Sunday July 27th, 2025 Worship

Anger tends to get a bad rap as an emotion. We’re always taught not to be angry, that it isn’t the good or Christian thing to do. But, the reality is that sometimes, we get angry! I’ll remind us over and over again that anger is just a recognition that one of our boundaries, conscious or unconscious has been crossed. Something has happened to which our bodies are vehemently opposed. Anger itself isn’t the problem, but what often gets anger in trouble is our response to it. I know that when I’m angry, I say things that I’m not proud of and my actions don’t always reflect how I want to be relating to others. It takes a lot of work to be aware of our anger and not just respond to it though, because sometimes, responding just feels so cathartic! And, ultimately, the hope is that our response comes out of our grounded sense of who we are and what our values are. Sometimes, we need a little reminding of that though.
This story from Genesis is such a great example of that. I imagine what this scene would look like if we were to act it out. You have God who is seething with anger, threatening to just wipe away these two towns of Sodom and Gomorrah. And then you have Abraham, trembling in front of God, as someone who wants to help calm God down, but it also scared to be in the way. What I love about the way Abraham handles this is that he appeals to who God is: “Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” (Genesis 18:25). While Abraham is stopping God from doing this for some selfish reasons too, for the sake of his nephew Lot, I think it is important here to see the way that Abraham calls out God, essentially saying, “this is not who you are!” He does all of this by humbling himself before God and getting back to the heart of who God is for us.
All of these readings we have today draw us back to a Scriptural understanding of who God is, a God of mercy and justice, whose steadfast love endure forever. This is in contrast to how humans can sometimes describe God, something that we have been hearing a lot more lately. It has become a part of our society that people love to talk about the ways that God is vindicative and will smite their enemies, that God is for us and against all others, including those who believe or even live differently. God has continued to be the tool through which communities are harmed, where God is distorted for human benefit, not God’s. We always want to weaponize God’s anger against communities that we don’t agree with, while we never read ourselves into the story as being the ones whom God is angry at.
As, I mentioned in the beginning, anger isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Anger can even be a part of love sometimes, so I can’t help by imagine that there are times when God is angry, or even worse, disappointed in the way that we humans treat one another and our world. I’ll be honest and say that my first instinct seeing the words Sodom and Gomorrah in today’s reading was to tense up, an involuntary result of my anxiety, because of the way the Sodom and Gomorrah story has been used to condemn and cause harm toward my beloved community. Anger doesn’t mean that God doesn’t love us, but it would be a valid response to the ways that we have turned away from God and all of God’s teachings, while still using the Lord’s name to inflict harm on one another. As I’ve said before too, God’s grace and forgiveness doesn’t just give us a free pass to do whatever we want in the world without thinking about the consequences. But, grace and forgiveness, God’s steadfast love still remains no matter how many times we as humans mess up. After all, isn’t that the story of the Bible?
I’m not trying to dismiss or defend God’s anger in the Genesis reading, but we also cannot ignore the other ways that God is described in our Scripture readings today. As one who does what is just (Genesis 18: 25), as one whose steadfast love endures forever and who does not abandon the works of their hands (Psalm 138: 8b), as one who wants to draw near to us through prayer for our sake and the sake of the world (Luke 11: 1-13). God is and gets to be so much bigger than we can even imagine, just as we are not static, emotionless beings either. One of my favorite examples of this is the word, חֶסֶד (hesed). It’s the Hebrew word that we translate in English as faithfulness, lovingkindness, steadfast love…we’ve actually heard it several times today. But, what I love about this word is that it is only used in reference to God. It is a core part of God’s identity, that is so central, so unwavering, that it can only be applied to God. When we look at this alongside the Gospel, to me, it says that God does in fact really care about us and the rest of creation. That there is such a strong desire for God to be in relationship with us, not because God has to, but because God chooses to.
Our Gospel today begins with Jesus teaching the disciples how to pray, in a way that should sound very familiar to many of us. And, while we most frequently say it communally now, there is no use denying that this is an intimate prayer. The Lord’s prayer isn’t just a blanket prayer for this thing or that, but is a prayer that recognizes the relationality that God has with us, invites us into seeing God’s vision for the world so that our actions may be shaped in response, and it is a prayer that expands beyond the personal into a hope for all of God’s creation.
When we pray, the Lord’s Prayer or any prayer for that matter, it transforms us. It requires us to take time to intentionally dwell in the relationship we have with God and gives us the space to express our joys, fears, concerns, and frustrations. Sometimes our prayers have words, and other times they are sighs, screams, or tears. No matter how they come about, we are inviting God to be present, calling on God to be the God that has been promised to us in Scripture. In some ways, we are a bit like Abraham, humbling ourselves before God and getting back to the heart of who God is, centered in that lovingkindness, that חֶסֶד (hesed).
I know I also don’t need to remind you that sometimes our prayers aren’t always answered in the way that we want. Which makes it extra difficult to hear this perseverance in prayer message in Luke’s Gospel today, this “So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened” (Luke 11: 9-10). This doesn’t mean that we were praying incorrectly or that we should stop praying. This also doesn’t mean that we can’t be angry with God too. But, I do encourage you to think about what is happening when we pray because even when we don’t get the response that we want, our prayers do bring us closer to God and to the rest of creation. It draws our life together with the life of the world, with the voices and hearts around the world who are praying too, those who are with us now, as well as the saints who came before us and those who are still yet to be born. Our prayer transforms our hearts and minds, drawing us back to the promises and vision of God, and shapes the way that we interact with the world around us. This, dear church, is a beautiful thing, even when it is frustrating and upsetting to not get the response we are hoping for from God.
There are a lot of challenging things to wrestle with in our stories today, from God’s anger to our understanding that not every parent gives good gifts to their children and is the example that we should be looking to in terms of how we relate to God. While there are so many more questions that can be asked and ways these things can be examined, the reality is that today’s story keeps drawing us back to the steadfast lovingkindess of God, the חֶסֶד (hesed), that is a core part of God’s identity. Within all of the messy bits, it allows us to see God more fully too, recognizing that there is a depth and complexity to God that we cannot always understand. And, that as people created in the image of God, the same thing can be said about us too. There are going to be days when we have no problem living in the way that we wish, and there are other days when people who care about us might need to help call us back to who we are when anger or pain draw us into a different way of being. This is what it means to live amongst community, to live with and for another. As we are constantly learning who we are and whose we are, and what it means to embody that reality in our world, as we are shaped by our prayers and sent out into the world around us.