What Do You Do With The Mad That You Feel?

Psalm 137

Preaching on the topic anger can be somewhat frightening because you run the risk of making people...well...angry. When I saw Psalm 137 on the lectionary this morning, there was this voice in the back of my head warning me not to pick that text: “It’s a trap!” Which of course made me think of Star Wars, so that’s where I’m going to start this morning.

I don’t know how many of you are Star Wars fans, but I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that all of you have at least a familiarity with the “Force.” The central conflict of the Star Wars saga is the struggle between adherents of “the Light Side of the Force”, the Jedi, and supporters of “the Dark Side of the Force”, who are called the Sith. Time and again, young Jedi apprentices are approached by Sith Lords and tempted to come to the Dark Side where they will find much more power, and cooler weapons. The temptation is usually premised on the assumption that the young Jedi desires that power in order to quench their thirst for revenge, or to scratch an itch that all the peace and compassion mumbo jumbo of the Jedi philosophy just can’t reach.

Perhaps the most famous convert is Darth Vader, who started off as young Annakin Sywalker. He was invited to train with Jedi masters at a young age. While away from home, his mother was killed, and he blames himself because he was not there to protect her. This fuels the fear and anger upon which the Sith prey to lure Annakin over to the Dark Side. The Dark Side also calls out to Vader’s son, Luke Skywalker (sorry for the spoiler). Like his father, he too struggles with a tragic loss of loved ones for which he blames himself. Like his father, he is filled with fear, anger, and hatred. He is courted to join the Dark Side by the Emperor, also a powerful Sith Lord. In a scene that plays out like a warped version of the Genesis 1 creation epic, the Emperor watches the Dark Side take hold of Luke and celebrates as something terrible is created. “Good! I can feel your anger.” “Good! Use your aggressive feelings, boy. Let the hate flow through you.” “Good! Your hate has made you powerful.”

In a famous line from the movies, Jedi master, Yoda, wisely acknowledges how “Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” Knowing this doesn’t do anything to diminish the desire to scratch that itch for revenge. Lashing out in fear, in anger, in hatred is clearly a bad thing, but it feels so good.

I hear echoes of the Emperor’s voice in Psalm 137. “Good. I can feel your anger. Good. So much hatred. Good. Smash your enemies' children against rocks.” Just because the voice says, “It’s good” does NOT mean it’s God.One voice we do not hear throughout the entire book of Psalms is that of God. As one of my Old Testament professors once said: “The book of Psalms presses the pause button on the divine voice.”

The Psalms are a collected voice of a people being lifted up to God. Sometimes in praise, other times in lamentation; sometimes filled with great joy and thanksgiving, and other times filled with great fear and anger. It’s hard for us to know what to do with these texts that capture such raw and honest feelings. I imagine it was hard for the author of the Psalms, and the community in which they were originally shared, to know what to do with those feelings, too. We read in other books of Scripture about the violence endured by this people, about the losses of loved ones, and homeland, and security that they suffered. These losses collected in the pit of their stomachs, brewing fear and anger. We also read about the vengeful and violent behaviors of these people.

“The Hebrew Bible [is] a long and laborious exodus out of the world of violence...plagued by many reversals and falling short of its goal,” says theologian René Girard. [1] And Raymond Schwager points out that “there are six hundred passages of explicit violence in the Hebrew Bible, one thousand verses where God’s own violent actions of punishment are described, a hundred passages where Yahweh expressly commands others to kill people, and several stories where God kills or tries to kill for no apparent reason.” [2] But upon closer observation, it can be seen, with only a few exceptions, that “whenever God acts to punish, God does so through human beings attacking each other. This indicates, says Schwager, that the actual initiative for killing does not originate in God, but is projected onto God by those who desire revenge.” [3]

The influence of sin upon the human experience is described as a voice of the tempter naming as “good” that which God has expressly forbidden. “We are meant to imitate God, says Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, but sin enters when imitation turns to envy and God becomes the ultimate rival.” [4] Walter Wink would go on to explain how this false sense of rivalry transformed “God into an idol on whom human beings...project their own violence and hatred.” [5] Learning to recognize and remove this projection from God is the slow, but consistent, lesson taught by the Scriptures. A lesson which comes to fruition in the Gospels in which “the human desire to be God is countered by the divine desire to become human.” [6]

Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees and religious leaders is based on his mission and ministry of removing the projections of violence and hatred and revealing a God who is, in fact, peaceful and merciful and compassionate. Jesus does get angry, but he doesn’t use that anger to seek revenge rather he uses it to highlight the need for reconciliation--that is, reconciliation of humanity with the true image of God it bears.

I used to play in the Richmond Youth Symphony Orchestra. Before all of our rehearsals and concerts, we would tune our instruments. This process of tuning would begin with silence, listening, and then a single tuning note played by the oboe. Slowly, the rest of the orchestra would join in, adjusting slides and tuning pegs to resonate with that single note. I can remember the faces our conductor would make as he listened to us tune, he would twist his face and point in the direction we needed to adjust. “You’re a little bit sharp,” or “just a touch flat.” Jesus wanted to tune the human heart to resonate with God’s love. Against the tuning note of sin, Jesus’ new tuning pitch sounded quite dissonant. The Pharisees and religious leaders, believing themselves to be conductors of the congregation, are contorting their faces and trying to convince people just how out-of-tune Jesus is. Meanwhile, Jesus is also pointing in the direction we need to adjust. It’s a case of multiple tuning notes. How do we tell which one we’re supposed to listen to?

I hear too much of the Emperor’s voice echoing in the world today, celebrating anger and hate. “Good. Keep playing that note loudly,” it says. And we do. And we blame the other instruments for being out of tune. And we play our note louder and louder, convinced that it’s the right one. “We are meant to imitate God, but when sin enters imitation turns to envy and God becomes the ultimate rival.” We have created false idols out of our own tuning pitch, and created a false rival out God’s love. What do we do with the mad that we feel? We exacerbate it. We choose to get mad about what other people choose to get mad about. Rather than stopping to listen and seek out God’s voice, we raise our own, seeking to drown out the dissonance. “Good. I can feel your hatred.”

I am reminded of a song written by Mister Rogers, dealing with this very topic. “What do you do with the mad that you feel?” he asks.

What do you do with the mad that you feel

When you feel so mad you could bite?

When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong...

And nothing you do seems very right?

What do you do? Do you punch a bag?

Do you pound some clay or some dough?

Do you round up friends for a game of tag?

Or see how fast you go?

It's great to be able to stop

When you've planned a thing that's wrong,

And be able to do something else instead

And think this song:

I can stop when I want to

Can stop when I wish

I can stop, stop, stop any time.

And what a good feeling to feel like this

And know that the feeling is really mine.

Know that there's something deep inside

That helps us become what we can.

For a girl can be someday a woman

And a boy can be someday a man.

That something deep inside that helps us become what we can, is the image of God we bear. God’s voice is inside us, and we must stop and listen to it when the world around us feels oh so wrong. There will voices telling us it is good to hate, but I pray we will see the contorted face of Christ on the cross and the nail-pierced hand pointing us in the direction we need to adjust. There are scriptures that wrestle with “the mad that we feel,” that acknowledge the voice of vengeance, that confess how tempting it would be just to give in and match it’s pitch, how satisfying it would feel to unleash our mad in a cacophony of uncontrollable rage. But anger and hatred are not the tuning pitch, even though they might sound the loudest. There will be great temptation to scratch the itch of anger...but I pray instead we can match the pitch of love.

1) Wink, Walter. Engaging the Powers. (1992. Ausburg Fortress, Minneapolis, MN). Page 146.

2) Ibid.

3) Ibid. Page 147

4) Ibid. Page 151

5) Ibid.

6) Ibid.