Praying When You Are Angry

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Madison Norris
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Text: Psalm 137 March 17 th, 2015 St Stephen s Sun AM Sat PM Praying When You Are Angry I want to talk to you today about praying when you are angry, and I want to start with a lesson from one of my

1 Text: Psalm 137 March 17 th, 2015 St Stephen s Sun AM Sat PM Praying When You Are Angry I want to talk to you today about praying when you are angry, and I want to start with a lesson from one of my g kids. This is a photo of 7 of the 11 g children, the Sewickley and Ohio kids a few weeks ago 1 That is Finnean in the middle with his hand up I ll come back to him later - and on the far left that is David. So their Moms and Dads have been teaching them to pray. Here is David at prayer: Video David at prayer. Just round and round Dad, Mom, night, Dad, Mom, night Sometimes prayer just goes around and around!! Such fun! Today we look at a cluster of Psalms that give voice to one of the deepest of our emotions, anger. The Psalms teach us how to pray when we are angry. Just to have a little more family fun with this before we dig into it, I found that one of my other grandsons was getting good at angry prayer. He was at our house a couple weeks ago, when he pulled this on me Video: Finnean at prayer In case you missed that, he is saying, On Guard! Say your prayers, Grampa Did you hear his mom whisper, be mean? Looks like he knows these psalms well!!

2 We call these imprecatory Psalms because they "pray against" our enemies. They call down God s curses on people. Today I want to give you a lesson on cursing. There are over a dozen of them in the Psalter, and they feature prayers like this: "Let death take my enemies by surprise; let them go down alive to the grave." Psalm 55:15 "O God, break the teeth in their mouths." Psalm 58:6 "May they be blotted out of the book of life and not be listed with the righteous." Psalm 69:28 "May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow." Psalm 109:9 The words are so contrary to what we think of Jesus, or of Christian behavior, that we don't know what to do with them. Most commonly what we do with them is to simply pretend they are not there; we skip over them - and we certainly do not pray them. But that won't do. Eugene Peterson says ( Answering God, pp. 95,96) they are there because E. Peterson, People who pray have a lot of enemies, and spend a lot of their praying time dealing with them Prayer is combat. Jesus would agree; he teaches us to pray, Jesus, Deliver us from evil. The psalms give voice to that combat in raw, blunt form. Of all the imprecatory Psalms, the one that is the most stunning and perhaps the most offensive is the one we read today, Psalm 137. Peterson calls it, the scandal of the Psalter. (p.96) It has three paragraphs to it. In the first paragraph, we see the context: 2

3 By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion! Psalm 137:1 3 The Psalm is written in a foreign land, "by the waters of Babylon". Israel has been overrun by ancient Babylon, Jerusalem has been destroyed, thousands of people have been slaughtered, and tens of thousands of Israelites have been taken captive and force marched some 800 miles to the Babylonian capital. 3 "There we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion." So the Babylonians taunt them, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!" But the Israelites, famous for song, have had all the songs knocked out of them (Peterson). Here is the second paragraph: How shall we sing the Lord s song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill! Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy! Psalm 137:4-6 It starts with a question we all face today, How shall we sing the Lord s song in a foreign land? They had no song to sing; they would guard their safety and their dignity by their silence and their memories: If I forget you, O Jerusalem " They steeled themselves to remember, as though their life depended on it. It did. The words are so moving, and strike a deep chord in everyone who has suffered horrific loss. We easily find ourselves right there, weeping with them, remembering with them, vowing with them: I, too, set Jerusalem above my highest joy. Then comes the third paragraph: Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem, how they said, Lay it bare, lay it bare, down to its foundations!

4 O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us! Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock! Psalm 137:7 9 4 The average modern reader says, What is this doing in the Bible? Well, partly, it is a memory. The neighboring peoples, the Edomites, hated them, when they realized Jerusalem was being overrun by the Babylonians, when the blood of the Israelites ran through the streets, they came to watch and cheer and hoot and taunt. They yelled Tear it down, tear it down take it all the way down!!! Hard to forget their taunts. But that is not all the survivors remember they remember how the soldiers came not just to win, but to crush and to spread terror - they would find mothers with babes in arms, and they would grab the babies, and swing them against the rocks, crushing their skulls. So the captives pray a blessing upon someone who does to the Babylonians what they did to them. You can understand their prayer. So how do we pray when we are angry? 4 steps: 1. Be Honest About Your Anger to God The scriptures have a lot to say about anger. It can be a terrible force for destruction, a poison that can infect a whole life or a whole community. But we find over 375 references in the Bible to God s own anger. What angers him are the things that destroy people, crush people, defile people. So we see Jesus in the Temple, angered at how they have turned God s house of prayer into a house of commerce. And we see Jesus standing by Lazarus tomb, angered by death. And we see Jesus with the Pharisees, angered by their hardness and their hypocrisy, and we see Jesus with his disciples, angered when they didn t have time for the moms with their little children. If you don t find yourself ever getting angry, that s not a virtue. Maybe you have lost sight of the reality of evil in life. Be honest about your anger. Then

5 2. Pray Your Anger to God The medicine for anger is the imprecatory Psalms. There you find yourself ushered into the presence of God, in all his holiness, in all his majesty. They all start out that way. What happens in prayer is that you catch sight of Him, high and lifted up, and when you catch sight of him, you can see what perhaps you have avoided because it is too hard to see the world in all its brutality, the injustice, the brokenness, the hard reality of suffering. And you cry out to him. O Lord, end it! Kill it. Root it out!! We have been long taught to deal with anger in one of two ways. We stuff it, or we express it. Neither will work. If you stuff it, it will eat at you from the inside, and eventually you will pay the price. Heart attack. Ulcers. Stroke. So, moderns think, express it, be honest about it, let it out. But anger expressed is a wildly destructive force. Anger begets anger, and everybody pays the price. It can destroy a whole region in cycles of retribution. Think of what is happening in the Middle East or in Ferguson, Mo. Anger unleashed is a terrible force. That is why James says, The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. James 1.20 Dallas Willard says, "There is nothing that can be done with anger it can't be done better without it." Dallas Willard I have come to think that James is right, and that Dallas is right. Evil must be met, but to meet it with anger takes someone who has been healed of his anger. That is above my pay grade. I find when I let my anger loose, there are always unintended casualties. A far better response is courageous, fierce, persistent love. So what to do with your anger? You take your anger to God. You 5

6 pray it. But you don t stop there, because when you meet God in such prayer your anger is lifted from you. 3) Release Your Anger to God When you take a careful look at the language of these Psalms, you notice something surprising. They do not say, Lord, give me vengeance upon my enemies. You would expect those kind of prayers, but they are rare. Instead they pray, Rise up, O Lord. Bring your justice to the world. They ask God to do what he has promised to do to judge the earth with his righteous judgment. They were so confident that he would do just that that they could pour and release their anger to him. If you do not believe that he will judge the world, then you must carry your anger, vent your anger, enforce your anger. You will pick up your sword and go after those guys Say your prayers And we have been strictly warned to do no such thing. We are not wise enough, we are not good enough. But if you believe that He shall come to judge the living and the dead, you can bring your anger to him and release it to him, because you know that the Lord of heaven and earth shall do what is right. He promises, and so we pray. We you call for him to come. But right here you might begin to think, Wait, what if he answers my prayer? What if he were to come and look carefully and look deeply? What if he were to look at me? Tim Keller puts it like this, If you would, in your foolishness, ever say, At midnight tonight, I want everybody in the world to get exactly what they deserve, don t make any plans for 12:01. This is exactly what happens. This is Psalm 139 "If only you would slay the wicked, O God! Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord, and those who rise up against you?" 6

7 Psalm But then he goes on and prays more, and his words change "Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting." Psalm The Psalmist knows that his own hands are not clean. His anxious thoughts betray him. He bids God to look within him more deeply than he can see himself. It is a bold prayer. If he continues in prayer, he will beg God to cleanse him from his secret faults, to wash him through and through, to make him new. Lead me in the way everlasting. He has arrived at the 4 th step. 4) Beg for the Mercy of God Eugene Peterson points out (p.102) that as Jesus came to the last hours of his life, he picked up a phrase from this Psalm. Peterson calls it, the cruelest verb : Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock! Psalm 137:7 9 It is the word, dashes. It is found in this scandalous Psalm, certainly familiar to Jesus and prayed by Jesus growing up. It is found in only one place in the NT, on the lips of Jesus at the end of his life. He has come into Jerusalem, and he begins to weep. They will dash you into the ground, and your children with you. Your enemies will not leave a single stone in place, because you did not recognize it when God visited you. Luke 19:44 Jesus is saying, Because of your hardness, you cannot see, you cannot hear, you do not even know that I stand among you. Your ancestors prayed your enemies would be dashed, but it shall fall upon you. He weeps his words. 7

8 But then he turns his sight, and moves through that week with a focus, a severity that unnerves his disciples. He can see his cross. He knows what lies ahead, and he doesn t flinch. He knows a far greater dashing will fall upon him. He is the beloved Son who was ripped from his Father s arms and dashed to the ground. That is why he came. He is the innocent one who suffered so that the guilty one could be saved. He is the blessed one who bears the curse, that the cursed ones might find the blessing. He is Lord of peace who bears the anger of the world so that the angry world could find the peace of the Lord. And now your prayer that began in anger and hatred has step by step found the way to his cross. In that place anger finds different words, his words Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Forgive us, Father, forgive us. So how do you curse your enemies? Perhaps like this Arise, O Lord, My enemies surround me. Rescue me, my God! Shatter the teeth of the wicked! (Psa 3.7) Do I not hate those who hate Thee? I hate them with a perfect hatred, O Lord, with the hatred of your Gospel. Take up the cross of thy Son, draw the sword of thy Spirit and fight them, O Lord. Dash them to the ground - in life giving repentance, Slay them - with his death Kill them - with his life Until sin and death itself are utterly destroyed and the earth is filled with your goodness, your grace, your glory. And start with me, O Lord. Start with me In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. 8

The Difficult Psalms Psalm 139 June 7, 2015

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