And when you’ve taken down your guard,
If I could change your mind
I’d really love to break your heart.

Tears for Fears

Anger might be my root sin, so I have spent a lot of time thinking and praying about it. Last Friday, in the immediate aftermath of the public and gruesome murder of Charlie Kirk, I re-posted some thoughts I wrote a few years back about anger in the teaching of the Desert Fathers. At that time we had neither a suspect nor a motive, but I could already see the wide array of usual suspects who use anger as a tool of manipulation stoking the fires and oiling up the machinery. We now know much more, and what we are learning and the responses that are taking hold—including those among Christians—have the fingerprints of anger and its judgment-corroding influence all over them.

Anger, of course, is a completely understandable reaction in the face of something as shocking and outrageous as the assassination we are all trying to process at varying speeds and in different but overlapping environments. God gave us certain faculties to help us address just these kinds of situations, and anger is one of them. But there are ways anger can motivate us according to God’s will. And then there are ways anger becomes misused, deforming, and destructive. I have found the wisdom of saints throughout the ages to be vital in discerning which is which. So, if you are interested, please allow a beggar to share some of the bread he has been given.

In Violent Times

I hold two thoughts about the events of last week simultaneously in a tension that I don’t think is that complicated. On the one hand, I was not among Charlie Kirk’s admirers. I know many people feel differently than I do, and I respect that because I really do try to take that “in opinions, liberty” thing seriously. My purpose here is not to litigate my disagreements with Kirk about Christ’s mission for his people in the world and the methods by which we live out that mission. If anyone really wants to know what I think I am happy to have the conversation I have had many times over the past decade or so, just not here and not now.

I only say all that throat-clearing stuff to give context for my “on the other hand,” which is that Kirk’s murder horrifies me on multiple levels even as someone who disagreed with his project. Part of my reaction is intensely personal. Three years ago many people in my sphere of relationships walked through the murder of a friend, and I still struggle to process the crushing flood of sorrow for a family whose husband and daddy is never coming home again. Even now it’s a coin flip whether I can talk about it without breaking down. It sickens me that an act of senseless, dehumanizing violence took so much from my friend and everyone who loves him. So there is no universe where I would wish that on anyone.

Kirk’s murder also horrifies me theologically. To take someone’s life in cold blood is a most basic offense against the image of God in human beings, as is the pleasure some have taken in it. It also horrifies me historically. Outrages like this have a terrible way of spiraling into endlessly escalating, mutually reinforcing, self-justifying cycles of resentment and vengeance.

And those two factors point to what horrifies me formationally about what we are staggering through right now. Much of this kind of violence is fueled by a tendency to treat people as abstractions rather than people, nothing more than little animations on my iPhone, in a world of screens that threatens to disconnect us from our humanity. I learned what had happened from my daughters via text message as gruesome footage of the shooting raced through their respective schools like wildfire via social media. I am deeply troubled about the harm that does to the souls of young people conditioned to treat such a thing as just another sensational TikTok. More troubling still is the reaction of some who, because of their animosity for Kirk, treated his murder with glee.

That brings me to my real point with this blahg, which is how we are called as people of God to respond to anger—both the anger directed at us and the anger we will inevitably experience ourselves towards others in a world that can be violent, cruel, and cold.

Let It All Out

If you really want a challenge as a preacher, preach on Psalm 137 sometime. I am crazy enough—or foolish enough—to have done it. But I was given Lamentations 3 for a text and Psalm 137 helped me get to where the Spirit was driving me with that sermon.

The reality is that Psalm 137 does not preach well. It is a vengeful, angry song, written from the riverbanks of Babylon where the exiled Judeans very much did not want to be. There was plenty of anger to parcel out, and the psalmist singles out Judah’s neighbors in Edom for special attention: “Remember, Lord, what the Edomites said that day at Jerusalem. ‘Destroy it! Destroy it! Down to its foundations!’” In other words, God, I hope you’ll make them experience what they celebrated when it happened to us.

The psalmist then turned to the exiles’ chief tormentors, the Babylonians who mocked them and amused themselves by demanding the Judean captives sing the songs of the homeland they had violently lost:

 “Happy is the one who pays you back for what you have done to us.”

Yeah, understandable.

“Happy is he who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rocks.”

Um. Whoa.

Why is that in the Bible?

Well, I think it is there because God wants it there. And I think God wants it there for our sake. Because there are going to be days when we want the people who hurt us to hurt the way we do. And God doesn’t want us appointing ourselves to do the hurting. Rather, God invites us to chat. We are invited to bring it to God, and even to tell God exactly what we hope would happen if we could focus all our rage on them like sunlight through a magnifying glass. And then—this part is important—to leave the outcome up to God.

As one of my professors is fond of saying, “Prayer is not a place to be good. Prayer is a place to be honest.” And if I want someone to be hurt the way they have hurt me, there is only one truly safe place to have that conversation. God wants us to have it in honest, transparent prayer—and to leave it there, like the most horrible offering ever.

The work such angry, spleen-venting prayers do in us is to pivot us to someplace else God wants to take us. In my previous writing I mentioned John Cassian’s argument that God’s purpose for anger is that we would be motivated to address our own sin. Thomas Aquinas, the brilliant 13^th century theologian who was a student of Cassian’s writings, expands on this. He taught that God gave us the capacity for anger so we would be moved to action by injustice . . . but.

The problem is anger is a transitional emotion intended to give way to something else. God means for us to be motivated by anger but not to hold onto it. And because we are not intended to hold onto it, anger becomes more corrosive the longer we do. Like a nuclear meltdown it eats through the containment housing, starts melting the wrong stuff, and contaminates everything with radioactivity.

The love motivation does not take hold in us without careful and deliberate cultivation. It requires being formed—not merely informed, but transformed—by God’s Word, holding open to God a heart receptive to the life-altering work of the Holy Spirit.

God may have given us the capacity for anger to move us to action against injustice, but we lack the capacity to act justly out of anger. John Cassian warned that we must not confuse our “lowly human disturbances” for the righteous anger only God can exercise. Instead, our anger-fueled reactions curve inward; they become self-seeking, self-serving, and self-justifying, melting our good judgment into radioactive slag. The action must come from a different place than the anger that motivated us to act. Ultimately the action must come from a place of genuine love for God and all that God loves, consistent with the ministry of reconciliation entrusted to us.

These Are the Things I Can Do Without

Lament is one place that God moves us to process our anger. Lamentations 1:21-22 echoes Psalm 137, but with a twist:

People have heard me groaning,
but there is no one to comfort me.
All my enemies have heard of my misfortune;
they are glad that you have caused it.
Bring on the day you have announced,
so that they may become like me.

Let all their wickedness come before you,
and deal with them
as you have dealt with me
because of all my transgressions.
For my groans are many,
and I am sick at heart.

I hope you caught what happened at the end there—the anger at what had been done to Jerusalem is still present, but then it pivots to confession and to grief. In lament the author is able to see the log in his own eye, not just the one in the eye of his tormenter.

Lament is crucial soul work we must do with God in prayer—if necessary, with someone who can shepherd us well rather than mire us in rage or sink us into despondency—or our anger will ultimately consume us like it consumed the men who threw Rack, Shack, and Benny into the fiery furnace. In his reflections on the Psalms Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “The Psalter gives us ample instruction in how to come before God in a proper way, bearing the frequent suffering which this world brings upon us. Serious illness and severe loneliness before God and others, threat, persecution, imprisonment, and whatever conceivable peril there is on earth are known by the Psalms. They do not deny it or try to deceive us about it with pious words . . . they all complain to God.”

I understand all too well the fear of telling God how I really feel when I know how I feel is not what I was made to be. But God can handle it. I must be honest with God about my pain, my anger, and my sorrow. Because there is something about being honest with God that degrades my ability to continually lie to myself. That is one reason that C.S. Lewis counseled, “We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.”

If I want someone to be hurt the way they have hurt me, there is only one truly safe place to have that conversation. God wants us to have it in honest, transparent prayer—and to leave it there, like the most horrible offering ever.

And that turns the page to another psalm, one that has been pushing me around for the past year or so, which is Psalm 139. That might sound strange, because Psalm 139 is full of so many nice sentiments—fearfully and wonderfully made, where can I go from your presence, etc. I almost invariably see and hear Psalm 139 presented from a posture of adoration, which is why verses 19-22 feel like a discordant record-scratch:

God, if only you would kill the wicked—
you bloodthirsty men, stay away from me—
who invoke you deceitfully.
Your enemies swear by you falsely.
Lord, don’t I hate those who hate you,
and detest those who rebel against you?
I hate them with extreme hatred;
I consider them my enemies.

Doesn’t exactly square with Matthew 5:43-48 or Romans 12:14-21, does it? What on earth is going on here? I actually think this passage is the emotional center and most honest part of the psalm, the “horrible offering” David is leaving on the altar—which has the curious effect of rewiring the way I read all the “happy” stanzas that precede it. This is what David came to talk to God about—his volcanic anger against violent and hypocritical enemies—and everything that preceded it was throat-clearing or perhaps even sarcasm. But now, finally, it is all on the altar. God—I am angry. Really angry. Angry enough that I’d just as soon see these people dead. And I’m angry at you for still letting them breathe. Since you won’t just leave me alone, do something with that in your wonderous knowledge.

And God does. Just spilling that bile on the altar of prayer brings David to a point of deep introspection about what a mess he is inside:

Search me, God, and know my heart;
test me and know my concerns.
See if there is any offensive way in me;
lead me in the everlasting way.

David had to pass through his anger to deep, painfully honest confession, and in confession his heart was finally open to the heart of God.

Remake Your Heart

I mentioned earlier that Screenworld tempts us to reduce people to abstractions. A related phenomenon, one that has animated many of Charlie Kirk’s admirers over the past week, is a tendency to treat famous people as avatars for ourselves. I suspect that there are many people, whether they have articulated it this way or not, who believe Kirk represented them and feel attacked in a very personal way by the cold-blooded violence of his murder. If that interpretation is in the ballpark of what you think or feel, I want to acknowledge that terribly disorienting tangle of hurt, fear, anger, and whatever else that might be hard to name. I think I can understand that with sincerity and sympathy.

The invitation when I am walking through such a valley—and it is a very hard invitation to accept, made all the harder while in the grip of anger—is to allow the Spirit of God to use my pain and fear and confusion and anger to help me understand the pain and fear and confusion and anger of others who are not like me when someone they view as representing themselves suffers injustice and violence. I think it is worth asking myself if I am able to do that, and if I am willing to do that. What do I need right now, in my own disorientation and pain—and am I willing to do the hard, humbling work of self-examination the Spirit of God wants to lead me into, so I can face why I can’t or won’t do that unto others in theirs?

These hard questions of reflection, I believe with deep conviction, lay at the heart of the response of love versus the response of anger.

One danger of the anger response is it makes lashing out at the wrong people all too easy. I have seen a lot of that this week. One example is the too-human urge to judge all members of this or that group (“They! Them!”) by the worst conduct of its least representative members—a standard none of us can survive ourselves. Another, which has hit some of my pastoral friends hard in the past week, is the viral insistence that not responding to Kirk’s murder in very specific ways must, MUST be the result of some nefarious motives by people who are insufficiently Christian.

These impulses are so uncharitable, but that is precisely how the corrosive influence of anger works when allowed to metastasize rather than serve the functions God intends. I have fallen into this trap often and made a spectacular self-justified mess of things in the process. The love motivation is quick to listen graciously, patient to seek fuller understanding, and slow to judge—all hallmarks of the Spirit, none of which we are able to do while marinating in anger.

The love motivation does not take hold in us without careful and deliberate cultivation. It requires being formed—not merely informed, but transformed—by God’s Word, holding open to God a heart receptive to the life-altering work of the Holy Spirit. Along the journey the Spirit has taken me on into the depths of my own soul, including the painful task of facing the ugliest soul-poisoning manifestations of my own anger with brutal honesty, I have become convinced of this: My posture towards bearers of God’s image—including image bearers who do not look or sound like me, image bearers I don’t really like, and especially image bearers who have harmed me or I think intend my harm—is a highly accurate barometer of where I am at on the anger/love spectrum.

Here’s another way to put it. Am I responding to provocation and injustice in the Spirit of Christ? Or am I responding as any person in the flesh would, only with a fig leaf of God-language as self-justification?

Anger is a transitional emotion intended to give way to something else. And because we are not intended to hold onto it, anger becomes more corrosive the longer we do.

I know all this is hard for many to accept. Dear God in Heaven, do I know it. Because fifteen or twenty years ago I probably wouldn’t have accepted what I am writing here, and I am painfully aware of how slow and difficult this journey into a new country has been for me. But God is good and grace is that amazing, that it can save a wretch like me, free me from the grip of anger that fueled so many other vices and distorted my humanity, and give me eyes to see the image of God in people I would not be inclined to see if left to myself. So I believe that even in the ugliness of this moment the light of Christ can shine in the darkness and turn our hearts to a better way, equipping us by grace to break the endless cycles of vengeance and to live Spirit-filled lives that are cruciform and invitational.

Why does it matter? Because the witness of the Church throughout the ages has depended on getting this right—they will know we are Christians not by our anger, nor by our belligerent defiance, but by our love.

By our patient and kind, truthful yet humble, longsuffering, Christ-imitating, Spirit-enabled love.

1900 years ago a man named Justin, who acquired the title “Martyr” when the Roman government took his life because of his witness for Christ, explained how this was playing out in his own time and place: “Many who were once on [Rome’s] side . . . have turned from the ways of violence and tyranny, overcome by observing the consistent lives of their [Christian] neighbors, or noting the strange patience of their injured acquaintances.”

Strange patience, even in face of [gestures at everything] all this. That is a hallmark of a Spirit-filled, Christ-conformed life that has been utterly transformed by the love of God.

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