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I’VE GOT TO NURSE THIS GRUDGE BECAUSE
IT’S SICK! I
HOW LONG SHOULD YOU HOLD A HAND GRENADE?
(9:44)
It’s probably one of the most wrenching books sitting
on the shelf here at our Voice of Prophecy offices . . . and it bit us
again during the prep time for this series of radio messages. Dead Man
Walking, by Sister Helen Prejean, and you might recall that Sean Penn
and Susan Sarandon were in an Oscar Award-winning film by the same title.
It’s a powerful study of the death penalty here in America, and you can
understand that this devout Catholic nun finds herself rather decidedly
on one side of the war.
There are so many stories of heinous crimes in this book: mass murders,
murders involving rape, murders involving torture. Young girls are suddenly
gone from the little country houses they lived in all their lives; Mom
and Dad wait and wait, while the police scour the countryside. A young
man’s graduation robe hangs in the closet, unworn, unused. Senior prom
photos on the kitchen table. And finally the horrible news comes in: “Mr.
and Mrs. LeBlanc, I’m sorry . . . we found David’s body.”
Of course, what makes the anger of these parents even greater is that
when they get to the courtroom, or when they go to Angola, the penitentiary,
they see Sister Helen there with the man who killed their child! She’s
there with Patrick Sonnier, praying with him, comforting him, fighting
for a stay of execution. It almost seems like the Church, and by extension,
God, is on the enemy side, aiding and abetting, helping to prolong their
torture.
We’re beginning a three-week radio series here, and frankly, I don’t know
if we’ll get even half a mile down the road in just fifteen Bible studies.
I’VE GOT TO NURSE THIS GRUDGE BECAUSE IT’S SICK; that’s our title. And
I imagine most of us have experienced some of this in our own lives. That
gnawing, repeated, never-ending, haunting-your-dreams hatred of that certain
someone. That person who hurt you. That person who has always profited
at your expense. That person who has cheated his or her way to the head
of the line, and always by taking the spot you should have had.
I don’t know if it’s comforting or not to discover that people in the
Bible — even some of the Bible writers — were in this very same boat.
Have you read some of the Psalms? Let me tell you . . . you get away from
Psalm 23 and all the still waters and grassy-green meadows — some of the
rest of King David’s writing happen in rip-roaring rapids and poison pastures
instead. Philip Yancey, in his latest book about the Old Testament, entitled
The Bible Jesus Read, says this:
“You don’t have to read far in Psalms,” he writes, “before encountering
some troubling passages, furious outbursts hidden like landmines in the
midst of soothing pastoral poetry. Some seem on the level of ‘I hope you
get hit by a truck!’ schoolyard epithets. ‘Imprecatory psalms,’ these
are called, or sometimes ‘vindictive psalms,’ or, more bluntly, ‘cursing
psalms’ because of the curses they rain down on opponents.”
The dictionary tells us that an imprecation is a calling
down of a curse on someone else’s head. It’s essentially a screaming rant-and-rave.
“You stupid, ugly so-and-so . . . I hope your dog dies! I hope your house
blows away in a hurricane! I hope your cable TV goes out during the Super
Bowl!”
Do you think I’m kidding? Here’s Psalm 3:7:
“Arise, O Lord! Deliver me, O my God! Strike all my
enemies on the jaw; break the teeth of the wicked.”
Most of this kind of writing actually goes along the
vein of — “Lord, please, just shut them up. Somehow express, in a voice
from heaven, that I’ve been right and they’ve been wrong. All I want is
justice.”
Well, friend, we have several weeks here to grapple with these sob stories
— our own and King David’s too. Today we just want to get one concept
on the table, and it’s this: It is not wrong to get angry.
That’s it. It’s not a sin to have anger in your heart. Did you know that?
Ephesians 4:26 says it very plainly:
“In your anger do not sin.”
It’s interesting that Paul is quoting here from guess
what source? That’s right; the book of Psalms. In fact, that line — “In
your anger do not sin” — is just five verses later than David’s sock-‘em-in-the-jaw
diatribe. But the Word of God — Psalms 4 and Ephesians 4 — tells us that
there is a time and a place when anger is not a wrong emotion.
That’s got to be comforting to some of the people in Sister Helen Prejean’s
case studies, which she shares in Dead Man Walking. Now, she was fighting
the death penalty for all she was worth. She was trying to rescue those
men on Death Row. But she also came to realize the incredible pain, the
overwhelming anger, being felt by the victims. She began to see the hurting
folks on the other side of the river, the people who were desperately
waiting for the state to throw the electric switch to end their misery.
Their grudges were a crippling burden.
Listen to these anecdotes. A Jimmy Christian was told by the police, back
in 1988, that his son had been killed. Did the cops ever get back to him?
Did the authorities stay in touch? Not one word. He eventually heard “on
the streets” that somebody had been arrested.
A man named Johnny Johnson came home from church one day . . . and found
his wife dead. Her throat cut. The only thing the police did was to arrest
him for the crime, even though his innocence was ironclad and obvious.
A Mildred Brewer actually saw her own daughter get shot one day, back
in 1979. But instead of getting to ride in the ambulance to the hospital
with her kid, police hauled her off to headquarters and wasted three hours
grilling her. During those three hours, her daughter died. When the police
finally arrested someone, the DA never even bothered to phone Mrs. Brewer
and tell her.
And of course, these stories are multiplied over and over — some in agonizing
detail. Parents would wait for long, horrifying years while the killers
of their children played the system, filing one appeal after another.
TV headlines mocked them night after night. It was a brutal ride — the
emotional roller coaster.
It’s no wonder that Sister Helen and these grieving, angry, poverty-stricken
victims, in their twelve-step meetings with names like “Survive,” came
up with really the only slogan that made any sense: God makes a way out
of no way.
In this marvelous booklet, How Can I Forgive?, by Vera Sinton — which
is our free gift to each of you this week — she makes this point early
on.
“Feeling anger when you have been hurt by someone is
not wrong.” She then adds: “It is a normal reaction and the sign of a
healthy personality.”
She suggests that, just as pain is an important signal
to your body that something is dangerously wrong, anger is often an appropriate
warning to you that something is amiss. But then she goes on to say the
same thing the Bible says, which is this: initial anger is often a good
thing, a necessary thing, even a righteous thing. Even Jesus had things
happen to Him which caused — at that moment — good anger. But here’s part
two of the diagnosis. Continued anger, nonstop anger, “grudge” anger .
. . that’s a different thing. That is harmful And dangerous. And it puts
you on a road that leads to sin.
We really ought to read the entire Bible verse, which is always a good
idea, isn’t it? Here’s Ephesians 4:26 again, and please take note:
“‘In your anger do not sin.’” So far so good. But as
we continue: “Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry.” And
listen to this from verse 27: “And do not give the devil a foothold.”
I recall a cute line from the comedienne, Phyllis Diller,
who was always duking it out with her moron husband, Fang. “Never go to
bed mad,” she advises. “Stay up and fight!” But you know, in a sense,
she’s right. It’s better to stay up and throw pillows for a while, to
stay up and fight, than it is to harbor a grudge, to stay mad overnight,
or over a month or a year or a lifetime.
Let me close with this last word about “imprecations,” and Philip Yancey
shares this reference from a Miroslav Volf and the book, Exclusion and
Embrace.
“For the followers of the crucified Messiah, the main
message of the imprecatory Psalms” — that’s the sock-‘em-in-the-jaw kind,
remember — “is this: rage belongs before God. This is no mere cathartic
discharge of pent up aggression before the Almighty who ought to care.
Much more significantly, by placing unattended rage before God we place
both our unjust enemy and our own vengeful self face to face with a God
who loves and does justice.”
That’s powerful, isn’t it? Maybe we could say
that even good anger is like a hand grenade that gets unexpectedly tossed
in your lap. That’s not your fault. That’s not wrong. But the fuse is
ticking, isn’t it? Give it up quickly, before sundown tonight, to the
divine demolition team.
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