Last week, we spent time focusing on the emotion of fear and how worry and anxiety can rule our lives, overpowering our ability to enjoy and appreciate the world around us. For our sermon today, we are going to be focusing on the primary emotion of anger, which is the perfect emotion for us to discuss on Palm Sunday as we begin holy week. To understand why anger and Palm Sunday go hand in hand, let me set the stage for you.

I’ve told you in the past that perhaps the greatest symbol of the corruption among the Jewish people was the Temple in Jerusalem. There were a lot of reasons for this, but perhaps the most important was that almost all the priests who were responsible for running the operations of the Temple were very pro-Roman. Every priest was vetted by the Roman government and was expected to be loyal to Rome’s interests. This conflict of interest is likely what inspired Jesus’ famous line, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” (Mt. 22:21)

The priests were also members of the aristocracy. They were often very wealthy and they were able to remain wealth because they took a cut of every transaction that took place on Temple property. Every time you came to worship God at the Temple by offering a sacrifice (which was required by the laws of the Old Testament to be forgiven), you were lining the pockets of the priests. Thus, when Jesus makes the statement, “You cannot serve God and wealth,” (Mt. 6:24) his reference point was, more than likely, the corruption taking place at the Jerusalem Temple.

The combination of politics and money made it so that the average Jew couldn’t afford to worship God. Indeed, what should have been a fundamental right of being Jewish was forcing many people to go into debt. This reality had built up a lot of anger and resentment among the peasant classes. They felt like they were being taken advantage of because they were poor.

This is why on Palm Sunday, Jesus marched into Jerusalem with his followers and made his way to the Temple courtyard. His goal was to disrupt the business transactions taking place on Temple property. Jesus overturns the tables of the money changers and the sellers of the sacrifices. Jesus wanted to make a statement—we’re angry, we’re not going to take it anymore and, until this ends, until politics and money are removed from the Temple, the Jewish people will continue to be oppressed.

This move would, of course, get the attention of the aristocracy, who would set into motion a series of events that would eventually lead to Jesus’ execution on Good Friday. But make no mistake about it, Jesus knew there would be consequences for his actions. He knew that causing chaos in the Temple would trigger a harsh response. He knew the end result of his choices would likely lead to death.

We read this morning from the book of Ecclesiastes that famous verse that says, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven…” From there the author goes on to list a number of opposing aspects of human life—a time to be born, a time to die, a time to laugh, a time to mourn, a time to tear, a time to sew. The list ends with a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.

Now, the scripture says that there’s a time for love and a time for hate. But in our world today, hate is something that we are often encouraged never to embrace. Why is that the case? Well, in our modern world, hate is often associated with racism. You can’t understand the historical roots of racism in this country unless you understand slavery.

The slave trade out of Africa created this massive labor pool for the agricultural economy, particularly in the South. However, in order to justify enslaving all these people, you have to embrace the notion that the people who you are enslaving are somehow inferior to yourself. This inferiority matters because, if they are equal to you, then how can you justify stripping them of their fundamental rights of freedom.

Therefore, the core of slavery in the United States was built around a racial ideology that those with black and brown skin are inferior to those with light and white skin. Although this racial ideology has no basis in reality, the cultural perspective that black skinned individuals were less human than those with white skin becomes engrained in the American identity.

Indeed, this thinking was so much a part of American culture that scientists wanted to prove this belief as fact and created an entire science of race known as Eugenics, which came into existence in the late 1800s. The purpose of Eugenics was to prove that white Europeans are the most genetically advanced humans on the planet in terms of culture and intelligence, while other races lagged behind. Even though Eugenics has long since been abandoned as having any factual merit, the vestiges of Eugenics are still very much a part of our culture.

Perhaps one of the most evident vestiges of this racial ideology occurred during the Jim Crow Era following the Civil War when large swaths of people in the Southern states adopted segregation as a normative way of life. The Civil Rights Movement, which was geared towards unravelling segregation, was met with staunch resistance from whites that was rooted in deep hatred of black and brown bodies. This is why thousands of people were arrested, imprisoned and even lynched. This is why at protests people were sprayed with hoses, attacked with billy clubs and bitten by dogs.

To hate someone requires a disconnection from their humanity. You have to ignore the fact that these are people who have the same basic, feelings, needs and desires as yourself. To hate another person means you are only looking at a person through a single dimension, focusing on their skin color, rather than as a multidimensional human.

As a child growing up, I was encouraged by my teachers that hate was never an appropriate option. You can dislike a person, but to hate is to be ignorant. To hate means you are not taking the full person into account and want to justify your superiority. This is what happens with all sorts of people in different situations where we group people together by their religion, race, sexual orientation, nationality, class or thought process.

The beginning of hate is often fear. We as humans are primed through millions of years of evolution to fear that which is different from ourselves. Our genetics tell us to fear that which we do not understand. Fear, as we discussed last week is a safety mechanism. The problem with fear is that we have a tendency when we encounter something that is contrary to what we know to reduce that person or group of people into the simplest means of understanding them.

For instance, in the United States, ever since 9/11, our culture has turned against Muslims. Rather than understanding that there are all different kinds of Muslims who hold a variety of different points of view, there is a tendency to think of any person associated with Islam as a terrorist. This, of course, is not true. There are literally 1.2 billion Muslims in the world and only a small fraction are engaged in jihadist warfare.

But why do we so easily reduce the entire population of Muslims into terrorists? Because we were angry about being attacked on 9/11. Was this anger justified? Yes, what Osama Bin Laden did was horrific and everyone in the US, including Muslims, had a right to be angry at him. But what happened is that anger turned into hatred and the reason why it turned into hatred is because of fear of the unknown, which caused us to reduce Muslims down the simplest means of understanding them.

All this to say, hatred is wrong, but anger is not always a bad thing. Anger can tell you that you feel something is wrong. Generally, anger comes from a feeling of injustice that you have been mistreated or harmed in some way. Your feelings of anger might very well be justified. Like in the instance of Jesus overturning the tables in the Temple. Jesus was angry at the way that poor Jewish people were being treated by the wealthy and how Rome was interfering in the affairs of the Jewish people. Jesus’ anger comes from a place of seeing the injustice of his people and wanting to do something to correct that injustice.

The problem with anger is that it can quickly become all consuming. Anger can lead us down a very bad path where we cannot let things go and it overtakes our entire being. This is where anger goes from being an indicator of injustice to a driving force in our lives that can destroy us. To use anger as motivation to correct injustice is one thing. To allow your anger to dictate your thoughts and persona is completely different.

For me, I allowed my anger to do exactly that and it consumed my very being. The injustices that I faced growing up became the entire focus of my life and I had trouble moving past them. I witnessed a lot of drug abuse growing up. My mother was a severe alcoholic, it’s part of the reason she died so young. When my mother would drink, she would say very hurtful and cruel things to me. It’s part of the reason I had such low self-esteem for most of my life.

My mother had two very distinct personalities. To the outside world, she was very put together, calm, nice and funny. But at home, she was an entirely different person. At a certain point, I started noticing this discrepancy between what I experienced and what everyone else experienced. And, I distinctly remember when I made the connection between my mother’s addictions and her behavior. I realized those substances were dictating the way she treated me.

As I aged into my teenage years, I felt a great sense of injustice around the way I was treated. Because from my vantage point, and, of course, I didn’t understand addiction at that time, I felt she was making a choice to use those substances. She was choosing to drink and, as a result, I was constantly being verbally berated by her. There was this hypocrisy that I saw in my mother where she said she loved me, but her words and actions said otherwise.

As a result, when I was about 10 years old, I made the decision that I would never in my entire life touch drugs or alcohol because of what I had experienced with my mom. My decision was only confirmed as my peers were starting to experiment with drugs and alcohol, as teenagers often do. Well, given that I could see what the end result of these substances could do to a person in my mom, I was horrified. I wanted to shake them and say, “You are playing with fire! Do you have any idea what this stuff can do to you? Do you have any idea how it can destroy your life and the lives of the people you love?!” But no one seemed to care about that and all of my friends, with the exception of one, fell away and some of them into really bad addiction issues.

So I’m dealing with all of this stuff at home and at school, and if you combine my circumstances with all of the hormones that come with puberty, I was angry all the time. My anger became an obsession. It’s what drove me to be successful in swimming and at school with academics. I was going to prove to my mother and everyone else that I was smart, capable and unstoppable. The truth is my anger fueled a lot of my success in my early life, but anger can only take you so far before it consumes you.

By the time I was in my early 20s, my anger was becoming more and more of a liability. It was getting me in trouble. Any time I felt I had been wronged, even if it was something minor, I would just lose my mind. Talk about the pinball machine in your head. I would sit in my bed at night thinking of what had happened, which would make me angrier and angrier to the point where I couldn’t sleep. It was bad.

When I eventually lost control and punched my boss over a game of foosball that’s when I was forced to get help. It was in therapy that I learned how children of alcoholics tend to have a lot of anger issues because anger is a way of gaining control. We tend to see ourselves as the victims and believe that everyone is against us. And even if we don’t drink, we can still mimic the patterns we learned from our parents and behave as though we are alcoholics.

All of this was true for me and perhaps one of the hardest realizations of therapy was grasping how my anger was one of the greatest impediments to discovering my spirituality. Here I was, touting the merits of unconditional love, and yet, there was almost nothing loving about my thoughts, feelings and actions. You can’t say you’re unconditionally loving when you hold onto every wrong you’ve ever experienced.

So a big part of me finding my spirituality was letting go of my anger and big part of letting go of my anger was learning how to forgive the injustices I had experienced in my life. For a long time, I thought I knew how to forgive. I would say, “Oh, I’ve forgiven my mother or this person or that person for what they did to me.” All the while, I would be thinking about those same wrongs all the time and they would fuel my anger.

When you’re constantly thinking about what happened to you, that’s not forgiveness. Forgiveness is when you let go of the transgression and you are able to move forward. I would say I had forgiven the transgression, but I was anchored in the same place. I couldn’t move forward. What I discovered is the only way I could move forward is by loving the person who had hurt me. By showing them love, it enabled me to move past the hurt and pain, which stopped me from being angry.

Here’s the kicker—you can’t do that part on your own. That’s where God comes into play. We believe our God is a God of unconditional love. It’s from God that I was able to find the love necessary to forgive and to move forward. And that’s my question for you today: What wrongs are you holding onto in your life? What injustices are keeping you anchored in place?

If you’ve been wronged in your life, if you feel as though you’ve been the object of injustice, it’s okay to feel anger. It tells you something’s wrong. But don’t let that anger consume you. Don’t let that anger control your thoughts. Don’t let that anger keep you anchored in the same spot. Find the love of God in your heart to forgive those who have wronged you. Find the love of God in your heart to let go of the anger. Find the love of God in your heart to move forward. Amen.