Speaker 1: Anger on its own will never produce righteousness. The problem is the anger that's ignored or anger that's not listened to, anger that's not evaluated, anger that is not allowed. All this will ever produce is more anger. Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here.
We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information. Welcome to church. Today, we are talking about anger, and we're actually going to finish our series on anger. But this week, it's hard not to be angry.
Once again, we see the injustice that surrounds us. We see the ways that the lives of people of color are not valued as the gifts that they are. And that should make us angry. A woman in New York is asked to put her dog on a leash and she calls the police telling them that an African American man is threatening her life. An African American man is arrested for a nonviolent crime and he is killed as he repeatedly tells the officer that he can't breathe.
And these things are not unrelated. Because when we weaponize our difference, when we weaponize our privilege, we create a narrative. And that narrative in turn creates the world that depends on our difference. And that should make us angry. But if that's all that that does, it does not change.
And this is a big part of what we have been talking about in this series. It's part of what we're going to talk about again today, that anger and Facebook posts and tweets and tears, these are not enough. We need to, all of us, be willing to look at the ways that we create and we perpetuate and we continue narratives that devalue and demonize black and brown and indigenous peoples. Because until all of us are willing to allow our anger to actually change the ways that we interact with the world and the people around us, Then we will keep seeing these videos. Beloved children of God, we'll keep paying the price and all of us will lose part of our souls in it.
So may your anger this week lead to change, to new ways of thinking, new ways of speaking, to new ways of interrogating your assumptions about the world, and inviting the spirit of grace to fill you with new ones today. God, for all the ways that we have weaponized our difference and our privilege, and we have ignored the voices around us that are pleading for help, we repent. Might your spirit do something inside of us to take our anger and our frustration and turn it into something good. Something that changes the world for the better. Something that reflects your kingdom and your commonwealth today.
Amen. Okay. My name is Jeremy. And today, I get to talk about being angry. Today, we're actually going to wrap up our series, how to be angry.
But first, a couple things before we dive back into the book of Daniel. Today is actually Pentecost, and that means that together we have reached the end of this fifty day celebration called Eastertide. For the past seven weeks, we have been living in the light of resurrection. Today, we remember the gift of God's spirit with us. And Pentecost is this really interesting moment.
In Acts two, the disciples have been told to go to Jerusalem and wait. But then on Pentecost, the fiftieth day after Passover in the Jewish tradition, we read that the spirit of God blows into the room, filling the disciples, and they begin to speak in other languages. So naturally, a crowd gathers outside because they can hear the disciples speaking in their languages. And we read that this is quite the crowd. The text in Acts says that Parthians and Medes and Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and parts of Libya near Cyrene, visitors from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, Christians and Arabs, all hear them speaking in their native tongues.
So understand that this is not so much a story about the speaking. This is really a story about the hearing and the listening and the understanding that the spirit brings with it. Then Peter goes out and he gives this sermon and thousands of people respond to the story of Jesus' day. There's two really important things here. First, the story of people from all over coming together, hearing each other, actually listening to each other, and understanding each other.
That is a story that is dependent on some biblical literacy. Way back in Genesis, there is this story about the Tower Of Babel. Some people want to build a tower that proves they are as powerful as the gods, and they're going to build this enormous ziggurat that reaches into the sky as a monument to human innovation. And innovation is cool. Don't get me wrong.
I love technology. But these people frame this as a challenge to God, an affront to God. And God doesn't like that, so God causes them to speak in different languages, and they can no longer work together, so they abandon their project. This is sort of an ancient tale that reaches toward an explanation for why we speak all of these different languages in the world. But it's also one that tries to give shape to the fact that it's our sin, our inability to work with the divine that divides us and isolates us from each other.
Well, now here at Pentecost, at the fulfillment of the promise of resurrection, when Jesus said, go to Jerusalem and wait for there you will receive power, the power comes in the form of the healing of Babel. People from all over, from every tribe and every nation now able to actually hear each other, to understand each other, able to work together now within the story of God's goodness and grace. So understand that the power of Pentecost, the gift of the spirit comes in our reconciliation to those we have once thought completely unknowable to us. And it is this really beautiful image because now we see those same disciples who abandoned Jesus when the religious leaders turned on him. Those same disciples that watched from the shadows with the authorities when they arrested him.
Those same disciples who were drawn from the lowest quarters of societal power to follow him, they are now empowered to reconcile these diverse populations. So Pentecost is about the presence of God's spirit, which elevates the voices we rarely listen to, leading to the healing of our deepest fractures and reconnecting us to the potential God always imagined in a united humanity pointed in the right direction. Now do we always get Pentecost right? No. In fact, in a lot of my experience with Pentecost, that has often been dominated by powerful men praying for more power.
But the real story of this day and the real climax of this Eastertide season is when we begin to allow spirit to breathe in and through our communities, highlighting the unheard voices in our midst and restoring our ability to achieve together more for God's kingdom than any of us could ever begin to dream of on our own. And that is an important story for day. And the odd as it might seem, it's actually quite a good segue into what we've been talking about in this series. Particularly, what we want to go with our anger in our final conversation today. Because so far in this series, Bobby has talked to us about how to be angry at God.
How our frustration with the way that things could or should be can actually lead us to partner with the divine in the redemption of all things. Then she talked about how to be angry at each other, how we can do this in ways that unleash fury and rage and violence like Nebuchadnezzar, or how we can be angry in ways that steal us in our commitment to do what is right even in the face of great personal cost just like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. I love this idea that we can choose whether our anger will bring the best or the worst out of us. And today, we have one more angle to look at this through. And we are going to use Daniel four as the lens to talk about how to be angry at ourselves, how anger can motivate us to make change in ourselves and through ourselves.
First though, as we should always do when we are angry, let's pray. God, for all the ways that we have not learned how to listen to our anger well, it has built up within us as fury and rage, but has not actually turned into something good on the other side. We're sorry. For the ways that we have pushed hard emotions away, we have not wanted to deal with them or maybe we have been conditioned or shaped in ways to think that we should not hear them. We repent.
We ask you by your spirit to be near to us. To help us to listen, to help us to see, to help us to find the ways that all of our emotions even the most difficult ones Speak to us about what the world is and what the world could be. God, may our anger always become something beautiful on the other side. Change and goodness and grace that becomes the world that you imagine when you dream about it. May our imagination be aligned with yours.
May the earth be as heaven is today. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Okay. On the agenda today is apocalyptic lit mood swings out of body experiences, and finding our way back to ourselves.
But before we get to Daniel four today, let's talk about Daniel as a book for just a moment. And first of all, can you believe that we're doing a whole series in Daniel? We're not even gonna talk about the lion's den at all. Although, to be fair, we probably all need a bit of a break from big cats after the tiger king. I mean, that happened.
But this is one of the interesting things about Daniel as a book. It's a story that has some famous narrative pieces. The other being the fiery furnace that we looked at last week. But the majority of Daniel is this very difficult book that contains a lot of dreams and interpretations and visions. It's a book that is set in Babylon, but it was written post exile.
After Babylon and after Persia, during the rise of Rome, most likely during the time of Antiochus for Epiphanes, who was a king in the Seleucid Empire who was terrible to the Jewish people. By the way, he was the fourth Antiochus, so Antiochus four, but that Epiphanes, that's a title he gave himself that meant God manifest. So, yeah, he had some issues. But Daniel is written during this time, trying to look back and make sense of the history of Israel from Assyria to Babylon to Persia to Greece and now with Rome on the horizon. And the tale is wrestling with these dual questions.
How did things go so wrong for us? And given that they did, how can we still believe that God is firmly in control of the universe? And it does this through this curious mixture of narrative and imagery. And we've seen some of that already in the dreams that have popped up, but for the most part, we've been following a narrative about Daniel and his friends. Now here in chapter four, we're gonna shift into something a little more exotic.
And the story is going to essentially start all over again in a way. See, chapter four starts as a dream that turns into an interpretation and then it kind of goes off the rails a bit into a dream sequence maybe where things get a little hard to make sense of. If you have ever read the books behind the Annihilation movie, that's the feeling that I get when I read Daniel. Great books by the way, but there's your obscure literary reference for the day. What you're gonna notice here in chapter four is that we are in some ways rehearsing the same story from chapter two, just this time from the perspective of the king.
And this is a very familiar trope in apocalyptic literature. The same story being retold from a different perspective. Now the book of Revelation, which we're gonna find our way back to in about five weeks interestingly enough, is actually the same story being told three times at different scales. It's the victory of Christ at the level of our personal faith and communities. It is the victory of Christ at the level of our governments and empires.
And it's the victory of Christ at the cosmic level of good and evil. But these aren't successive stories in Revelation. It's the same story starting all over again at the beginning each time just with a new lens to view it through. So hold on to that, and we'll make our way back in a few weeks. But the point today is that retelling the same story is a very common idea in this genre.
Because you have to understand that apocalyptic doesn't mean the end of the world or at least it didn't back then. It meant a revealing of something that was hidden. And one of the ways that you can get at something that you missed is to keep coming back looking at it at different angles. And that's what the writer of Daniel is going to do here in chapter four. In some ways, that's actually what we've been doing in this whole series.
In chapter four verse one says by the way, one more thing here. The first three verses of chapter four are actually the last three verses of chapter three in Hebrew. So depending on what translation you're using, this can get a little tricky. But in the NIV, chapter four starts this way. King Nebuchadnezzar, to the nations and peoples of every language who live in all the earth, may you prosper greatly.
It is my pleasure to tell you about the miraculous signs and wonders that the most high God has performed for me. How great are his signs, how mighty his wonders, his kingdom is an eternal kingdom, his dominion endures from generation to generation. So what we've got here in the opening is an address from the king going out to all the people apparently across the entire world, and he is in quite a good mood today. A stark contrast from where he was last week throwing people into fiery furnaces. But I wanna talk about this for a second.
Because as important as our anger is, as sacred as anger can be, anger can also be sometimes the emotion that masks our insecurities. This is precisely why our anger needs to be listened to. I talked about this on YouTube a couple weeks ago, but I recognize that often my anger comes from not receiving the accommodation or the privilege that I'm used to. We all get used to certain things and when we don't get them, that can make us angry. But if you're anything like me, you've probably gotten used to being offered a lot.
I mean, have resources. I have a platform to share my ideas. I people who pay attention to me and take me seriously. And what can happen is that that can make me think that I deserve all of that all of the time. So if I have to wait in line at the grocery store, let's say, or if I have to defer to someone else, if I'm not doing well, if I'm not particularly self aware on any given day, I can get angry about that.
Now, I could just say, well, that's immature and it is, trust me. Then I could just move on. But in doing that, in not thinking about what my anger is telling me, I'm actually missing out on something really important. Because it's not just silly that I got angry. It's not just immature.
That anger is telling me that something has gone sideways inside of me. Of course, my anger at waiting in line at the grocery store is not at all equivalent to the anger that you feel at real injustice in the world. But if I don't listen to that emotion, if I don't ask where it's coming from, if I just keep on pushing it aside and ignoring it, what ends up happening is that it keeps coming back. And I keep bouncing back and forth like the king. Seasons where I am ready to throw someone into the fiery furnace in one moment.
And then I'm ready to say to the nations and all the peoples who live in all the earth, may you prosper greatly in the next. That kind of a swing in me is usually a sign that I haven't been attentive to what my emotions are telling me. And that may be a small part of what the author is trying to get at here with these huge swings in Nebuchadnezzar's moods. This is what the king says to all the people. I, Nebuchadnezzar, was at home in my palace, contented and prosperous.
I had a dream that made me afraid. I was lying in bed. The images and visions that passed through my mind terrified me. So I commanded that all the wise men of Babylon be brought before me to interpret the dream for me. When the magicians, the enchanters, the astrologers, the diviners came, I told them the dream, but they could not interpret it.
Finally, Daniel came into my presence and I told him the dream. So here's our question. Is this the same dream from before now told in a new way? Or is this a second dream that the king is having? And scholars argue about this, but regardless, it is about coming back to the same ideas with a new angle, and that's really important for apocalyptic texts like this.
Because last time in chapter two, the dream was about an enormous statue dazzling and awesome, and God carves out a stone and throws it, smashing the statue to pieces so that a mountain can take its place. This time in chapter four, the dream is about enormous tree. Its top touched the sky. It was visible to the ends of the earth. Its leaves were beautiful.
Its fruit abundant, and on it was food for all. And this time, a messenger from God appears and cuts down the tree, strips its branches, scatters the animal, and binds the stump in the ground. Last time, Nebuchadnezzar couldn't figure out that he was the statue and Daniel had to tell him. This time, Nebuchadnezzar can't figure out that he is the tree and Daniel has to tell him. But here's where things get strange.
Because all of a sudden, the tree turns into a man, and then the man turns into an animal. And not only that, once Daniel recounts the dream and explains it to Nebuchadnezzar, it actually happens? In verse 28, we read that all of this happened to King Nebuchadnezzar. Twelve months later, as the king was walking on the roof to the royal palace of Babylon, a voice from heaven came. This is what is decreed for you, King Nebuchadnezzar.
And immediately, what had been said about Nebuchadnezzar was fulfilled. He was driven away from his people and he ate grass like the ox. His body was drenched with the dew of heaven until his hair grew long like the feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird. At the end of that time, I, Nebuchadnezzar, raised my eyes toward heaven and my sanity was restored. Then I praised the most high God.
I honored and glorified him who lives forever. Okay? But notice here, this sequence in chapter four moves from a dream to an interpretation to some kind of experience. But even as the king is recounting it, he moves from first person to third and back, and it all feels very disorienting, very disjointed as you read it. Part of what seems to be going on here is this sort of distancing from self.
If you remember the way that we encountered Nebuchadnezzar's dream through Daniel in the first week of this series, the king has a dream that he can't make sense of, then he is thrown into an immediate rage at not getting the answers that he is used to. He threatens to kill all of the sages, all of the wise men, anyone who can't give him what he demands when he demands it. And it's only when Daniel is able to interpret the dream that he comes back to himself. But now this time, as the king tells the story, the dream sends him into some kind of an inhuman moment. He's driven into a wilderness.
He eats grass. His hair grows like feathers. His fingers become like claws. Obviously, this is some kind of a metaphor, but in his telling of it, he literally becomes an animal. He loses himself.
And again, this type of literature is notoriously difficult to parse out systematically. Is this the same dream from before? This time seen from Nebuchadnezzar's perspective. Is this a second dream with separate but remarkable similarities? Well, in the narrative, it's more like the latter, but thematically, this is about forcing us to come back and look again at the same ideas.
And when we do, what we see is the ways in which moments that challenge our preconceptions about ourselves can drive us to entrench or they can force us to reevaluate everything. This is the thing that we sometimes miss because we're so used to imagining Nebuchadnezzar as the villain of the story. We forget just how profound his own internal tale is. As John Goldingay says, Nebuchadnezzar is an example to us, a warning of how not to be led astray by power and achievement, but also a model of how to respond to chastisement and humiliation. See, Daniel experiences Nebuchadnezzar's anger in a more objective sense.
This fury and rage that he sees at not getting what he wants channeled into threats of violence. But in some ways, Nebuchadnezzar's experience is just as true, maybe even more true. Because for Nebuchadnezzar, what he sees is him losing himself, him betraying himself. He sees himself become something less than himself. But the beauty here is that he allows that to wake him up.
Nebuchadnezzar actually ends the chapter by saying, and now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and exalt and glorify the king of heaven because everything he does is right and all his ways are just. Those who walk in pride, God is able. The word here actually has the connotation of being wise or patient. So maybe we could even say that God is gracious to humble. Here's the thing for us to remember in our conversations about anger.
And particularly this final conversation of how to be angry at ourselves. It's okay to mess up, and it's okay that your anger got the best of you. It's not okay that you lashed out and someone got hurt by that, but the truth is we all know that it happens. And in those moments where we are disappointed with ourselves, Those moments where we are frustrated with ourselves, in those moments where we are angry with ourselves, and how we have acted, how we have given in or responded to our anger, in those moments where we see our anger pouring out of us and it does not look like us. It doesn't reflect the us we want to become.
We can choose in those moments to turn away from that and we can ignore that. We could pretend it didn't happen that we didn't see it. We can carry on as if we have always been. Or like Nebuchadnezzar, we can acknowledge that this moment, even this moment, even this anger is telling us something needs to change. That we are losing ourselves.
That we are less than ourselves, that we need to come back and take stock and allow God to heal ourselves. And remarkably, this is what even the same Nebuchadnezzar that we met three weeks ago, the one that we saw lashing out in furious rage over not getting what he wanted last week, this is what he allows his anger to do to him. To become the catalyst for the transition that brings him back to himself to change himself. And that is the remarkable grace that is woven all throughout the story of Daniel. The kings propped themselves up as toy gods only to have their impotence and rage held up to them.
But the story was not about their rage. It's not about their anger and fury. It's about what we do with it when we see it in us. See, book of James says that your anger does not produce the righteousness God desires, and this is absolutely true. Anger on its own will never produce righteousness.
The problem is the anger that's ignored or anger that's not listened to, anger that's not evaluated, anger that is not allowed. All this will ever produce is more anger. Or is anger at God that is channeled back into earnest searching and open listening? Anger at others that is channeled into healing words and just action for the common good. Anger at ourselves that confronts us with our sin and catalyzes transformation within us.
That is righteousness. Because anger is a feeling, but righteousness is always a choice of what we do with it. And just like on the day of Pentecost, the more voices that we have for the spirit to speak to us through, and there are places from which we are willing to listen to God's voice, the more powerful, the more true, the more holy and beautiful our experience of each other and ourselves will become. So may you learn to listen to your anger this week. May you take it seriously and meditate on it.
May you hear everything that it says to you. But then, may you invite the spirit of God to take that message and transform it into righteousness. No longer just a feeling, no longer just an emotion, but now healing words and compassionate action into self reflection into good for all of those near you who need it. May even your anger bring you to peace and change the world this week. Let's pray.
And for all the ways that we have felt anger and we have not known what to do with it. So we pushed it down or side. We have refused to listen to what it says to us. We are sorry. And we invite you to speak to us through it.
As we read the news, as we watch what is happening in the world and we feel that anger over a world that is not just a world that is not what you want it to be. May you take that anger and channel it into action, into introspection, into ways that we evaluate our privilege, into new words, into new ways of speaking, into just action to change the world for those who the world is not meant for. God, may we build a kingdom, a commonwealth, a world where every single person can be valued, can be loved, can be given everything that they need to flourish. And in that, may you join us. May you partner with us.
May we get to see your redemption take place around us all the time. And we are so thankful that even our anger can be used by you for your imagination of this world. God, shape us, change us, point us in new directions this week. Amen.