It is a remarkable run of master and student. We start with Socrates. You know the name and may know about his death. What you may not know is that we don’t actually have any writing by Socrates. The closest we come is an account by one of his students describing his trial and execution, though it is not clear if he was really tried for being an atheist, or was simply a political scapegoat in the unstable context of an Athens defeated by Sparta.
The student who wrote that account was Plato, and in his case, we have plenty of writing, the foundation of philosophy in the Western tradition. He, in turn, taught Aristotle, another of the classic philosophers with a tremendous and important body of work in both philosophy and the natural sciences.
Though by the standards of the other two, Aristotle was a failure. His most famous academic student was Theophrastus. Who the heck is Theophrastus?
Aristotle did have a famous student, but he was not a philosopher. He would grow up to conquer territory from the Adriatic Sea to the Indus River, before dying unexpectedly at a young age in the great palace in Babylon, where he intended to establish his capitol. You know him as Alexander the Great.
It is to Aristotle that I turn for inspiration this morning. In his “Nicomachean Ethics,” he wrote:
“Anyone can become angry, that is easy…but to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way… this is not easy.”
Anger is a tricky subject in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Moses loses his temper and gets banned from the Promised Land, dying alone.
We pretend Jesus only got angry once, during the “Cleansing of the Temple,” and then try to pretend that was religious, not economic, as if these were different things to Jesus. They weren’t.
During the First Great Awakening, Congregationalist pastor Jonathan Edwards declared us to be “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and all too often, that is exactly how God is depicted in Christianity, as a violent drunk in a worn out recliner yelling for another beer, scary and unpredictable.
Then there is collective anger as revolution, which the church, as an institution with temporal wealth and power, abhors. We have Martin Luther inspiring a religious revolution, but when that became an economic revolution, he sided with the murderous oppressor. The fact that Huldrych Zwingli, founder of Reform Christianity, died on the battlefield is rarely mentioned.
Finally, there is our every day misplaced anger, captured perfectly in the Netflix time travel film “The Adam Project,” when young Adam say to adult Adam “I think it’s easier to be angry than it is to be sad. And I guess, when I get older, I forget that there’s a difference.” Grief and anger are first cousins.
So yeah, anger is a tricky subject for someone trying to follow Jesus. Which doesn’t make me any less angry. As the unhinged news anchor declares in his brilliant and prophetic rant in the 1976 film “Network,” “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
And then, I touch ground, connect with the deep story, listen to the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who lived and lead through a period every bit as gruesome as the one in which we find ourselves today. In 2008, he said “There are things that must evoke our anger to show we care. It is what we do with that anger. If we direct that energy we can use it positively or destructively.”
Twenty three centuries, and the wisdom hasn’t changed, whether it is Aristotle, Tutu, or Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer: our need for serenity, for courage, for wisdom.
I do care. I am sad. And I am angry.
I am angry that queer kids are still taking their own lives.
I am angry that a corrupted court has sanctioned the murderous torture of conversion therapy.
I am angry that hate feels like agency and power to men who are, in fact, stripped of their dignity and power by end-stage Neo-liberal capitalism.
I am angry that Christianity gets the blame for hate when fundamentalisms in all three monotheisms share this trait, homophobia and misogyny cut from the same cloth. In fact, the Nazi leadership, decidedly anti-Christian and drawn to the occult, sent the men with the pink triangle to concentration camps. And unlike other groups persecuted by the Nazis, queer men who survived the camps were not treated as victims on release, but were instead prosecuted and often jailed again by the post-war governments, with the time in the camps credited as time served.
By nominal Christians in West Germany.
By nominally atheist Communists in East Germany.
I am angry that I spent part of last weekend preparing my affidavit in the case of Julian Raven vs. the City of Elmira in which a local bigot sought to have our Elmira Pride Festival cancelled because in his mind the mere existence of LGBTQIA+ individuals is obscene.
But what will I do with my anger?
I turn to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and comments he made about an equally important hero, W.E.B. Du Bois. Just weeks before he was struck down by an assassin’s bullet, King said about Du Bois:
Above all he did not content himself with hurling invectives for emotional release and then to retire into smug, passive satisfaction. History had taught him it is not enough for people to be angry—the supreme task is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.
God does not need our praise.
God is God and does not need us at all.
But God does love us, as She loves all of Her creation, and calls us to be co-creators of a just world for all. And that isn’t going to happen by stewing in my anger on the couch or by posting angry rants on Facebook or TikTok, the hurling invective of social media.
Every week we talk about practical Christianity, and yesterday so many of you practiced Christianity as we understand it. There were no outsiders yesterday. You welcomed the stranger, treated them as honored guests. It was amazing, and worthy of praise.
I am angry. And sad. And afraid. The progress that we have taken for granted as inevitable has proven anything but.
Two decades ago, I warned those who would listen that when marriage equality came, a large number of cisgender gay white men just like me would switch sides, abandoning queers of color, non-binary and transgender folk, and is has happened. Scott Bessent serves in the Trump Cabinet because his privilege as a wealthy white male trumps, pun intended, his disadvantage from being gay. Because you can get away with anything if you are a wealthy white man except stealing from other wealthy white men.
Yesterday was important and our anti-racism work is important but we must bring these forms of prophetic witness together. The misogynist pro-natalism of Ketamine Musk aside, people are not having babies because they can’t afford childbirth, much less childcare, or a house in which to raise a family. The Bible is filled with commands to love one another. Economic justice is love made concrete, love in action.
What are you doing to build a just world for the working class white man who can’t find a decent job paying a decent wage, a violent drunk in a worn out recliner yelling for another beer, scary and unpredictable because he cannot be who he has been raised to believe he must be? Raised to believe he is entitled to be? His rage is misdirected but it is real.
We are good on some issues. That is worthy of praise. But there is talent sitting in these pews that is not fully activated. We need conversations about healthcare and childcare and housing and private equity, need to learn and to strategize, to organize and unite as Dr. Du Bois did, as Dr. King did, as Audre Lorde did, as did Harvey Milk.
Twenty years ago, a successful evangelical pastor argued that the church needed to return to its earliest form, not as worship-tainment aimed at a needy divine narcissist, but must instead be schools of discipleship. And so we must. But discipleship in the Way of The Park church on the Way of Jesus. How did those Abolitionists succeed? What education and planning took place before that sit-in at the lunch counter? What does in mean, decades later, to ACT UP once again?
I am mad as hell. But I’m not coming with a clever sign. I’m coming with a plan. May God’s just and caring realm break forth, with a little help from me, and may God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
Most Amazing God,
Creation is weird by design,
natural selection meets serendipitous exuberance,
immense canyons,
feathers that seem irresponsible,
the platypus just because You are You
and we lack imagination.
You give us these lessons
in every butterfly,
every sunrise,and we ignore them,
trying to beat creation into box,
weed-free lawns,
girly girls and macho boys,
and perfect nuclear bomb families.
Forgive us our hubris,
and remind us once again,
that you are the God of all that is queer
and new and unique,
fickle and finite,
and us.
Jesus did not fit the boxes,
and would not stay in the one they put him in,
so we pray as he taught us, saying:
Our Father …