a grace that perceives with compassion what could have brought this painful wrong about. The meek inherit the earth, because they’re able to heal, dissipate, mitigate or divert their anger. In corporate-speak this is called anger management. You can pay a fortune to be trained in it. But a lot of it comes down to self-knowledge and maturity: eating regularly so as not to become hangry, keeping out of the way of people who wind you up, not visiting inflammatory websites that look to infuriate their viewers, not drinking too much. When Jesus says, ‘Pray for your enemies,’ he’s offering an invitation to this approach that leads us into empathy, perception and understanding rather than amplifying our bile. But the notion of riding a mellow floating carpet of perpetual smiling benevolence isn’t the ideal we’re aspiring to. Meekness can’t mean suppressing feelings that will only destroy us or come out in uncontrolled ways. And in many cases anger’s a good and appropriate thing: as one medieval theologian puts it, ‘If you can live amid injustice without anger, you’re immoral as well as unjust.’

This is where Mildred and her three billboards are instructive. Mildred is all about channelling anger. She retains the intensity, but it doesn’t destroy her reason. She doesn’t suppress silently or yell verbally or lash out physically. She methodically finds a way to ensure her community confronts an uncomfortable truth. For Mildred, anger becomes fuel. It’s not done overnight: she takes several months to come up with a plan. It’s not perfect: she masks the untidiness of her own relationships, with her ex-husband, with her son, with her daughter prior to her daughter’s murder. It doesn’t change her whole character – she still exhibits violent and reckless action in the story. But she doesn’t give in to powerlessness, doesn’t subside into guilt or self-pity, and doesn’t impatiently begin a vendetta when she hasn’t got the evidence to point the finger at a likely culprit. This is what it means to be angry but not sin.

Most of all, she doesn’t turn into Captain Ahab. Ahab does almost everything that turns anger into the poison of rage. There’s a membrane between anger and rage. Rage is the moment when anger becomes exhilarating, because we no longer have to justify our actions since the wrong we confront is so egregious we feel we’ve been handed a blank cheque. This is the indulgence of anger, the delight in being in an intoxicated state of zero accountability. Revenge or righteous indignation seizes us, and the red mist descends. We set off on a rampage of pure hatred. Our actions become neither wise nor proportionate, but we don’t care, because assuaging our fury has become our god. We’ve become a slave to a force that has consumed us. This isn’t always violent: sometimes resentment and bitterness can take over a person, a community or a whole nation, and a quieter but just as poisonous intoxication can overwhelm judgement and mercy. When we become subject to such a process we need to ask ourselves whether we’re being manipulated by someone who has an interest in cultivating such antipathy.

So ‘Be angry but do not sin’ means do be angry. Do accept that you’re not immune from the triangle of wrong, blame and powerlessness. Do develop the self-knowledge to recognise what makes you hot-headed and intemperate so such things won’t always take you by surprise. Do find an outlet for your anger so it’s not all internalised and suppressed. Do turn anger into fuel. Do find constructive ways to retain anger when such strength of feeling can impel you to combine with others and confront a wrong that truly needs addressing. But do not sin. Don’t let yourself become Captain Ahab. Don’t let hatred or bitterness colonise your character. Don’t allow anger to turn into poison. ‘Do not let the sun go down on your anger’ is telling us to distinguish between these responses actively and purposefully, and not let things just come out in the wash, because sleeping on things can simply permit more time to fester and impute sinister motives and demonise and amplify grievance.

One paradox of the Christian faith is that we recoil from the scriptural portrayal of God’s anger, especially when it seems violent and disproportionate; but in the end the only way to temper our anger is to accept that ultimate justice, vindication and restitution lie in God’s hands. The awesome words, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay’ from Deuteronomy, quoted in Romans, are telling us that, while we seek to right wrongs, the fulness of justice, with truth, understanding, mercy, forgiveness and reconciliation is something only God can bring – and the good news is that God will bring it. Anger as poison names the moment when we make the story all about us, magnify our hurt, our perception, our judgement, our intervention, and our instant solution. Anger as fuel recognises the story is not all about us, and incorporates gentleness of judgement and persistence in pursuing justice. The good news of the gospel is that the story is all about God, and in the end the fury will cease, and God will bring peace to our hearts, and our lives, and our relationships.