A sermon given September 17, 2000

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning! We welcome all to this place of worship—the tired and weary, the seekers of new truth, those who come with joy in their hearts. Whoever you are, how ever you may be, you are welcome. Come, let us worship together.

Every morning I sit down to my breakfast and open the Oregonian. It is a ritual I can hardly do without. I read the first page first—and that whole first section. Then the Metro section. Usually by this time I’m angry about something. I’m muttering to myself as I chew my toast. "I can’t believe this!" I say out loud, as I pick up my coffee cup. I am drawn into ignorance, violence, and the suffering of others--not just in my community, but in our whole country, for that matter in the world.

Like for example the recent article about the conjoined twins, Jodie and Mary, born in Britain. Mary has a heart and lungs that don’t work. She can’t survive alone. Jodie seems to be a healthy baby, but unless she is separated from Mary, she will probably have heart failure, and both of them will die. The parents want to save both babies. Of course. But they can’t. So they have asked for treatment to be stopped, thus ensuring the deaths of both babies. They told the court, "We could not possibly agree to any surgery being undertaken that will kill one of our daughters. We have faith in God, and we are quite happy for God’s will to decide what happens." "No!" I say, "No, God doesn’t will that your babies die! What kind of God is that? Save Jodie. Let Mary go." Do you want one live baby or no live babies?" I’m mad at the parents, I’m mad at the court, I’m mad at God. So I often start my day with a good dose of anger. Thank goodness for Doonesbury, which I save ‘til last, so I can relax and laugh again.

I would say that I carry around a huge amount of anger, and so do most of us, I believe. We deny it, we express it, we suppress it—but it’s there. Road rage. Airport rage. We are an angry society in many ways. And why is this so? Most of us live in crowded, anonymous urban settings, where we are constantly over-stimulated by noise and by the images of advertising. We smell noxious fumes. We fear for our lives when drivers run red lights and ignore walk lanes. Furthermore, we are always pressed for time, it seems. Our lives are not our own, with many of us working longer hours than we want to. Many of us are trying to cram two lives into one. And our children. We worry about our children growing up too soon.

We are here today in church, where for a few minutes each Sunday, we focus on the deepest concerns of our hearts. But the rest of the week is spent in a secular society bent on competition and individual freedom rather than co-operation and community. We feel caught in a web of expectations that drive us, and yet we long for rest, for a sense of relationship and peace and real presence in the days we have been given. We chaff against these societal bonds, feeling powerless to change our lives. Yes, we are, as a whole, an angry people. The question today is, how can we take back our power? How can we use our anger to redeem a suffering world?

You know, what I wonder is not why we have so much anger and violence in our society, but why we don’t have more. More crime, more anarchists throwing rocks through windows, more school shootings. I think perhaps we don’t because human beings pretty much adapt to what is. We don’t much question the status quo. For revolution to occur, two elements must prevail: unbearable pain and hope. I think we have neither in this culture. At least there are not enough of us with unbearable pain. And hope? So many people have lost hope that we have only 1/3 of our people voting in major elections. Things are really not so bad, we say. Things are really pretty good. I mean, we could have been born in East Timor. We live in a democracy, at least. Don’t we?

We accept the status quo, for one thing, because as human beings we have learned a certain way of ordering reality. That way we can depend on life to be more or less predictable. Why do battered women stay with their men? Why do untouchables accept their caste? The phenomenon of internalized oppression is one that is well known—that is, people who are treated disrespectfully will internalize that view of themselves and come to see themselves as "less than," as unworthy, as deserving of their fate.

My son Madison, who has done some legal work for prisoners, told me of the time when a prisoner was to have an eye operation. But he killed his cell mate—for what reason, I do not know—and the prison denied him the operation. My son tried to get him to press for his right to have medical care. But the man would not. He said that he understood that he was being punished for what he had done, and he did not deserve medical treatment.

Somehow we want what we’ve always had, even it’s bad for us. The ego protects itself that way. Our built-in biases are kind of like a library system—they allow us to access information rapidly, and once we make a commitment to a certain catalogue, so to speak, we spend more time maintaining the system than in revising it. These biases give us self-confidence and free us from the discomforts of self-doubt. You may notice in yourself or in others that flash of anger when you are threatened with conflicting information. We just don’t want to hear it, even if it is true. So we kill the proverbial messenger.

People have a fundamental need to find meaning and order in life’s experiences. We would like to believe that people get what they deserve—that justice is alive and well. We need to make sense out of confusion, order out of randomness. Sometimes we need to believe that a situation is divinely ordained, so we can accept a personal injustice. Like the women who support the men in the Promise Keepers movement. I’m not saying they’re wrong to do so, but I want to point out that these women are doing a trade-off: they will promise to submit to their husbands, which is what God would want, and the husbands promise to stop drinking and running around and ignoring the children, which for sure is what God would want.

Another way we deal with our need for a rational world is to denigrate the victim. The poor bring suffering upon themselves, we hear it said. They’re just lazy. Single mothers are blamed for "getting themselves pregnant," as one congressman put it. This man, it should be noted, was never a strong student of biology. And take the homeless. How many times have I heard people say, "These homeless people, they want to live on the street." (Actually 5-10% of them do, 90-95% don’t.) Poverty is a little more complex than these careless explanations—but it certainly makes us feel better to blame the poor for their plight. Our world then seems orderly and just.

What else makes us angry? Well, just the vicissitudes of life. The on-going losses. The Buddhists teach that loss is inevitable. They will make an intricate sand painting and then wipe it out with one swoop of the arm. But no human beings are immune from the pangs of loss. When people we love die, we are often angry with them for dying. That’s not logical, of course—but what does logic have to do with it? Our relationships are many-layered and mysterious and contradictory—that’s what it’s like to be human. We don’t have to feel guilty that our feelings are not always logical. They are just what they are.

I stole my sermon title today from Christian ethicist Beverly Harrison, who writes in a wonderful essay by the same name, "We Christians have come very close to killing love precisely because we have understood anger to be a deadly sin. Anger is not the opposite of love. It is better understood as a feeling signal that all is not well in our relation to other persons or groups or to the world around us. Anger is a mode of connectedness to others and it is always a vivid form of caring. So anger is not right or wrong—it is a signal, a signal that something is amiss in relationship. It is something we need to pay attention to, and use to make necessary changes.

Some of us, though, find it very difficult to acknowledge our anger. As children, we may have seen anger misused, and then decided, "I’ll never be angry that way." I know a man whose father was a physician in a small town. The father was a saintly figure to his patients, always kind and reassuring. At home, though, he could be a petty tyrant, filling the walls with fear as his temper erupted over and over again and poured out over his wife and children. His son decided that he would never be like his father—and he isn’t, but in suppressing his anger, he has also suppressed expression of all feeling.

Or perhaps as a child you were raised in one of those families, as I was, in which children are not supposed to have feelings—or at least negative ones like sadness or anger. Or maybe nobody was supposed to have feelings. So you learned perhaps, as I did, to swallow your feelings until you didn’t even know what your feelings were. I was basically depressed until I was in my 30’s and began a healing journey into therapy. I remember doing a drawing with lots of sharp red streaks in it. My therapist asked me, "Now what do you see in this picture?" "Love," I answered, thinking red, thinking hearts and valentines. "Have you ever heard of ‘seeing red’?" she asked. "What about anger?" I’ve had to work my way through anger to get to love.

Actually, it’s more typical of women than of men to have trouble acknowledging anger. Little boys are encouraged more often than girls to control their environment and to externalize their anger, and therefore tend to express that feeling more easily than, say, tender feelings like hurt or fear. Philosopher John Wikse speaks of his own struggle: "I was taught that a real man is a masked man, the Lone Ranger. If others could see beneath the mask of self-possession, if they could know you in your real needs, they might reject you; a real man should not have needs . . . ." On the other hand, little girls are encouraged to be pretty and pleasing to others, to say yes, to not cause trouble. It is often easier for girls to cry than to feel anger.

So how do we handle this often misunderstood emotion? First of all, we must simply acknowledge that we indeed are angry, we must accept our anger as a legitimate feeling, neither bad nor good in and of itself. It is a signal—that’s all. That first step is very difficult for some of us.

Then we must try to discern where our feelings are really coming from. Is the anger revealing an old hurt, something that is still unfinished within? Are there old angers and griefs that are still alive and need to be worked through? What hurt is the anger covering up? Underneath a man’s anger may be his sense of failure as a provider, his lack of self-respect. Underneath his partner’s anger may be the old fear of betrayal and abandonment. Check to see where the anger is coming from, so that it won’t be inappropriately dumped on an innocent party.

If another person is the source of our anger, and we want to keep that relationship, we need to take care in our expression of anger. Screaming and name-calling and hitting below the belt can leave wounds that are difficult to heal and scars which toughen the skin of love. Maybe you need to take a few deep breaths before you say anything. Or maybe you need to take a walk before your feelings run away with you--then come back and talk.

A few years ago, my younger sister decided she wanted to "redefine" our relationship. When we grew up, we didn’t have a mom, so I fell into a kind of parental role with her. Basically, though she was in her forties, I was still trying to run her life. She started gently with me, sending me a book entitled Sisters, which dealt with competition and conflict. I wondered why she sent me this book, since I never perceived any conflict: she always did what I told her to do. Then one day she ventured the thought, "You know, there’s a lot of competition between us." I thought to myself, "Competition? There’s no competition. I’m prettier, I’m smarter. Where’s the competition?" I can now understand why she took to yelling and screaming at me—and she did get my attention. But her anger began to threaten our relationship. We needed to work out a new way, so we began to talk about it rationally, and both of us began to make changes in the way we relate to the other. She has become less dependent on me, and I have become, I hope, less bossy.

In the midst of conflict, one way to get through to a better place is to take your responsibility for your piece of it. Without owning our own faults and failures, we simply project all the anger onto another. In the 70’s when I read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and got into a women’s consciousness-raising group, I finally got it—yes, women were oppressed, women were second-class citizens. I had denied it until then, and my new understandings hit me hard. For a while I was furious at men. I wore a T-shirt that proclaimed, "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." But it occurred to me shortly thereafter that I needed a man more than a fish needs a bicycle. Much more. I stopped wearing the shirt, and I came to understand that I had bought into the cultural gender definitions myself—I had bought the whole package. Part of the reason for my rage was that I had allowed myself to be co-opted for so long.

Let’s talk now for a moment about the relationship of anger to love, in the arena of social justice. I know most of you remember the World Trade Organization protest in Seattle last December, in which our church was so active. I was interviewed three times by various TV stations, and they always wanted to know about the violence. Violence is sexy. Violence sells newspapers. Before the march it was, "Do you anticipate violence?" Yes. "Will your church group engage in violence?" No. And after the march, another interview: "What did you think about the violence?" Of course the violence mainly consisted of the police pepper-spraying peaceful marchers and shoving them around. But the interviewer was asking about the violence of the so-called anarchists, who so far as I know only threw rocks through a few windows and set a trash bin on fire. So I said to this reporter, "Just what is violence anyway? Is violence throwing a rock through a window? Or is violence operating a sweatshop where 14-year-old Indonesian girls work for almost no money? Tell me, how do you define violence?" It is interesting that when the oppressor does violence, it’s never seen as violence. But when the oppressed fight back, then it’s labeled violence. Would I throw a rock through a window? No. Do I think that’s the worst form of violence that I saw in Seattle? Not by a long shot.

Do you remember Archbishop Oscar Romero? He died from an assassin’s bullet on March 24, 1980. In the words of Pope John Paul II, Romero gave his life "for the church and the people of his beloved country" of El Salvador. During his three years as Archbishop, he became known all over the world as a fearless defender of the poor and suffering. He was honored by many, but he was also hated by powerful persons in his own country. Week after week his voice went out over the archdiocese radio, speaking against murder and torture, exhorting his people to seek peace and forgiveness and to build a more just society. Here are his words from a broadcast on February 5, 1978: "When the church decries revolutionary violence, it cannot forget that institutionalized violence also exists, and that the desperate violence of oppressed persons <cannot be> overcome with one-sided laws, with weapons, or with superior force."

It is risky to live as if the kingdom of God should prevail on this earth. As if we expect it. And what do I mean by "the Kingdom of God"? Respect for the worth and dignity of every human being; the lasting peace that comes from justice; care for the earth, our source of life. It’s risky to expect that—and to demand it. Romero knew the risk, Gandhi knew it, Martin Luther King, Jr., knew it, and yes, Malcolm X knew it, too. Radical love is a dangerous way to go. But without the persistence of those who believe in this love, without the willingness to risk, we are lost. The world will be given over to those who, for short-term gain, would exploit the weakest among us, would despoil the planet.

Don’t invoke anger easily. Use it respectfully, for it can fuel your finest work. Love however you like, love frivolously, if you will--but take care with your hate. Hatred of other persons—let it go, it’s trivial, not worth your attention. No, save your truest anger, your deepest passion, not for your personal grievances, but for the evil that preys upon those least able to defend themselves. Save your rage for greed that is yoked to power, for power in service to the few. Let anger be the mark of your compassion, let it be the strength of your caring, for the greatness of your anger depends on how selflessly you use it. It is a precious gift. Use it in the work of love.

So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Holy One, we find it difficult to be so human, so vulnerable to our feelings. We ask that we not deny that we are feeling creatures. We ask for forgiveness for those times that we trivialize and misuse our anger. May we turn our anger, instead, to fierce caring, to a deep desire to make justice where there is no justice, to bring love where there is no love.

So may it be. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Go now and love as foolishly as you may, and may your anger be a rising passion for the good.

Copyright 2000, by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.