Sunday 03 • 31 • 19

But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry and he prayed to the Lord and said, "Oh Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish. For I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. Therefore now, oh Lord, please take my life from me. It is better for me to die than to live." And the Lord said, "Do you do well to be angry?" And Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade till he should see what would become of the city. Now the Lord God appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah that it might be a shade over his head to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant so that it withered. And when the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind. And the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, "It is better for me to die than to live." But God said to Jonah, "Do you do well to be angry for the plant?" And he said, "Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die." And the Lord said, "You pity the plant for which you did not labor nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left and also much cattle?" This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. — Jonah 4:1-11

Would you pray with me? Father, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing and acceptable in your sight. Lord, you are our rock and our fortress and our redeemer. We pray these things in the strong name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

A Case Study in Anger

Today we're taking up number six of the seven deadly sins: anger, or wrath. We're doing so by looking at a case study. One of my friends calls this book and this person the South Park prophet—like the TV show South Park, been on for twenty-three years, probably best known for its very angry cynicism and spoofing and making fun of everything. Nothing escapes the knife of Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

We usually think of this book as one of those small books at the end of the Old Testament, one of the minor prophets, and we usually think of it as a monster story. Jonah's most famously known for being swallowed by a whale or a big fish. This is why it's usually featured in children's storybook Bibles and all kinds of children's Bible stories. And yet, this is not a children's story. The monster in this story—the biggest monster—is not the one in the water. It's the one that's on the inside of Jonah. It's his own anger.

Now, I know we picked up chapter four and you may be very disoriented about what we read. Let me back up and tell you the backstory to Jonah, and then we'll pick up where we are.

The Backstory

Jonah has three main characters: God, his prophet Jonah, and the people of Nineveh. Nineveh was the enemies of Israel, the superpower of the day, and they were very famous for their cruelty—a very aggressive nation, something akin to ISIS in their terrorist and aggressive stance toward Israel. They were known for taking captives and skinning them alive. They were known for burying their enemies, their captives up to their neck in the sand and leaving them. They're known for taking people and nailing their tongue to a piece of wood and tying them to a tree and leaving them to die. Cruel, cruel people.

God calls his prophet Jonah in the ninth century BC to go and preach to this people. Go and preach this message: you have time to repent. And if you don't repent, God is going to bring disaster on your city.

Chapter one tells us when Jonah gets this calling and he hears these words from God, he goes the opposite direction. God calls Jonah, who's living somewhere near the city of Tel Aviv today in modern Israel, to go to Nineveh, modern Iraq, 500 miles away across the land. Instead, Jonah goes down to the port and he boards a ship going to Tarshish, which is modern Spain—2,000 miles in the opposite direction. Jonah wants nothing to do with God's calling, and he gets in this boat and they're making their way.

He's asleep in the bottom of the boat, in the hole of the ship, and suddenly a storm comes up—so bad, this is a storm on the Mediterranean. It's so bad that the sailors, veteran sailors of this boat, fear for their lives. They call everybody on the boat.

They pray to whatever god they serve, but the storm only gets worse. They ask, "Who did something wrong here?" The sailors employ a theology that many people share: bad things are happening, so somebody must have done something disobedient. When they ask Jonah, he actually confesses: "I did. I'm running away from God."

The people ask, "What are we going to do?" Jonah tells them to throw him overboard and the storm will calm down. They refuse at first. The storm gets worse. Finally, they relent and throw him into the Mediterranean Sea. The sea calms. Jonah is famously swallowed by a large fish—that's another sermon. But three days later, the fish vomits him up on land.

After the whole fish vomiting sequence, when God comes to him again and says go, Jonah goes this time. He preaches to Nineveh and the city turns. As Jonah preaches this message of God's coming disaster, from the greatest to the least, the king declares:

Put on sackcloth. Perhaps God will relent from his anger and spare us.

This is the end of chapter three. It says:

When God saw what they did, that they turned away from their evil ways, God relented of the disaster he said he would do to them and he did not do it.

And where do we find Jonah? At the beginning of chapter four, he's sitting in a lawn chair overlooking the city of Nineveh, waiting for apocalypse. He's waiting for God to come and bring disaster on his enemies. How do we find Jonah? The most often repeated word in chapter four—in the section we read today—is anger, angry. This is how we find Jonah.

We're going to look at the South Park prophet and ask: what can we learn from Jonah about anger? I want to look at three things today: the goodness of anger, how anger goes bad, and how God can heal it.

The Goodness of Anger

Anger is, of all the seven deadly sins, a complicated case. Because it's not just a vice—it's also an emotion. It's something that we feel. Notice in the passage we read here in verse four and verse nine that God comes and asks Jonah a question about his anger. Twice.

Do you do right to be angry? Or are you right in your anger?

Let me deal with a misconception before we get further into this. Some of you think, "I'm not really an angry person." You may know people who are angry people. You may be glad some of those people are here this morning to hear this sermon because they're angry people. Traditionally, we divide people between those who get red-faced and explosive with their anger, and those laid-back, unflappable types who seem like nothing bothers them.

But think about the other words we use—they're really just substitutes for the word angry. We say, "I'm so frustrated right now." Frustration is a type of anger. Grumbling is a type of anger. Complaining is a type of anger. I can't remember how many times I've called this out in our home: annoyance at another person is a type of anger. Displeasure, distress, exasperation, irritation—all of those are different types of anger. Anger comes in lots of disguises, but it's all the same substance.

You may not think of yourself as an angry person, but all of us are. In Jonah, we see someone who personifies hot anger. In chapter four, Jonah is physically hot under the beating sun, but that outward experience mirrors what's going on inside him. He's hot with his anger. He's an explosive angry person. He yells at God. We think of anger in those forms, but anger is also served up cold—like a grudge, like the silent treatment, like stonewalling a person. Neurophysiologists separate people between those who hold rage in and those who express it, but all of it is anger.

The question then is not who gets angry, but why we get angry.

Going back to the question God asks Jonah: do you do right to be angry? Here's a second misconception: that all anger is bad. Inherent in that question is the idea that anger can be right. Anger can be good. There's a right time and a right place for anger, and a wrong time and a wrong place for anger.

In fact, what we see in scripture is a God who gets angry. This is really unpopular. Americans really struggle with the idea of a God who gets angry, a God who burns with anger. We think of that as primitive.

Western people, we love the god of love, the god of peace, the god who's about mercy and grace but not wrath, not punishment, not fire, not anger. But here's the question: what if those two attributes have to go together? What if love and anger actually have to go together?

You see, what you get angry about tells me a lot about what you love. If you tell me the things that you get angry about, it tells me what you really love, what you really care about. Anger is love in motion to deal with a threat or something you value, something you really care about. That's why anger can be right. It can be righteous. That's why God's anger is righteous.

We read about a coming day of judgment. That may be something you don't care about, but people in refugee camps in Syria really care about that. People who have experienced great hardship or great injustice are like, "Yes, I long for the day that God puts justice, does justice, does what is right, cares about what's wrong, displays his anger that's in service to his love." So anger is not inherently bad. What do we read in scripture about God's anger? It's not no anger. Jonah himself tells us. Did you see this in the passage? It's all about Jonah's anger here. But he says something about God's anger. What's God's anger like? Jonah says:

You're a gracious God, gracious and merciful, slow to anger.

See, God is not no anger. God is not blow up anger, but God is slow anger. And this is what's held up for us as an example in the Bible for what our anger should look like. What good anger is. Proverbs tells us:

Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty. He who rules his spirit is better than the one who takes a city. And good sense makes one slow to anger. And it is his glory to overlook an offense. — Proverbs

Ephesians tells us:

In your anger, do not sin. — Ephesians 5

So it can be wrong to never get angry. When I meet with a couple who are coming to us for premarital counseling and they say, "Yeah, we never have anger problems. We've never had a fight," I'm like, "I'm not doing your wedding." Because you're having fights—one of you just doesn't know it. It can be wrong to not be angry. A lack of anger can be a lack of love.

John Chrysostom, an early church father, says:

He who is not angry, where he has grounds to be, sins. Unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices. It fosters negligence, incites not only the wicked but the good to do wrong.

So good anger is not no anger. It's not blow up anger, but it's slow anger.

How Anger Goes Wrong

Here's a question: who knows lots about anger and has two thumbs? This guy right here. So I'm going to tell you about anger going bad, both for my wife and Jonah. Let's talk about why anger goes wrong. How does it go bad?

Somebody said this: "A person who is angry on the right grounds against the right persons in the right manner, in the right proportion for the right length of time is worthy of praise." And I think that quote unpacks all the different ways that anger can go wrong. And we see all these in Jonah.

Anger on the right grounds. Jonah shows us he's angry about two things. First, very obviously, he's angry about God's mercy for the enemies of Israel. He all but says, "I knew this is what you do—that you're so gracious." He's angry that God is showing mercy to those people. How could you? But he's angry about something else, and you notice this all in the funny part in the middle of this passage about the plant and the worm. God appointed something. So here's Jonah—he's sitting in his lawn chair with a six pack of Coors, waiting for the city to be destroyed. And he's hot. God causes a giant plant to grow up very quickly, a vine to grow up and shade him. I want you to think about one of those elephant ear plants, right? Lots of shade. Then God appointed a worm. That's never a good thing in the Bible. The worm comes and eats the plant. The plant dies, and then God appoints a scorching east wind that blows and just tortures Jonah. And he is just angry about what? In that moment, it's about his discomfort. "You provided this, and then it disappeared. The shade that I had."

See, contrast Jonah with Jesus. Jesus was angry many times in the New Testament. His anger blazed up at several points, but it was never about personal comfort. It was never petty. It was never about personal offenses. Over and over, you read about our savior and the way he got angry, but it was always for the benefit of others. It was like, "These people are being denied from worship of the living God. Sin and death are still in the world." He's angry, but it's not petty and it's not personal.

How much of our anger? I'll just speak very personally. How much of my anger is about what I perceive to be injustice?

The world's not working the way I thought it was. And we can try to make it about perceived injustice. You know, all I care about is things being done fairly. Really? I mean, most of it is about our discomfort. Most of it is about pettiness and personal offenses that really don't matter. See, the grounds of our anger are off.

See, Jesus was angry but never about petty things. Always for reason, always for cause. Second, angry in the right manner. There—that is in a way that's redemptive. Anger in service to love is surgical anger. It's laser focused. It's not bringing the atomic bomb. That's what Jonah was waiting for. Obliterate them all. Wipe them all away. He wants God to just wipe them out.

But God's attack on Nineveh. What does God's attack on Nineveh look like in this passage? It is a surgical strike. I'm going to send in my prophet. I'm going to attack very specifically these people in this way and they turn and relent. God's anger in this passage is redemptive. It's laser focused. It's a surgical strike.

See, what is our anger like? Is it focused? Or is it wipe it out? Is it surgical? Is it for healing? Some of the best heroes of the last century are those who personified surgical anger—people who got angry in such a focused way. Listen to Martin Luther King Jr. talk about this in his speech "Love Your Enemies."

To our most bitter opponents, we say we shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as cooperation with good. Throw us in jail and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes, threaten our children, we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us, leave us half dead, we shall still love you. But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom but not only for ourselves. We shall appeal to your heart and conscience so that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.

Man, that is laser point anger. That is surgical anger. What is your anger like? Is it in service to good? Or is it wipe it out?

Third, anger in proportion to the offense. So often we get angry too easily or way more out of proportion to the situation that we're actually facing. This is Jonah. I mean, doesn't Jonah seem in some ways like a gigantic toddler in this passage? Like when he says, "I'm angry enough to die." Like, really, Jonah? Really? And yet we don't say that, but we're like that. Have you ever exploded over the slightest thing? Have you ever looked back on a situation and thought, "Gosh, man, I really lost it there. I lost control of myself."

See, the ancient Romans had a saying: "Ira furor brevis est." Anger is a brief madness. Anger makes us crazy and blind and confused and confusing. Have you ever noticed that you look back on an argument and you can't remember what made you so mad? Like, "I know I was really mad and I had a good reason. I just can't remember what they said."

One proverb says anger is a stone cast into a wasp nest. It's a graphic picture—angry enough to die, like way out of proportion. Angry in proportion to the offense.

And fourth, angry for the right amount of time. Think about Jonah again. He says to God, "It is better for me to die than to live." And he's saying something there about how long he plans to be angry. Forever, right? "I'm going to be angry forever. It's better if I just die now than to live."

Sometimes our anger is like that. You know, think about a house fire. Let's say there's an abandoned house and you take an open container of gasoline and put it inside the front hallway and throw a match in and it just flares up, explodes. And our anger is like that a lot of times—explosive, slam doors, yelling, stomping, big displays. The fire department comes and puts out the fire.

The next day though, you go back to the same place where the house was destroyed. And there's a little smoke coming up. Is the fire out? I mean, sort of. But it's smoldering now. It's not out. It's still burning. And some of us are the big display. But some of us are smoldering and it is a cold, cold fire and it may smolder for days, for weeks. We take something, we hold it in our minds, we just meditate on it. We're like a steak marinating—but a bad one, right? Just meditating on things that really cause us to sour on the inside. We're a smoldering fire. We don't forget what's done.

See, are you like, "It's better for me to die than to live"? Are you going to be angry for a long time? Are you right in being angry?

Finally, angry against the right person or the right target.

Have you ever noticed how we don't take our anger out many times on the real target of our anger? It happens to be like whoever's close to you at the moment, or someone who says something at the wrong time in the wrong way, or someone who you can be mad at and they'll still be around, or someone who's most available.

For example, this happens all the time in restaurants when people get mad because their food's late and they stiff the waiter some money. The waiter isn't the cook. The waiter wasn't the one who made the food late. You were mad at the waiter. Or think about having a really difficult boss. You come home and you're short and ugly with your roommate, you're snippy. Your roommate had nothing to do with that. Or you've been dealing with a fussy, whiny two-year-old all day long, and the older sibling comes in and just happens to be there when it's time to mow. You know, he takes it out on people.

See, Jonah is angry with God. And so are we. He's angry with God. I think while we may lash out at people that are close to us, in reality, many of us are deeply angry with God.

Are You Angry With God?

See if any of these shoes fit. Are you disappointed at your marriage? "Yeah, I did all the right things. I did all the right things. And this is where I am." Are you frustrated at your lack of marriage? "Like, I followed all the Christian rules and this is where I am?" Are you frustrated and angry with God's people? I mean, God's people may have legitimately let you down. They are good at that. People have disappointed you. People have hurt you. We're rightly angry with what they do, but our anger really is at him.

What about when we feel indifferent and dull? We come to this place where God—whatever about the things of God, whatever. I mean, when someone has promised you, "If you'll just follow these rules, follow this one verse, this little formula, this little Christian formula, it's all going to work out for you," and you've trained up the child and it hasn't worked out. I mean, let's be real. Aren't we angry with God? Aren't we angry with God?

Let me just be full disclosure. Being angry with God is definitely a sin. Definitely a sin, right? There's a self-will. There's a "my will be done." There's "I'm on the throne of the universe and these things are not working out the way that I think they should work out because I can see all and believe all and do all," right? That's what we believe in those moments.

See, there's a God-playing, a passion for my will to be done, takes over the controls. David Paulison says this: "There's something high and mighty about anger when distilled to its basic elements. Anger goes wrong when you become godlike. Your desires become divine law. Poke your way into every example of bad anger and you will find God-playing."

And man, Greek and Norse mythology are just great pictures of this. Perfect for this. You know, we're like Zeus with the thunderbolts. We're going to bring down the hammer of Thor. That's us. God-like anger. Jonah-like anger. But it's really anger at God. It's rebellious and wrong.

And yet, this is what I want you to hear. As one of your pastors, I really want you to hear this: And yet, God can handle it. This is one of the most hopeful things in the book of Jonah. God doesn't go, "Alright, Jonah, I'm done with you." God engages him. Jonah's angry with God, and God engages him in it. God pursues him. He cares for him.

This is what I want to say to you. Look, as a pastor, can I tell you, I would much rather have the one person who's honest with me about the fact that they're angry with God than the 100 people sitting in this congregation who are really mad at him but won't be honest about it. Because God can work when we're honest. God can work with the person who's honest with himself and with him who admits, "I'm angry at God." There's a lot of pretending going on. We're angry people.

Now, we all know that anger is dangerous to your health. You've read probably all the studies or stats on this stuff. Like, two hours after an outburst, the chances of a heart attack skyrocket. It's bad for heart disease. These things about anger. But it's worse than that. Because anger is a deadly sin. It's deadly—not for those who are the recipients of our anger, but for us.

Frederick Buechner probably says this best. He says:

Of all the deadly sins, anger might be the most fun. To lick your wounds, smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll your tongue over the prospect of bitter confrontations ahead, to savor the last toothsome morsel both of the pain you're given and the pain you plan to give back. It's delicious. A feast fit for a king. But the chief drawback is what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

But there's good news in Jonah. So I love this. I can't get past this chapter. I love this chapter.

Because this points us to the healing of anger, not the extinguishing of anger. Remember, anger can be good. Anger can fuel justice, it can defend those we love. There is a good place for anger. But I'm borrowing this phrase from another pastor: the healing of anger. Anger can be healed and channeled for right purposes. But it's not how you think. It's not venting.

Some of you have been camping a good bit, and you've tried to make a fire before, and you know when it's just not working, what do you have to do to the fire? Get the twigs and you get the stuff. What do you do to it? You blow on it, right? You blow on it because it's giving oxygen. Blowing on your anger, giving vent to it, does nothing to make it go away. But rather, like blowing on a fire, it causes it just to flare up.

So counselors used to say, "Hey, vent your anger. Just go kick the furniture, yell, yell at your dog, you'll be fine." But that doesn't work. It grows our anger. Rather, here's what we need to do with our anger. Three things.

First, admit your anger. I was a pastor for a long time in Philadelphia, and Philadelphia is famous for its anger. I mean, that city—people drive angry, they throw snowballs at Santa Claus, for real. And they boo all their sports teams. Angry, angry place, and very open about it.

But what I found since I've been a pastor these eight years in Raleigh is that this is every bit as angry a place. We just are nice about it. We just have a smile on our face. "Yeah, bless your heart. We ought to get together sometime." Now we're not going to do that. We're deeply angry people. We just look nice. We act nice. We're so nice and we're so angry.

Look, would you admit that you're angry? Would you admit that you're angry at God? Can you be honest with Him and yourself this morning?

Second thing: analyze your anger. Here's a suggestion. Keep an anger journal for a week. You may want to not leave this out on your desk at work. Do this on your phone. Keep an anger journal. Write down all the times that you got angry. Just keep a note—irritation, annoyed, grumpy, angry—write down those, and write down the circumstances. Do that for one week, and then just set it aside for a couple days and come back and pick it up.

Here's what I want you to see. I want you to begin to notice the patterns, the themes, the triggers. And they fall into several categories: people not doing what they're supposed to be doing, people taking credit for your work, situational events that get in your way like traffic jams, or being disappointed in yourself. I want you to just notice the patterns. Understand what is it that I'm so angry about, and ask yourself two questions about that.

First, what do I love right now? What am I loving? I'm angry because I'm loving something. What am I loving? And second, do I do right to be angry in this situation? It'll show you your heart.

The Greater Jonah

And finally, this: go to the greater Jonah. You know, it's fascinating. Jonah is one of those people who's referenced so many times in the gospel. Over and over, Jonah is referenced. And in Mark chapter 4, we read the story that almost parallels perfectly the book of Jonah.

Jesus is in a boat, just like Jonah was in a boat. Jesus is asleep in the boat, surrounded by veteran sailors. And a great storm comes up, just like with Jonah. Asleep in the boat, veteran sailors wake him up and say, "Don't you care if we die?" Both stories—there's a miraculous divine intervention and the sea is calmed. In both stories, once the sea is calm, the sailors are more scared by the reality of God than they were before the storm even began.

In the midst of the storm, Jonah tells the sailors, "Look, there's only one thing to do. Let me die and you will avoid judgment and survive." In the midst of our sin, Jesus says, "I'm going to die so that you will avoid judgment and survive. I die for you." Jesus comes and says, the greater Jonah is right here. One greater than Jonah is right here.

See, Jonah went from his post in Israel all the way in the opposite direction to Spain, to flee away from the will of God. Jesus comes from heaven to earth to obey the will of God. Jonah thrown overboard and sacrificed to calm a raging storm. Jesus thrown to an angry crowd to satisfy our raging sin. Jonah was called to preach to a people who hated him but would eventually repent. Jesus came to a people who hated him and eventually put nails in him.

Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days because of his disobedience. Jesus was in the belly of the earth three days for my own disobedience. And after three days, Jonah was spit out onto dry land to give him a second chance. After three days, Jesus was raised from the dead from the belly of the earth to give you a second chance.

Take your anger to the Lord today.

Even your anger at him. Do you see? The greater Jonah has already become the surgical strike. God has done the great work, the laser focused destruction of our sin so that we're not destroyed. We're made alive in him. A surgical strike has been done to set us free from sin and death so that we might have life and have it to the full.

So, will you take your anger to him? One of the things I love about this book, did you notice how the book ends with a question? It's an unfinished story. We don't know what Jonah did next. Did he take his anger to the Lord? Did he come and repent? It ends with a question mark because it's a question mark for us. Will you? Will you?

But here's what I know about Jonah, and the text doesn't say this. We know that Jonah did repent. Why do I know that? Because we're reading a private story. Jonah one through three is public story—Jonah running away, Jonah preaching to Nineveh, people repenting. Jonah four all happens on a hillside overlooking Nineveh between the Lord and an angry prophet. And the only way we know this story is if Jonah told the ending. If he came and told the story of how God redeemed him in his anger. And God can do that with you. Will you let him? Will you let him?

In the name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit, amen.

Would you pray with me? Father, we are angry people. We're angry against you. And Father, we're afraid to admit or to face just how broken and angry we are. We need your spirit today. We need your grace. We thank you that you welcome your enemies and you love those who are rebellious against you. Father, help us to come and be honest and admit and lay down our angry hearts before you this morning. We pray in Christ's name. Amen.