Sunday, February 24 - Anger

This sermon was preached for the 7th Sunday after Epiphany, Sunday, February 24 at Church of Our Saviour in Oakland, CA. The texts for this sermon were: Genesis 45:3-11, 15, 1 Corinthians 15:35-38,42-50, Luke 6:27-38, and Psalm 37:1-12, 41-42.

Our passage from Genesis today features a beautiful moment of reconciliation between brothers. But to understand this moment we have to go back. Back to a man named Jacob.

Jacob was blessed with many children but he loved one child, Joseph, more than all the rest. Jacob gave Joseph all the best chores, the fancy clothes, and his favor and approval. And Joseph turned around and rubbed it in everyone's faces. He tattled on his brothers to his father and he bragged about how he was destined for greatness and to rule over his family.

So Joseph's brothers were angry. Quite reasonably angry. Might you even say that they had every right to be angry?

Here is what they did with their anger: they plotted to kill Joseph. They threw him in a pit. They sold him into slavery.

Now then there is Potiphar. Potiphar buys this handsome slave Joseph, who works hard and gains his trust. But then one day Potiphar's wife comes running into him screaming that his slave has insulted her and tried to do worse.

Doesn't Potiphar have a right to be angry in this moment? Isn't it understandable why he becomes engaged?

Here's what he does with his anger: he locks Joseph into prison to rot.

But Joseph, through tricks and turns and the blessings of God, rises to power and prominence over all of Egypt anyway. And who should come to him for help but his own ten older brothers, suffering under the same devastating famine that was the key to Joseph’s financial and political success.

Now, Joseph, Joseph who at this point has been betrayed by his own brothers, who had his life and family and liberty ripped away from him as a teenager, and been wrongfully accused and thrown into prison---Wasn’t Joseph, out of anyone, right to be angry at the family who had betrayed him so horribly?

Here is what he did with his anger: He pretended not to know them. He tested their trustworthiness. He set up difficult, almost impossible tasks for them.

But that all comes before our passage from Genesis. This moment, here, when Joseph chose to do the unexpected. “Joseph could no longer control himself,” the Book of Genesis records. “He wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and household of Pharaoh heard it. And Joseph said to his brothers, ‘I am Joseph’…and Joseph said to his brothers, “Come closer to me.”

Nobel Peace Prize nominee Scilla Elworthy had this to say about anger: “Wherever there is injustice, there is anger, and anger is like gasoline -- if you spray it around and somebody lights a matchstick, you have an inferno. But anger inside an engine is powerful: it can drive us forward and can get us through dreadful moments and give us power.”

Throughout the story of Joseph, there is blatant injustice. You’ve got the unfairness of favoritism and sibling rivalry. The horrible inhumanity of slavery. The fear that the one you love has been threatened and violated. The terrible fracture of betrayal and lies. And so, throughout the story of Joseph, there is anger. Justifiable anger. Righteous anger.

Despite what the Psalmist would have us believe, the problem here is not the anger itself. The problem is what we do with it. Do we light the match that begins the inferno of harm? Or do we build the engine and power it, together?

Joseph chooses, finally, to step back from his life and take a longer view. He sees the wider injustices of the life around him. He sees the inequality of the storehouses of grain in Egypt and the famine that turned his family into desperate refugees.

When he is ready, Joseph chooses to say, “Come closer.” And with his family, they begin to form a plan together that will save their people from death. Following the lead of the one who was dealt with most unjustly, all that anger takes on a new purpose.

Sometimes the question isn’t about who is right and who was wronged. Everyone in this story has a right to be angry, even the father, Jacob, who had himself suffered under fatherly favoritism and sibling rivalry.

The question instead turns out to be: What is the injustice here? And what are its roots? In this moment, can I look past the person in front of me who has totally infuriated me? Can I look beyond to the larger problems and pressures that have coalesced into this moment, and make the unexpected choice?

In the passage from the Sermon on the Plain in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus lists examples of several moments when it would be understandable to be angry. Being smacked in the face is a big one, and so is being stolen from and taken advantage of. Lending and not being paid back.

Jesus offers his followers a choice in those moments. The choice we are being given is not about what to feel. Jesus does not say to us, “do not feel anger." See, the “love” in “love your enemies” is not an emotion. It’s a verb. A verb right alongside “do good” and “bless” and “pray.” What matters is what we do with the anger.

Do we take a step back to see the poverty that lead someone to steal? Do we recognize how cycles of violence carry through generations? Do we choose to do the unexpected: to take our anger and put it into the engine that breaks apart the painful patterns that lead us here again and again.

Here is the good news: Jesus was born as a human being. He took into himself to all the human conflict and jealousy and anger of all the generations of human beings before him, going back beyond Jacob and Joseph and all his brothers. Jesus came, in his body and his words and his actions, to be another way. The unexpected way that breaks through it all.

So what if we really did take Scilla Elworthy at her word and thought of anger as a fuel? What if we saw it as a potential gift, precious energy, the church and the world need to do the unexpected thing?

What if we say--when we are ready-- “Come closer.” Come, let us build that engine together.