Can you find comfort in God's anger?

The Lord has turned away his anger.

The first reading from Isaiah chapter 12.

Isaiah 12 · chapter mention

You will say in that day, I will give thanks to you, O Lord, for though you were angry with me, your anger turned away, that you might comfort me.

Behold, God is my salvation.

I will trust and will not be afraid.

For the Lord God is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation.

With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation, and you will say, In that day, give thanks to the Lord, call upon his name, make known his deeds among the peoples, proclaim that his name is exalted, sing praises to the Lord, for he has done gloriously.

Let this be made known in all the earth.

Shout and sing for joy, O inhabitant of Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.

The word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Amen.

The feeling of anger is an emotional response to a tear in the moral fabric of the universe.

Think of King David's anger when Nathan told him how the rich man had served the poor man's pet at his dinner party.

Or think of a moment when your wrath was kindled.

The injustice may not have been great.

It may just be that the toilet seat was left up again, and you've talked about it a hundred times.

Yet that injustice was enough to fill you stomach and chest with anger.

Now, our perception can be off.

We can perceive an injustice where there really isn't one.

And this is one of the reasons why we train our children to be slow to anger.

Plus, even when our anger is justified, almost all the time that anger leads us to rage or revenge or other evil ends.

So what we do with anger matters a great deal.

But for my purposes this morning, we can pass over those very important topics.

I want you to hold on to just this thought that anger functions like the referee throwing a flag onto the football field.

Anger flags a violation.

It flags an injustice, something that has gone wrong.

And if you and I, who ourselves are often the ones engaging in the injustice or the wrong, nevertheless can feel this kind of anger, can recognize when things are not as they should be in this world, then it really shouldn't be that surprising for us to find out that God can also be described as being angry in terms like we heard from the prophet Isaiah this morning, who addresses the Lord and says, You were angry with me.

Now, of course, when we're speaking of God, we're never talking about blind rage, nor are we here describing contempt, for the Lord does not hold us, his creatures, in contempt.

God and God alone is capable of that kind of pure, righteous anger that we can only theorize exists.

A kind of anger that is ultimately anchored in really strong and deep love.

I suppose we get an approximation of this when something is happening to somebody we love and it's hurting them, and we get angry at that thing.

So if you have a loved one who is suffering from an addiction, for example, and is drinking too much, you might be really angry and upset at that addiction precisely because you care about that person and you don't like to see what is happening to that.

And so it is with God.

You could think about this from God's perspective.

Think about how he sees you as this beautiful handiwork of his, his creature, whom he has placed in a world that he made for you, a world that pulses with the divine energy of the Creator, carrying on, sustaining all things.

He sets you down in a world where every blade of grass pushing up in the spring and tulip blooming fairly shouts of the splendor and majesty of its maker, and invites you to join in praising and glorifying his name.

But that's not even all.

He has given you a share in the miracle of life and consciousness and existence and being, and he's even made you capable of being redeemed into richer, fuller life with him, an eternal future with him.

And yet, when he sees your life and mine, how often does he find us responding as we should?

If you take gifts like these, the gifts of creation, what you have been endowed with, the raw materials that are all around you, or the glory of redemption and what your God has done for you, and if you hold that gift lightly or turn your back on it, if you take those gifts and use them to impose your own will and your own way, if you turn them to self-serving ends that bring harm upon others, can you grasp that this is in no way good for you?

That in fact it constitutes a sort of shrinking down into something less than what your God made you for.

And if that is so, then don't you think that that would be enough of a wrong in this universe to cause God's anger to boil.

Sin, in other words, is what provokes God's anger because sin is what corrupts us and drags us down.

It's a negating of everything that God made us for.

So God cannot possibly be reconciled to your sin.

Instead, this is where his anger is directed and focused.

And this divine wrath at sin is in no way theoretical.

It is something that we experience.

Probably at some point in your life you did something that was just so blatantly wrong that you had this feeling right away that God must be angry with me because of what I did.

In fact, maybe just mentioning this right now is enough for you to call to mind some regret, something of which you are ashamed of in your past, and just having it called to mind is enough to make you cringe and squirm.

It's the wrath of God that causes that feeling.

It's this knowledge that you are accountable to him and that his face is set against your sin that makes that feel so bad.

The Lord is placing his strong hand upon you, causing you, like Isaiah, to cry out and say, You, Lord, were angry with me.

At other times, the wrath of God is lurking in the background is this kind of vague sense of dissatisfaction with the way things are in this world.

When we try very hard to get everything in our life neat and tidy and just the way we want it, and yet no matter how hard we try, it's never quite right enough.

Or it never quite lasts the way we want it to.

That kind of vague sense that things are not entirely as the way as they should be in this world.

That too is an indicator of God's anger and God's wrath.

And when we experience this wrath, when it comes crashing down upon us, it can cause us to do several things.

Often what we try to do is to sign a contract with God.

Contra which says, okay, okay, I will own up to what I have done wrong.

I will admit it.

The tears in the fabric, they're mine.

But Lord, give me a chance to try harder, to do differently, or at least let me give my heart over to you, and then you won't have so much of a reason to be angry with me.

At other times, this divine wrath can push us to think that it would be better if God just left us alone and so hurt us towards despair or rebellion.

But this experience of God's anger is not going to lead us to the conclusion that we should turn to him.

After all, what kind of sense does it make to run to the one whose wrath you feel?

And that is precisely why God does not ask us to do this.

He refuses to sign any sort of contract with us.

He does not make a demand that we must first turn our hearts to him, and only then will he turn to us.

He plays no games like that whatsoever.

Instead, he takes the first step.

Look at the way that Isaiah describes this.

He says, You were angry with me, but your anger turned away that you might comfort me.

God who cannot reconcile himself to your sin, can and does reconcile himself to your person.

He directs his anger towards that which would drag you down, corrupt you, and kill you.

And in directing his anger there, he establishes the firm basis on which his love might reach out to you to lift you up, to reconcile you, to make you right and whole.

Okay, so this is a difficult concept, so maybe think about it in these terms.

Think about how many of the stories we tell have a plot where somebody turns into a villain by losing their humanity.

In the stories we tell, Smeagol becomes Gollum.

Anakin Skywalker turns into Darth Vader.

Achilles becomes subhuman in his brutality as he desecrates Hector's body.

But think about those villains before the turn.

Think about the loss, the shrinking down, the negation.

And if you think about it carefully, you will realize that towards the villain himself, it's not really anger that you feel.

Now, to be sure, what the villain does, the evil deeds are a cause of anger, but for the villain, you feel sadness at the tragedy of the life.

In other words, if you flag the anger and notice where it's going, the anger here is really directed at the mysterious power that corrupted the person and caused the loss of their humanity.

In fact, in our stories, if that power that corrupted the person can be broken, the villain can even be redeemed.

Vader can become Anakin once again when Luke pulls the helmet off.

So it is with God.

This is what we are talking about here.

God's anger is directed at what is corrupting us.

And so he deals decisively with it.

He turns his anger away from us by directing that anger at himself, at his only son, at Jesus, who stepped into this world and said, Every tear in the moral fabric of the universe is mine.

Every injustice that has been done, I claim as the one who did it.

Every wrong, every sin, all of them I own.

And Jesus, in claiming all of that as his, turned God's anger so that it was solely focused upon him, where he bore it, the wrath of God, upon the cross, and dragged that anger down to the tomb, where he left that anger to be buried when he vacated it.

God turned his anger aside by pouring that anger out upon Jesus once and for all.

So that in Christ we have been reconciled to him.

And having turned his anger aside, he might take the initiative to reach out and comfort us.

Now, because we would never believe this, because when you are experiencing the wrath of God, when you know your guilt, when it weighs down heavily upon you, you cannot possibly believe that this could be the case.

Well, what God does is He establishes a well from which you can draw waters of salvation.

He sends preachers to you because when you are feeling that wrath of God, you need a voice outside your own head to speak it to you, to say, look, your God has turned his anger from you.

And for you, he has but a word of forgiveness and grace and comfort and consolation.

We need someone to speak that word to us so that it can drill down into our hearts whenever that wrath of God is pressing down hard upon us.

And so he establishes for us in the church the pulpit and the font and the altar as this well, this deep, deep well that we can return to again and again.

And every time we return to this well, there is always water in it, and every time we draw the water, it is always the same water.

Always this same message of reconciliation and grace and forgiveness.

Your God reaching out to comfort you by speaking his word to you, by washing you in baptism, by feeding you, by coming to you over and over and over again with that word of absolution that says, My wrath has turned away.

Now see my grace and my love and my compassion for you.

Look, if you've got one of those minds that spirals or loops, that gets stuck in this track that says, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I've heard all of this, and yet still I think I've done one sin too many, where maybe God's anger couldn't possibly be turned away yet again.

If you get stuck in that kind of loop, then at least consider this.

At least consider the repetition.

That every time you come to the well, the water's the same.

Do you suppose that you could take that repetition as a sign that God means it?

If every time you come here, the words are the same, I forgive you all your sins.

Would God really repeat himself so thoroughly if he didn't mean it?

No, God is coming to you with this invitation.

He says, Draw near to me, for my anger has turned aside.

I will be the one to comfort you.

So come, draw this water from this well.

See what I have done for you.

And you might even learn to find comfort in God's anger.

After all, if his anger has burned away everything that would drag us down, everything that would corrupt us, everything that would kill us, then what is left but God's love and you and me, whom he lifts up with it.

He makes you more yourself than you would be if he left you on your own.

That's why he reaches out to comfort you with this gospel message.

So we have the well, we know where the water is.

Let's draw it with joy.

For our God has become our salvation.

Amen.