Ephesians 4:25—5:2
John 6:35-51
Pastor Tom Johnson, August 8, 2021
In our reading from Ephesians, our Scripture says, “Be angry—be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.” This is all part of a very practical portion of Paul’s letter where he encourages us to live out our Christian lives with integrity, authenticity, and love. Over and over again, he tells us our motive, example, and strength come from Christ and his love for us. “Be angry,” our Scripture says. This is by no means an endorsement of anger. In fact, just verses later it says, “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger.” One translation says, “in your anger, do not sin.”
Jeffrey Gibbs, professor of New Testament at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis wrote an excellent article called “The Myth of Righteous Anger.” In it he says that Scripture warns us of the dangerous reality of anger. He points out what many of us can observe on the TV screen, social media, and even out the car window as we drive across town: contemporary American culture is a profoundly angry culture. There is the lie that is perpetuated that if you feel strongly about an issue, you have the right to get angry at the opposing side. We celebrate it when someone goes ballistic and expresses outrage against our perceived enemies. This is sometimes called righteous anger or righteous indignation.
It is fair to say that anger is not automatically sinful. But that is not the point of our text. The point is that anger can often lead us to sinful and diabolical outcomes. Gibbs says that anger is no where listed as one of the fruit of the Spirit. In fact, in our text it says that can give our Adversary a foothold in our relationships. Just a few chapters later, Paul will say that “our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Anger threatens to make us slaves to our negative emotions. If we go to bed mad—if we let the sun go down and rise upon our anger—if we let anger fester and grow, we are allowing anger to rule our hearts and minds. We are spiritually and emotionally held captive to anger. Our hearts will become hardened and calloused just like old Pharaoh when he would not let God’s people go. Anger is dangerous. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that to be angry in our hearts and with our words makes us murderers in the eyes of God. And so we see the chilling truth that sin is not just an unhealthy expression of anger. Sin is also anger’s tyrannical rule over our hearts and lives.
British philosopher Alain de Botton says that anger is often caused by unrealistic optimism. That is to say, we have an idealized but also distorted belief of the way the world ought to be. So we throw a temper tantrum when we lose our keys. We become embittered toward our friends and family when they let us down. We are enraged when we are caught in traffic, upset when we get the wrong food order, or furious when our flight is delayed two hours. The problem, de Botton says, is that we are too optimistic. We expect the world around us to be a place where our keys never go astray, people never let us down, there is no traffic, table servers make no mistakes, and weather or mechanical problems never cause flight delays. That world without disappointments is fantasy not reality. Pessimism, he says, is the great key to unlock a more peaceful soul. One of my seminary professors once asked a class, “How many of you find yourselves deeply disappointed by the people around you?” Many of us raised our hands. He said, “Lower your standards. You’ll be much happier.”
I’d like to encourage us to be biblically pessimistic. We should be skeptical about our own capacity to control our anger. We should see the world as broken, sinful, and where evil is palpable. We should let go of the fantasy of a world that revolves around us and never fails us. But we should also be a hopeful people. God has given us the Bread from Heaven. We believe that God has given us all we need for life and godliness. We have the fruit of the Spirit that dwells within us. This gives us a biblical optimism that he who has begun a good work in us will bring it to completion. We can be, as our text encourages us to be “kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God has forgiven us in Christ…and to be imitators of God just as Christ gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering.”
I love the multi-sensory message—and especially the culinary thread through our readings these weeks. Someday, I’d like for us bake bread in our kitchen, and for us all to bring in a loaf of fresh baked bread. When visitors enter our church, they would smell the fragrant offering of the Bread of Life. We are bearers of that sweet and fragrant aroma by our slowness to anger, our kindness, our patience, our humility, our forgiving nature, our tender-heartedness, and our mindfulness to be like Jesus. when will we ever be fully like Jesus? When we see him face to face. But not yet in this life. But we can give people a whiff and a taste of him who will never let us down. In him we have absolute forgiveness and will never die. “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”
Jesus, Sun of Life, my Splendor,
Jesus, Thou my Friend most tender,
Jesus, Joy of my desiring,
Fount of life, my soul inspiring—
At Thy feet I cry, my Maker,
Let me be a fit partaker
Of this blessed food from heaven,
For our good, Thy glory, given.
"Jesus, Sun of Life, My Splendor," (G.F. Handel)
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