“Bless us with anger,” Bishop Gene Robinson prayed, on Sunday, January 18, 2009, in Washington, D.C. The setting was a “kick-off” concert celebrating the inauguration, two days later, of a new president.
“Bless us with anger.”
The bishop asked God for the blessing of anger in response to discrimination against “refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.” When we witness this discrimination, may God bless us with anger.
But how can anger be a blessing? Anger so often is destructive. Anger motivates acts of violence. Anger in even small amounts can be corrosive. Someone cuts you off in traffic and you flip them the bird: This is corrosive. It damages, however slightly, our social fabric.
Often enough I feel angry. Often enough I understand the function and value, if not the “blessing,” of anger: we humans evolved this sharp emotion. Anger urges us to fight, to make ourselves bigger, to assert, to overcome. Anger has been described simply as the feeling you have when something is in your way. There’s a barrier in front of you, and anger helps you remove that barrier.
But anger, in the quarter century since 9/11, is running rampant. Anger is now chronic. Anger seizes our social media, driving us all wild with resentment and frustration. We seethe with anger at our enemies, at many, even most, of our political authorities.
This seems to be an era of forever wars, of forever anger: there is no end in sight for the unjust and ridiculous war in Ukraine. There is no end in sight for the atrocious violence committed by Israeli settlers in the West Bank, armed with weapons purchased with funds from the United States. There is no end in sight for the chaos and appalling violence of the endless civil war in Sudan, a war nearly everyone else in the world ignores.
There is no end in sight for the churning anger and rage of our polarized political world, where every news cycle offers an answer to this wretched question: who can behave the most reprehensibly? There is a political candidate here, and another there, who rises above the vitriol and runs an ethical, honest campaign. I have donated to one of these candidates, and I hope he wins. But our nation furiously rages against itself, and the wins are few.
How can anger be a blessing?
Let’s begin with the anger Bishop Robinson prayed that we would feel: anger on behalf of survivors of discrimination. That anger is a blessing when it leads to effective action, to powerful allegiance, to the presence of justice. When injustice is in our way, anger shoves it aside.
But we hear about a more straightforward, personal anger in today’s Good News. Of course, anger on behalf of survivors of discrimination can certainly be personal: maybe you’re mad about our culture’s rejection and abuse of trans persons because you yourself are nonbinary, or your spouse is trans, or your child is genderqueer. But the anger in the troubling parable of Jesus is personal in a communal sense: it is the anger of a whole community of faith, outraged that their values were crossed by one of their own members.
This anger is not sparked by outside agents acting badly, by an online culture-war bigot, or an unnamed masked ICE agent. The community is angry because one of their own has misbehaved. He received mercy, but then he turned around and denied that same mercy to his companion. That crossed a line. That was a terrible thing to do.
Of course the characters in the parable are not whole communities, but individuals, so it could hit us as a moral tale about one-to-one injustice, one-to-one anger: there’s a king, and he has some slaves. But the first hearers of this parable were a first-century Christian community, maybe a network of house churches, and the lesson is about all of them, about the values they all share, about the power those values hold over all of their imaginations, about how dead-serious Jesus is that all of them, all of us, should be acting on our deepest beliefs, our deepest convictions.
We must not deny others the mercy we ourselves have received! We must not!
To get this point across, Jesus gets vivid. He gets provocative. He turns up the heat. He already had us squirming with the bit about a king and his slaves: that economic system rightly repels us. It’s worse than even our own unjust capitalist economy. The first listeners of his words were doubtless not wild about kings and slavery, either. They lived in an occupied land. They knew in their bones how powerless and vulnerable most people were in their day.
But Jesus goes further. The king calls the unforgiving slave “wicked” — an extreme take on his character. And even worse, the king hands the slave over to be tortured until he repays his debt, a debt which originally had been forgiven.
And even worse than that, Jesus wraps up his rant by saying, “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” The Father will torture us if we don’t forgive as we have been forgiven! It’s all so extreme, so wildly over the top.
That is how important this teaching is: Matthew’s Gospel has Jesus raging, here. It’s as if the evangelist is pleading with us, “Please, please, you just have to understand this!!”
The king extends mercy to his slave, who is drowning in debt. But hold up: please note that debt here is not just a metaphor: we could read this whole parable as a homily on economic justice and fully understand its true meaning. We are a Christian community, and are taught in general to forgive and be merciful, but that forgiveness and mercy is chiefly about economic justice.
Our values are not just about being kind and gentle neighbors, about doing to others as we want them to do to us, about living life with gratitude and hospitality, about spiritual transformation and warm community celebrations. We do proclaim those values! But closer to the quick, for us, most essential for us, as followers of Jesus, is this: God creates a splendid world that should be bountiful and nourishing for everyone, not just the few. Every human person should rest under a roof, and eat at a dinner table, and learn at a nearby school, and find gainful work that draws on their gifts and skills. Economic justice is the beating heart of Christian ethics.
And so we are taught to be enraged when that value is crossed. We are angry not just to feel a proud sense of righteous outrage, but to then shove that injustice out of the way, so that all are fed, and sheltered, and educated, and employed.
We rightly concern ourselves with welcoming everyone who comes in these doors, for we follow the one who ate with disreputable people and empowered women and other survivors of economic injustice to his abundant table. But we pray for the blessing of anger to go deeper, to work ever harder, to do whatever we can, always with God’s power, to mend this damaged world, so torn asunder by inequality, greed, and selfishness.
In a few moments we will confess together our sins — the sins for which we share mutual responsibility, common culpability — and then we will embrace in the Lord’s peace. We do not have an anger ritual in our Sunday mass! Be reassured: the lesson today is not that we should rage against one another. No, it’s not that at all.
It is this: Nourished by this abundant Table that groans under the weight of God’s grace, our bellies full and spirits forgiven, we are to rise up in common purpose, and yes, if necessary, in righteous anger, to “forgive our brother or sister from our heart,” that is, to forgive their debts: to shatter the economic vise that presses so mercilessly on our companions, on our neighbors, on our fellow citizens, on children and families in Gaza and Sudan, in Ukraine and Cuba, in south King County, in Uptown, in this room, in your pew.
So yes, Lord, yes — you who trampled death by death, you who ate with outcasts and raged against the forces of oppression — yes: bless us today. Bless us to rise up and right the wrongs of this world. Bless us to thunder out of here on your mission of mercy.
Bless us with anger.
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Preached on the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 19A), September 13, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Genesis 50:15-21
Psalm 103:8-13
Romans 14:1-12
Matthew 18:21-35