Dealing
With Anger
Pastor Mathew Magera – 7/1/18 – Sermon 294
St. Thomas Lutheran Church, Trufant, MI
To God be the Glory!
Grace and peace to you from
God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
We have a gem of an Old
Testament tale today. If we didn't hear the story with its book, chapter and
verse in the Bible, we may just wonder if it really came from the Bible in the
first place. The Bible is full of little snippets like this that we just would
not expect to find within the sacred scriptures, many that we won't even have
the opportunity to explore this summer. It's easy to skip over gems like these
because they don't usually appear in the prescribed readings from week to week.
But, after hearing this one, if you are ever asked to lead a devotion, pull
this one out and see how many people don't even know this is in the Bible.
So, when we come to
something that doesn't seem very sacred or biblical, so different it makes us
snicker a little bit we have two choices to make. We can either pass over
stories like these, chuckle at their improbability maybe and call them irrelevant
and instead seek to learn something from the Sermon on the Mount or something
like that or we can dissect them and see what God is trying to tell us through
these strange encounters.
Elisha was the prophet that
followed in the footsteps of Elijah, who we heard from two weeks ago. It's easy
to get the two of them confused because their names sound so similar. Elijah,
with a J, came first. Elisha came after him. Elijah's reputation left rather
large footsteps. Elijah was easily the greatest prophet of the time. Some
people loved Elijah. Other people hated him because he was a prophet of God who
was unmovable in his faith and in his message. As a result, Elisha had a
similar reputation because of Elijah. Liked by some, hated by others because of
his message. The Bible also says Elijah had plenty of hair. Elisha, not so much
as we can see. After Elijah was taken up into heaven, Elisha had big shoes to
fill. So many people wanted to follow their own religions and just put their
Jewish roots aside. It may not have been uncommon for either one of these
prophets to have been driven out of a town. With that knowledge, we find Elisha
on his way to Bethel. It's possible he may have finished preaching in the place
he had just left. Maybe his message was not received very positively. As he is
on his way, he finds he’s not alone. These boys, or to be more specific, this
gang of teenagers come following him from the town he just left.
These teenagers come with a
certain tough guy swagger in their step, gum-smacking between their teeth, eyes
glaring, and they start mocking him. Hey Baldy! You better get off our turf,
Baldy. Don't ever come back here again, Baldy. There is Elisha, exposed on the
open road, dozens of teenagers following him, teasing him, overpowering him,
perhaps threatening him. He see them coming closer and closer toward him, maybe
packs of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeves of their white t-shirts, holes in
their blue jeans, leather jackets, nose rings, tattoos or whatever the
Israelite equivalent of this look might be. In other words, intimidating.
All the while, you can
probably feel the rage building up inside of Elisha as he is mocked for his baldness.
Coupled with his exposure of being caught alone on an empty dusty road,
thinking about the big shoes he has to fill as a prophet, the amount of times
his message is rejected rather than accepted. You can imagine he feels all of
this building up inside of him until he just can't take it any longer. He's
made it to the edge. It's over. No more Mr. Nice Prophet. He calls a curse on
them in God's name and two bears come running out of the nearby brush,
growling, tearing the boys from limb to limb, 42 of them to be biblically
accurate.
Elisha surveys the road
which was now bloodstained, quiet and calm. I almost imagine him brushing the
dust off his shoulder and just moving on. Or maybe he feels remorse for what
happened and he grieves. He doesn't do anything at this point, he just picks up
right where he left off and keeps walking. What about the boys? What about the
bears? Did anybody get away? Will the news spread? What is Elisha feeling? So
many questions. So few answers. And Elisha just takes his bald head elsewhere
and keeps preaching.
Is this the kind of behavior
we expect from a man of God like Elisha? Would we expect a prophet to crack
under the pressure of scrutiny and persecution and call a curse upon people,
even teenage boys, even ones who may have deserved it? We have discovered a
weakness in Elisha. He had a certain suppressed anger within him, a vengeance
lurking in the shadows. He was pushed over the edge and his bears came out from
the brush.
This is a story about what
happens when anger gets the best of a man of God, a story about when anger,
among other things, gets the most of us. What happens, is bears. Just like
Elisha, we have bears. Hiding in the brush, waiting to be released. And when
they are released, they come, they destroy. And we can't get away from them.
There were two men hiking in
the woods on a weekend camping trip. They decided to go off trail and do a
little exploration. Not long after they got deep into the countryside, they
came upon a bear trying to get some berries from one of the trees. When it
noticed the two men it looked at them and began to growl. The two men stood
still. The bear continued growling at them. One of the men then bent down,
reached into his backpack, pulled out a pair running shoes and started changing
out of his hiking boots and into the shoes. His friend looked at him and said,
"Are you crazy? You can't outrun a bear." As the last lace was tied he
looked up and said, "Oh, I don't need to outrun the bear. I just need to
outrun you."
This story speaks a certain
truth for us today. We can’t get away from our bears. When we reach our
breaking point, we can't outrun our bears and the power they have to destroy. When
we reach our breaking point, whether it be anger, lust, hate, addiction, frustration,
impatience, when we reach our breaking point, even our best intentions cannot
outrun the powerful bears that reside in our subconscious ready to inflict
damage at our command. We have that power just as Elisha did and we release
them to carry out our sinful intentions.
Finding the good news in a
story like this is challenging. Elisha got mad, 42 teenagers were mauled, the
grace of God appears absent. The quiet bloodstained road gave me the chills
this week as I imagined how it must feel to stand in the aftermath of a school
shooting or be in a public place after something went terribly wrong. Nothing
left but the bloody and tearful remains of someone’s breaking point. It's time
like these, like the quiet road on which Elisha travels, in the quiet schools after
a tragedy, in the quiet room in our house after we said or did the wrong thing,
it is in times like these where we begin to wonder where the grace of God is
and how someone who seems so unlikely could do such a thing.
You're right. There is no
visible grace in this story. While humorous on the outside because of its
unexpectedness, on the inside it is an ugly story. Elisha, a man of God, has an
ugly side, a side of him that would act upon the taunting cries of the
threatening youth. We have the same power as Elisha, to get pushed to the edge
and let our bears out to attack others, to unleash our anger, our addictions,
our temptations in different ways. You have those bears. I have those bears. They
may not look like or act like his did, but we still have them. We want to keep
them penned up too. We never want them to be seen. We always want to keep them
hiding in the brush, tucked away in our shadowy subconscious. Just think about
this and think about what you, as children of God are capable of. It doesn't take
much for us to look within us and to find those dark and shadowy places and
deep inside we know we are capable of some pretty terrible things.
We need to look at this
story of Elisha and his bears as a call to confront the true power that we have
within us, a power of evil, to do sinful things, hurtful things. Whether people
deserve it or whether they are innocent, this is what we are capable of. Yet,
just because we read stories like this in the Bible and just because we have
experiences like this in our world where it appears the grace of God is absent,
where our bears are released and the damage is done before we have a chance to
rethink it, when these things happen, it doesn't mean that God's grace is truly
gone. God's grace is still there. It is only hidden and its hiddenness is
masked behind the reality of our sinful lives.
What are your bears? What
would you rather keep tucked away in the depths of your shadowy subconscious
that you don't want anybody to know about? Where are those areas of your life
that you believe God's grace cannot reach?
Here's the thing you need to
know. God loves you, bears and all, whatever they are. He loves the ugliness
that is within us. Name those bears in your mind right now. Bring them before
the Lord. Maybe your bear is anger. Maybe it is something else. God already
knows they are there. He knows your bears, he knows where you hide them. He
also knows what it takes for you to reach the edge and release them. God
desires to love the ugliness within you just as he desires to love your beauty.
What I'm saying is that it is okay to acknowledge your bears. God doesn't love
the damage that our bears inflict when they are released but he loves even that
dark and shadowy part of us. We are not perfect, we all have bears and it is
our bears that need God's grace just like the rest of us.
Like the point I made
moments ago, we can't outrun our bears. We can't hide from them. Not even with
that pair of running shoes we have in our backpacks. We cannot escape our
bears. But, we can stand up and acknowledge their presence in our lives and
seek God's guidance when we are moving toward a breaking point or his
forgiveness after we have reached that breaking point.
God loved Elisha and his
bears. Unfortunately, Elisha was pushed too far and those bears did terrible
things. But, God still loved him, not what he did, even if the boys deserved
it. Elisha would go on to do many great things in his service to the Lord, but
like anyone, he still had his weaknesses. God loved him, weaknesses and all.
With thoughts like this, how
is this story even remotely full of whimsy? Before I got serious with this
story, you'll have to admit how far out of place the story seemed, how it made
you chuckle a bit because of just how far out it was, how far Elisha went in
dealing with his anger. Elisha completely lost it. But, then through a humorous
story developed a very serious problem. What a God we have that can take a
strange and atypical encounter to help us address something serious. Something
relatable to then become something to change us. Something that grabs our
attention, that draws us in to learn something but also to find God's hidden
grace.
This story is more than just
about anger. Yes, it shows us what anger can do, but we cannot limit our
weaknesses to just anger. What it does show us is that even a child of God
still has the power within them to do evil things but that even when we do, God
does not end his relationship with us. God shows us mercy and grace, every
time, by loving us even when we do not show grace.
When you come forward for
communion today or when it is brought to you, when you accept that invitation
to the table of our Lord, bring your bears with you. Let them feast on the
bread and wine with you and let the Lord love you, bears and all. Let his blood
wash over those bears and let him fill you with forgiveness, love and grace.
And know that when you hear the words the body of Christ given for you and the
blood of Christ shed for you that those words are for you and your bears too. They
are covered. You are covered. We want Jesus to get to us before we end up like
Elisha and releasing our bears on others whether they deserve it or not. Yes,
we have released our bears in the past, we have gotten pushed to the edge of
our anger, our addictions, our sinful passions and we have released those bears
bringing trouble upon ourselves or others. But, God's grace is waiting to meet
your bears, to tame them, to love them, to change you. Ugliness and all, we are
invited to the table of forgiveness.
Yes, we can laugh a bit at
the humor in this story, but as we laugh, let it also remind us where God's
grace is needed, where it appears missing, yet is found hidden in his love for
us and our bears too. To God be the glory, now and always. Amen.