In the second of a sermon series on everyday spiritual challenges, Pastor Brooks focused on the subject of anger. Listen to the sermon now.
Scripture Reading—James 1: 16-20
A core part of our identity as a church is our commitment to being open and affirming. While this has historically been associated with unconditionally welcoming and embracing LGBT persons, being open and affirming can have a broader meaning as well. It essentially has to do with how we relate to whoever walks through our front door. Do we treat them as a child of God? Do we treat them as we would want to be treated ourselves? With that said, as your pastor, I think it is part of my responsibility to occasionally challenge you to think about how you can stretch your arms even wider to embrace people. In order to do that this morning, I want you to imagine that emotions and feelings are people and that through the front door of our church walks none other than anger himself (or herself as the case might be).
Now, let’s be honest… Are there some of you who would rather not let Anger through the door? Am I only one who doesn’t like being around someone who is angry, especially if they are angry at me? Actually, someone doesn’t even need to be angry at me for it to feel unpleasant. Moreover, doesn’t anger seem like mainly a negative thing? Would it really be so bad to just bar anger from entering? It would seem like it might make more sense to be open and affirming of everyone, except Anger personified or simply angry persons. While it might be easy to think that churches should be no-fly zones for anger, before we get carried away, I am reminded of a children’s book I have been reading to my daughter lately. It’s a book written by Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. The book is about when Arun went to live in his grandfather’s village. One day Arun was playing soccer with the other boys in the village, and in the midst of playing, he was knocked to the ground. He was convinced that the other kid did it intentionally, so filled with rage he picked up a stone to throw at the kid. Suddenly, however, he felt consumed by a sense of shame. Wouldn’t others wonder how Gandhi’s own grandson could possibly be so angry that he would want to hurt someone else? Arun dropped the rock and ran with tears streaming down his face to see his grandfather. He blurted out all his feelings to him, and Gandhi responded by observing that Arun’s anger was normal. Everyone at times feels angry. Arun is astonished to learn that “everyone” includes his grandfather.
The tricky thing about anger is that even though none of us like it, all of us have it. Whenever any of us walks through the door to the church, the reality of anger walks in as well, even for a peaceful saint like Gandhi. We can’t bar anger from coming in without barring ourselves or anyone else for that matter. This isn’t to say each one of us is always feeling angry when we walk through those doors. I hope not. Instead, the appropriate analogy here is that each of us experiences anger in the same way that we experience hunger, thirst, or pain. Anger is part of the normal realm of biological experiences for us as humans, and we should actually be glad that we evolved as humans to be get angry. Has anyone ever come to you after having a horrible experience in which they were wronged by someone, and you responded to them by saying, “You have a right to be angry”? When someone gets fired unfairly by his or her boss, that person has a right to be angry. The same goes for societal injustices as well. If a group of women are sterilized against their will, they have a right to be angry. What would the world be like if people didn’t get angry? You have perhaps heard that pain is your body’s way of sending you a message. Anger is similar. It has a message to send us, and sometimes that message is that all is not right. Sometimes the additional message is that things need to change.
There is a caveat with anger, however. This is also something that Gandhi told his grandson. After Gandhi explained that everyone gets angry, he went on to essentially say that what matters is what you do with that anger—do you let it strike like lightening or do you channel it and transform it into a productive source of light for yourself or others? Ultimately, the appropriate channeling of anger becomes the third path when it comes to anger. One response to anger is to repress it, and studies show that this has a negative impact on one’s health. It leads to high blood pressure which we know leads to other serious health problems. A second response to anger is to just uncork it and let it fly whichever way it wants to go. This actually has become an increasingly popular view. This approach has been called the “catharsis hypothesis.” We need to punch bags and let out primal screams. According to this view, we will feel better if we just let it all rush out, but as a number of studies have pointed out, this is actually a myth. As one writer notes, these discharges of anger don’t soothe anger; they fuel it. Thus, the answer is to take the third path in which one neither represses anger nor unleashes it willy-nilly, but instead finds a healthy way to channel that anger and transform it. Sometimes this can entail doing some self-soothing as well. I know for me it helps to call someone I trust, so I can talk about what I am feeling. I also find a good physical activity like a walk or a run helps release some of the negative energy I have. Often a lot of us have good strategies for dealing with anger that we are not even consciously aware that we have or use.
With that said, anger is a difficult emotion to handle whether it is coming from ourselves or someone else. With regard to our church, it does help to first realize that Mr. and Mrs. Anger walking through the door could be us. I think that is one step toward living up to our Open and Affirming ethos as a church. And, remember anger is a feeling. It is not an action. When I talk about Mr. or Mrs. Anger walking through the door, I am not talking about someone coming in with guns blazing. I am talking about someone coming in with a feeling that they can act upon in any number of ways. Whether or not guns should come into our church is a separate issue, and some churches do put up signs saying, “No guns allowed.”
Even with this point made, letting Anger through the door can still be a tough idea to swallow, but I think it is actually an idea for which Open and Affirming churches are well-suited. This realization came to me when I discovered the work of a psychiatry instructor at Harvard named Joseph Shrand. Shrand is known for his work in directing a drug treatment intervention program for teenagers. As I watched a video of him, I thought this was interesting because, as they say, “He’s no spring chicken,” but the more I learned about him, the more I realized why he is able to cross the age gap and work so effectively with people much younger than himself. Based on the experience and knowledge he has gained from both everyday life and his work with addicted teenagers and adult psychiatric cases, Shrand has written a book entitled, Outsmarting Anger.
In the book, Shrand looks at both approaches that work and approaches that don’t work when it comes to engaging people who are angry. What doesn’t work is to dismiss someone’s feelings of anger: “Losing your temper won’t help things.” What doesn’t work is to try to change someone’s feelings: “You need to calm down.” What doesn’t work is to lay down like a doormat, because then you are not doing your own dignity and self-worth any favors. What really doesn’t work, is to just tell someone, they have an anger problem. Has anyone ever experienced that just leading to more anger? Finally, what really, really doesn’t work is to escalate the situation with your own anger, because that is when things can really blow up. What works instead is to disarm a person’s anger with respect, with empathy, and with listening. This resonates with our scripture for today. James says, “Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.” Note how it doesn’t say everyone should simply stop being angry. Shrand also lists other ways to disarm a person’s anger. One way is to have a genuine interest in what they are feeling. Another is to enter into the situation with a sincere demeanor of peace and calmness. Another is to engage the person with a magnanimous offer of friendship. And, then finally, it can occasionally help to have a well-timed, appropriate sense of humor. One of the main thrusts behind Shrand’s approach is to make sure that the person who is carrying the anger comes to feel truly valued. This more than anything else can disarm people of their anger. All of Shrand’s thoughts about engaging people who are angry struck me as resonating deeply with how an open and affirming church should probably engage people in general.
There is also a lot of common sense behind Shrand’s approach. The novelist Louisa May Alcott once observed, “It takes two flints to make a fire.” By controlling our own response and actions, we can refuse to thrust out the second flint. Moreover, we can create a space in which the other can say, “Hey, this person is actually listening to me and respecting what I have to say. I can put down my flint as well.” Shrand gives some remarkable examples of putting his ideas to work in his own life. One of my favorites is the day he came home from work to find someone he didn’t know nailing a yard sign in Shrand’s front lawn. Shrand was annoyed to say the least, but he had enough self-awareness to go into the situation knowing that it wouldn’t help to be a second piece of flint. Sure enough, one piece of flint was already present. As Shrand approached the man, he could sense from the man’s body language that this person was bristling with anger and had a defiant attitude. With a calm and gentle voice, Shrand asked the gentleman what he was doing. In a very defensive manner, the man responded by saying that he was putting the yard sign next to the fire hydrant because it was public property and he had the right to do so. Instead of confronting of him, Shrand used humor to begin disarming the man. He made a joke about how the man could put up the yard sign so long as it didn’t endorse a political candidate he opposed. The man then began to calm down and the two proceeded to have a remarkable conversation in which Shrand learned that the man was announcing a yard sale after having spent the last three years going through all of his late wife’s belongings. The man also shared how one day he made breakfast for his wife and was bringing coffee to her in bed when he entered their bedroom to find her lying there peaceful, but unresponsive and not breathing. Tears came into the man’s eyes as he spoke, and suddenly this situation that could have been one of angry escalation became one in which two strangers made a remarkably deep connection with each other.
Shrand has successfully used his approach with teenagers who suffer from addiction and who frequently carry with them a lot of anger. What he says about this experience is this, “For many of these [teenagers], surviving what they have been through has made them amazing empathizers. They understand rejection, negligence, abuse, and personal struggles more than many adults.” Through his work with them in his program, “they are praised and seen as valuable.” Soon, a new pattern of social behavior emerges. They “begin to be supportive of each other’s recovery and sobriety as part of their own restoration.”
This may be a radically jarring idea, but what if we saw Shrand’s treatment program as a metaphor for us as an open and affirming church. What if we unconditionally embraced people with anger or no anger, and what if in doing so, we became a place of restoration. What if in doing so, we ultimately multiplied the power of empathy and support that we have as a church. In a way, values such as empathy, respect, and affirmation become the gifts that keep on giving. And, so my friends, I say, “Let anger walk through our door! And let it be part of what makes this church such a sacred and wonderful place to be.” Amen.