Word of Salvation – October 2015

 

Love is Not Easily Angered

A sermon by Rev. Pieter Tuit on 1Corinthians 13:5

 

Here in Tasmania we do not have to fear erupting vulcanoes with all the resulting damage that they can do. Gail and I learned about the devastating power of a volcano when we moved to the Philippines in July 1991. We arrived in Manila probably one or two days after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo. Our airplane was one of the last ones able to land. The next morning, the city of Manila, even though 300 km from the volcano, was covered in centimeters of volcanic ash. The pictures give you an idea of the damage done. This volcano had been dormant for at least a thousand years. All that time it had been quiet, peaceful and non-threatening. Many communities had been build on its slopes. Until the outburst came. Countless lives were lost. Property damage run into the billions. The area continues to be impacted by what happened there 21 years ago.

As I said we do not have to fear volcanic outbursts like Mount Pinatubo. However, we do have to deal with outburst that can leave a lot of misery in their wake. I am speaking here of human vulcanoes, human Pinatubos, people ready to explode. The result is frayed emotions, destroyed relationships, unhappy marriages, broken parent/child relationships. I remember my mother telling me stories about the explosive power of one of my grand fathers who died two weeks before I was born. Many of us present here this morning can tell similar stories of what it has been or what it is like to live or deal with angry, irritable people.

Our Scripture this morning reminds us that love is not easily angered. One of the holy habits God wants to form in his children through the fruit of the Holy Spirit is tempers with a long, yes very long fuse. Love is not easily angered we read in the NIV. Other translations have love is not provoked or as we read in the Message, “Love does not fly off the handle.”

Smedes call irritability the emotional launching pad for anger. It means that you are always ready for a temperamental blast off. It means to have your insides coiled, ready to spring into an outburst of fury. Anger itself goes even further. Anger is an emotion with a passion and it comes with energy. An angry person wants to tear things, or people apart. Anger usually pushes us to attack.

When we get angry we throw a tantrum. We swear. We use four-letter words. Yes sometimes we hit, and even fight. Some of us may not be expressive about our anger. Others put our anger under a lid. We disguise it. We pout. We express it in passive aggressiveness.

What we do with our anger tells us a lot about what kind of people we are. It tells us a lot about how far we have progressed on the road to sanctification. After all, not to be easily angered, not to fly off the handle, is one of the holy habits the Holy Spirit from God and Jesus wants to form in each one of us.

It will help us to understand why we are irritable. Why we get quickly angry. The short answer, of course is that it is a result of sin and a lack of sanctification. Paul, in Galatians writes about fits of rage as evidence of the sinful nature. It is for him not a small matter because he calls it a reason for not being able to inherit the Kingdom of God. He encourages the Colossian Christians to put to death what belongs to their earthly nature and to get rid of such things as anger and rage. This means that, if we find ourselves to be always irritable, very quick to get angry this can be due to the fact that we are unconverted, that we live outside of Christ, that we do not have the Holy Spirit in us, that we need to repent, and be converted.

Scripture reminds us that the ultimate reason the inconveniences in life causes us to be irritable, is our failure to find peace with God. Being out of tune with God puts pressure on other things. We expect them to give us what only God can give. Consequently, when they do not give us that what we expect we become irritable. We become easily angered. Without the love of God, we make our unfilled and dissatisfied egos the axis around we want everyone and everything to turn. We turn everything in our orbit into a means of our personal satisfaction and when this does not happen we are easily angered.

This of course has consequences in our lives. When we are easily angered we get angry with everything and everybody who slows us down whether this is in traffic or at the check out counter. We fly of the handle when tea is late two nights running and we are not happy with what is on our plates. Some marriages are unhappy because a spouse expects from the other spouse what only God can give. We are concerned and angry at the same time when our teenagers come home 45 minutes after the agreed upon time.

The result is a loss of joy. People who are easily angered, who have a low threshold of irritability, are not joyous people to be around. Some of us may have experience of having to walk, so to say, on egg shells so that the other person, sometimes a spouse will not be easily angered. Smedes comments here that irritable people are folks with agitated souls who have lost their awareness of life as a gift. It is impossible to feel gratitude for life as a gift when we feel cheated out of the life we are trying to earn. This is painful. This is the loss of joy.

Irritability can lead to hostility. When we become hostile we see the object of our anger as an enemy and we are not inclined to make peace. Hostility is so dangerous because the next step is often violence. Sometimes this violence is directed to a spouse or a child and we have issues of physical and other forms of abuse.

This therefore raises the question,what can this love of God in us do to our irritability and capacity to get angry? It should be said first of all that it is not always wrong to be or get angry. Scripture reminds us here to be angry but not to sin. ! Corinthians does not say that love never gets angry. However, it does say that love does not get angry very easily. In other words the love of Christ in us puts a very long fuse on our anger. Yes, our anger can be provoked but not easily.

Smedes comments here,” we do not want Christian love to turn us into spineless souls without heat or passion. We want the freedom to get angry. We also want freedom from slavery to our anger. We want to calm the furies within us. We want to conquer irritability, not anger.

There are things that God’s love will not do for and to our anger. First of all, God’s love in us will not make us hide or disguise our anger. Being, or becoming passive aggressive is not a holy habit for following Jesus. The same applies to pouting or the silent treatment. We are angry but we do not want to tell the other person that we are. Yet, we expect them to get the message that we are angry, and that they should do something about it. Does this sound familiar? How many marriages are unhappy because this kind of stuff happens. Smedes comments here that disguising anger relieves people of the responsibility of doing something about our anger. However, it forces them to deal with an irritable person who will not let his or her anger to be recognized for what it is.

God’s love in us does not make us explode in anger causing all kinds of ruptured relationsips in its wake human Pinatubos leave hurt and bleeding people in its wake. This is what Paul had in mind when he wrote to the Ephesians, be angry but do not sin. He was saying here do not disguise or hide your anger but do not act like a volcano either. This is also the reason why he counsels especially fathers not to provoke your children to anger. Yes, children, young and old can at ties sorely try a father’s patience. At the same time much damage has been done and there are many ruptures father child relationships because dad did not practice the holy habit of not being easily angered.

It is also important to remember that being a Christian does not mean that all the irritants are taking out of our lives. God’s love in us does not take away people or things who have the potential to irritate us. Smedes writes people irritate us by rubbing our sensitive egos. They do not appreciate us. They ignore us when we need to be noticed. They remind us of duty when we want to have fun. They do not respond when we cry for help. They are more successful than we are though they have fewer talents than we. We think we marry the person we love but after we are married we learn that our spouse can irritate us and we need to learn every day to love the person we married. People can irritate us by their love. Love is often put in clumsy hands. There is a well-meant love that chokes us; people push into our lives and cling to us with love when we want to be left alone. Some peoples’ dying is made much more difficult by loving relatives who do not want to let them go.

God’s love in us does not forbid anger completely. Love does not make anger wrong There are things in life that demand our getting angry at them Not to feel anger at them would mean we are either insensitive to evil or afraid to get angry. God and Jesus showed righteous anger.

God’s love in us does put a long fuse on our anger and irritability because it is the power that directs our attention away from ourselves to others. It is the power to relate to other peoples’ needs without demanding a return on our investment. If we do not make ourselves the center of the universe we will not feel frustration as sharply and painfully as we do when personal satisfaction is the primary goal of our lives.

God’s love in us does fulfill our deepest need. Our deepest need is to know God and to be loved by him. Our hearts are restless until they find rest in God. John writes in his epistle if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God abides in him.

Because God’s love fulfills our most basic need it reduces the potential for frustration Again once satisfying our own deepest desires is less than our ultimate goal love begins to reduce irritability by directing our energies in the direction of the needs and rights of other people. God’s love does not take away the things that cause us to be irritable but we feel different about them. We no longer feel the frustrations in the same way.

God’s love in us also helps us to communicate our anger. It gives us the freedom to admit that we are angry and the grace to express our anger in a constructive way. Smedes writes love’s power comes to us first as a gift received. We feel first the freedom of being loved powerfully. God’s unconditional love gives us freedom to know how anger prone we are and to admit to ourselves that we are angry people We can admit our anger to ourselves and express it to others because we can accept ourselves as anger-prone people.

This means therefore that we do not have to hide it from others in a passive aggressive way. When we are filled with and can act in the freedom of God’s love our object will not be to hurt the other person but to change the situation we are angry about. We leave the person who is angry with us or at whom we are angry free to respond the way he or she wants. If he acts forgivingly so much the better. If he responds with anger we will nevertheless leave him free to make this response and we trust that at another time he may change his feelings of anger.

When we are filled with God’s love we are or become grateful people who received our lives and all that comes with it as a gift from God. No longer is the world around us an obstacle course we must run to achieve our happiness. The world and our life in it becomes a gift , a playground where we discover our very selves as a gift of God. The first breath in the morning, the first good morning dear from a spouse, the first handshake from a friend or a hug from a child, the change to be healthy and the opportunity to work all of it we see as a gift from God.

This does not mean that we do not know about the shadow side of life, the agony and the misery. We continue to live in a world where some are robbed of their rights, others are staring and for other life seems to be worse than death. However, as Smedes reminds us that when God’s love gives us the power to be concerned about other people’s miseries and needs, we do feel our own lives as gifts and this does open the windows of gratitude.

Gratitude is God’s antidote to irritability. Being grateful people makes us people with long fuses on the time bombs of our anger. It is very difficult to be coiled for anger as long as we are feeling grateful for life. It is difficult to live on the edge of fury when we experience the wonder that we should exists at all.

No, God’s love in us will not right away sweep away every tendency to get angry. The inflammation of the ego will take a long time to heal. For some of us this may take longer than for others. Generational habits also play a part here. However, when we are truly filled with God’s love we do not have to say I am just like my father or my mother and you know that they had a temper. When we are filled with God’s love we will, be it ever so slowly, and be it ever so small, reflect the character of our heavenly Father and our special brother Jesus Christ.They have their fruit growing Holy Spirit at work in us. This fruit of the Holy Spirit makes the fuse to the timebombs of are anger very, very long. Where there is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness and self-control irritability and anger are kept where it should be.

We will also experience that filled with God’s love we will find a new way, a godly way, a sanctified way to be angry because we will learn to be angry and not to sin. At the same time we will be amazed at our tolerance for annoyances that used to drive us up the wall because they blocked our way to pleasure and fulfillment.

Love is not easily angered. Love does not make us fly off the handle. We can trust. This is the theme of our messages for this year. Because God is who he is, slow to anger and abundant in mercy. Because this God is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who knew how and when to be angry but also how to be meek, because we have the Holy Spirit doing his fruit growing work in us, his fruit growing people we can trust that the fuses on the timebombs of our anger will grow longer this year, that we will not be like Mount Pinatubo.