My sermon this week came from the last part of Luke 14, where Jesus keeps telling parables at banquets that speak to larger things. I know these stories, but had never seen what they have to say about anger.
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Today’s sermon is one of those that could use a recap like those that come up when you’re watching a limited series on television: “Previously on Whatever . . .” and then they show crucial scenes to get you caught up. So, previously on Sunday Sermons, last week we saw Jesus go to dinner at the home of one of the religious elite and he began by healing a man who had edema—a man whose body held too much water and yet he stayed thirsty—and then he told a parable about not jostling for position when you look at the seating chart.
Where we pick up the story today, as soon as Jesus finished telling that last parable, he turned to the person hosting him and said, “When you have a dinner, don’t invite people who will invite you back. It will be a much richer party if you invite those who can’t repay you, which may have made the host wonder why they had invited Jesus.
In the awkwardness of the moment, one of the guests said something akin to, “Well, when we all get to heaven everyone will be at the same table,” which evoked another parable about a banquet.
Jesus described a scene the people around him would have recognized, though it might seem odd to us. If someone wanted to host a dinner, they would send out the invitations and then, based on the responses, prepare the food so they had enough for everyone and didn’t waste anything. When the meal was ready, they would send for the guests to come and eat.
Except when dinner was ready, the guests offered excuses instead of their presence, and not very good excuses at that. One said they had bought a farm and had to go see what kind of farm they had purchased and asked to be excused. Jesus’ audience would have understood that no one would buy a farm without having walked the land first. The second person said they had purchased five teams of oxen, also unseen, and needed to check them out and said they were sorry. Again, who does that? The last one said, “I just got married (which also meant the host had not been invited to the wedding feast) and I can’t come to dinner,” and offered no apology.
Needless to say, the host was angry. The meal was ready and the excuses were flimsy. They were all transactional. (Remember in that time a marriage was fundamentally a business transaction because the woman was considered property.) They chose acquisition over relationship, and the host did the opposite.
Actually, he did what Jesus had just talked about. He told his servants to go out on the streets of the city—the busy streets and the side streets—and get anyone they could find who needed a meal. When that didn’t fill up the room, he sent them out into the countryside and down the back alleys, and then he expressed anger of his own: “No one I invited will taste my dinner,” which sounds like he didn’t plan to ever invite them again.
But there’s another way to hear that last statement. It could also mean the host realized that once he had a party where he invited everyone—and I mean everyone—those who defined their importance by who they excluded would no longer want to eat at his table. They would write him off because he had nothing to offer them.
The words and actions of the host sent me back to something poet David Whyte wrote several years ago about anger. He said,
Anger is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly, about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for.
I remember the first time I read those sentences. I think my head turned and looked at the book the way our pups’ heads turn when they hear a strange noise. I had never thought of anger as deep compassion. As I have told you, I grew up in a family where we talked about our feelings every fifteen years whether we needed to or not. Because my dad had grown up in a very volatile family, he was determined his family would not be that way. What he wanted was for us to not be explosive; what we ended up doing was swallowing most all of it.
The anger he was scared of was not what good anger is. The anger that appears to be the fuel for American society these days—the outrage, the violence, the division—is not good anger either. Jesus was angry a good deal of the time, but angry in a way that did not strike out in violence.
I learned how to get angry from Ginger, who is the most forthright person I know. Her anger is honest, current, and fair. She embodies what Whyte describes as anger in its pure state:
It is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics. . . . Anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here; it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate, and the body larger and strong enough to hold it.
What I learned from Ginger was that anger was not something to be scared of, or avoided, or stuffed away. To be angry doesn’t mean to be violent. True anger is honest, even vulnerable. To be angry, by that definition, is to speak the truth in love. That doesn’t mean it isn’t hard to hear, but it does mean it’s a relational act.
When everyone he thought he could count on bailed on his dinner, the host turned his anger into invitations, rather than explosions. He filled his tables with hungry people and fed them. He did not become transactional and try to get even with what he felt had been done to him. He became more generous to more people. He couldn’t change the hearts of those who wouldn’t show up, but he could change the lives of those that did.
These are days that invite us to be angry in much the same way—to find ways to make our anger invitational. When others dehumanize, we can humanize. When others work to divide people, we can connect with people. When others try to out yell everyone, we can make room for others to speak. When others try to make us cynical, we can double down on hope. When we feel like the outrage takes up all the space in our lives, we can make time to cook, or garden, or talk to neighbors, or volunteer, or stay late at coffee hour. We can commit to calling family members we don’t agree with just to see how they are doing, just so they know we love them.
And when we see those who are consumed by outrage, let us also have the grace to remember they are actually consumed by fear—fear of the unknown, fear of change, fear of losing something, or whatever their fear may be—and we remember that love is stronger than fear, which is why we can’t let our fear get the best of us. We must choose not to strike out in rage, but let our anger make us more generous and compassionate. That’s the only way that everyone can thrive. That’s the only way everyone gets fed. Amen.
