Turning aside anger

After 1 Samuel 25:1-44 

An arrogant, unthinking word,

spoken without care or thought,

evokes a response of revenge

and destruction, swords belted

and unsheathed, their bearers

determined to cut a swath,

hew down, destroy in anger

and recrimination. And yet

a voice, a single voice,

meets the sword head on,

risking her own life, seeking

forgiveness for one who

didn’t deserve it. Anger

seeking vengeance for arrogance

and insult is set aside. The voice

is heeded, the petition for mercy

granted. And it is God who

answers the sin with judgment.

 

Photograph by Marcus Paulo Prado via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

“Rock of Ages,” hymn by Augustus Toplady – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

 

Why Euthanasia Feels Intuitive – Time Challies.

 

“God, that Madest Earth and Heaven,” hymn by Reginald Heber and Richard Whately – Anthony Esolen at Word and Song/

 

The Other Side of Human Rights – Seth Lewis.

 

Hilda and Caedmon – poem by Malcolm Guite.

Better than Pharisees Part 2

After Matthew 5:17-26 

How can you be better

than Pharisees, those

paragons of virtue who do

everything expected and

are master virtue signalers? 

I’ll explain. First, don’t be

Angry. Ever. For any reason.

Even if you’re justified,

Especially if you’re justified.

Second, don’t call anyone

a fool, even if that’s 

exactly what they are.

You can’t even call

them a fool in your head.

Resolve all bad feelings

against you, even if they’re

unwarranted. Reconcile 

with your accusers, even

if they’re wrong or false.

 

Who can do this, you say?

Who is humanly capable

of doing these things?

Right question. 

Right answer:

No one. That’s the point.

We can’t escape who 

we are. We can’t escape

our humanity. That’s why

there’s a law, a whole set

of laws, in detail because

the lawgiver knows how

we twist and turn and

try to find refuge from

our own behavior.

 

We can’t escape our fate

on our own. Only one

can do that, and do that

for us. The law is 

an impossible standard

because we’re human

and the lawgiver is not.

We can never measure up.

Our hope is in the impossible,

and the impossible has only

happened once.

 

Photograph by Chris Brignola via Unsplash. Used with permission.

In praise of gentleness

It’s difficult to look at almost anything online these days and not be offended. It seems worse when the person doing the offending is someone you know, a Facebook friend you’ve actually met in person, say, and you know them to be kind, compassionate, and caring. And then on Instagram, POW, a bowlful of anger gets dumped on a specific target but splashes all of us. 

It was ugly. I was stunned. I knew the person leaned leftward politically, but I never expected what I saw. It’s not only the leftward leaning; the rightward crowd does it as well. And I’ve caught the tendency in myself, when you see something or read something that takes you from a calm-and-collected zero to a red-hot 90 in 4.3 seconds.

 

It’s not an attractive characteristic. It’s fueled by frustration and anger. It’s heightened on social media, which we seem to think gives us license to behave badly. 

We forget the call to be gentle, with others and ourselves.

 

Gentleness has been on my mind this week; it was part of a sermon by our pastor Sunday, when he preached on Galatians 6:1-10, in which the Apostle Paul exhorts us to be gentle in reproof, not to become weary in doing food, and do good to everyone, “especially those of the household of faith.”

 

The target of my friend’s ire was a well-known conservative commentator, who also happens to be a Christian. And I wondered what might be the outcome if my friend, instead of heaping outrage and condemnation, had instead prayed for this individual, not that they would come around to my friend’s thinking, but instead would experience God’s grace, God’s blessing, and God’s encouragement. And what if my friend prayed daily for this person for a week.

 

And what if my conservative friends selected someone they disagreed with – Rachel Maddow, Elizabeth Warren, Stephen Colbert – and prayed for that person for a week, that they would experience God’s grace, God’s blessing, and God’s encouragement. 

 

In either situation, nothing might happen. But I suspect that, if nothing else, the heart of the person praying might change. And that may be one of the unexpected benefits of prayer.

 

A gentle word

 

If I would choose

my word, it would not

be power or glory, 

it would not be pride

or control, it would not

be wealth or position or 

title. Instead, if I could,

I would choose gentle,

the word I’d want 

to describe my demeanor,

to describe my actions,

to describe my spirit.

Gentle is accepted

in all situations, 

sometimes used and

abused but accepted

nonetheless. Gentle

is a being word. Gentle

is an action word. Gentle

is a word, a life that’s

learned, a condition

that’s taught. And

it is so hard.

 

Photograph by Godwill Gira Mude via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Forgiveness” by Brian Jones

A friend makes an offhand remark, and suddenly it’s almost 10 years ago. I’m sitting in my office and work, my back to the door. I hear a noise and turn around, and three people are standing there. One is my boss. One is his boss. And one is a high-level executive who felt threatened by my speechwriting work for the CEO, and politically maneuvered me out of doing it.

They had a problem. The replacement speechwriter, who had no prior experience, had turned in a 30-page, single-spaced manuscript – that’s 12,000 words – to the CEO for a major 15-minutes speech. It should have been 1,500 words, and the CEO didn’t even like full-blown manuscripts, preferring extended outlines. And the speech was two days away. The three executives were there, essentially hats in hand, to ask me to fix it.

My first reaction was anger, carefully contained. The second was an inward smugness – the CEO had sent them to me to fix it. And fix it I did. But I had to be careful, because, in the corporate world, this is the kind of situation that the three would likely try to find a way of blaming me for their mistake. It was unfortunate that I felt more gratification than forgiveness.

It is, perhaps, one of the most difficult issues anyone, and especially Christians, must wrestle with in a broken world.

Forgiveness.

It may be forgiving a colleague at work who engaged in the fine art of political backstabbing, with you as the victim. It may be a relative or close friend. It may be a pastor or an entire church. And it may be forgiving yourself.

Forgiveness is tough terrain. And it is the terrain tackled by Brian Jones in his 2008 book, Forgiveness: Get Rid of the Gorillas of Pain, Anger and Bitterness and Start Living.

Jones, a pastor, has heard enough and experienced enough about pain and brokenness in human lives (including his own) to know of what he speaks about forgiveness. Through a combination of observations, personal anecdotes, Scripture references, and self-reflection, He speaks to the very heart and soul of what forgiveness is, why it’s needed, where it comes from, and steps one can take to actually do it.

“The best I can tell,” he writes, “the wrongs themselves aren’t what we catalog and keep recalling. It’s the triggers, the ambient sounds and sensations that bring back the feelings of rage. These are what we can’t help recording and what keep us from forgetting the wrongs done to us.” He’s exactly right. We don’t keep an open journal in our heads about who and what need forgiving, dwelling hourly on each entry there. Instead, the hurt and pain are buried, until something – an observation, an off-hand comment, a scene from a movie or a television program – trigger the memory. And the anger.

Brian Jones

Jones uses the metaphor of a gorilla to explain forgiveness. We all keep gorillas inside of us – angry, sometimes raging gorillas of hurt, pain, and brokenness. He tracks the gorillas in his own life and the lives of the rest us, tracing where they come from, what has really caused them (what he calls “gorilla DNA”). And then how we rid ourselves of the gorillas.

Jones is senior pastor of Christ’s Church of the Valley in suburban Philadelphia. He received his B.A. degree from Cincinnati Christian University and his M.Div. degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. He is the author of Second Guessing God (2006), Hell is Real: But I Hate to Admit It (2011), and a forthcoming book to be published in the fall of 2017. He also writes practical articles on leadership and preaching for senior pastors at SeniorPastorCentral.com.

Forgiveness is almost a decade old. But the wisdom and truth it contains about one of the most common needs people experience are timeless.

Top photograph by Peter Hershey via Unsplash. Used with permission.