By Such Stripes Are We Healed
by Jack Shaver
©The United Church of Canada, 1985
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 0-88622-196-X
7M/12/85/APL
Used with Permission
Wednesday
God and anger
Ephesians 3: 14-19; 4: 25-32
Ephesians reads more like an essay than a letter. It is written without haste in the cool of the day. The author savours his long, balanced sentences. Things are being recollected in tranquillity rather than thought out on the spot. By this time a great deal of thinking has been done in the church, many connections made. Many things have been put in place. Indeed it feels as if nothing is out of place. The Christian movement is beginning to have an established language. It has the sound of a familiar faith rather than a puzzling innovation.
I find it significant that, as the Christian movement lost its youth, its message didn't lose its edge.
Through much of my ministry I would read those verses from chapter three as part of the marriage ceremony. I used the author's prayer as a kind of toast to the bride and groom-that they being rooted and grounded in love would come to comprehend the knowledge-surpassing love of Christ and so be filled with all the fullness of God. Familiar as it is, and one long flowing sentence as it is, it manages to sing out the gospel every time.
- I picked the second passage from this letter because there is a line in it that indicates that the original good news has not lost its edge.
- Be angry, but do not sin.
If we could spell out exactly what that means for all time it wouldn't be any good as the vehicle of a living word to us when we needed it. But it is a sentence that is worth walking around while it gives off hints as to its meaning.
One can be angry and not sin. Anger isn't necessarily a sin. Anger can be an appropriate state. As the body of believers builds itself up in love, anger has a place. The author speaks of our growing up in Christ by speaking the truth in love to one another. A loving fellowship is not to be equated with one from which all anger has been removed. The revelation "God is love" does not eliminate God's wrath. Rather it puts before us a loving wrath.
True as all that is, and solid good news as it can be, it runs the risk of demonic distortion. The closer we come to the essence of the gospel, the greater the peril that we turn it into a righteousness of our own. The notion of God's loving wrath is much closer to the gospel than the sweet mush often put in its place. But the notion that wrath can be loving has been used, down the ages, to give humans holy title to do vicious things to one another.
Anger isn't necessarily sinful, but it usually is. It is probably right that we not trust our powers to make the distinction. As the author of Ephesians has it,- Let not the sun go down on your anger.
- Confession
Here we are, see us, O God. - See our struggle to be:
- Our procedures for holding life together, our devices for proving we're somebody, our defences of our status and territory. We lay all that before you. It has often felt perverse and futile. As we bring it for you to see, we discover how destructive it has been and how mistaken.
- Have mercy upon us.
- See our effort to be good:
- Our caring and our serving. As we lay our goodness before you, we discover it falls short. Our hearts harden when caring gets painful; and our aggressive help is destructive. Our goodness fails to save a lost world, and our highest goodntss is too often what shuts you out.
- Have mercy upon us.
See our life with you:- There is the heart of the matter. We lay before you all that we trust to save us. All that we cry about when we feel unjustly done by. All that we complain about when we feel abandoned by you. We lay before you our troubled search for you as we flee the world you love and punish the flesh you became.
Nothing greater can happen to us than that we are forgiven.
Amen