Do Not Let the Sun Go Down on Anger

 Transcribed from the sermon preached August 9, 2009

 The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Scripture Readings: Ephesians 4:25-5:2, Wisdom 2

Wis.2

[1] For they reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves,
"Short and sorrowful is our life,
and there is no remedy when a man comes to his end,
and no one has been known to return from Hades.
[2] Because we were born by mere chance,
and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been;
because the breath in our nostrils is smoke,
and reason is a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts.
[3] When it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes,
and the spirit will dissolve like empty air.
[6] "Come, therefore, let us enjoy the good things that exist,
and make use of the creation to the full as in youth.
[7] Let us take our fill of costly wine and perfumes,
and let no flower of spring pass by us.
[8] Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither.
[9] Let none of us fail to share in our revelry,
everywhere let us leave signs of enjoyment,
because this is our portion, and this our lot.
[10] Let us oppress the righteous poor man;
let us not spare the widow
nor regard the gray hairs of the aged.
[11] But let our might be our law of right,
for what is weak proves itself to be useless.

[12] "Let us lie in wait for the righteous man,
because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions;
he reproaches us for sins against the law,
and accuses us of sins against our training.
[13] He professes to have knowledge of God,
and calls himself a child of the Lord.
[14] He became to us a reproof of our thoughts;
[15] the very sight of him is a burden to us,
because his manner of life is unlike that of others,
and his ways are strange.
[16] We are considered by him as something base,
and he avoids our ways as unclean;
he calls the last end of the righteous happy,
and boasts that God is his father.
[17] Let us see if his words are true,
and let us test what will happen at the end of his life;
[18] for if the righteous man is God's son, he will help him,
and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries.
[19] Let us test him with insult and torture,
that we may find out how gentle he is,
and make trial of his forbearance.
[20] Let us condemn him to a shameful death,
for, according to what he says, he will be protected."

[21] Thus they reasoned, but they were led astray,
for their wickedness blinded them,
[22] and they did not know the secret purposes of God,
nor hope for the wages of holiness,
nor discern the prize for blameless souls;
[23] for God created man for incorruption,
and made him in the image of his own eternity,
[24] but through the devil's envy death entered the world,
and those who belong to his party experience it.

Ephesians 4:25 – 5:2

[25] Therefore, putting away falsehood, let every one speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another.
[26] Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger,
[27] and give no opportunity to the devil.
[28] Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his hands, so that he may be able to give to those in need.
[29] Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for edifying, as fits the occasion, that it may impart grace to those who hear.
[30] And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, in whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.
[31] Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, with all malice,
[32] and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

[1] Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children.
[2] And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

Here we are again, back in the beautiful letter to the Ephesians.  Paul, or a Pauline disciple is giving advise on personal strength and relationship.  The goal Paul puts before us is freedom, freedom from allowing ourselves to be controlled by the behavior and words of others, freedom from reactivity, and freedom from the devil, from those inner voices that would have us be ruled by lying, bitterness, wrath, anger, clamoring and slander.

[26] Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger,
[27] and give no opportunity to the devil. Opportunity to the devil?

          Now many of us modern folks would rather ignore the devil, ignore the very concept of the devil, to assign such mythical imagery as a superstitious creation of a bygone era, something to be left to the fundamentalist whackos. Or perhaps we take the anthropologists approach: the devil is an evolving cultural construct that serves a certain social purpose in a particular historical context, but is just a creation of that culture we study with nothing relevant for our educated modern culture or our individual life.  Constructed or not, the devil forms a part of a Christian psychology which I would like to unveil today for it is a model of self and cosmos which holds much truth, and certainly a more powerful truth than the variety of modern models of psychology. 

Most of us would admit at least to ourselves that we hear voices in our head pushing us on to compete and grasp for what little power and pleasure we may obtain in this life or voices which tell us we are powerless, no good, shameful, and therefore unable to trust that anyone would really want to be good to or love us.  So often we are tempted to distrust others, and to try and manipulate our way.  We know of angry voices within ourselves that jump up to take control when we are threatened or disrespected. When someone pushes our buttons, we react.

          OK. So we may get nervous with this talk of inner voices, fearing association with psychological delusion, psychotic or schizophrenic personality.  But acknowledging that we have parts of our personality that play unique roles in the self system can give us strength to identify them and thereby make more conscious and free choices.  We can even choose to love those parts of ourselves for trying, even if in a wrong way, to protect or gain power for us.  Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

          Freud sought to locate mind and its parts as a creation of and existing within the physical being or brain.  So he created a new map.  He tossed out God and inserted the Super Ego.  He tossed out the devil inserted the animalistic, greedy, selfish, pleasure seeking little Id.  Then the ego tries to make its way dealing with the other two.

          In the psychology of the Christianity, there is God, personified creative force and collective power for goodness and truth.  There is the Devil, personified collective force for evil and falsehood.  There is what Paul calls the Flesh, the physical, animal part of self, which is easily driven or tempted by the devil.  And there is the Holy Spirit, which is our true self, in alignment, in co-creative existence with the Creative Force and power for goodness and truth…that is God. 

          Using the analogy of waves: God is the Creative life force, who creates and sends out waves of life and love.  The Holy Spirit is the wave that is sent out.  When we are on track, “sealed” as Paul says, we go with the flow; we participate as part of the wave of life and love. 

          But these parts of the personality in Christianity are not just creations existing only in the mind.  Like Jung’s “collective unconscious”, they are bigger than or go beyond the mind or our physical being, and encompass the life of the community and indeed the entire cosmos and its Creative Force. 

          Minds together create spiritual waves of identity that take on an existence larger than the individual minds who imagine them: the collective mind then helps create the individual mind. We see this in collective fear or hatred, in cultural or social forms of power and popularity. We see the great powers of the world change heads but very rarely principle.  The New Testament refers to these as the powers and principalities of this world.  Powers and Principalities encompass and are embodied by emperors and the elite, but they are more: the spirit, the collective unconscious of the evil and powerful.  On the opposite wave, we see Jesus embody the Holy Spirit to the degree that when we see him we see the Spirit of God.  He is both fully human, a regular human being, but also fully God, fully tapped into, sealed into, the eternal wave of the Spirit and the Creative Force, which is God, the Alpha and the Omega. 

          For more modern examples of the reality of spirit beyond mind, we saw the great wave of teamwork and the love of freedom that helped dig America out of the great depression and on to defeat that great collective evil - the Nazis with their beastly head Hitler. We felt collective grief after 9/11, and a collective anger that took us uncritically into a war with Iraq.  We felt the collective shame of the sin of racism during Hurricane Katrina, and regardless of party, we celebrate the hope and power of the spirit to overcome tenacious divisions in the election of an African American president. Fashion is a simple form of this collective wave that carries changing definitions of beauty, art, class, education, sexuality, power, success and popularity.  While there are nuances of truth and beauty in fashion, more often than not the changes serve to keep power the same, as the lower classes are always behind if they can even afford to care.  

          Also, self is formed and exists within a larger family system, which has waves of strength and weakness; there are loving and judgmental, sick and anxious, healing and nourishing parts or aspects to family.  They all interact and impact one another, and help form our individual self.

          These collective waves run through us, whether family, social or cosmic; we internalize them and live them out, and send them out – living our part of the wave. We participate in this spiritual wave in small ways through each and every thought and action, and we contribute with our whole life.  And our individual life has a flow that leads us to productive or non-productive, truth or falsehood, love and trust or selfishness and hate.  As Christians we believe that when our physical bodies die, the wave energy of which we are a part, the spirit continues.  Moreover, our uniqueness, the uniqueness of our contribution to the wave of life, the wave of the Holy Spirit goes on, it continues to live.

So when Paul says, “We are members of one another.  Be angry, but do not sin.  Do not let the sun go down on your anger. Give no opportunity to the devil,” he is speaking both of a day and of our life, of immediate action and relation this day, and metaphorically, toward that time when the light of our life fades into the darkness of death.   Also, he is speaking to individuals and to the community of believers, to the body of Christ.

          If we live in the Holy Spirit, then we move with love.  Even when others are angry, even when the society is angry or living with falsehood as truth, by God’s grace so sweetly offered through Jesus, with the strength of the Holy Spirit we choose the loving way.  We choose to let go of our anger, to not hold onto it.  When someone pushes our buttons with meanness or falsehood, we do not immediately react, but stay open and conscious of the Holy Spirit’s plan of truth and love.

          We can’t help but get angry.  That is a part of life.  But we don’t have to let our anger enslave our actions.  We can keep anger finite while love springs eternal.  Anger is not our determiner.  By God’s grace we claim the power to let it go and move on with love; love for ourselves and love for others.  

Some things are so hurtful, painful, and difficult that they make us feel alone, they draw our consciousness inward until we feel small and disconnected.  The mysterious spiritual dimension of life fades into darkness.  These painful events or relations make us want to break away, to hide or run or fight.  Then we do things to restrain or control, to hurt, or break or steal from others.  We get angry at ourselves, at our small and sinful being.  We try to hold ourselves together, to pull ourselves out of it.  We get tight and rigid, losing resiliency.  We fear our ability to go on.

          This is the spot where we must give up our lives.  We must risk losing our lives in order to gain life.  We let go of our hold on our self, our life, and discover that we are lifted up to new life, lifted up as on eagles’ wing, carried on the wave of the Holy Spirit by grace.  The sun goes down on our anger, but we find with the psalmist “If I say, "Let only darkness cover me, and the light about me be night,” even the darkness is not dark to thee,
the night is bright as the day; for is as light with thee.

          Or with John imprisoned in Patmos we envision
”A new heaven and a new earth…the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband;
"Behold, the dwelling of God is with humans. God will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God herself will be with them; she will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away." And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.
And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.

          As we let die the part of our self that can’t let go of anger, the part of ourselves that the devil knows so well, as that part of our self dies, we are offered a new being, humble in self but powerful in the Spirit.  We are a unique child of God, children of the Creative Force of the Universe, coheirs with Christ, and we are members of a body larger than our own, the family of God.

          With this great hope, we are empowered to be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgives us.  We grow onto be imitators of God, grafted in the Holy Spirit, beloved children. We seek to walk in love, like Christ, to make of our lives a fragrant offering.