Monthly Archives: January 2012

Paul’s advice to not let the sun go down on our anger confronts the danger of nurturing anger within us until it becomes destructive. When you experience anger, following Paul’s advice, it is important to act in a way that can resolve it. When you act to resolve feelings of anger, you are retaining your power over the anger rather than allowing it to dominate your personhood.

An important first step is to own your power over your emotions. Victor Frankel reminds us, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning that the last and most precious freedom that we have is the power to choose our response to whatever is happening to us. Writing from a Nazi concentration camp, he suggested that the Nazi guards could act in hateful and cruel ways but the power they could never acquire over him was the power to choose how he was going to respond. He could choose to hate them, feel pity for them, laugh at them, or even have compassion for the way that hatred had distorted their personality. That freedom to choose his response gave him dignity in a very dehumanizing situation.

Two days ago I asked you to make a quick list of ten things, people, or conditions that generated anger within you. Now look at that list. Taking them one at a time, first consider what alternative emotional responses you could choose rather than anger. You may not want to choose another response, but you have the freedom to do so.

Having taken control of your capacity to choose, I want to suggest a further step. If the Spirit of God is present in your life, how might you choose to respond in a manner that holds the possibility of building up the community rather than further isolating you within it. Anger has frequently become the generating force that has resulted in transforming actions. A mother’s anger at the fact that her daughter was killed by a drunk driver, resulted in the formation of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers that has saved countless lives. Don’t overwhelm yourself, but pick one of two from your list and consider how you might allow your anger to move you in a redemptive directions. Even as you do that, I think that you will discover that anger has become less destructive in your own life.

A major reality that we have to confront in what we might call an age of anger is the fact that anger often hurts the person who is angry more than the person or situation that is the object of their anger. While it is true that occasionally an angry person will erupt in violence or otherwise express their anger in ways that harm others, for the most part unresolved anger hurts the person who is feeling it. When Paul says, “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.” Eph. 4:26, he is offering some good advice for one’s personal mental health as well as speaking a truth for the community.

One of the criteria that Paul insists on for measuring action is only doing or saying that which builds up the community. This is a practical expansion of Jesus central teaching that all the rules of life can be summed up in loving God and loving neighbor. Anger that we hold on to tends to isolate us from both God and neighbor. You might share with God an anger concerning conditions or actions that hurt others, but the objective of God’s anger is always towards redemption. Being angry at conditions that cause little children to starve, for example, only has value if it moves towards those children getting fed. To truly love God requires us to love those who God loves, and that includes the sinners that rebel against God. Paul is an obvious example. He, by his actions, had become an enemy of God but God’s action was towards redeeming Paul so that he might become God’s instrument for advancing the church.

While, in most cases, you don’t have the power to change evil people into good people, holding on to that anger only permits them to have power over you and “makes room for the devil.” So tomorrow let us look at the strategies by which you might redirect the energy generated by anger towards attitudes, actions, etc that are less harmful to you the believer.