Hot Buttons
© by the Reverend Dr. Byron E. Shafer
Sacrament of Baptism; Special Offering for Mozambique)
We
need to get angry!
After
all, like Jesus, we’ve been baptized not only with water,
but
also with the fire of the Holy Spirit.
We
need to get angry, but over things
that matter,
and
in a way that’s healthy and constructive!
So
I’m not advocating the indulgence of
our “pet peeves,”
those
small things that irritate us–
as
when a man on the subway takes up a seat and a half,
or
when a woman on the bus puts on her makeup,
or
when some moron cuts ahead of us in line!
Annoyances
like these scarcely register
on
the radar of injustice.
These
are not the things we need to get
angry about.
No,
the things we need to get angry about
are
thoughts
and actions that do register on the radar of injustice,
the
things that reek of wrongness + wrench our God-given souls
because
they create humiliation or inflict physical harm.
We
need to get angry about the things
that
push the hot buttons of our moral outrage.
What’s
a hot button of your moral outrage?
Is
it being party to a cruel, gossipy conversation aimed at a friend?
Is
it watching from your apartment window,
as
one of our members did recently, while the chimney
of
a nearby building belches illegal incinerator smoke
for
the whole of a long Sunday afternoon?
Is
it learning that in our country more than 3,000,000 children
are
abused by adults each and every year?
Or
that 13.5 million children in our country live in poverty,
one
out of every five?
Is
it coming to understand that in this time of national prosperity
the
poor continue to get poorer, while the rich get much richer?
Is
it listening while the mayor tries to criminalize
a
victim of police gunfire and tries to rationalize
his
not reaching out in sympathy to New York’s
stunned
and grieving Haitian-American community?
Certainly,
this last was the hot button pushed at yesterdays's
meeting
of the Presbytery of New York City, the association of
100
Presbyterian churches in the 5 boroughs of New York.
I've
never seen as much anger at a presbytery meeting
over
something going on in the city.
As
a result, a resolution of protest was passed, calling on
the
Justice Department to investigate our police
department
and
the role of the mayor and police commissioner.
I
have placed a copy of this resolution in this
morning's
order and service, and I invite you
to
read it and participate in the anger of
your
presbytery.
We
need to get a certain kind of anger,
the anger of moral outrage!
We
need to possess a certain set of hot buttons, those of holy anger.
For,
like Jesus, we’ve been baptized with the fire of the Spirit,
and
it’s the fire of the Spirit that fuels the kind of actions
that
resist evil and overcome injustice.
In
this morning’s Second Lesson from John, we meet head on
one
of Jesus’s own hot buttons of moral outrage.
For
the most part, the gospels portray Jesus as a master at keeping
the
nagging, time-consuming, energy-sapping details of life at bay.
Maybe
that’s why some of us have been able
to
think of him primarily as “gentle Jesus, meek and mild.”
But
here, in this passage, we see a far different side of Jesus.
Here,
confronted with the bustling, pre-Passover scene in the
courtyard
of the Jerusalem Temple,
Jesus
gets whip-cracking mad!
If
we today find Jesus’s actions surprisingly forceful,
the
Judeans who witnessed them then must initially
have
experienced Jesus’s behavior as completely out of bounds.
For
didn’t the practices going on at the Temple provide services
that
were indispensable for the pilgrims from far away places
who’d
come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover?
How
else other than buying animals here would pilgrims
from
Asia Minor and Greece and North Africa be able
to
furnish the certifiably unblemished animals
required
for sacrifice at the Temple itself?
And
how else other than using the services of
money
changers at the Temple would
travelers
with Roman coins bearing the
idolatrous
image of the emperor be able
to
obtain the image-free Tyrian coins
required
for paying the Temple-tax?
But
Jesus does get whip-cracking mad over this scene.
He
gets angry that the priests are using as their marketplace
the
courtyard of the Temple rather than the hillside opposite it.
He
gets angry that the money changers are turning a holy
obligation
into yet another opportunity for making a buck.
He
gets angry that people are led to experience
the
Temple more as a place for conducting business
than
as a space for encountering God.
Jesus
gets angry that the Temple has become for many
simply
a slaughter-house, a trading-house, a party-house,
and
Jesus desires for those who have come as pilgrims
a
different kind of opportunity,
the
opportunity to experience the Temple instead
as
a house of God, as a house for prayer and praise.
What’s
happening at the Temple pushes Jesus’s hot button so hard
that
he reacts instantaneously, in the full heat of passion,
without
considering the risks he might be running.
So
Jesus takes some of the ropes that are at hand as halters
for
cattle, and fashions them into a kind of whip. With that,
he
drives both animals and people out of the Temple courtyard
&
in the process overturns the tables of the money changers,
sending
thousands of coins clattering onto the pavement,
where
their sound is added to the wild cacophany arising
from
the bleating and lowing of stampeding herds
and
the panicked outcries of the escaping crowds.
For
this outburst by Jesus is taking place not on some sleepy
afternoon
when only a handful or two of persons are present. No,
it
is taking place on a day leading up to the Passover festival,
when
the population of Jerusalem is increased four-fold by
the
arrival of pilgrims from throughout the Roman empire.
At
no time of the year is the Temple’s courtyard busier, +
at
this time and place Jesus takes a prophetic stand
against
the power structure,
protesting
their profanation of God’s house.
Jesus’s
demonstration gains him
maximum
attention and instant notoriety.
Not
all of us are prophets like Jesus.
Not
all of us will turn our anger
into
such dramatic displays of public protest.
But
that need not prevent each of us, in our own way,
from
letting holy anger, righteous indignation, lead us,
in
the Spirit of Christ, to standing up for what is right.
For
like Jesus, we, too, have been baptized
with
the fire of the Holy Spirit.
The
contemporary Christian author C. S. Song has observed that
righteous
anger, anger like that of Jesus,
is
not vengeance in action.
Now
please listen carefully, for what I'm saying now is the
very
heart of what I have to say today.
According
to C. S. Song, righteous anger is not
vengenace
in action.
Rather,
righteous anger is love in agony.
Not
vengeance in action,
but
love in agony.
Thus,
Jesus was not filled with hate for the Temple and ritual
that
he sought in anger to purify. Far
from it.
Jesus
loved the Temple and its ritual,
and
he agonized over it, even unto anger.
So,
too, Jesus was not seeking to wreak vengeance on the priests.
Instead,
he was seeking through his expression of love in agony
to
set them on a right course.
And
Jesus was not intent on destroying the money changers.
Rather
he wanted to turn them decisively
to
far nobler business.
It
is this property of holy anger—
that
it is born of love, of agonized and agonizing love—
that
saves such anger from turning into the bitterness
and
the self-righteous arrogance that is sin.
It
is the absence of the quality of “vengeance in action”
and
the presence of the quality of “love in agony”
that
sets apart the righteous anger of a Martin
Luther
King, Jr. from the self-righteous arrogance
of
a Pat Robertson.
Holy
anger—it’s not vengeance in action,
but
rather love in agony.
Holy
anger seeks not to humiliate and punish gossipers,
but
to snap them into the realization
that
such speaking is, quite simply, wrong and hurtful.
Holy
anger seeks not to inflict pain on the rich
but
to end the pain of the poor.
Holy
anger seeks not to punish and belittle our mayor,
however
tempting that might be.
Nor
does it seek to injure the police.
Rather
holy anger seecks to counteract both effectively
and
non-violently the hurtful influence of the mayor's
divisive
and unjust tongue.
And
to help toward this end,
please
take home and read the resolution
that
our presbytery passed yesterday.
There
is much in our world that is wrong.
Our
country suffers from the cumulative effect
of
much social neglect
And
it is precisely because we love the world + our country so much
and
agonize over their condition so fully,
hat
we need to get angry.
For
like Jesus, we have been baptized
with
the fire of the Holy Spirit.
Let
us pray, using the words of Thomas Troeger printed
on
the front cover of our order of service:
With
holy anger, Christ,
disrupt
the power that feeds
upon
the cruel sacrifice
of others’ rights and needs.
As you turned over tables
and
sent coins
spinning
and jangling
across
the temple floor,
disrupt
the unholy commerce
in
our hearts:
selling
faith
for
security
and
trading justice
for
peace.…
By that same anger start
what
evil can’t defeat:
a
stubborn passion in the heart
to see God’s will complete.…
…Baptize us with fire!
But do not let our rage
grow
bitter as the din
of
fierce mean minds that fail to gauge
when anger turns to sin.
Instead, let anger be
the
first note
in
love’s ascending scale,
the
starting tone
of
heaven’s dove…
Instead,
let anger be
compassion’s
kindling fire
that lights in us the energy
to live as you desire. [Amen.]
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