“Anger is extraordinarily easy. It’s our default setting.
Love is very difficult. Love is a miracle.” – Brant Hansen
I’ve often remarked to Carrie that every couple that finds a way to remain married for longer than, say, ten days, embodies a minor miracle. There are so many things that can go wrong in a relationship: misunderstandings rooted in personality differences, gender differences, family differences, and differences in life experience; hurtful words and behaviors rooted in ignorance, selfishness, meanness, and sinful pride; honest disagreements and unsolvable differences on substantive matters; destructive addictions, infliction of verbal and physical abuse, prolonged neglect, and unfaithfulness.
And if two people staying together through time is a minor miracle, then surely a church family that manages to love one another through smooth and turbulent waters qualifies as a full-blown miracle. The issues that churches have split over are as numerous as the stars in the sky—or at least the number of major branches, denominations, and sects across the Christian family. Choosing to journey together as a faith community through time requires a near-miraculous amount of love and grace.
One practice that I believe could greatly help our churches today is a commitment to being unoffendable. Philosopher and theologian Dallas Willard once reflected that “a mature Christian is someone who is very difficult to offend.” He was not describing being so apathetic that one never engages in disagreement. He was describing a person with a secure enough faith to calmly engage with others holding a wide variety of viewpoints. The truth is that within any congregation, there will be a wide spectrum of sensibilities, opinions, beliefs, and ideologies. To take offense upon learning that someone in your church family doesn’t agree with you is to open yourself to being endlessly offended.
Somewhere along the way, it seems, Christians absorbed the idea that to be faithful to God one must be angry about any number of issues. And let’s be honest, many of us enjoy being angry. We like the sense of moral superiority that anger grants us. We like how self-righteous anger makes us feel, the energy and purpose and clarity it gives us. The problem is, every angry person in human history believes their anger is a righteous anger, that their dispute is well-founded, that their opponent is clearly in the wrong. All this should cause us to resist blithely believing that anger is our best approach for moving through life or that being easily offended is a true sign of our righteousness. It may actually be evidence of how grumpy and peevish we are, or how diminished our love and graciousness are.
In Ephesians 4:26, Paul teaches “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger…” Paul does not equate anger with sin. One can be angry and not sin. But just four verses later, Paul clarifies that anger is not the long term answer: “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander… and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” My prayer for us is that we may mature as believers who are unoffendable, full of good-will, and slow to anger.
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