Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
11^th of August, 2024

Ephesians 4:25-5:2

‘Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.’

In the Letter to the Ephesians a follower of the Apostle Paul seeks to sum up Paul’s teachings and apply them after his death. In his Letter to the Galatians Paul had written: ‘As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.’ (Galatians 3:27-29). The purpose of the Letter to the Ephesians is to explore the implications of this unity. The passage we hear today is not simply philosophical advice on how the virtuous are to live. The author of this Letter is telling Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians how they are to live together, now that they have all been baptized into Christ.

The behaviours that the author of the Letter commend are those that will enhance relationships and enrich community. The behaviours they condemn are those that tear communities apart. Members of a community must speak the truth, individually and collectively, because we are all part of one another and so to lie to another member of the community is as damaging as lying to ourselves. But we are not to speak the truth recklessly. We are to be careful that our truthful words are only those that are useful for building up and those that give grace to our hearers. People are not to steal, not because thieving is wrong, which it is, but because those who steal do not put aside resources for their community’s care of the destitute. There is no place for bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander and malice in the church. Instead, members of a Christian community are to be kind to one another.

Despite the new unity created by baptism, despite members of the church being clothed in Christ, Christians are still human beings and will get things wrong and hurt each other, which is why the writer tells the Ephesians to be tender-hearted and forgive those who sin against them. But because we have been baptized into Christ we are a new creation. Jesus and the Holy Spirit with which we were sealed at our baptism do enable us to live in new ways as we imitate Jesus and support one another.

That is all very well, but what do we do with the phrase the NRSV translates as: ‘Be angry but do not sin’? Most commentators agree that ‘be angry’ is not a command. It is simply a recognition that every single human being does feel anger at times, sometimes appropriately. Anger is a response to a perception of hurt or danger or wrong-doing, and if we are in danger or at risk of being hurt it is better to respond with anger than with fear. This week I was listening to a political commentator talking about the coming Presidential Election in the USA and he said that fear is an immobilising emotion, while anger is a mobilising emotion. That is not just true when it comes to getting out the vote. It can also be true if we meet an animal that wants to eat us.

If we read ‘Be angry but do not sin’ this way, then the author is simply telling the Ephesians not to allow the emotion of anger that all human beings sometimes feel to lead them into sinful words or actions. In a sermon on this passage Episcopal Priest Barbara Brown Taylor says that most of us have not been taught to experience anger as part of love, or to express anger without sinning. She writes that we are instead taught to deny that we are feeling anger at all, until the denial no longer works and the anger we have been covering up erupts, either at the wrong person or at the right person but over the wrong thing. Or else we turn our anger inwards, berating ourselves for even feeling it, and it becomes depression – or an ulcer. Taylor argues that to be angry, but not to sin, we need to take responsibility for our anger. We should be curious about it. Why are we feeling angry? Is the situation that is provoking our anger intentional? Do we have our facts straight? What part are we playing in the situation? What is our anger trying to teach us?[1] Sometimes what our anger is trying to teach us is that there is a bear after us and we should run away, fast, but that is unlikely to happen in church.

There is, however, another way to read this verse. The author of the Letter could be saying to the Ephesians, ‘Be angry and so do not sin.’ This verse could be an instruction: be angry when there is something to be angry about, when it would be sinful not to feel anger. The Ephesians are told to ‘be imitators of God’ and both the Jewish and Christian biblical writers agree that God is sometimes wrathful. The Jewish prophets were certain that God is most angry at injustice. The prophecies of Isaiah begin with God’s wrath at a ‘people laden with iniquity’ and a city in which ‘Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not defend the orphan, and the widow’s cause does not come before them. Therefore says the Sovereign, the Lord of hosts, the Mighty One of Israel: Ah, I will pour out my wrath on my enemies, and avenge myself on my foes!’ (Isaiah 1:23-24) The Prophet Amos also writes of God’s righteous anger.

Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land … The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds … I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on all loins, and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day. (Amos 8:4-10, see also Micah 6)

We believe in a God who is Love, and according to the prophets that very love means that God is outraged when human beings harm each other.

Expressing anger unhelpfully is one of my own besetting sins. I have, you may have noticed, a quick tongue, and it can at times be a bitter one. Words that the author of this Letter would describe as ‘evil talk’ frequently come out of my mouth. I do not speak only what is useful for building up; my words are not always those that give grace to my hearers. When I condemn myself for my unhelpful expressions of anger I have sometimes been reminded by colleagues that we are called to imitate Jesus, and one of the things that we know Jesus did was overturn the tables of the moneychangers in the temple. I usually respond by pointing out that Jesus is the Messiah and I am not, so I must be much more careful to make sure that my table overturning is appropriate. But given that Jesus modelled righteous anger and indignation for us, maybe the Ephesians are being told in this passage to be angry at anything that divides the community and disrupts the unity of the Spirit in the church. Perhaps the Ephesians are being called to demonstrate the same anger that the Apostle Paul expressed when he wrote to those who demanded that Greeks be circumcised, ‘You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?’ (Galatians 3:1)

By David Hayward, @nakedpastor,

So I wonder. Maybe it is not merely permissible for Christians to feel anger. Maybe at times it is required of us. We know that there has been a divine discontent in the face of injustice that led Christians to oppose slavery, and Nazism in Germany, and the refusal of civil rights to African Americans, and apartheid in South Africa. If we are to speak the truth to our neighbours then sometimes that truth will be, with all kindness and love, that what they are doing is wrong and they need to stop. In such cases it could be that anger will give us the courage we need to say what we need to say, to overcome the fear that could keep us silent. Last week Alistair got you to sing one of my favourite hymns from the Iona Community, ‘Inspired by love and anger,’ and the first verse of that is:

Inspired by love and anger, disturbed by need and pain,
informed of God’s own bias, we ask him once again:
‘How long must some folk suffer? How long can few folk mind?
How long dare vain self-interest turn prayer and pity blind?’[2]

When anger is coupled with love, and motivated by God’s own bias, acting on it is not making room for the devil.

In the years of my early adulthood the Melbourne writer Kaz Cooke had a column in the Saturday Extra section of The Age titled ‘Keep Yourself Nice’. (You may remember it because it lampooned Balwyn North as the archetypal middle-class suburb.) Today’s passage from the Letter to the Ephesians reminds us that Christians are called to be kind, not nice. We are to live in love, imitating Christ who loved us. That sometimes means doing most un-nice things, like speaking the truth. It might even mean feeling God’s anger at injustice with God, and then joining Jesus:

Amused in someone’s kitchen, asleep in someone’s boat,
attuned to what the ancients exposed, proclaimed and wrote,
a saviour without safety, a tradesman without tools
has come to tip the balance with fishermen and fools.

[1] ‘Divine Anger,’ in Barbara Brown Taylor, God in Pain: Teaching Sermons on Suffering (1998).

[2] Together in Song 674, ‘Inspired by love and anger’ by John L. Bell and Graham Maule, from Wild Goose Songs 1: Heaven Shall Not Wait. © Wild Goose Publications.