February 24, 2013 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. | Second Sunday in Lent

Anger for Lent

Hardy H. Kim
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 27
Philippians 3:17–4:1
Luke 13:31–35

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

Luke 13:34 (NRSV)

The prophet is a person who holds God’s love as well as God’s anger in his soul, enraptured or enfevered.

Abraham J. Heschel
The Prophets

It’s the second Sunday in Lent now, and I thought I’d begin this morning by checking in with all of you: how is Lent going for you?

I have to admit that it’s been a struggle for me to feel like I’m really having a spiritually productive Lent. It didn’t help that Lent started right after I returned from a wonderful mission trip to Havana, Cuba. I mean, it was hard enough to return to the gray skies and chilly winds of Chicago from the warm sunshine; the bustling, colorful streets and markets of Old Havana; and the deep blue surf of Cuba’s northeast coastline. So can you blame me for failing to seriously engage in Lenten exercises of fasting and prayer when I am still thinking about wonderful meals filled with zesty beans and rice, crunchy plantain chips, and succulent tropical fruits? When questions raised by conversations over refreshing mojitos still linger in my mouth like the cool taste of mint? And when the wonderful love and hospitality we received from our mission partners in Cuba—most powerfully expressed in the stories, rhythms, music, and dances they shared with us—still have my heart pounding to a different, and irresistible, beat?

This is not to say that this time has been spiritually empty for me, for the different perspective I was given during my time in Cuba—particularly in the personal stories of the Cuban Christians we met—have me thinking about my own world in new ways. Frank Lucas, a member of our Chancel Choir and a fellow participant on the Cuba trip, expressed what I have been feeling during this first part of Lent very well in a recent email: “The trip already seems a while ago, though the memories are still fresh and startling. . . . We look at the reality we’ve returned to differently. It was a wonderful trip that has changed the way we see the world.” The stories Frank and I heard, and the things we saw, raised serious questions about political and economic justice, about how we are called to address these things as Christians.

Following the Cuban revolution that led to a new government in 1959, Protestant churches such as the Presbyterian Church in Cuba (which had supported the goals of the revolutionary leaders and had shared a vision of greater justice and equality for all Cubans) were deeply hurt and bewildered at what followed the advent of the new government they had helped to bring to power. This new government betrayed Protestant church partners by taking away their schools (a key institutional resource) and instituting policies that barred persons who openly expressed their Christian faith from advancing in academics, business, or politics.

Hector Mendez, the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Havana, saw the church come under attack by the leaders of the revolution it had supported. Yet instead of looking to his own security, he did what all his friends said was crazy: he gave up a promising career in law to become a Presbyterian minister because, as he put it, he began to believe that “God and the church might actually need me.”

Aware of discriminatory educational policies, our translator and guide, Carmina Blasco, did not try to hide her Christian faith when taking her exams to enter a course of study that would allow her to achieve her dream of becoming an architect. Because of the harsher standards for Christians, Carmina missed making it into the architecture program by one point on the exam. Carmina was offered a place in the economics department instead, and she’s now an accountant who uses her training to keep the books for the Presbyterian General Assembly in Cuba.

Hector and Carmina and Leinad Vazquez Iglesias (a producer at a radio station and a member of First Presbyterian in Havana who helped to document our trip through sound and video) don’t just live in a world where the injustice of government policies (Cuban or otherwise) are a thing of the past. Leinad and his family struggle with inadequate housing and insufficient food. You see, Leinad works full-time at the radio station and is paid 500 Cuban pesos—or around $30—per month. This salary and the monthly food ration is not nearly enough to feed his family, let alone pay for a house or rent. So he’s had to build an extra level into his father-in-law’s house for his family to have a space of their own. He works extra jobs in the black market when he can get them, as most Cubans must, to make ends meet.

This black market—existing in a gray area between local Cuban life and the world of tourists and foreign interests—is a complicated and difficult reality for Cubans. Leinad and others see money far in excess of his 500-pesos-a-month salary flow by, day after day, in a tourist economy that has its own currency (the Cuban Convertible Peso, or CUC) and that is purposely structured to make certain goods and services available to tourists but inaccessible to Cubans.

The historic and present-day reality in which Hector and Carmina and Leinad live was so much to take in. It was confusing and complex: the motivations of revolutionary leaders and international adversaries in the formation of the political and economic structures in which Cuba exists seemed beyond our ability to know; trying to figure out how any Cuban could make a household budget work seemed an immense task that would require multiple ledgers and some very fuzzy math. The answer to so many of our questions was “It’s complicated.” As Leinad summed it up for us, “You will never understand. We Cubans—we don’t understand it. We just live.”

In trying to comprehend the struggles of the Cuban Christians who displayed so much peace and grace in presenting their stories to us, I often found myself coming back to one question: “How are these people not angry . . . all the time?!” They suffer at the hands of their own government; they suffer on account of the massive global influence of a country, the United States, that is intent on breaking the will of the Cuban leaders. Yet not once did I hear them raging against their own leaders. Not once did I hear them condemning the United States.

One day when we were discussing the bizarre dual economy that exists in Cuba and how it makes life hard for Cubans—all while the wealth of tourists and foreign dignitaries passes right before their eyes—I couldn’t resist asking Carmina, “Doesn’t all of this make you angry?”

Her response was, “Of course. Of course it makes me angry.”

“So, who are you angry at?” I asked. Carmina answered, “I’m angry at all the time that has been wasted, for me and all Cubans. I’m angry that my gifts and my dreams have been wasted and I haven’t been able to use them in ways that could have made me happy and the world a better place. I’m angry for three generations of Cubans who haven’t been able to fulfill their potential, and who have had to choose between leaving their country to pursue their dreams and staying to deal with this situation.”

I was amazed at what I heard—because I was expecting an answer about anger that blamed an external party, responsible for the injustice Carmina and others had suffered. I was expecting an answer naming a target for reparations, if not revenge. I was thinking in terms of anger that aims to heap bitterness upon others in response to the hurts inflicted. This was not the anger Carmina expressed to me.

Consider Jesus’ response when the Pharisees inform him that Herod intends to kill him:

“Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.’ Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” Jesus doesn’t respond in fear of the threat. Still, there’s nothing meek or mild about his answer. Can you hear his very real frustration and anger? He’s not backing down in the face of danger. But his anger is not really directed at Herod, who threatens him, is it? His grief and his anger flow from his regret: that the relationship he longed for with Jerusalem, the holy city of God and God’s people, is not possible . . . because Jerusalem is not willing.

In our reading from Luke, Jesus stands opposite Jerusalem like the ancient prophets before him. This Jesus is what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel describes when he writes, “The prophet is a person who holds God’s love as well as God’s anger in his soul, enraptured or enfevered.” Jesus, like Carmina, holds anger in his heart not just because what he sees in front of him is so bad, but also because he had a dream and vision of what might have been for the people that he loves.

Andrew Lester, a Southern Baptist professor, counselor, and author spent much of his life exploring the connections between anger and Christian faith before he died in 2010. In his book The Angry Christian, Lester laid out his belief that too many Christians have been taught that anger is always sinful and that, therefore, many Christians assume anger should be absent from the spiritually mature.

Lester lays out an alternative view and argues that

in many situations, anger is the most loving and, therefore, the most Christian response. Rather than squelching anger, I suggest the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” should often motivate us to be angry. For Christians, a faithful response when our deeply held beliefs—central to our integrity and moral commitments—are contradicted or transgressed is to be threatened and feel angry. Anger can be the logical and ethical requirement of loving others as God has loved us. Ideally, our capacity for anger should be activated when the values we have adopted as Christians are threatened. In these situations, anger is not the opposite of love, but an expression of love. Anger may arise, indeed should arise, within us as Christians because of our love, not in contradiction to our love.

Now, Lester admits that “anger that is expressed destructively toward others, ourselves, or God adversely affects our spiritual journey. Anger’s power can destroy our health, our relationships, our community, and our sense of God’s presence and grace.” Yet Lester argues that the capacity to become angry—an attribute of Jesus himself that we see in our reading from Luke today—is a significant aspect of our humanness, rather than our sinfulness. According to Lester, a proper anger—one that reflects Jesus’ occasional angry responses to evil—motivates us to speak and act when we may be tempted to remain silent and unresponsive to the vast needs and troubles of a world compromised by sin.

The Jesus in our story today—the Jesus of holy anger—stands before Jerusalem and vents his grief and his frustration. And in this expression of his humanness, he gives us an indication of what his love and his anger will lead him to do. He knows that he will eventually return to Jerusalem, where the fox awaits him, but he will not come as a conquering lion; he will come as a hen trying to cover her chicks—even though he knows, just as we do, what foxes do to hens.

The Jesus I see in our reading today causes me to consider whether I am dwelling deeply enough within the love God calls us to—a fully committed love of God’s creation and God’s people. If I were to have the courage to live into that kind of love, what kind of anger might be kindled in my heart? Could it be as grace-filled and free of hate as the anger I heard expressed by Carmina when we discussed the realities of Cuban life?

I have reflected on the Lenten challenge that emerges for me from our gospel reading today: the challenge to hold a deep love of God’s people in my heart and to hope for their welfare; the challenge to hold, at the same time, a holy anger at the injustice and oppression that exist in the world. I realize that responding to this call means that the more our reality differs from the hope to which God’s love calls us, the more our hearts will be torn apart by the distance between our hope and our reality; the more our hearts will break when our love opens us up to feeling anger at injustice.

One example of how I believe we are being called, right now, to respond out of love for God’s people and to feel anger on account of the ways in which our world does not reflect God’s justice, is the call to speak out about gun violence and the suffering it is inflicting on our communities. The same Jesus who pleads with Jerusalem to come to him and be sheltered under his wings—surely this Jesus cries out to cities like Chicago, where so many lives are lost to a senseless scourge of bullets fired from all-too-plentiful handguns and assault weapons, to set aside violence and to come to him.

Many of you will have heard the saying “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.” When it comes to the issue of gun violence and our Christian response, I would rephrase this saying as a challenge for all of us: “If you’re not angry, then God’s love does not live in your heart.”

In the city of Chicago, since the beginning of this year, there have been forty-eight gun deaths—eight of the victims teenagers, including Hadiya Pendelton. If you’re not angry, is the love of God alive in your heart?

In 2012 in Chicago, while city and statewide gun control measures were being struck down by judges, there were 500 gun deaths, making up 87 percent of all homicides in Chicago. If you’re not angry, is the love of God alive in your heart?

Speaking of 2012, in 2012 there were seven mass shootings—the most for any year dating back through 1982—with a total of seventy-two persons killed and sixty-eight people injured by perpetrators using semiautomatic handguns and assault weapons. Twenty of the victims killed were those first-grade students at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. If you’re not angry, is the love of God alive in your heart?

In 2012 there were more than 32,000 gun deaths in the United States. By contrast there were 3,156 total deaths in Afghanistan—civilian and military—as a result of military hostilities there. If you’re not angry, is the love of God alive in your heart?

Since Sandy Hook, we haven’t had another incident that has devastated the nation like that brutal mass murder of children, and yet there’s still plenty of cause for concern. Since the events in Newtown, Connecticut, at least 2,192 more persons have been killed using guns. If you’re not angry, is the love of God alive in your heart?

It doesn’t matter what your take on the Second Amendment is. It doesn’t matter whether you believe the mental health of gun violence perpetrators hasn’t been examined enough. What matters is this: if you believe each person is a created and beloved child of God, gifted with the divine image and deserving of God’s love—if you accept this basic, fundamental Christian belief, then each death that results from guns designed specifically to kill people (made far too readily accessible by a system that values corporate profit over commonsense regulation and the safety of human life) should make your heart break. Because the love you have for God’s people, and the hope that God has for each one of them, is so far removed from a world where, every day, lives are threatened by a reality of violence and death, that our hearts cannot contain it all. We should be standing before our cities like Jesus, the mother hen who risks the teeth of the fox to nestle her chicks close to her breast. We should be angry as hell and willing to stand up and take whatever threats come our way in order to speak out to save God’s children from guns!

As a church—as a community of faith that claims to be a vessel of Christ’s love to the world—it’s time that we stood up to live into the anger that is rooted in that love. It’s time for us to risk being the target of abuse or of criticism, so that we can make it known to all who would listen that God’s love demands a world where no one should live under threat of death at the end of a gun—especially not in their homes and schools, not in their offices or places of worship, not in the city that our Lord Jesus loves and died to save.

Even knowing the danger that comes to a hen willing to put herself between a fox and her chicks—even vulnerable to the threats aimed against anyone who might stand against the powers of the world—if we mean what we say when we say we love God’s children, then proclaiming the truth of our convictions, even if we’re vulnerable to our enemies, is what God’s love calls us to do.

This is how we’re called to live, especially during this season of Lent: fully committed to living into God’s love for this world. We’re called to grieve the reality of the world that doesn’t live up to God’s love, that causes God’s children to suffer. We’re called to get angry about that suffering. And we’re called, for the sake of Jesus, our mother hen, to get up and do something about it.

This is the challenge I put before you this day, people of God: let God’s love dwell deep within your heart this Lent; get angry at a world that doesn’t live up to this love; then act to make God’s love known to a world that so desperately needs it. In the name of Jesus, who longs to gather us, gather all God’s children to himself. Amen.