Twelve years ago, I quit one of the great joys of my life. I had enough. I was disgusted and embarrassed and I felt hoodwinked, used, and deceived. So I quit.
Baseball, this great game that had captured my imagination and heart since I was in junior high, had become bloated, monstrous, and impure. Steroids had turned the game into a chemistry experiment and the players barely resembled their true selves. Worst of all, every sense of pure fascination and enjoyment I experienced as a fan became a fool’s errand because surely none of these players had achieved transcendence and great heights without taking a short cut, without cheating themselves and the game. So, I was done.
In the last few years, I have started to feel the same way about the American church. It seems to be taking short cuts and injecting itself with a substance that makes it swell and produce unusual results. This substance is fueling the church and has increased its power and significance. But this substance is anything but Godly, only serves to achieve results while corrupting the body with a toxin that looks just like the rest of the world and dismisses the purity of the Christ that it proclaims.
This artificial and harmful substance is anger. Somehow, anger has become accepted as a means for the church and its members to handle life in the 21st century. And it keeps holding on to it because it keeps getting results even though it reveals a heart that is corrupted, unchanged by Christ, and linked to false power, deceit, hate, lying, greed, and oppression. I don’t want any part of this acceptance and complicity with anger.
Jesus was so against the use of anger that he described three different levels of punishment due the angry person. He says they are worthy of judgement, arrest, and even hell, simply on the basis of their anger. A wise man once said, “Anything that could be done with anger can be done better without it.” We may think that anger is the only way to get results and that we have to join the ways of the world to be significant in the world but all anger is doing to the church is poisoning any real value it might have; any real word it might bring that is loving, hopeful, merciful, faithful, gentle, kind, and peaceful.
Jesus continues his emphasis against anger in the passage referenced above by saying that our worship will lose its meaning and purity if we still harbor anger. He knew how anger corrupts and he makes quite an effort to get his followers to eradicate anger from their lips and from their lives.
I don’t want to quit the church or my affiliations to it but I will not participate in a steroid version that barely resembles Christ’s intent for it or turns it into a bloated, ugly, malformed entity. May we all assess our methods of fueling the body of Christ, the church, and end our love affair with anger. Christ will have nothing to do with it and we shouldn’t either.
