Title: Does God Get Angry?
8/20/06 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time Yr. B
Isaiah 3:1-9, 16-26 and Luke 16:19-31 (not lectionary)
Rev. Joy R. Haertig
When I was in Jr. High I became a good friend with a girl named Pam who had moved with her father and sister to Mercer Island after her mother and father divorced. Her mother stayed behind in Maryland so I never met her. Pam and her sister would tell me stories about her and the one I remember was how she used to call God on the phone when the girls were being disobedient and report their behavior to him.
I think they told me this story because I was a preacher's kid and they thought I might find it interesting.
I thought it was absolutely awful.
Using God in that way is a great way to make atheists out of your children!
Does God get angry? I guess their mother certainly hoped so!
The answer to that question - if there is one - has a lot to do with who and what you believe God to be.
I intentionally chose two scriptures this morning that if you read the scriptures literally, (which a lot of us do at first glance anyway) reflect the idea that God does indeed get angry and in turn punishes people for their disobedience. I also chose a scripture from both the Old and New Testaments because I wanted to remind us that you can find an angry and a loving God in both of them. (Don't talk yourself into thinking that the Old Testament God is all about anger and the New Testament one is all about love, I can guarantee that you will be either surprised or disappointed.)
There are many images of God in the Bible, (in both the New and Old Testaments) but there are two prevailing images that the various images fall under. (Resource book, Marcus Borg - “The God We Never Knew”)
First one:
Monarchical image of God - Reflected in today's readings.
God is transcendent.
Anthropomorphic images: King, Judge, Father (Middle Easter image of Father as the patriarchal head), Lord.
A Spirit, but a Spirit-being out there somewhere. (In the heavens?)
Our job is to be obedient rather than disobedient. Anger and punishment if disobedient.
Second one:
Spirit image of God. (Not a spirit-Being as the Monarchical image, but Spirit.)
God is all encompassing - in and out there - transcendent and imminent
God is life and more than life. We live in God.
Apostle Paul writes: “God in whom we live and have our being.”
Anthropomorphic images and inanimate images - Mother, Abba, Wisdom, Wind, Mountain, Rock etc.
Our “job” is to be in relationship with Spirit - to recognize that we live in It. Estrangement rather than disobedience is the challenge.
The presence of these two prevailing images of God in the Bible tell us that they have been with us since the beginning of our Judeo-Christian history even though many of us have only known about the “Monarchical” image of God as King and Father.
Does God get angry?
Monarchical image of God - God as a Being.
Feels anger, sadness, love, hope.
See God as Spirit, not a “Being” - do not attribute human emotions to God.
Anger is a human emotion.
God is beyond human emotion yet human emotions are the descriptive tools we have to talk about our relationship and our experience of Spirit.
Because I have come to believe and live most deeply in the idea of God as Spirit I have come to understand the prophets and Jesus in this way:
The anger of the prophets and of Jesus is their anger (inspired by their relationship with God) at how estranged we have become as a people, and the horrible consequences of that estrangement.
Their attributing their anger to God is a way of saying THIS IS IMPORTANT, that it is a matter of life and death; we are killing ourselves because of our estrangement. The consequences are NOT because God is angry and wills it, the consequences are because there are consequences to favoring a relationship with greed and violence over a relationship with Spirit.
If you were to re-read either of today's scripture you can glean the issues the people were dealing with at that time - violence, materialism, politics, and greed. They sound very much like what we struggle with today.
The prophets and Jesus were gifted - or cursed (depending on your point of view)- with the task of being the voice in the wilderness. A voice that most of us don't like to listen to!
Old Testament scholar, Walter Bruegemann uses the term “holy intrusion”. Whether you believe their anger was literally from God or not, their cry is a holy intrusion, a wake-up call for a sound-asleep people. Jesus' anger is not God's anger - but it was a holy intrusion.
Does God get angry?
I don't believe so.
But that should not stop us from doing so if it can empower us away from estrangement and towards relationship with Spirit.
We are the Body of Christ in the world today - the kind of anger reflected in today's scripture is being voiced on behalf of the poor and forgotten. We so often read these passages and feel berated or punished - but they are spoken on behalf of the forgotten.
It is not the anger of estranged self-righteousness but the holy intrusion of an indignant love expressed by human beings that long for us to live in God.