• Please Note: This text is pulled directly from our Worship Team’s sermon notes and may differ slightly from the message delivered on Sunday.

Sermon: Everything Can Be Used, Except What Is Wasteful

I want to ask you a question, a very simple question—

When you think of someone who is a spiritual model, can you imagine them angry?

Probably not, right. The Dali Lama, who has spent his entire adult life working to regain the freedom of the Tibetan people, angry? Pope Francis, who committed his whole life and ministry to the poor, who lived in basic apartment, rather than the Apostolic Palace, who washed the feet of the faithful with his own two hands, angry? It just doesn't seem right, does it?

And yet, anger is as human as breathing. It's a foundational part of the human experience, and it starts when we're very young. Anyone who's watched young children play knows they aren't always sunshine and rainbows. A big part of helping kids grow up is helping them learn to identify their feelings, including anger, and to work with them in ways that are productive, useful, helpful. And, yes, even pet dragons. But those basic feelings, happy, sad, joyful, angry, they are part and parcel of what it means to be human.

If you were here last week you heard it in a question that was asked. It was an improv based service, and as such, there were prompts from people here. One of them asked simply “What do we do to feel good after reading the newspaper?” It's a question a lot of us have been asking these last 10 years, and some of us quite a bit longer. What do we do with our anger? What is there that is spiritually grounded about anger? And, if we live in our preconceived notions of what a spiritually grounded life looks like, it's easy to imagine that there is no place for anger, but this morning I want to suggest to you that far from being foreign to a spiritually grounded life, anger is part and parcel of it, and if, if, we choose to pay attention to it, to use it, to become masters of our own selves, our inner world and the myriad of ways in which is links to our outer world, all of it, even anger, can be useful to our growth, to our depth, and to building lives that we can be proud of.

So if you can't imagine the Dali Lama or the Pope ever being angry, let me offer a few other options. In the book of Exodus Moses goes up on the mountain to talk with God. While he's away the people decide he's been gone too long, so they gather up their gold, and they cast a golden calf to worship. When he comes down with the first copy of the 10 commandments, he sees what has happened, and he's so angry that he throws the tablets down, breaking them. Jesus (yes, Jesus) was said to be angry a number of times throughout the gospels, most famously when he went to the temple and saw the money changers. He turned over their tables and he cast them out of the temple. 500 years ago Martin Luther was a quiet monk in Germany, watching as the poorest of the poor were fleeced by traveling representatives of the Vatican, who needed money to build St. Peter's Basilica. He set out to reform a church and launched a revolution, nailing not one or two or even 10 complaints right to the door of the the church, but 95 propositions for reform. You don't just do that without having some fire in your belly. It wasn't that many decades later that here in New England the preacher Jonathan Edwards famously preached about the way that people were sinners in the hands of angry God. An angry God.

What I'm getting at here is straightforward and simple. Even the most grounded of us gets angry from time to time, and the question is not, or at least should not be, are we always wrong to be angry, though sometimes it is unskillful. The question is: What are we to do with all that anger?

Now, I have had a number of conversations about this over the last two years, but I trust that many more of us have felt it. There's anger in our private lives, and there's anger about what is happening in our country. In our private lives we have more agency, more power, hopefully to bring about the ways we want things to be, and yet, even there, many of us have been taught that we can't be angry, that it's not okay to be angry, and I think it is, in part, because we've confused two things with one another. We've confused rage with anger. We've confused the red faced, mouth foaming, heart racing, shouting that is rage with anger. But anger isn't one thing. Like all our feelings it exist upon a spectrum. Sometimes we're frustrated, or irritated, or stressed out. Sometimes we're furious, explosive, enraged, out of control even. But sometimes we're mad, or disappointed, we'll say, and they are all part of that internal thermometer that tells us how we're doing and, in our better moments, helps us remember what matters most.

Because this service was mostly inspired by conversations about the nation, I'm going to leave the place of anger in our personal lives for another day, important though it is. But I think it's helpful to at least name part of what it seems like so many of us are angry about. Righteously angry about. It's not just that people in power, people whose actions impact us, and those we love, but over whom we seem to have precious little power and influence are doing bad things, and they are.

Breaking things. Tearing things down with no understanding of what they are destroying or why it might be valuable. Acting as though they have no accountability for their actions, and can raise prices, or drop bombs, or tear apart families and no one can do anything about it, and then when those things don’t go as they had hoped, casting about for anyone but themselves to blame.

It is enough to make us angry. And rightfully so. But what I think many of us are especially angry about is much deeper than all of that. It's not just the actions, it's the way so many of them violate basic expectations and values we think that everyone should share.

• Don't hit people, much less shoot them, or bomb them
• People in power, parents, teachers, politicians, should always look out for the people who have no power
• Public service should be about the greater good, not greater riches for yourself
• Public officials should stay out of the private lives of everyone, from their bedrooms, to their doctors offices, and so much more
• Clean up after yourself, and hopefully leave things better than how you found them

These aren't complicated ideas, their core values we share and hold that help us frame our lives and govern our actions, and when people violate them, it's not just the immediate impact of their actions, it's the way that they suggest we cannot count on shared understandings to maintain basic social norms, without needing the intervention of laws or law enforcement to make life not just livable, but thriving, for everyone.

It is enough to be angry about. It is.

Which brings us back to the question: What to do with that anger? Do we let it boil up inside us? Do we pour it out on the daily, on the people nearest to us because they are at least in front of us, instead of on the other side the world? Or do we treat it with awareness, and respect, for what it can teach us, what it can remind us, about who we are, and what values we hold

Now, I promise you, I can't fit everything in this morning, or we'd be here all morning. But there's two things I want to offer you, about what to do with that newspaper, or newsfeed, and the other about what we might take from our reading this morning, by Audre Lorde.

First, we can make choices. Important, personal choices, about what we give our attention to. For a very long time people have been trying to buy our attention, and our anger, to build their own wealth and power. From the days of yellow journalism, and false stories about ships being attacked in foreign harbors launching wars, to the powerful digital algorithms that know that angry people are likely to stay engaged for longer on their social media feeds, to the evening news where it has long been said that what bleeds leads, anger has been, and is, a business for far too many people.

Moral outrage, righteous or not, get monetized, and our attention gets made a commodity that is traded in click and counts, and even things that begin accidentally become viral phenomenons that leave us feeling worse for it. And make no mistake about it, most of it isn't accidents. Most of it is people who are trafficking in your outrage, your anger, to make themselves money. As Jodie Shaw wrote last fall—

“Outrage is no longer a byproduct of the system. It is the system.”

The people making the content and the people consuming it burn out. Trust is lost. And we retreat into our own lives, making the world smaller and smaller with each bit of brokenness that we consume.

So, we're faced with a choice. Do we engage, as good and faithful citizens, making sure to keep up to date about the events in our world, and sharing our opinions with friends, neighbors, co-workers, family, and yes, public figures, but do so in measured moderation that lets us choose how much news we consume, how much we allow ourselves to be pulled, intentionally, into the outrage cycle, and focus on what we have the most influence over? Or do we turn our attention to the next piece that was carefully crafted to hijack not just the news cycle, but our own cycles, and distract us from what really matters.

I'm reminded of a speech that Dr. King gave about the towering intellect and leader that was WEB DuBois, on what would have been Dr. DuBois' 100th birthday.

“Dr. Du Bois,” he said, “the man needs to be remembered today when despair is all too prevalent. In the years he lived and fought, there was far more justification for frustration and hopelessness, and yet this faith in his people never wavered.”

And then Dr. King said this—

“Above all he did not content himself with hurling invectives for emotional release and then retire into smug, passive satisfaction. History,” he said, “had taught him it is not enough for people to be angry – the supreme task is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.”

Which brings me back to Audre Lorde. If you know her address “The Uses of Anger,” you might know that it was subtitled “Women Responding to Racism.” And that is a powerful topic, and one that deserves it's own attention. But for this morning, as we ask ourselves, what use is anger in our lives, I want to return to what she said in the portion that is our reading this day—

“Everything can be used / except what is wasteful / (you will need / to remember this when you are accused of destruction).”

Not just every woman, but every person, has the well-stocked arsenal of anger that can be used against those oppressions that brought it into being. Anger is a tool, maybe even a friend, because it reminds us that we are not passive victims in a world over which we have no influence or control. It is the deep reminder that when we interrogate it, when we control it, when we use it, it is a powerful source of possibility and change.

For as James Baldwin so eloquently put it—

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Our anger is that inner voice, not always still or small, but sometimes big and bold, that tells us that something must be different, that we matter, that the people we love matter, that the earth we call our home matters, and if we are use all the tools at our disposal, we must not hold them back from the workshops of our lives.

Now, I want to be clear, I don't mean hatred. I don't mean rage or violence that sends us out of control and destroys what is around us. I mean something bigger, deeper, more meaningfilled. I mean that connection to the information and energy that is contained in our anger, and I mean our ability to use it as a transforming force for love.

I wish I could stand up here and tell you that what is happening right now is strange, and new, and different, but the people who have been on the receiving end of state sponsored violence, on the receiving end of culturally sanctioned violence, and silence, for generations and centuries tell me otherwise. So here's my encouragement to you—

If you find yourself angry at what is happening in our nation, if you find yourself ready to push for change, to bend the moral arc of the universe, then use that anger to ask why, to ask what it is that you most love, that matters most to you, and learn from those who have faced this struggle before.

And when you have clarity, and energy, when you can say what it is you are fighting for, and not just against, say it loudly, say it widely, not because you've been manipulated into some sort of fake fight, or invited to share someone else's manufactured astroturf campaign, but because you know the truth of what Audre Lorde had to say—

“It is not the anger of (others) that will destroy us but our refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger as an important source of empowerment.”

May we make it so.

Rev. Eric Banner
Senior Minister