Sermon 669+October 2, 2011

Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
1st Sunday with Deacon
808th Week as Priest
634th Week at St Dunstan’s

Conflict and Anger

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Jesus told a story that enraged the Pharisees. It was a parable, only more plainly stated than his usual style. It was flatly allegorical: The vineyard is the Promised Land. The tenants are the Jewish leaders. The messengers are the prophets, one after another. The son of course is Jesus himself, the Anointed One, the Christ. The story is a warning: this will happen if you do not change your mind, change your ways, and believe.
 
This is Jesus in direct conflict with the Establishment. This is Jesus in your face. You can feel the tension, can’t you? You can tell it’s all about to break wide open.
 
I don’t like conflict. I try to avoid trouble, only trouble seems to find me. All you have to do is question my competence or my honesty, and you have pushed all of my buttons.  I can’t stand it. I hate this about myself. I do the very thing I hate most about myself. I get angry. I lose my temper. I attack. I argue. I fight, and it’s not a fair fight.
 
So why did our Lord create such a conflict for himself? Let’s face it. He started it. He told the story, already knowing what their reaction would be. He started the trouble! But why?
 
This is not the Jesus I was looking for. This is not the Good Shepherd. This is not the Bread of Heaven. This is not the Water of Life. So I see Jesus doing the very thing I despise most in myself. Please, Lord, say it ain’t so (ref. the kid cornering Shoeless Joe Jackson of the Chicago Black Sox to ask him about cheating in the World Series). Tell me it was an accident. They didn’t quote you accurately. That’s not what you said. It was all just a big misunderstanding.
 
No, I think it happened just the way the story was told. Jesus gave them the parable and they understood exactly what he meant. He told the prophetic truth. But just like Jack Nicholson said in “A Few Good Men,” he said, “Mister, you can’t handle the truth!” The truth he told was that the kingdom was going to be taken away from them, the leaders, and given to his followers.
 
A long time ago, Bishop Stough told me, “make no peace with oppression.” When you see injustice, when you see somebody bullying a smaller, weaker person, wherever you see wrong being done by hard, cruel, uncaring, mean people, you’ve gotta stand up to it. Make no peace with oppression. Get up. Stand up. Stand up for your rights. (That’s Bob Marley, not Bishop Stough.)

Ironically, there is a conflict evident within our midrash, our interpretation, of the passage. Our Christianity is a way of love, joy, hope, peace—not of confrontation, anger, and conflict. You may say there are times when we have to confront, to show righteous anger—but another voice, a stronger voice, keeps telling me to make peace, endure suffering, carry a cross. On the other hand, surely Jesus would not give us his example and then tell us not to follow it! So, what’s the answer? Is it right to fight the good fight against oppression? Is there a time and a place when anger is appropriate? Surely anger is often sinful … but is anger in us always a sin?

At this point, St Paul cries out in my memory, “Wretched man that I am, who will save me from this body of death?” The answer is Christ himself. St Paul struggled to explain the complexity of a life lived “in Christ” to the Philippians. To be “in Christ,” he said, was “to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings.”

This much I know: I have not yet attained the goal, and neither have you. We want to be “in Christ,” but we are not there yet. We want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection. We want to be brave enough to share in his sufferings. But we are not there yet. We have much more to learn—about ourselves, our neighbors, and Christ himself.

So, in the meantime, let us be quick to bless and slow to anger, eager to love but hesitant to claim the higher ground. Amen.

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