"For We Are Consumed By Your Anger..."

“For we are consumed by your anger;
by your wrath we are overwhelmed.
You have set our iniquities before you,
our secret sins in the light of your countenance.”

— Psalm 90:7-8

At first reading, some might read Psalm 90:7-8 and think, “God is so mad at us that God will destroy us and we should be afraid of how angry God is at us.”

The problem is that when we take a verse or two and do not look at the overall arc of scripture we really can miss the much bigger point. In this case, the bigger point is that no matter how much we want to think that God is angry with us, God is not angry with us.

I know this can sound like I am speaking crazy since the “Scripture clearly says” that we are consumed by your (God) anger. How could this be a verse that testifies to how God is not angry with us?

The words here indicate that perhaps we are not consumed (as in that we are being destroyed) but that we are consumed (as in it captures our imagination) with God’s anger.

Humans are consumed, convinced and sure with God’s anger.

Maybe we are consumed with God’s anger because we believe, deep down that God cannot really love us. We are angry people and so God must be angry. We project ourselves onto God and thus violate the one of the big ten (thou shall not make graven images). God’s ways are not our ways and yet we are convinced/consumed with the idea that God must be angry.

God is not angry at you. You do not anger God - your actions are not significant enough to make God angry. Maybe we want to believe God is angry with us to convince ourselves that our actions are much more important then they really are in the grand scheme of things? Maybe we are convinced that God is angry at us as a way to exert some feeling of power and control? I mean what could be more powerful than to be able to get under God’s skin?

I Am Not Good Enough To Be Anything Else

There are a lot of reasons to be Christian, but there is only one reason that I have heard from another person that I deeply resonate with. She said, “I am Christian because I am not good enough to be anything else.”

I am too emotional to be a stoic. I am not very disciplined in my logic to be a philosopher. I am too jittery to be a Zen Buddhist. I am too theistic to be an atheist. I am too angry at injustice to be a hippy. I am too ignorant to be a social justice warrior. I am too privigleged to be voice from the margins but not famous enough to be a leading voice from the center. I am too unsure of myself to be a life coach and too hesitate to be a leader. I suffer from imposter syndrome most days and on the other days my head is larger than a balloon in a parade. I am too clean to be a shepherd and too dirty to be a priest. I am too happy to be a pessimist but not Pollyanna enough for optimism. I like to be a realist but find that I am not practical enough but still not intellectual enough to be thought leader. I don’t spell well and have all sorts of bouts and fits with grammar.

I have learned about many different religions and am just not good enough to make the grade.

I am not good enough to be anything else and so I give thanks for Jesus Christ who gives mercy and grace in more abundant ways than I could imagine. Christianity is the last best hope that I have to belong with others, discover God and receive Good News.

Maybe this is where Christian preachers fail. We have been preaching a gospel of striving, achieving and success and few people are good enough for that news. The Good News is that Christianity is full of sinners, losers, failures. Or as I like to call them, people like me.

If you are good enough to be something else, good on you. If you are not, then you might be the best Christian.

Pastor, I know you are busy...

About every fourth or fifth email I receive and about half of every phone conversation I have, I hear something like, “I know you are busy, but…” I cannot speak for every pastor but I believe that this modified story from the spirituality of the desert story might speak for many clergy - including myself:

There was a student who went to a teacher and asked for a word. The teacher shared a word with the student who went back home. The next day the student forgot what the teacher had said, so the student returned to the teacher.

“I am sorry teacher, but I have forgotten what you said yesterday. Can you share a word with me?”

The teacher spent a little more time with the student this second time, and then the student went back home.

A week later, the student returned and said, “Teacher, I am so sorry to bother you and I have asked now two times, but I have forgotten and would you share a word?”

The teacher sat all day with the student before the student returned home.

After two weeks, the student returned to the teacher. The student felt ashamed and was embarrassed to ask the teacher, yet one more time, “I know you are busy, and I know that I have taken a lot of your time already, but I have forgotten what you said. Could you remind me again?”

At this point the teacher took the table lamp that was to his right and asked the student to pass him a candle that was on the entry table. The teacher lit the candle, handed it to the student, and asked the student for a second candle from the entry table. The teacher lit the second candle, handed it to the student who was asked to retrieve a third and then a fourth candle.

The teacher lifted the lamp up and looed at the student who was now holding four lit candles. The teacher said, “Is the lamp diminished because it gave some of its light to the four candles?”

The student understood and said, “No.”

Never again did the student hesitate to visit the teacher and both of their homes became full of light.