Beginning this week we will be publishing both a podcast and text version of the sermon.
Paul’s advice in this selection from the letter to the Ephesians is one of the more beautiful and inspiring portions of scripture. It also contains one of those portions more challenging portions of scriptures. Paul’s advice on anger is challenging and often misunderstood.
Paul advises the Christian community in Ephesus to “Be angry, but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Ephesians 4:26). While I was teaching in the high school, I several times had conversations with my classes in which the students felt that feeling anger was itself sinful. The advice to feel anger but not sin seemed contradictory.
We need to realize that emotions themselves are neither good nor evil. Emotions just are. Even what we might call the “baser” emotions of anger and fear are natural responses and morally neutral. It is, however, what we choose to do in response to these emotions that becomes suspect to moral evaluation. Anger can be a motivator to great good or profound evil. These actions have moral consequences.
One of the great souls that knew this was the Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi. In reflecting on anger, Gandhi observed, “It is not that I do not get angry. I don’t give vent to my anger. I cultivate the quality of patience as angerlessness, and generally speaking, I succeed. But I only control my anger when it comes. How I find it possible to control it would be a useless question, for it is a habit that everyone must cultivate and must succeed in forming by constant practice.”
Anger is a biological response. Deep inside our brains is a structure called the amygdala. This structure is sometimes called the “reptilian brain.” From an evolutionary standpoint, this portion of the brain seems to be one of the earliest portions to evolve and is common to all vertebrates, or animals with backbones. The amygdala seems to have among its functions the production of emotional responses, specifically the responses of anger and fear. Stimulation or damage to the amygdala can cause uncontrolled aggression or states of constant anxiety, or the complete absences of these states.
As mammals, however, we have a more highly evolved portion of the brain called the frontal lobe. This portion of the brain is associated with reasoning and emotional regulation. The amygdala seems to function in an on-off state – aggression/rage or lack of aggression rage. For animals with less highly evolved frontal lobes, when the amygdala activates, the creature immediately responds with aggression. However, as humans who have a more highly developed frontal lobe, when our amygdala become activated, we will still experience the anger, rage and aggression, but our frontal lobes allow us to regulate our responses to those emotions. Rather than lashing out as a different animal might, we can choose how to act on the emotion, directing it either in a destructive or constructive way. An interesting story is told of a man named Phineas Gage, a nineteenth century railroad worker. While placing explosives for blasting during the construction of a railroad, the tamp used to pack the dirt around the explosives sparked against a rock, igniting the explosives and driving the tamp up into Gage’s head, destroying the left portion of his frontal lobe. Gage survived, but was never the same. This is the description given by Gage’s employers for his behavior after his convalescence from his accident:
The equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities, seems to have been destroyed. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operations, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man. Previous to his injury, although untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart business man, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation. In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was “no longer Gage”
It is our frontal lobes that gives us the ability, and the moral responsibility, to regulate and direct our emotional responses, and we can exercise this ability and responsibility in both constructive and destructive ways. I think about the various responses to the killing of black citizens here in the United States. In some instances the tragedy and injustice was met with anger that flashed out into the destruction of property, violence and riots, whereas the violent murders of the nine church members at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church brought different reactions of prayer vigils, non-violent gatherings and public statements of sorrow by the world.
It is in this ability to regulate our emotions that our moral responsibility arises. We cannot help but feel that anger. It is a deep response within our biology. The emotion just is. Not only as creatures who have evolved with a highly developed frontal cortex, but also as Christians, we have a responsibility to direct and regulate our anger in constructive ways that confront injustice and bring about the peaceable kingdom of Christ.
Paul’s further advice on not letting the sun set on our anger can also be understood in terms of biology and morality. The rage and anger we may feel that is triggered by the amygdala is instant, but also relatively short lived. Observe an animal that feels threatened. It will frequently react, fight, and then move on. It is in our troublesome frontal lobes that the trouble arises. We humans have a tendency to hold on to whatever triggered our anger. We mull over the trigger, massaging the hurt, nursing it into a smoldering ember awaiting an opportunity to rekindle the flame of our anger and lash out. We have actively chosen to hold on to the emotional response and nurture it into something destructive, and this is where our moral responsibility resides. Paul advises us not to do this. Frederick Buechner, the Presbyterian writer and theologian, observes, “Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back–in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.” Buechner is rightly observing that when we think we are consuming our anger with relish, it is in fact our anger that is consuming us.
This week, let’s go forward monitoring our emotional responses. The emotions we can acknowledge as morally neutral and let them pass, but let us also examine our responses in light of our biological and Christian moral responsibility.