A Meditation on Wrath

We as we are, and We as we ought to be

It has been good to curb my consumption of political media in recent weeks. I’ve been listening to a Great Lecture on the Middle Ages. I’ve been cleaning, sorting, and making trips to Goodwill. I’ve been buying Christmas presents and preparing to host ten people for Thanksgiving this week. I’ve even drafted sample writing for a potential book proposal. And of course I’ve been reading more, including Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, Spiritual Depression by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and Elizabeth Oldfield’s Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times.

Oldfield’s book is a wonderful example of richly curious Christian writing. As a self-probing tour through the seven deadly sins, I can’t help but love it. (Yes, anyone who knows me well knows I have a pet interest in the vices, which probably says more about me than I’m comfortable admitting). I’m not very far in the book and have only just read the chapters on wrath, avarice, and acedia. But the chapter on wrath hit particularly close to home, exposing some sin in my life that I truthfully didn’t see before. I knew we lived in a wrath-filled moment. The trouble was that I saw it as everyone else’s problem.

Oldfield’s approach—to the sins—is confessional. These are her problems and her vices. This is an admission that allows the reader to lower her own defenses and do a little self-searching. In the chapter on wrath, she asks readers to make a list of the people they would feel uncomfortable attending a dinner party with and why. This seemed like a pretty low-stakes exercise. I wasn’t being asked to name people I hate, just people I preferred not to spend time with.

I’m not going to share my list here at the risk of offending. It’s an embarrassing list, really, a list to say just how snobbish and self-righteous I can be. This was reinforced by the second half of the exercise, which was to articulate why you don’t want to attend a dinner party with these people. The caveat is that you’re constrained to use “I” instead of “they” though like a sneaky writer finessing words, I managed sentences like “I find them unprincipled and opportunistic” and “I am embarrassed by their bigotries” and “I tend to find them self-preoccupied and boring.”

The list was revealing enough, but then imagine that during the days I was writing and thinking about my list, I found my contempt exposed in interactions with a handful of people. I judged this person for the college they attended. I judged that person for the presidential candidate they supported. I read a political headline and despised the people at the center of the drama. It wasn’t just judgment that surfaced in my heart. It was contempt. It was scorn. It was wrath according to Oldfield’s definition. Wrath, by its very nature, severs relationships. It distances us from our deep knowing of shared humanity. Righteous anger, on the other hand, serves relationships. “Theologian and Professor of Africana Studies Willie Jennings told me when he came on [The Sacred] podcast that his Pentecostal church has a policy: When you’re angry with someone, tell them, but hold their hand while you do so” (38).

That was a picture for me to consider! I needed to imaginatively hold the hand of every person I found contemptuous, stupid, bigoted, superficial, self-preoccupied, and uncurious. I needed to do even more than this, according to the peace-making, reconciling gospel of Jesus Christ. I needed to pray for them and heap burning coals of kindnesses on their head. I needed to see my habits of superiority and repent, turning from the “bond of shared contempt” and the inner mode of disgust. I needed to look to Jesus and his utter disregard for party lines and tribal loyalties because as Oldfield writes, “Jesus never seems to calculate whom it is safe to be seen with” (47). This isn’t to say that I had to restrain all manner of discriminating opinions. It’s still important to “judge” just and unjust, false and true, and in fact, this seems to be part of our vocational calling as the people of God whom he has commissioned as salt and light in the world. But I am not permitted final judgments, and I am certainly not permitted wrath.

All this was an exercise to bear out why I find it meaningful to engage with perceptive explorations of the vices. Oldfield again: “I don’t believe we can become more free, more loving, or more just unless we are able to name the things in ourselves we want to change” (62). Language then doesn’t simply name reality; it allows us to apprehend it, even the reality about ourselves we might wish to otherwise ignore.

But here is our emphatically good news. God miraculously works to repair us, to heal us, to rescue us from all the sin that would sever us from life-giving relationship with him and with others. From our wrath and our greed. From our envy and sloth. From our vainglory and gluttony and lust.

This brings me, of course, to the season of Advent, which will begin this coming Sunday. If you don’t traditionally celebrate Advent, then I beg you to learn about this season of the church calendar and to consider celebrating this year. (No hyperlinks—because Google). Advent simply means marking out the season of waiting for the birth of the Christ-child. This might mean lighting the traditional candles that highlight the elements of our good-news story. This might mean reading Scriptures centered on the story and a book of reflections on these Scriptures. I think it certainly means worshipping with God’s people and celebrating together that the light of Christ has dawned into our wrathful world. Most importantly, it helps us to anticipate the humble grandeur of the story of God drawn near to humanity, all of us not fit for the divine dinner party.

I’ll be writing on Advent themes in the weeks ahead, practicing in this space the habit of sacred Christian time. If you want to also read some wonderful Advent books, you might check out Tish Harrison Warren’s Advent: The Season of Hope, Hannah Anderson’s Heaven and Nature Sing or Fleming Rutledge’s Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ  or Russ Ramsey’s The Advent of the Lamb of God.

“In a very deep sense,” Rutledge writes in one of her collected Advent sermons, “the entire Christian life in this world is lived in Advent, between the first and second comings of the Lord, in the midst of the tension between things the way they are and things they way they ought to be.”

In between, in other words, we as we are and we as we ought to be.