From Anger to Zion

Taylor Porter

Description

Anger, judgment, forgiveness, wisdom. All of these and more are biblical words we've used so often that they have very little meaning for us anymore. For others--seekers and those who are coming to church for the first time--these words sound like jargon. They are words that divide new church members from those who have been there a lifetime. In From Anger to Zion, Porter Taylor reflects on an alphabet of biblical words in ways that will help newcomers understand and speak the language, and that will encourage those familiar with these words to rethink them.

A wonderful storyteller and writer, Taylor's essays, each based on a biblical text, take ancient words and ideas and bring them into contemporary life. Egypt of old is today's broken place in our lives—the place where, like Moses, God is most likely to call us to go. Forgiveness is explored as a way of unfreezing time; without forgiveness we cannot grow. What does Isaiah's and the Israelites’ homesickness have to do with today's homeless and lost people?

These beautifully written essays are wonderful devotional material, but they also can serve as material for preparing to preach or for small-group discussion within parish reading groups.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Practice
• Christian Rituals
• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Church Publishing Incorporated
• Date de parution: 01 août 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780819225931
• Langue: English

Extrait

From Anger to Zion
From Anger to Zion
An Alphabet of Faith
PORTER TAYLOR
Copyright 2004 by Porter Taylor
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
Morehouse Publishing, P.O. Box 1321, Harrisburg, PA 17105 Morehouse Publishing, The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
Morehouse Publishing is a Continuum imprint .
Unless otherwise indicated, biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture taken from THE MESSAGE is copyright by Eugene Peterson, 1993, 1994, 1995. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.
Cover design: Lee Singer
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publition Data
Taylor, G. Porter.
From anger to zion : an alphabet of faith / G. Porter Taylor.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8192-2111-2 (pbk.)
1. Episcopal Church-Sermons. 2. Anglican Communion-Sermons. I. Title.
BX5937.T29F76 2004
252 .03-dc22
2004003659
Printed in the United States of America
04 05 06 07 08 09 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my parents Richard and Sarah Taylor
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
A nger
B lessed
Body
C alling
Child
Church
Clean and Unclean
Cross
D emons
Discipline
E quipment
Evangelism
F all
Forgiveness
Freedom
Friends
G reat Love
H ome
Hospitality
I dolatry
J oy
Judgment
Justice
K airos
Kindness
L ove
M yth
N ewness
O pened
P entecost
Prodigal
Q uestions
R econciliation
S alvation
Suffering
T ransfiguration
Truth
U nbelief
V ision
W ilderness
Wisdom
Work
Wounds
X
Y es
Z ion
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Because these essays first were sermons, I must express my gratitude to the people to whom they were preached. All sermons are conversations about things that matter. I am grateful to the people of St. Gregory the Great Episcopal Church in Athens, Georgia, for encouraging and participating in such conversations. Over and over, this community has gone deeper and deeper into the mysteries of faith.
I am thankful to Lee Ann Pingel for her enormous and generous help in the editing of this manuscript and to Hortense Bates, whose wonderful sense of order is a needed corrective to my incorrigible drive toward chaos. I also wish to express my appreciation to Debra Farrington for her encouragement and cheerful support.
I am also appreciative of the many writers, preachers, and speakers that have inspired me and from whom I have borrowed. I am especially grateful to Richard Rohr. I give him credit throughout this manuscript for his ideas and words that I have directly borrowed, but I am aware of how much of these essays grow out of his writings and teachings.
Most of all, I am grateful to my family: Arthur, my son; Marie, my daughter; and, as always, Jo, my wife.
A
ANGER
Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger.
-Ephesians 4:26
Let s admit it. Most of the time we don t know what to do with anger-especially as Christians. We rarely applaud anger as a virtue. You don t hear people saying, He is such a good Christian because he is so angry.
No, what we usually hear is, He is such a good Christian because he is so nice . We think being nice is a much better trait than being angry. And, for those of us who are Episcopalian, we might add tasteful. We ll take nice and tasteful over angry any day.
But guess what? In the letter to the Ephesians, Paul explains how to live as Christians. Nice and tasteful don t make the list, but anger does. Paul says, Be angry, but do not sin. No doubt the Ephesians pricked up their ears at that! Suddenly this Christianity thing took on a whole new perspective. Be angry, but do not sin.
Anger is very tricky, a double-edged sword. It can be a vice or a virtue, depending on how it is used. There is no doubt that anger is dangerous; it is so explosive that we can easily slip from righteous anger into sinful anger. Consequently, we need to be prayerful and careful with our anger. We need to pay attention to the hallmarks of righteous and sinful anger.
Sinful Anger
Anger is energy, and energy must be transferred into activity. Anger comes from our passions, but it becomes sin when it is destructive, either to others or to ourselves. Pent-up anger will either explode uncontrollably or eat away at our hearts and souls until it takes up all of our interior space. Unless and until we deal with our anger, there is no room in us for anything else. As a result, we are incapable of action. For this reason, Paul cautions us not to let the sun go down on our anger.
Once I got angry with my wife, Jo, but being the nice, tasteful person that I am, I held it in. On the inside I was boiling, but on the outside, I was fine. In the middle of the night, I had a nightmare that I was being suffocated, and to free myself from my attacker I screamed, Get off of me! and crashed my elbow into Jo s ribs. That was a hint that anger doesn t magically disappear; it will come out one way or another, and unless it s channeled constructively, it will almost certainly burst out destructively.
Thus, Paul also reminds us we are members of one another. When we lash out at another, we do injury not only to that person but to ourselves as well. Whether we are angry at another over a truly unjust act or simply out of a selfish need to have things our way, the great temptation is to feel superior to the other person. Our anger helps us tower over the other person and, like Zeus, send down our thunderbolts. Venting our emotions this way may make us feel good, but it s destructive. Regardless of the cause, rage or vengeance is not righteous anger.
Righteous Anger
Anger is connected with our values: we only get angry about things we care about. I don t trust anyone who never gets angry, because that person has no passions. Who would just shrug off seeing two men push an elderly lady down to steal her purse? We get angry when we see something wrong. Moses was angry when he came down Mount Sinai and saw the golden calf. Jesus was angry when he saw the moneychangers in the Temple. Jesus was even angry enough with the Pharisees and the scribes to call them names-a brood of vipers (Matthew 3:7).
The key to dealing well with anger is provided at the start of Ephesians 5: Therefore be imitators of God. We are to be angry, but we are to imitate God s anger. God does get angry, but not over traffic jams or bad calls by referees. God is angry when humankind does not conform its ways to God s ways. God is angry when we do not live moral lives: when we do not do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God (Micah 6:8). God gets angry because God longs for us to be our best, as individuals and as a people, but we settle for so little. Why not have a world of justice and mercy and peace? In other words, let s get angry over something worthwhile. It is when we find ourselves irate over traffic or sports that we should heed Paul s instruction to put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice. Righteous anger is reserved for the deep sinfulness of our world and its structures that perpetuate injustice.
When we are angry over appropriate issues, our anger should imitate God s anger. When God gets angry, God enters into a dialogue (albeit a heated one) with the people. Gods says, You have not followed my laws. You have sinned, and the people of God argue back. However, the relationship is maintained: the whole point of the dialogue is to reestablish the covenant.
God s anger always leads to a new covenant; it always serves a larger purpose. Even the flood in Genesis-an example of God s anger at its most extreme-led to reconciliation between God and humankind. God was so angry with the people who would not walk in God s ways that in a fit of anger God destroyed them. However, out of this came a new and everlasting promise that God s anger would never be destructive again. The Hebrew Bible is filled with this pattern of anger/conversation/new covenant.
It is this new covenant, this disruption of the status quo, that makes anger-ours or God s-so scary. But the truth is that most of the time the status quo needs disruption. We need to be angry the way Hosea and Amos and Jeremiah and John the Baptist and Jesus were angry. We need to be angry the way Mothers Against Drunk Driving are MADD. Our anger is the force that can make our world accountable and move us to talk about how our ways fall short of God s ways. Then, when that talk is finished, we need to have the courage to reach out to the other person and establish a new covenant. We need to disrupt the status quo, and then we need to have the wisdom to make something new.
So let s not waste our time and our passion being angry over not getting our way; let s not waste our time and our passion screaming at the traffic or at soccer referees. Instead, let s think about the world God wants. When we see how far we are from that, let s be angry, but instead of sinning, let s imitate God.
B
BLESSED
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
-Matthew 5:3
In February 1985, I went on week s retreat to a Carmelite monastery in Crestone, Colorado. The plane landed in Denver at about two in the afternoon, and I rented a car. I drove south for about an hour and then came to a roadblock: the wind was blowing so much snow across the road that it had to be closed, and the patrolman could not tell me how long the delay would be.
Patience has never been my strong suit. So, as the cars with Colorado tags lined up to wait, I whipped out my map and figured out an alternate route: back to Denver and then ea