I originally posted this as part of an update on our family’s Sabbatical Year site. I wanted to share it with all of you here, too… 

I’ll start with a confession/acknowledgment. I’ve always turned my nose up at community events put on by churches. I’m thinking about “secular” events––the kind that could have just as easily been sponsored by a Rotary Club or the city hall––where they distribute a little grab-bag at the end with information about the church and maybe a brief articulation of the gospel. Or sometimes a little bolder: someone takes the microphone near the end of the event and shares the gospel and/or invites people to come to a worship service.

Now we’ve come to Spain and helped put on several community events and activities sponsored by the church. We ran an English Weekend in September, held a big Thanksgiving dinner in November, and sponsored a secular concert in January. We’re teaching English classes to government workers for free every Friday. Next week, we’ll be in all seven of Algete’s elementary schools leading an “English Week” program. None of these are exclusively Christian activities. That is, any Rotary Club could do them without needing to make any changes (except for that little handout telling people who we are and giving them an invitation to our church gatherings).

Rather than turning my nose up, I’ve come to appreciate these activities and look forward to more opportunities for them. That change of heart has come because I’ve seen a different reason for the activities in the first place. In the past, I’ve seen the invitation as the real point of these activities. Why does a church hold a concert or a children’s fair? So they can invite people to their church or share the gospel. If they knew that no one would respond to those invitations, they wouldn’t waste their time on the events.

But the invitation has never been the point of the activities here. There’s no veiled, real agenda. The point has been to bless.

Blessing

We wrote early on about the way the church here emphasizes prayer––a more serious emphasis than I’ve ever seen or given before. Most unique to the church’s prayers here is a focus on blessing. We spend a lot of time praying God’s blessing over Spain, the city of Algete, and its people.

The church has especially taken Psalm 132 as a word for us. The psalm says,

13 For the LORD has chosen Zion,
he has desired it for his dwelling, saying,
14 “This is my resting place for ever and ever;
here I will sit enthroned, for I have desired it.
15 I will bless her with abundant provisions;
her poor I will satisfy with food.
16 I will clothe her priests with salvation,
and her faithful people will ever sing for joy.”

One of our leaders began asking last year whether God could say the same for Algete. Whether God has chosen Algete, desiring to dwell here and bless its people. [1. The psalm’s reference to Zion as God’s chosen place isn’t insignificant. There are lots of big theological things happening here. You can’t just replace “Zion” with any city of your choosing. And yet, we still believe there’s a word here for us about our particular location.] As the church, the Body of Christ, we want to join in that blessing.

Why do we do English camps and classes and presentations? Why do we sponsor “secular” concerts and Thanksgiving dinners? To bless. Those events have no veiled purpose. Yes, we hand out information about the church and invite people to join us. We do that because we want to invite people at every opportunity. But those invitations truly aren’t the reason for the events. If we knew no one would respond to our invitation, even after doing months’ worth of free English classes, would we still do the classes? Absolutely! We don’t do them to add new people to our church. We do them because we’re part of the Church, and the Church blesses.

Maybe this has always been the point of all those “secular” events I’ve seen churches sponsoring, and I’m late to understand it. If their primary purpose is veiled and strategic––trying to bait people with an event, then hook them with an invitation––well then, I continue to turn my nose up at those. But there’s a place for the church to bless just for the sake of blessing. We bless not to achieve some other goal, but because we are a people of blessing. I’m embarrassed that I’m only now seeing that more clearly.

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Are you an angry person?

If you are, let’s start with something unusual. Let’s celebrate that.

“A study of the accordance will show that there are more references in Scripture to the anger, fury, and wrath of God, than there are to His love and tenderness,” writes Arthur Pink.[1. In The Attributes of God, pp. 95-96]

Richard Niebuhr famously criticized liberal Protestants for ignoring that point: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”[1. The Kingdom of God in America (1937), New York: Harper and Row, 1959, p. 193] In Niebuhr’s formulation, the beginning of the error came by a denial of God’s wrath. So Garret Keizer says to the contrary, “I am unable to commit to any messiah who doesn’t knock over tables.”[1. in The Enigma of Anger, as quoted in Rebecca DeYoung’s Glittering Vices, p 121.]

Why would we celebrate a God who has wrath? A messiah who knocks over tables?

My favorite quote about anger may answer that question: “Great love is the root of great anger. You don’t get angry unless you care.”[1. Rebecca DeYoung, Glittering Vices, pp. 121-122. Again, I’m indebted to DeYoung’s work in this post more than I am probably even aware. You should read it.] We celebrate a God who has wrath because our world is full of injustice, and we want to know that God cares.

Wouldn’t you agree, too, that human anger has a godly place in our world? Yes God says, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay.”[1. Deuteronomy 32:35; Romans 12:19; Hebrews 10:30] Yet few of us would say that leaves no room for our own anger at injustice and our own efforts to repel it. Imagine a world without anger, outrage, and retribution. It would shrug at the Holocaust, acquit the rapist…

Anger shows that you care. It rises out of a great love.

When anger becomes a vice

Just as we’ve seen with lust and gluttony before, vices start with good things and then distort and pervert them. Anger becomes a vice when it misuses our desire for justice.

Fighting the wrong fights

Think back through your last week or month. When did you get angry? What was the injustice that drew your wrath?

If that anger showed that you care, if it arose out of a great love, what does it reveal about your love?

When I think back on my greatest moments of outrage, this self-assessment cuts pretty deep. I’ve had moments of righteous anger when I saw people blaspheming or misrepresenting God, or church workers doing poor work in the name of God. I’ve written with indignation about double-standards in church staffing situations.  Events like the Newtown school shooting have left me at once heartbroken and furious. But a lot of my anger has been spent on personal offenses.

When I look at the proportions, I’m sickened to see how strongly I’ve reacted, and how long I’ve burned, over perceived injustices done to me in the past. Moreover, I’ve seen how quickly I can get irritated and grit my teeth when something isn’t going precisely as I want. A low-grade anger starts to develop when the traffic lights seem against me, or when things at work or home don’t all run smoothly.

What does this say about my great love? It says that a lot of my great love is for myself.

I know we aren’t meant to be doormats––walked all over by other people without ever a word. We needn’t take every bit of injustice that comes our way or tolerate poor or inappropriate behavior forever. In the ministry setting, churches are often accused of being too slow to fire. We’ve been known to bear with great patience people who should have been let go long before. We need to recognize that patience has bounds, and when we cross them, we become simply negligent.

But I recognize too often in myself something opposite the description of God’s character. Did you know that eight times in Scripture, God is described as “slow to anger and abounding in love”?[1. Exod 34:6; Num 14:18; Neh 9:17; Ps 86:15; 103:8; 145:8; Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:2] Most of those times, he’s also called “compassionate and gracious.” To the contrary, my anger can come quickly and negate all love and compassion and grace.

What fights are you fighting? Are you fighting good fights? The kind of fights that God would fight––for justice and truth and beauty?

Fighting the wrong way

The other question to ask is how we fight when we’re angry.

Let’s acknowledge it: fighting dirty can feel good. Because it’s usually about achieving justice through the lowest common denominator––eye for eye, tooth for tooth, insult for insult, misery for misery.

These feel good because they’re quick answers that give us control. Damage inflicted in a moment can take years to heal. When we fight, we can be part of the slow struggle to heal or we can inflict quick damage.

This happens when we direct our anger at ourselves, too. A person angry at herself for something she did (or didn’t do) can seek peace, or she can choose to punish herself––taking vengeance against herself for past mistakes. How many suicides have been the result of self-loathing? A person’s final angry judgment against herself?

The vice of anger misuses our outrage in legitimate cases of injustice. It causes us to seek justice through more pain rather than through healing.

Fighting back against the vice of anger

The most common pattern in fighting the wrong fights and fighting the wrong way: quickness.

We pick the wrong fights when we lack the forbearance to endure some amount of personal suffering or offense or inconvenience. We fight dirty when we lack the patience to seek peace and let God avenge. We become quick to speak and quick to anger.

I’m amazed by the lack of anger that I’ve seen from many Holocaust survivors. I think it’s a result of the forbearance they were forced to learn and exhibit. Their very survival required a degree of patient endurance I can’t fathom. Those who survived can tell of a great hope they carried––that their lives and sufferings could still have meaning. They didn’t give up because their existence still had a purpose.[1. See Viktor Frankl’s excellent book, Man’s Search for Meaning, for a treatment of this.]

And here patience and hope come together. When our hope is in God––in God’s justice and care––we can stand to patiently endure our present struggles, fight the good fight of peacemaking and restoration, and trust God to administer final justice.

Patience and hope light the path away from the vice of anger. These come only from God, as we grow to trust in him.

Can you assess your anger this Lent? What’s making you angry and how are you fighting? How can you be quicker to listen, slower to speak, slower to become angry? How can you fight good fights as a peacemaker, seeking justice and restoration for all? The beginning of the answer is to recognize how the vice of anger is perverting our sense of justice and then to seek patience and hope from God.

 

“In your anger, do not sin.”[1. Ephesians 4:26] May your desire for justice make you a peacemaker, blessed and called a child of God.[1. Matthew 5:9] And “may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”[1. Romans 15:13]

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