WHAT REALLY MAKES YOU MAD?
March 15, 2009
Exodus 20: 1-17
John 2: 13-22
Rev. Dr. Dennis Winkleblack
Prospect United Methodist Church
Bristol, Connecticut
Once upon a time there was an elderly woman who was driving a big, new expensive car. She was preparing to back into a parallel parking space when suddenly a young man in a small sports car zoomed into the space – beating her out of it. The woman jumped out of her car and angrily demanded to know why he had done that, when he could easily tell she was trying to park there and had been there first. His response was simply, “Because I’m young and I’m quick.”
When the young man came out of the store a few minutes later, he found the elderly woman using her big new car as a battering ram, backing up and then ramming it into his parked sports car. Now he was very angry and asked her why she was wrecking his car. Her response was simply, “Because I’m old and I’m rich.”
We live in rage-full times, don’t we? Especially where cars are concerned. How often do we read how even something as innocent as a lane change that accidentally cuts someone off can infuriate someone into trying to get even with a gun.
This morning we look at a time when Jesus got mad. Really mad. In fact, his outburst, his holy rage was so great that the gospel writer John thought it deserved mention in what became our Bible.
Jesus had gone to the Temple. Worship in the temple in those days was more like being in the midst of a bazaar or a giant tag sale. Crowds of pilgrims from the four corners of the world milled around everywhere in the great courtyard, pressing around the stalls of the moneychangers whose business was exchanging the currency of a dozen nations for the special temple coins that were required for offerings in the temple.
In addition, because the heart of the temple’s worship was still the complicated system of sacrifices, there was a whole section devoted to the sale of birds and animals. The noise level must have been really something! In sum, this buying and selling of animals had become quite a business in and of itself. It greatly distracted from the Temple’s religious purposes.
Seeing it, Jesus got mad, really mad. Then, with no warning, the prophet from Nazareth, came bursting into the temple courtyard, shouting in a loud voice, “You shall not make my Father’s house a house of trade.” Grabbing a bunch of straw used to bed the cattle and employing it as a whip, he began to overturn stalls and tables, sending the temple currency and the coins of the whole known world rolling in every direction. Meanwhile, cattle and sheep ran wild and doves were thrown from their cages. What had been orderly confusion had suddenly become absolute chaos.
Jesus was mad. Mad that something which mattered so much – love for God as shown through worship—was being so abused, so scandalized. And so he raged in anger.
This is clearly a side of Jesus we’re not accustomed to seeing. And yet, as John Knox, the New Testament scholar has written, “No account of Jesus could be even approximately correct which did not call attention to Jesus’ frequent and sudden anger.”
There is much we could make of this account this morning, but let’s focus on only one thing. I’ll put it in the form of a question: “What, for Jesus’ sake, really makes you mad?”
Now, before you answer, let me caution you that your answer may reveal a lot about you. Imagine, for example, that one could only identify personal issues as something they’re really angry about. Say, income taxes. Or how the newspaper delivery person always forgets to throw your paper where you want it. Or, as in our opening example, how rude other drivers are.
These are all legitimate things about which to be upset or even angry. However, before you give your final answer, think what it says about us if our holiest anger is limited to issues such as these.
Kaj Munk was a Danish pastor who was the spiritual force behind the Danish resistance to Hitler, who was taken away and shot in a field in January of 1944.
Before he was arrested and killed he wrote to his fellow pastors: “What is the task of the preacher today? Shall I answer: faith, hope and love? That sounds beautiful. But I would say, courage. No, even that is not challenging enough to be the whole truth. Our task today is recklessness. We lack a holy rage. The recklessness which comes from the knowledge of God and humanity. The ability to rage when justice lies prostrate on the streets and when the lie rages across the face of the earth. A holy anger about things that are wrong in the world. To rage against the ravaging of God’s earth and the destruction of God’s world. To rage when little children must die of hunger while the tables of the rich are sagging with food. To rage against complacency, and to seek to change human history until it conforms to the norms of the kingdom of God.”
Well, by now you’re probably catching the drift of this sermon. Clearly, we need a holy rage -- among pastors and among all Christians. As Hal Luccock of Yale Divinity School once said, “The church has too often been guilty of only teaching docile people how to be more docile.” I’m afraid there is truth to this.
And so a question I will let you answer is this: “might it be that God is calling you this Lent to a holy rage, a holy anger? Calling you to act on a holy anger that you’ve been aware of, but have put in the background because you’ve been otherwise preoccupied?
Anger, say, at the way we’re destroying our environment. Or anger at things which exploit people or discriminate against people because they’re a different color or gender or too old or different in any number of ways.
Or anger that our election of an African-American president has brought out the worst kinds of racism in so many white people. Or anger at conditions which spawn and perpetuate poverty or homelessness or malnutrition or ignorance in this, despite the recession, still the wealthiest country in history.
Or anger at how people are dying every day without knowing God’s love and purpose for their lives. Or anger at how impotent we churches are in reaching out to such people.
Do any of these things make your blood pressure rise? Make you want to do something, say something, give something to change things?
Recently, we all mourned the loss of 48 lives when Continental Flight 3407 crashed on landing just outside Buffalo, New York in a severe ice storm. Sadly, the airplane was equipped to with de-icing equipment to handle the crisis had the pilot just disengaged the automatic pilot earlier than he did. 
What you may not know is that this de-icing process for airplanes first came about because a man of faith named Leonard Haslim got angry in the late 80’s watching the 6 o’clock news. Seems scores of people had died in an airplane crash in Washington, D.C., because the plane’s wings had iced up, making it too heavy to fly. Watching the sad attempts at rescuing the passengers, Haslim decided to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. So he went to work.
His invention called the Electro-Expulsive Separation System, or which he called the “ice zapper,” won him NASA’s aware of inventor of the year in 1988. What it did was pulverize ice an inch thick on the surface of an airplane’s wing. Yet it used no more power than a single landing light, and cost less than an airplane tire. Indeed, one can only imagine the thousands of lives – very possibly yours and mine -- that have been saved because Leonard Haslim got angry watching the 6 o’clock news.
So, dear friends, what bothers you? What really bothers you? What might God be asking you to get really angry about? Taxes? Oh, please, you and I are made for much holier anger than this.
Really, what’s wrong in the world that makes you so mad that you could imagine yourself going to the effort to learn more about it and doing something to make a difference? Maybe write some letters. Maybe join a group that works for change. Maybe give some money.
It’s been noted that “Christians are the people who define reality in terms of the last being first and the first last, children being at the center of it all, and the poor, the hungry, and the sick being royalty.”
If this be so, and we believe it is, there’s a whole lot that’s fouling up God’s world. If God be God, you can be sure that God has been calling and right now is calling someone to a holy rage. Might that someone be you?