BE ANGRY AND SIN NOT

A SERMON FOR THE 5th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Those of you who are old enough to have lived through the 1960s will remember the hippy movement:  long-haired barefoot beatniks wearing flowers in their hair but very little else, smoking LSD, camping out at Woodstock, demonstrating against the war in Vietnam, and so on.  It was portrayed as an age of innocence, the enlightened innocence of these new Adams and Eves, flower children in our earthly Garden of Paradise.  They tried to tell us there was no such a thing as sin, that no one need be burdened by any sense of duty to family, to country, that there was no need for obedience to the authority of the law, be it of man or even God.

There was a lot of talk back then about love.  A lot of talk about peace.  But it was a false love and a false peace that these happy hippy harbingers of chaos brought with them into the world.  It was the overthrow of the Deity, the God who alone is Love.  Get rid of authority, get rid of obedience, duty, responsibility, sacrifice, and love becomes what?  Think about it.  If the true object of our love is nothing but the satisfaction of our appetites, if we were made merely to satisfy our own selfish desires for lust and drug or alcohol-induced euphoria, is that really our ideal of the perfect world?  Isn’t it rather when we can sacrifice our own desires for the sake of another, when we can lay down perhaps even our life for our country, our family, our loved ones, isn’t it only then that things begin to make sense in our head?

Today’s readings clearly illustrate the distinction that must be made between false love and true love, between a false peace and the true peace that comes only from God.  When we read these words of St. Peter in his first Epistle, and the words of Our Lord himself in the Gospel, we need to take a deep breath, pause, and examine our conscience.  There are a lot of words there about compassion and peace, not rendering evil for evil, not being angry against thy brother, and so on.  But make no mistake.  Ours is not a hippy religion of peace and love.  Yes, peace and love are very important.  But they must be the real thing, not the false peace that comes from loving and indulging ourselves.  Not the false love that rejects sacrifice for another.  Remember what Our Lord said about this kind of peace in another part of the same Gospel:  “Think not that I am come to bring peace on earth: I came not to bring peace, but a sword.” (Matthew 10:34).  We need to take a sword to this kind of self-love and false peace.  We need to wage war against it, and hack it to pieces.

Today’s Epistle tells us to render not evil for evil.  We must make sure first of all that we are not the ones to render evil first.   We must never provoke our neighbor to anger by our own self-indulgent actions.  But if someone does provoke us, or renders evil to us, we must never render any evil back to him, because two wrongs don’t make a right.  As Christians, we must be above repaying evil with evil, and if someone sins against us, our response must never be to commit a sin against charity ourselves by rendering him evil in return.  “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”  It doesn’t mean we should not defend ourselves, but if we find ourselves in such a position where we must use anger, or even violence, in defence of ourselves or those we love, or perhaps our nation, we must always remember that there must be no room in our souls for hatred against those who attack us.

The second lesson from today’s Gospel is that we must have a reason—a good reason—for being angry.  Our Lord says:  Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment.  Does this mean we should not be angry when evil is done unto us?  No.  Our Lord very clearly says Whoever is angry without a cause.  In other words, make sure your anger is justified.  Anger is not always sinful.  Sometimes we are justified in our anger.  When parents must show anger to a naughty child, for example.  Or the anger Christ showed when he drove the money lenders out of the temple.  We must make sure though, that we are reacting proportionately to the offence.  We don’t beat a child black and blue because he steals a cookie.  We keep our anger within the limits of what constitutes a prudent reaction to the outrage committed.  In fact, we shouldn’t  really display anger at all unless it is the most effective means of producing a good result.  If it deters future bad behaviour, for example.  Or if a display of annoyance or anger produces the necessary remorse in the culprit.  Above all else, we must keep our anger under control, and never lose our temper.

Sometimes it’s our duty to be angry, even in those frustrating circumstances when we have to tolerate the existence of evil in one form or another.  Some of those evils that we have to put up with should make us angry.  When we read the statistics on the modern human sacrifices being performed in so-called family planning clinics, we should be angry.  When we hear about the institutionalized perversion they call same-sex marriage, we should be angry.  When we see the wicked behavior of some of our priests, we should be angry.  And we are angry.  And we express that anger from the rooftops, because the work of the devil is not something we should just tolerate; when the devil works against God, we need to fight back as soldiers of Christ, ready to defend our holy Faith and good morals against the onslaught of evil.

But in fighting back do we ever render evil for evil?  No.  We don’t bomb abortion clinics, we don’t violently attack scandalous priests, we don’t mock or bully those who choose a morally perverse lifestyle.  We don’t have to fight all evils head-on.  Sometimes it is necessary to tolerate them in our midst, and sometimes we have to just follow what St. Peter says in his Epistle today:  We should eschew evil, and do good.  Eschew, that means avoid.  Avoid evil, and do good.  It sounds so simplistic.  But think about it, because it is, in fact, the perfect answer to evil.  Do good.  For what is evil if not the absence of good?  Just as darkness is the absence of light.  And when it’s dark, what do you do?  Do you fight the darkness?  Do you make speeches against it, write long articles denouncing the evils of darkness, complaining how much better off we would be without it?  No.  You just switch the light on.  Darkness cannot exist if light is present.  And so how can evil exist if good is present?  When we do good, we put to shame those who would do us evil.  We make a mockery of their foul attempts to soil the good we do, and we bring this about simply by doing greater good!  The person who does us evil will either be shamed into stopping his evil attacks, or he will be put to shame by being seen as the evil aggressor, attacking us without a cause.   And if we act in this way, then the eyes of the Lord are surely upon us, and his ears are open unto our prayers (says St. Peter), but the face of the Lord shall be against them that do evil.

This then is the way we need to act.  St. Paul puts it another way in his own epistle to the Romans:  If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink:  for in so doing thou shalt heap COALS OF FIRE on his head.

Ultimately we have nothing to fear from our persecutors.  The martyrs used to rejoice in the face of those who would threaten them with torture if they would not offer incense to the pagan gods.  The martyrs would laugh in their face, and say that there was nothing they could do to them beyond hurting their bodies – the worst the persecutors can do is kill them, and what is that except to send their immortal souls straight to heaven?  What greater gift could these evil men give them?  Imagine the rage that must have caused in them that hated the Christians!  That the very worst thing these men could do to the Christians was to give them exactly what they wanted by sending them to a haven of peace and eternal happiness with their God.  Again, St. Peter puts it very nicely in today’s epistle:   And who is he that will harm you, if ye be followers of that which is good?  But and if ye suffer for righteousness' sake, happy are ye: and be not afraid of their terror, neither be troubled; But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts.

These last few words are our abiding key to unlock the mysteries of evil and persecution.  By sanctifying the Lord God in our hearts, in other words, by being as holy and godly and loving, truly loving, as we can, especially in the face of evil, we will not only have nothing to fear from our enemies, but will indeed heap coals of fire upon their heads.  And simply by doing good in return for evil. 

And so I wish you all peace and love.  Not the 1960s version—perversion—of peace and love that comes from self-indulgence, pleasure and the abolition of God’s laws.  But the true peace with each other and love for each other that comes from our willingness to sacrifice our own will and pleasures in order to bring the peace and love of God to each other.   This is the true reflection of the love that was shown us by our Lord God, whose dearly beloved Son sacrificed his very lifeblood for us on Calvary’s Cross of Redemption.