"The Deadly Sin of Wrath: Take This Sermon and Shove It!"

Ancient Reading: Buddhist Story

“Two Buddhist monks, Tanzan and Ekido, were once traveling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling.

“Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection and in tears.

"Come on, girl," said Tanzan at once. Feeling compassion for her, he lifted her in his arms and carried her over the mud.

Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he no longer could restrain himself. "We monks don't go near females," he told Tanzan, "especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?"

"I left the girl there," said Tanzan. "Are you still carrying her?"

Modern Reading: “Falling Trees” by: Robert Fulghum, “All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten”

“In the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific some villagers practice a unique form of logging. If a tree is too large to be felled with an ax, the natives cut it down by yelling at it. (Can't lay my hands on the article, but I swear I read it.) Woodsmen with special powers creep up on a tree just at dawn and suddenly scream at it at the top of their lungs. They continue this for thirty days. The tree dies and falls over. The theory is that the hollering kills the spirit of the tree. According to the villagers, it always works.

“Ah, those poor nave innocents. Such quaintly charming habits of the jungle. Screaming at trees, indeed. How primitive. Too bad thay don't have the advantages of modern technology and the scientific mind.

“Me? I yell at my wife. And yell at the telephone and the lawn mower. And yell at the TV and the newspaper and my children. I've been known to shake my fist and yell at the sky at times.

“Man next door yells at his car a lot. And this summer I heard him yell at a stepladder for most of an afternoon. We modern, urban, educated folks yell at traffic and umpires and bills and banks and machines--especially machines. Machines and relatives get most of the yelling.

“Don't know what good it does. Machines and things just sit there. Even kicking doesn't always help. As for people, well, the Solomon Islanders may have a point. Yelling at living things does tend to kill the spirit in them. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts....”

Sermon:

I agree with Robert Fulghum that yelling is not always the most productive way to handle problems, but don't you enjoy getting angry sometimes?  I certainly do.  I love getting angry at the New York Yankees and the Dallas Cowboys, at reality shows, and inane commercials, and of course the stock market.  I'm even partial to the sentiment of Mark Twain when he said, “In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.”

I especially get angry at boneheaded politicians. Sometimes I'll throw a pillow at the television when I hear them manipulating, pandering and lying. I've been especially angry lately at the presidential candidates for being so angry with each other.

Oops! There seems to be a problem here, doesn't there? Could it be that I'm falling into the anger trap?  I get so angry with myself when I do that!  Oops! I did it again, didn't I?

You may have noticed that sometimes I get caught in the anger trap when I preach.  It's a temptation to be like the Old Testament prophets who call down the wrath of God on those who I believe are just not doing what they should be doing.  It may come across as an intolerant attitude of “Take this sermon and shove it!”  But there is something so delicious about being self-righteous!

The theologian, Frederick Buechner , wrote that, “Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun.  To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back -- in many ways it is a feast fit for a king.  The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you. “

OK, so there are a few drawbacks to this wrath thing.  But it's so hard not to be angry.  The Buddhist writer, Pema Chodron, tells the story told by Jarvis Masters, a prisoner on death row and an author.  “Jarvis has his TV on in his cell but he doesn't have the sound on because he's using the light of the TV to read.  And every once in a while, he looks up at the screen, then yells to people down the cell block to ask what's happening.  The first time, someone yells back, 'It's the Ku Klux Klan, Jarvis, and they're all yelling and complaining about how it's the blacks and the Jews who are responsible for all these problems.'  About half an hour later, he yells again, 'Hey, what's happening now?'  And a voice calls back, 'That's the Greenpeace folks. They're demonstrating about the fact that the rivers are being polluted and the trees are being cut down and the animals are being hurt and our Earth is being destroyed.'  Some time later, he calls out again, 'Now what's going on?'  And someone says, 'Oh, Jarvis, that's the U.S. Senate and that guy who's up there is ... blaming the other guys, the other side, the other political party, for all the financial difficulty this country's in.'  “Jarvis starts laughing and he calls down, 'I've learned something here tonight.  Sometimes they're wearing Klan outfits, sometimes they're wearing Greenpeace outfits, sometimes they're wearing suits and ties, but they all have the same angry faces.'”

He's right.  Everywhere we look we see people with the same angry faces. This anger often rises to violence and even warfare. While our children play games that portray themselves as heroes graphically slaughtering their enemies, our government is carrying on two wars that pit our nation against enemies that have been dehumanized to the point that we feel free to torture them.  I'm getting angry again about all this anger!

But where does all this anger come from? Some say from our Jewish/Christian religious roots. Most of us grew up hearing stories about the wrath of God. When God was upset with humanity – and it happened frequently – he would respond with a righteous wrath, driving Adam and Eve out of the Garden, destroying every human being on the Earth except Noah and his family, smiting the Egyptians, slaughtering the Philistines, and on and on.

But the greatest wrath was saved for those who would not accept Christ as our savior. Those were the folks who would be cast into the eternal fires of hell. Talk about over-reacting! The theologian Karen Armstrong thinks the real purpose of hell was to create entertainment for those in heaven as they peered over their parapets at those who are suffering intolerable torment.  No wonder we have anger issues!  Many of our religious heros – not to mention political ones -- have been ruthless, violent, sociopaths. Today Yahweh would be thrown into prison an eternity for all the laws he broke in his heyday.

Many times anger is actually a normal human response that allows us to protect our autonomy. But it becomes one of the seven deadly sins when it becomes harmful and hateful. This deep anger not only hurts others but it isolates those who express it.

Deep anger is deadly not only for the individual but for relationships. In the book “Blink” Malcolm Gladwell tells how researchers analyze marriages by doing “thin slicing,” that is, taking small segments of interviews and predicting the possibility of success and failure of the relationship. For instance, he discovers “that for a marriage to survive, the ratio of positive to negative emotion in a given encounter has to be at least five to one.”  Yes, five to one. That means that in any relationship, we should be saying at least five nice things for every not-so-nice thing. Minimum. That's scary, isn't it?

The most effective way to thin-slice a relationship, researchers discovered, was to ask a couple to tell the story of how they met. By telling the story of the most important event in their relationship, the signature or the marital DNA, becomes clear, as does the future of the relationship. The researchers looked at several indicators in these stories, including defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and the most important of all, contempt.

Contempt is a deep anger that comes from a perceived superior position. “A lot of the time it's an insult,” writes Gladwell: 'You are a bitch. You're scum.' It's trying to put that person on a lower plane than you... “ Not only can the success or failure of a marriage be accurately predicted on the basis on whether contempt exists in a relationship, but researchers have found ... “that the presence of contempt ... can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or a wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system.”

Let's be honest: all of us – and I mean all of us – need less anger in our lives, don't we? And some of us need a lot less. We cannot live a spiritual life as a wrathful person. Anger will keep us from being happy and healthy.

So what can we do about it? First of all, we can learn to forgive. To forgive does not mean that we can't be angry. In fact, anger is a vital part of the process of forgiveness.

Too many times forgiveness is just a nice word for denying our pain and anger, but if the goal is to heal the relationship and to make it as whole as possible, then we must claim our pain and anger. To say that we're willing to forget we've been wronged does not heal a relationship. Only truth heals a relationship.

The only way to reshape a relationship into the curve of connection is to communicate our hurt and yes, our anger. As Phyllis Diller said, “Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.” But -- and this is especially important -- the purpose of the anger must not be to hurt the perpetrator of the pain, but to bring balance back to the relationship. If our intent is to hurt rather than heal then we've jumped onto that endless merry-go-round of retaliation that will eventually destroy our spirit.

There's a Buddhist story that tells of just such a situation. "A man is struck by an arrow from an unknown assailant. Rather than tending to the wound, he refuses to remove the arrow until the archer is found and punished. In the meantime the wound festers until finally the poison kills him. Which is the more responsible for this death: the archer's letting go of the arrow or the victim's foolish holding on to his anger? “

Which is the most dangerous to us: the poison of someone else's anger or the poison of our own anger? If I'm hurt, it does not give me the right to hurt another. And if I choose to do so, I'm hurting not only the person I am angry at, but I'm hurting myself. Isn't this what often happens when we get angry? It may be someone we love very much. It may be someone who is long ago dead, and yet we continue fighting with them, holding onto our wrath, and thus keeping ourselves trapped in the past.

It's only after we've been able to lovingly express our anger that we can finally let go of it. Just like the reading this morning about the monk who was angry with the other monk for carrying the young woman across the stream, we need to let go of our resentments. Or think about that big bag of rotting potatoes we're hauling around that you heard about in the For All Ages – not a good way to live, is it?

This letting go frees us to be fully human.  We're freed from needing resentment and anger as an excuse for our shortcomings. We're freed from needing to punish others – and thus ourselves – for our pain. We're also freed from needing to identify ourselves as victims instead of powerful persons with great possibilities.

Once we're able to forgive and let go of our anger, then we can move towards graceful activism, or what the Buddhist call loving-kindness. The practice of loving-kindness calls for the embracing of our anger so that we may accept and learn from that which we fear and resent. Then we let the anger dissolve into loving-kindness as we cultivate an attitude that embraces all and allows for no separation. Loving-kindness also gives us the ability to transform our anger into compassionate action. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmitted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmitted into a power that can move the world.”

Anger, lovingly expressed and intended to heal instead of harm, gives us the power we need to change our world for the better. How can we not be angry when we see our Earth being ravaged, when we witness an unjust war, when we experience people being dehumanized through racism and hatred. But by using wrath and rage as a weapon we become that which we are fighting. As a Buddhist saying goes, when we point a finger at someone else, four fingers are pointing back at us.

Our challenge is to channel those angry feelings into loving-kindness and graceful activism. We don't want to suppress or repress the anger, but to open our hearts so that energy can move through the filtering system of compassion and forgiveness. We need to be able to look into the eyes of those we blame and see ourselves. Then we need to work for peace and justice with love.

There’s a story I've told before but bears repeating. It's about an old Cherokee who one evening told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. “He said, 'My son, the battle is between two 'wolves' inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.' The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: 'Which wolf wins?' The old Cherokee simply replied, 'The one you feed.'”

May we feed that better part of ourselves so that we may breathe in peace and breathe out love.

So may it be.

Sources of inspiration for sermon:

“Awakening the Buddha Within” by Lama Surya Das

“Practicing Peace” by Pema Chodron

“Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell

“Anger” by Thich Nhat Hanh

"Living in Communion: An interview with Father Thomas Hopko, Parabola, Volume XII

Parabola: The Seven Deadly Sins Volume X Number 4

Questions for Covenant Groups and others:

1. What makes you angry?
2. What helps you to deal with your anger?
3. Do you remember a time when someone was angry with you? How did it make you feel?
4. Do you remember a time when you have forgiven someone? How did that feel?
5. Do you remember a time when you have been forgiven? How did that feel?