Lent 3

Back in 1980, former New York Yankee baseball player and manager Billy Martin wrote an autobiography titled NUMBER 1.  In one excerpt, he said that he and teammate Mickey Mantle were doing a little hunting down in Texas during one off-season. Mickey had a friend who would let him hunt on his ranch.

When they got there, Mickey told Billy to wait in the car while he went in and cleared things with his friend.  Permission was quickly granted for them to hunt, but the owner asked Mickey to do him a favor. He had a pet mule in the barn who was going blind, and he didn’t have the heart to put him out of his misery. He asked Mickey to shoot the mule for him. Mickey agreed. 

On the way back to the car a plan formed in Mantle’s mind. Reaching the car, he pretended to be angry. He scowled and slammed the car door shut. Billy wanted to know what was wrong. Mickey replied that the owner wouldn’t let them hunt there after all. “I’m so mad at that guy that I’m going out to that barn and shoot one of his mules,” said Mantle. He drove like a mad man to the barn. 

Martin protested and said, “We can’t do that!” But Mickey was adamant, “Just watch me,” he shouted.  When they got to the barn, Mantle jumped out of the car with his rifle, ran to the barn and shot the mule and killed it. When he got back to the car, he saw that Martin had also taken his gun out and smoke was curling from its barrel, too. 

“What are you doing, Billy?” he yelled. Martin answered, “We’ll show that Sonofagun. I just killed two of his cows.”

One of the questions we all have to deal with from time to time is what to do with our anger. We’re aware of the negative results of anger. People can do stupid things when they’re angry, like shooting someone’s cows. But are there any positive aspects to anger? Are there times when we ought to get upset? Indeed, there are. 

In today’s Gospel, when Jesus arrived at the Temple, he was upset by what he saw. There in the Temple courtyard were people buying and selling cattle, sheep, and doves for sacrifices. The merchants who were selling the livestock thought they were providing a service for those pilgrims from out of town. They would not have to travel with cattle or sheep; one was available for them to purchase to sacrifice. Temple workers were also exchanging foreign coins for Temple currency. Again, they thought they were doing the people a favor. People were required to use Temple currency when they made their donations.

Temple employees were providing a service, exchanging foreign currency into Temple coinage, which in itself was not a problem. But they also were taking advantage of people by charging a large fee to make the exchange. That was a problem.

Perhaps what angered Jesus the most was that they were taking advantage of the people who could least afford it. Charging one day’s wages to exchange coins was outrageously high. The Temple became wealthy from this questionable practice. You could say that the Temple, a place of worship, prayer, and repentance, was being maintained by swindling the people who could least afford it. It seems the more money they made, the greedier they became, charging higher and higher rates of exchange.

Jesus was hoppin’ mad. We’re not accustomed to Jesus being angry. We like to think that Jesus was always kind and loving to everyone he encountered. We like to think that Jesus never said a harsh word to anyone. But Jesus was so angry that he felt he had to do something to get the Temple officials’ attention.

Suddenly he was turning over tables and scattering coins across the pavement. Then he took a whip and forced the traders out of the temple and drove the sacrificial animals out into the courtyard. 

When the dust cleared, people probably wondered what had hit them. But most folks knew, deep down, that Jesus was right. Christ’s example tells us that there are times when a Christian ought to get angry. 

There’s a story from American history about a man named George Wythe (pronounced with), a signer of the Declaration of Independence and perhaps one of the period’s most noted legal minds. Wythe was an active Episcopalian who served on the vestry at Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg. In 1776 George Wythe, Thomas Jefferson, and Edmund Pendleton began the task of reworking and updating the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia. The task took most of their time for three years. It was really an extraordinary piece of work. However, there was at least one flaw – a flaw that would one day haunt the family and friends of George Wythe. 

In 1806, Wythe suffered for almost two weeks from what almost certainly was arsenic poisoning and then died. It is also reasonably certain that Wythe’s grandnephew, George Wythe Sweeney, had added the arsenic to his great-uncle’s coffee. However, the only person who saw Sweeney commit this act was Lydia Broadnax, Wythe’s devoted mulatto housekeeper. But negros and mulattos were forbidden under Virginia law from testifying in court against whites – a law that George Wythe had chosen to let stand during his revision process. So, despite fairly certain knowledge that Sweeney had murdered Wythe, the court had to let Sweeney go free.

I suppose we might consider that a case of poetic justice. If he had recognized the rights of African Americans, George Wythe’s killer would not have gone free.

There is a time when Christians ought to get angry about some of the inequities and injustices in our world. As Melvin Wheatley once said, “There are situations in life in which the absence of anger would be the essence of evil.” So yes, there is a time for anger. 

And there is also a time for action. The danger of acting when we’re angry, of course, is that we will act foolishly. You may have heard about the farmer who was working in his cornfield one day when he spotted a mouse gnawing away at a stalk of corn. He thought of the long hours he had spent clearing, planting, and cultivating this field. Now this rodent was trying to destroy it!

Anger raged within him. He grabbed a stick and rushed toward the mouse – beating, slashing, and chasing until, finally, he dealt the mouse a lethal blow. A sense of sweet revenge swept over him. Then, he looked around and realized that he had destroyed nearly half an acre of corn in order to kill one little mouse that couldn’t have eaten more than three stalks in an entire season. 

The Greek philosopher Aristotle once said, “Anyone can become angry, that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way – this is difficult.”  Yes, it is difficult.

Yet anger can be a great motivating force in our lives. Sometimes that anger can be constructive. God has used angry people to cure some of the worst injustices and to solve some of the most perplexing problems this world has known. 

A man named Leonard Haslim got angry watching the 6 o’clock news one evening. Hundreds of people had died in an airliner crash in Washington, D.C. because the plane’s wings iced up, making it too heavy to fly. Haslim decided to make sure it didn’t happen again.

So Haslim came up with a brilliant, but rather simple, solution. Everyone who has studied science knows that opposite charges attract and like charges repel. Haslim used that principle to come up with the ultimate wing deicer. He wrapped a thin sheet of rubber around an airplane wing, with wire ribbons carrying electrical current underneath.

When he threw the switch on, the positive wires jumped away from each other, as did the negatives, breaking the ice that had frozen to the layer of rubber above them. 

Haslim said, “It’s like snapping a hall carpet and watching the dust fly.” His invention can pulverize ice an inch thick on the surface of a wing. Yet it uses no more power than a single landing light, and costs less than an airplane tire. “It’s so simple, lightweight, and cheap, it’s nauseating,” said Haslim. Hundreds, if not thousands, of lives have been saved because Leonard Haslim got angry watching the 6 o’clock news.            

Is there something that makes you angry? I’m not talking about shooting somebody’s cows because he didn’t let you use his farm to hunt. But perhaps there’s something wrong in the world that a voice within you keeps saying, “Somebody ought to do something about that.”

Perhaps that somebody is you.