A Prayer of Anger April 24, 2016 Rev. Dave Benedict

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Priscilla Cooper
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1 A Prayer of Anger April 24, 2016 Rev. Dave Benedict Wow. That is one intense psalm. Had you heard or read that psalm before? Did you know language like that was even in the Bible? What kind of pain, anger, would prompt someone to think those kinds of thoughts, to wish that kind of thing on someone else, on babies, and then to write it down? And what would prompt God to include it in His Word? Why is this psalm in Israel s prayer book. Why is it in our Bibles? And why are we drawing attention to it today in our church? A prayer of anger. That s our lesson for today as we focus on the psalms as tools for teaching us to pray. And we re talking about prayer because prayer is an essential part of being in a relationship with God. If you want to understand prayer, begin with what you know about friendship. That s the advice C. S. Lewis gives us. Friendship with God is what we were made for; it is our reason for being. Last week, it wasn t hard to make the connection between a healthy relationship with God and the need to express our humility before Him through regular and heartfelt prayers of confession. We get that. God

2 is not our equal, not even close to it. And, it s not just His greatness that puts Him above us. It is His holiness. He is holy, holy, holy. And we are not. But that doesn t prevent us from coming to know God. Jesus paid the penalty for our sin. All we have to do is confess our sins and God is faithful and just to forgive them and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So, we get the connection between confession in our prayers and our friendship with God. Now we have to deal with the next great crippler of friendship with God, our anger. Anger, improperly handled, destroys relationships especially our friendships. How many of our human friendships have gone south either blown up or disintegrated over time because we didn t have a functional way to deal with anger in the relationship? From a full knock-down, drag-out fight to the deadly simmering of passive anger, how many of our relationships have suffered because we didn t have or we didn t use healthy ways of dealing with anger in the relationship? A prayer of anger. That s what Psalm 137 is. A prayer. An angry prayer. An angry, desperate prayer written by angry people and then adopted and prayed by a angry nation. And, given what they had experienced, if you were them, you d be angry, too!

3 But you are you. And you have your own reasons to be angry. From all your low grade irritations with situations, family members, bosses and work-mates, friends, spouses, pastors to raw anger, those whitehot rages that come to every life from time to time. You. Me. We all have our own reasons to be angry. Our anger, improperly handled, always affects our relationship with God, even when God is not the direct object of our anger. All anger, improperly handled, affects our relationship with God. And so, just as it is important that we develop healthy, effective tools for dealing with anger in our other relationships, it is vital that we have tools for dealing with anger in our relationship with God. Prayers of anger are the tools we need. And the book of Psalms provides us with all the tools we need for all the kinds of anger we experience. Let s take a moment to remember how the Psalms work as our tutors in prayer. The Psalms are prayers that teach us to pray. Last week I quoted Eugene Peterson, who said, The Psalms are the best tool available for teaching us to pray, 150 carefully crafted prayers that...attend to all the parts of our lives that are at various times and in different ways rebelling and trusting, hurting and praising.

4 That s what the Psalms do they take the raw material of our lives and direct all of it toward God, sometimes in praise, sometimes in confusion, sometimes in frustration, sometimes in anger. The psalms are honest prayer. Sometimes psalms are prayers of praise and thanksgiving, but sometimes they sound whiny, like Psalm 6: All night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears. Sometimes they sound paranoid, like Psalm 69: Those who hate me without reason outnumber the hairs of my head; many are my enemies without cause, those who seek to destroy me. Sometimes they are flat-out vindictive. Listen to Psalm 12, May the Lord cut off every flattering lip, every boastful tongue. In the Psalms, God intentionally inspired the liberal use of "raw" metaphors, like cutting off lips, to remind us of our need to be brutally honest with Him in prayer. We're not to spiritualize our circumstances or to distance ourselves from our anger with religious jargon in our prayers. The Psalms keep our prayers rooted in reality. Peterson also said, Dissociated from the rawness of life,

5 prayer drifts into silly sentimentality, or snobbish mysticism, or pious elitism. We don't want that, not if we want to know God, not if we want to experience his presence in our lives. What is said in the psalms might be shocking, or immature, or just plain rude, but every psalmist seems driven to lay bare before God exactly how their experience of life at the moment feels to them. To give it to God and let Him make sense out of it. Ok. Let s go back to Psalm 137; a prayer of raw anger, expressed in the most graphic of terms. Psalm 137. You ll find it on page 973 in the pew Bibles. What is this Psalm all about. Verse 1 gives us the historical context. By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. About 900 years after God led His people into their Promised Land, and about 400 years after He established the nation of Israel with first Saul and then David as king, Israel was conquered by the Babylonian empire and most of those who survived were taken back to Babylon as captives. Everything they knew and loved was taken from them. The Temple was destroyed; in fact, the capital city of Jerusalem was destroyed, it s great walls torn down.

6 We know this period of captivity lasted 70 years, but at any moment during that 70 years, the exiles had no hope it would ever end. They hadn t just lost their homes and their freedom. They had lost, as far as they knew, their place as God s people; their identity, their religion, their purpose, their future. By the rivers of Babylon we sat. By all historical accounts, the rivers of Babylon the system of canals that carried water throughout the city were beautiful, lush, peaceful garden spots. Even so, God s people wept as they sat there, remembering their homes in the dry, hill country of Israel, remembering everything that made them unique and important in the world. The land God had given them; their place as God s own people. Verse 2. There on the poplars trees that lined the river, they hung their harps the instruments they had used to worship God in the Temple and in their homes, to sing of their history with Him, to experience their cultural joy. Nothing symbolized their hopelessness, their anger at this catastrophic change of circumstance, more than to hang up their harps. Our life is over. Verse 3. But they aren t left alone to wallow in their misery. They are tormented by their captors. Hey,

7 sing us a song! You were such a joyful people, always singing and dancing. Sing us a song now! Verses 4, 5 and 6. How can you ask us to sing? Our songs of our God and of our homes, both of which you have stripped from us. My hand for playing and my tongue for singing don t work any more. How can I sing? There is a change of style and tone as we move into verses 7, 8, and 9. Linguistic scholars have struggled in what to make of it. Many believe it is actually a song; but with a twist. You want a song from us? Ok, here s a song. Have you ever enjoyed a foreign language song without having a clue about what the words mean? You like the tune, the voices, the instruments, and what the words mean is really irrelevant. They could be singing anything and you wouldn t know. They could be singing curses! It is very possible this is going on in Psalm 137. Calling down God s wrath upon those who wronged them, singing joyful sounding music and calling wrath upon their oppressors in words their oppressors couldn t understand. Verse 7. The Edomites had been their allies against the Babylonians, but they changed sides and joined in the

8 destruction of Jerusalem, Tear it down, tear it down. Betrayal! Verse 8. The Babylonians. Unspeakably brutal in their warfare. Happy is the one blessed the one who pays you back with the same treatment you gave us. And finally, verse 9. This sentiment that shocks us every time we see it in print, every time we hear it aloud. Happy is the one blessed is the one who takes your infants as you took our infants and dashes them against the rocks. Raw, uncensored anger. A prayer? A model for our prayer? All of the above. OK. Let me make two pastoral observations about anger and prayer, about how we can and must combine anger and prayer. 1. Anger, itself, is not the problem in our relationship with others and with God. Anger is part of life. We all know that. Anger is an inevitable result of two realities; a) we are humans. We have emotions and we experience things personally. And then, b) we live in a fallen world, where self-interest, evil, and circumstance work against us in ways that do real damage to us and others.

9 The combination of these two realities produce anger. It can t be avoided; therefore, it shouldn t be avoided. To deny anger its place is to deny both being human and the fallenness of our world. Anger doesn t come in one shape or size. There is sudden anger, slow anger. There is irritation and there is rage, with all variations in between. There is vindictive anger, vengeful anger, prideful anger, and righteous anger. There is the personal anger we feel for someone who has taken advantage of us, who has cheated us, or abused us. There is the community anger we feel when our nation has been attacked or our people threatened. And there is an anger we can only direct toward God who not protected us from tragedy, insult, or abuse. Some families are more comfortable with anger than others. I call them blow up/make up families. They process anger differently than families who take their anger underground, where it constantly simmers but rarely boils. Some cultures are more comfortable with anger than others, as well. Italians are blow up/make up as a group, while Scandinavians are generally unable to express anger, but very good at being passively aggressive with it. I wonder which group settled in northern Minnesota?

10 Christian culture as a rule doesn t know what to do with anger. It feels like sinning to be upfront with our anger, but it is sinning to nurse anger below the surface, like we often do. The Bible makes it pretty clear anger is not the sin; nursing anger is. Ephesians 4:26 quotes Psalm 4 In your anger do not sin, and then says, Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry. In other words, deal with it. Praying the psalms is a way to be angry without sinning. 2. The Psalms teach us what to do with our anger. First, take it to God. Psalm 3, and dozens of other psalms model this for us. Psalm 3 begins, Oh God, how many are my foes. Psalm 4 starts out, Answer me when I call you, my righteous God. Give me relief from my distress. Every psalmist is committed to the idea that their trouble and the anger it evokes must be addressed directly to God. We can even be pretty blunt about it. Psalm 7, verse 6, says, Arise, O Lord. Deliver me, O my God. The Hebrew sense is more like this, Wake up God! Get over here and help me! We can be blunt, even insistent about it. But we have to take our anger to God.

11 Where does my help come from? It comes from God. Next, the psalms teach us to hold nothing back. No anger we hold is off limits for our prayer. Few things elicit raw anger more profoundly than abuse. To be abused. To have someone you love abused. Many scholars have come to believe Psalm 109 is the prayer of an abused person. If you have suffered abuse at the hands of another, read Psalm 109, verses 6-19, and see if it doesn t give voice to the rage our abuser produces within us. No anger is out of bounds in prayer. I ve mentioned before, as young children, my siblings and I were victims of physical abuse from our biological father punishments that got way out of hand. My mother divorced him and married a good man when I was six, and life was so much better from that point on. But, as an adult, married and entering my 30 s, I had not yet dealt with the anger his abuse built in me. I had just stuffed it inside, and I had no capacity, no vocabulary for expressing it. In fact, I had continued to stuff every angry thought throughout my life. Sometimes, with no warning, I would just blow. A counselor suggested that I buy a plastic baseball bat mine was yellow and use it to vent my anger. By hitting a pillow as hard as I could, in private, while I expressed by anger out loud, as loud as I could.

12 That s the idea these psalms of anger are getting at. We are to lay out before God the depth of our anger in the most descriptive, most cathartic, most satisfying language available to us. And then we are to leave it with Him. Leave it with Him. He alone can deal with it appropriately, justly. Over half the psalms in Israel s prayer book are about trouble, fear, and anger. As you read them, you ll notice that almost all of the end the way Psalm 4 ends. Here s verse 7. Arise, Lord! Deliver me, my God! Strike all my enemies on the jaw; break the teeth of the wicked. And here s verse 8, leaving it all in God s hands. From the Lord comes deliverance. May your blessing be on your people. Nothing good comes of anger that we keep for ourselves. It may be understandable anger, even justifiable, but our anger acted out or repressed always works against relationships with others, with God. We are not wise enough, and, frankly, not good enough to deal properly with our own anger. Psalms of anger are a gift to us, even Psalm 137. The Psalms teach us how to pray our anger; address it

13 to God; leave nothing out; pray it the way we feel it; and then leave it with God. He will deal with it. He has dealt with it. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, God has dealt with our anger and all of its causes. Prayers of anger. Another reason to pray the psalms, routinely. By ourselves or in community with others. Silently or out loud. Praying the psalms will put us in touch with every kind of anger humans can feel, at every level of intensity we feel them. And they will lead us to give our anger to God and to leave it with Him. Amen.

Praying When You Are Angry

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