I’m going to begin my sermon today by saying to you that I’ve struggled a lot while looking through tomes of wisdom and searching scripture.  Then I found myself stuck as I was working on this sermon, because everything seemed so abstract.  My question always is, will you remember any one thing three days after I’ve preached my sermon? And if you do remember one thing after I’ve preached it, then I’ve probably done a good job.  If you don’t, then I have probably not done a good job. So I had to come up with something to try to snag you, and we are going to see how well I do.  I’m going to confess something to you, and I don’t think you’re going to have to take it before an ordination review board or anything, but we will see about that.  I did a very politically incorrect thing this week, and I gained some insight from my action.  As I deal with the tensions of the world and the cares of the people in this congregation, sometimes I need a diversion too in my own life.  And the other night I watched the Miss USA Beauty Pageant.  That’s my confession.  Now, I want to say to you in my own defense, that most of these young women were going on to medical school, and law school, and were very bright.  And I am afraid that beauty pageants really are about beautiful women—I will confess that.  But one of the interesting things about this, as beauty pageants struggle to come up to the year 2003, was the end when they did the usual question and answer thing.  One of the contestants said that all she wanted was world peace, and you know there is something fairly average about that.  The pageant actually asked some very interesting questions.  And I was struck by the answer of one of the contestants who I think won the contest.  Someone asked her, “Is the world a better place now or when you were a child.”  And I, like most people, went through the following thought process: I was a child of the 60’s, and let me think what was going on.  We are in 2003, and what is going on?  I began to do an analysis of outside events, but as I did this, she took a whole different spin on the question.  She said, “You know, when you’re a child, if you’ve been raised in a good family, then you’ve lived with protection and you’ve lived in innocence.  You look at the world with a great deal of optimism, and of course when you’re a child, the world looks much better than it does when you become an adult.  And my hope is that most of us can take some of the optimism that we had when we were children and apply that optimism to our lives today.  And by the way, I thought that her insight was not only profound, but it also broke the stereotype that beauty queens don’t have brains.  Now, where am I going with that in a sermon about anger and kindness?

As I reflected on the beauty queen’s insights this week, what I have come to understand is that the anger that most of us feel comes from a childlike wish for life to be as it was when we were children.  When most of us were children, we were protected and every whim and desire that we had, if we had good parents, those parents tried so desperately to meet.  As we have grown into adulthood, we find that the world is not like we want it to be.  We don’t have that fairytale world that we lived and imagined that we were in when we were children.  Because of that we get very frustrated and very angry.  That’s true in my life, and I bet it’s in your life as well.  There was a recent survey done in the London Times that was extremely insightful.  And in the survey they were asking a question to try to discover people’s satisfaction with life.  And they ran this survey all over the world, and they ran it with different socioeconomic groups.  Now, when you factor out the people on the very bottom (that is the people that literally live without shelter or adequate food, because there is no question that when people live at that level of existence that their level of satisfaction in life isn’t going to be good), the survey showed that the people who are on the lower end tend to be more content with their lives than the people on the upper end.   The survey also showed that people in Western Europe and in North America were much less satisfied with their lives than people from other places in the world. This survey tried to go beyond just asking those questions and throwing those facts out.  It got at what causes some people to be so content in life, even though they obviously have fewer material goods, and in many cases not even the same safety and security that people in western Europe and the United States have.  Some of the questions that the survey asked ultimately showed that it was people’s level of expectation of what life was going to give them that reveals the level of content in a person’s life.  The analysis of this survey showed that most of us in Western Europe and North America live with such high expectations of what we expect life to give us, that we tend to be much more angry and dissatisfied.  We feel this way simply because life can never give us what we have set such high expectations for it to give.  Many of us live miserable, angry lives simply because we set the bar higher than can ever be reached.  I remember one time many years ago when I had a friend whose son went off in the military to another country and married a young foreign woman.  He brought her back to the United States, and they were divorced within six months because she was watching Dallas.  You remember that drama program?  She thought that everyone in the United States lived like that.  This woman was dismayed and shocked when she realized that she wasn’t marrying JR’s son or someone like that.  And she went back home.  Over the years, I’ve kind of wondered how many of us in America see the “Dallas” kind of life and think that we deserve it.  Many of us become very angry when life doesn’t give us that.

Well, I want to go back and look at the scripture for a moment.  In Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, he challenges us on practical aspects of our life.  And the Jesus who emerges from Matthews’s Gospel is not the easy, lighthearted Jesus of whom we want to think—you know, the gentle shepherd who holds us warmly.  Here Jesus is the rabbi and the teacher who pushes us and informs us that we must live our lives on a narrow road that few will take.  He tells us that we must seek to live our lives in ways that mirror God’s Kingdom, even when every impulse in us tells us something different.  Whether or not you take Matthew’s words literally or figuratively, he does say in the 5^th chapter that our souls are in danger of hell fire.  But what he tries to say to us is that the anger that we feel toward a brother or sister puts us in danger of destroying the very soul that God has given us.  We learn that one of the most challenging elements of living the Christian faith is to struggle against that part of us that would at least psychologically try and hope to destroy another.  Now if you think about it, what is it most of the time that creates that anger we feel toward another?  Well, very often it’s because someone hasn’t met our expectations.  I learned from a good therapist several years ago that I could not control other people.  While this seems obvious, at the time I really thought that if I worked hard enough that everyone would do things like I knew they should do them.  And it ended up with me being a very frustrated person.  When we acknowledge the God-given ability of all people to have their own free will to seek how God would have them live, we then come to understand that we can’t control others.  Only with such acknowledgement can we rid ourselves of the barrier of anger—by struggling against anger’s power to destroy our relationships.

The second and most important part of the anger equation comes from a sermon that I preached several weeks ago.  I honestly believe that original sin, which was referred to by the early church fathers, is really about our narcissism.  Narcissism always focuses on me and on how I see the world and how I want the world to be.  I go back to the beauty queen.  What did she say?  She said that life always seemed better when we were younger because after all, a young child’s world revolves around himself or herself.  A young child knows that life will be what he or she wants it to be.  By the way, that is a natural and good thing for children.  It’s not so good for adults.  How often do we live our lives desperately seeking to have what we want only to fail?  That makes us think that we want what others want.  This is due to our own self-absorption.  We fail to be able to pull out of ourselves because we don’t always seek God’s will first in our lives.  Now, what was the antidote of anger supplied by the people in the Middle Ages who made up the seven virtues and seven deadly sins?  The interesting thing is that it’s kindness.  And what is kindness?  Kindness is when you no longer are struggling with what you want; instead, you focus on the needs of someone else.  You respond to another’s needs rather than focus on what you want from someone else.  Kindness is just the opposite of what anger really is in our lives.  And I’m going to ask you the same thing that I asked the children: sometime this week when you get angry with someone, the first thing I want you to do is to go do something kind for someone else.  And it’s not an assignment that I’m going to grade like report cards.  But I want you to wait a few days, and afterwards ask yourself: how did that impact your spiritual journey? It’s interesting to realize that some of the most difficult things that we struggle with during our faith journey revolve around that issue of our own desires.  Instead, let us be able to give ourselves over wholly and truly to what God and God’s Kingdom are in our living.  May God be with us all in the days ahead.