Sectional 2. Dealing with Spiritual Abuse

Transcript (edited for readability).

Dealing with spiritual abuse. This is probably the most difficult, touchy subject that I will be talking about this weekend. Anger. What makes you angry? Are you angry sometimes, often, perhaps even all the time? Do you realize how important anger is in your spiritual life? Do you realize how toxic anger is? Do you realize the opportunities for ministry and spiritual growth that anger provides?

One book that I keep coming back to, again and again, because of its spiritual and pastoral wisdom, is a collection of the sayings of the Desert Fathers by Benedicta Ward. The Desert Fathers — you know, these were those guys who went out into the desert in the third, fourth century, because they lived in a society very much like ours, a society that had gone toxic: broken family, sexual chaos, social chaos, guys who were basically messed up. And they withdrew from society into the desert, so that God could fix them up. Interesting guys.

There's a story told about one of the fellows who lived in one of these very informal, monastic kind of communities. The brothers reported to the head of the community that this guy had fasted — he prided himself as an ascetic — he'd fasted very easily, without any problem, totally, absolutely, for seven days nonstop, and spent all the time in meditation and prayer, very little sleep even. And then one of his young fellow brothers disturbed his meditations by laughing out loud and jesting with another guy, and the fellow lost his temper and tore strips off this young member of the community. This was reported to the abbot, the community's father, and he said: this guy could fast for seven days, but he couldn't control his temper. He has not yet begun his journey. He's not yet begun.

Now, anger is a spiritual problem. It's a pastoral problem. And at least in Australia — and I suspect here, North America — it's a growing problem in the church. We live in an angry society. It crops up in many different forms. You've got road rage; a new category that sociologists have identified is "mother rage," which is mothers losing their temper with raging children. Sadly, it's not only out there in the world that you've got angry people — the church is full of angry members. And angry members make angry pastors. It goes together. They're bedfellows.

Now, what is it that makes us angry? Anger has many causes, but one of the most significant is that anger comes as a result of some kind of abuse — some kind of abuse from somebody who is significant or close to you, somebody who puts you down, somebody who hurts you. If guilt is a symptom of sin, anger is a symptom of being sinned against, and the worst kinds of abuse come from breaking the Ten Commandments. I don't know if you've ever been taught to look at the Ten Commandments and use them in self-examination — not just to identify your guilt for the sins that you've committed, but to use the Ten Commandments to identify the sins that have been committed against you. You see, it works both ways. For every sin, there's somebody who's been sinned against. And the worst kind of sins or abuses are those against the Ten Commandments — the sins against us.

Once again, the church has been called to account by society here. As you know, we live in societies that are obsessed with sexual abuse. Now, that's not the only kind of abuse — there's abuse of authority, there's verbal abuse, there's physical abuse, there's emotional abuse. Sexual abuse is only one of many kinds of abuse. As I said yesterday afternoon, the worst kind of abuse is spiritual abuse — abuse which breaks the first three commandments, if you like, or the first four commandments — and the worst kind of spiritual abuse is the abuse of office: the office of father or mother, but worst of all, the office of pastor.

Do you realize how many people you've damaged just because you're a pastor? It horrifies me, if I look back on my ministry, to realize how many people I've damaged spiritually as a pastor. You know how much damage you do to your wife as a husband, and can do to your children, your grandchildren — but you also always damage people spiritually by your abuse of office. You see, the worst is always the abuse of the best. And if the pastoral office is the highest spiritual office, it presents the greatest danger and the greatest opportunities for spiritual abuse.

Now, one of the things that psychologists have very clearly identified in many different ways is that there is a cycle of abuse. And you know that from your pastoral work: abused people become abusers. You can see that most clearly in the matter of sexual abuse. Our prisons are full of abused people who become abusers in turn. That's the normal, natural way — that's the toxicity, if I can put it that way, of abuse. It's very rare that anybody can be abused without becoming an abuser in return.

The same thing happens with pastors. What makes abusive pastors — and sadly, there are many, many of us who are abusive pastors — is that we are abused, and then we become abusers in return. And very often it's because we're abused by, say, a seminary lecturer, or a president, or a senior pastor. You get the scenario.

Now, what's the result of abuse? I can only barely touch the tip of the iceberg. You know what the result of sin is — guilt, and so on. We've done a lot of reflection on that. But I don't think we've done all that much reflection on what happens to people who are abused. The immediate effect of being sinned against — abused, particularly by somebody close to you — is that instead of feeling guilt, you feel shame. Another thing we need to do much more reflection on is the importance of shame in our societies. We live in guilt societies rather than shame societies, and so we haven't a language, we haven't a vocabulary, we haven't a way of thinking about identifying, dealing with, and helping shamed people. It doesn't mean shame's not there — you live in a society full of shamed people.

One of the immediate reactions of being abused is a sense of shame. And that's often very closely associated with the sense of being somehow contaminated, defiled, dirtied. And the result is that you withdraw, you isolate yourself. Now, when somebody abuses you, you feel hurt and angry. And what you do with your anger goes one of two ways: you either bottle it up, turn it inward on yourself, or you turn it outward — you dump it on other people. You know the way externalization goes: you dump it on the people round about you. The boss makes you angry at work, has abused you; you come home and dump on the wife, and the wife dumps on the kids, and the kids kick the cat. It goes down and down. You express it — but the problem is that if you express it, you dump it on other people, and they, in turn, need to dump it on other people.

But the more common thing, at least in Christian circles and in our circles, is to turn the anger inward, to restrain it, to internalize it. And that leads to terrible results, because the anger eats away, and the hurt eats away inside you, and leads to self-pity, and is one of the commonest and most toxic causes of depression. Some kinds of depression are basically internalized anger. And you know the way it works: you bottle it up, and then you get the slightest trigger — once it reaches its critical point, like a pressure cooker, you explode, and it's dumped all over the place, and everybody around you is scolded.

Anger destroys people. If you internalize it, it destroys your soul, it eats away inside you — it's toxic, it corrodes you. If you externalize it — and you have to externalize it eventually — you become a kind of black hole or a nuclear reactor. You affect everybody round about you, and you destroy relationships and destroy communities. Does that sound familiar? That's the crudest kind of analysis. I'd encourage you all, somewhere along the line, maybe not to read up about this, but just to analyze it. And the best place to start is with yourself. Examine yourself, your own anger, and the way it works and the way it affects you when you've been hurt. And then you'll see it in other people — you'll see it working in your marriage, in your family, in your congregation, in your community.

Yes? Is there a sequence between frustration and anger? Not all frustration is anger, but quite often anger is associated with frustration — that's one of the bedfellows. There are many kinds of anger, too, and I don't want to simplify it too much, but I'm talking about that kind of anger that comes from being sinned against, from being hurt in a way. And then frustration comes there too. But there are other kinds of frustration that have nothing to do with that — you're frustrated because you can't get your way, or you don't have success, or a thousand other reasons for being frustrated. That's not necessarily anger.

No — and that's the problem, that most of us, if somebody says, "John, you're angry," we say, "No, I'm not angry, I'm never angry" — until I lose my temper. Right? We don't even notice it. The people around us pick it up like anything. Our kids are good at picking up our anger.

Yes, brother — anger as a result of abuse or hurt, can this be a matter of perception? I'll come to that — there's a sin element. Is it perception? Yes, it can be, but it can also be a fairly trivial thing that's then exaggerated — something that's fairly minor is then perceived to be something very major. Well, the person has the feeling that they've been sinned against, and that's all that matters to them. You're not in a position to judge other people; you can only determine that for yourself when you're angry. And a lot of the anger that we have in the church is perceived anger, because what Satan does — and I'll come to this — is magnify anger, and create unnecessary offenses and causes of anger, occasions for sin.

Anything else? Hey, I told you it was going to be touchy — press the right button and you make me angry.

Now, anger is not just a psychological, social, spiritual factor. And by the way, there's a whole industry of helping people deal with anger — anger management is a big branch of practical psychology, and it's very useful because it helps, not with the major problem, but with learning to control your anger. Now, I'm not interested in the psychology of anger — there's a lot of tremendous, good psychological work done on that, and you can ask Bev about that. I'm interested in anger as a spiritual problem.

What is the spiritual problem with anger, particularly the anger from being sinned against, from being hurt by somebody? I think Paul nails it most exactly in Ephesians chapter 4, verses 26 to 27, and then verse 30. I'd commend this whole chapter of Ephesians to you as being very useful for yourself and for helping to minister to people who are angry. Paul says the following: "Be angry, but do not sin." Notice — he commands us, gives us permission to be angry. He says, be angry, but do not sin. How does sin come in with anger? Then he goes on to say: do not let the sun go down on your anger, or your wrath, and give no opportunity — in Greek, topos, place — for the devil. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption.

Now, Paul here, when he says "be angry," recognizes that anger itself is a good gift from God. Can I repeat that? Anger in itself is a good gift from God. As you know, God gets angry — we have the wrath of God, and it's a good gift from God, just as guilt is a good gift from God. What's so good about guilt is that it shows you you've done something wrong. If we didn't have the capacity for guilt, we would have no recognition of our sin, and there'd be no possibility of forgiveness. In the same way, anger is good, because anger makes it clear to us that somebody has hurt us spiritually in some way, damaged us in some way — and therefore it's an index, not of sinning, but of being sinned against. Once again, not all anger is of that character, but some kinds of anger are good, because they show that you've been damaged, hurt, and that something needs to be done about it.

Yes, back there — a righteous anger? Yes, I mean, if you want to put it philosophically, yes, but in practice it's very difficult to identify. I don't know whether I've ever managed to have just anger, completely. The only person who has just anger is God. Clearly. And that's one of the ways of putting it. But I'm not interested in looking at this theoretically but practically — yes, there is a just anger, and quite obviously — look, if somebody does something evil, wicked to somebody — you get a creep of a bloke who molests a little girl — okay, I've got to be angry, and it's right to be angry, angry with the guy, and particularly angry with the terrible sin, just as God is angry with sin. So, yes, there is a place for righteous anger, just anger. But the problem is that in most cases, when I get angry, I'm always in the right — and that's what makes me angry, because I'm a victim of injustice. I'll come to that in due course. And that's the problem — I'm in the right, and I see myself as right, and therefore my anger is justified, righteous anger. I'm sure if you went around and got close to it, got people to be honest, all those angry people in your congregation would feel justified and feel that their anger is righteous anger. Can you see the problem? Don't touch on that.

Now, as I said, anger in itself is a good gift from God — it's an index of being sinned against, an index of abuse. The problem doesn't come with anger, but as Paul says: be angry — good, if you're angry, express your anger, admit it, bring it out into the open, deal with it, learn from it, just as you do with guilt. But be angry, express your anger, admit your anger — but do not sin.

Now, how does the sin come in? Paul goes on to say: do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity or place for the devil. When I've been abused and angry, the door is open for Satan — the front door is open for him to launch his most potent spiritual attack on me. How does it work? What Satan does is keep on reminding me of the sin that has been done to me. He reminds me of the offense that has been committed against me. Just as the Holy Spirit reminds us of our sin in order to bring us to repentance, so the evil spirit reminds us of the sins that have been committed against us. And you know the way it works — there's something there that gets on your shoulder. You think of the offense, and then that offense is replayed and replayed over again, over and over, like a broken loop in your mind. And you know what happens when you keep replaying it — the more you replay it, the angrier you get, and the worse the offense becomes. And at the same time, you remember all the other offenses this person has done against you, or all the other hurts you've suffered, and it makes you more and more angry, and you're more and more justified in your anger. And the person who committed the offense against you becomes your enemy.

Have you noticed the enemies in the Psalms? Who are those enemies? This is the territory of the enemy. You all know it from your own experience — the person becomes the enemy. You go from the offense to the offender, and the offender becomes worse and worse the more you replay it, until that offender becomes your enemy, your attacker. And the worst thing about it — once you reach that point, you are justified, in your own mind, in your anger and your malice and ill will against the person; you wish the worst for the person, and you demand justice for yourself and against that person. And that's where you slip into dangerous territory, because then you occupy the moral high ground, and you occupy the judge's seat. You pass judgment on the person who's hurt you, and you condemn in your own heart the person who's hurt you. So Satan keeps on accusing that person until he can get us to the point where we become the judges of that person and condemn that person in our hearts. And the moment we've done that, we have sinned.

And then, once I've condemned that person, I will seek to get payback, revenge, to vindicate myself — and I'm justified in doing so, because I am in the right and that person is in the wrong. Righteous anger, going back to your point. And usually in Christian circles, the revenge we take is not the crude form of physical revenge — bashing a person up. It's very often verbal revenge, use of the tongue — I want to come back to that — or, what's even more pernicious, emotional revenge, where we kill off the person in our hearts. Now they're dead as far as we're concerned.

Now, why does Satan employ this particular form of attack? I've done a lot of thinking and reflecting on this, and as far as I can see, in terms of spiritual warfare there are two basic kinds of spiritual attack that we experience as Christians. There's what I call the front-door attack. A whole theology is built around that as Lutherans. How does it work? Satan tempts us to sin. We sin, and then what does he do once we've sinned? He accuses us of sin. And he uses God's word to accuse us of sin. Is he right? Yeah, he's doing God's work, strangely. And then he does his switcheroo — he uses God's word not just to accuse us, but to condemn us, in order to destroy our faith. You know the scenario — the whole doctrine of justification fits into that situation, the condemnation we experience where Satan uses the word of God, the law of God, not just to accuse us — that's fair — but then to condemn us in order to destroy our faith in Christ.

Now, most of us are fairly well schooled spiritually to deal with that kind of attack. But we're not so well schooled to deal with what I call the back-door attack. How does the back-door attack work? Satan gets somebody who's close to us — preferably somebody over us in the church, or close to us in the church, our brother — to sin against us. And then he accuses that person of sinning against us in our own hearts, so that we will condemn that person — and he does that so he can destroy our love for our brothers and sisters in Christ, our love for our president, our love for the elders in the church. And in that way, he doesn't destroy our faith directly, but he destroys the church, and in the long run this back door disconnects us from Christ, isolates us, and finally ends up destroying our faith. Do you understand what I mean by the back-door attack? The ultimate point he wants to bring us to is where we not only are angry against a person and condemn the person, but we end up hating our brothers and sisters instead of loving them. As soon as we begin to hate, he's won the victory. And there is nothing that does such great spiritual damage in the church as that kind of hatred.

Yes — spirit again, please? Yes. And it used to be — what I saw, it has… yes. By the end of the study, I saw those are all things that destroy love. Yes, enjoy — yes, this guy created us to share joy with him. Yes, yes. But you've got envy going on, being petty — it destroys it all. Yes, yes. And it's not so much sins against faith, if you like, but sins against love — and that's what makes them so toxic. In this way, the evil spirit, Satan, attempts to undo the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of faith and the spirit of love. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of community and unity, and by getting us to fall out with each other, to hate each other, he desecrates our holiness. Remember what Paul said — do not grieve the Holy Spirit, in whom you've been sealed for the day of redemption. Now, that's real telling — I had a Freudian slip there, "the day of revenge." Good Freudian slip, or bad one.

What grieves the Holy Spirit most of all in your congregations? It's not people sinning necessarily — if you deal with sin, well and good, you're doing God's work. But it's where sin then leads to bitterness, resentment, anger, and hatred and condemnation of each other. Paul says: be angry, but do not sin, and do not let the sun go down on your wrath, or your anger. That's good practical advice, because here's the funny thing that happens — somebody sins against us, we are hurt and very, very angry, but then after a while we begin to cherish our anger. Do you understand what I'm saying? We cherish our anger. Why do we cherish it? We hold on to it, we almost delight in it. Why? Because we have power. Over the one who sinned against us, we occupy the moral high ground, and it energizes us. It puts us in the right place — it puts us in the right, and others in the wrong. Therefore we have power — we have spiritual power, and we are empowered by it. There's something perverse in us that holds on to hurts.

Have you found, ministering to people, that people actually hold on to the hurts they've suffered? They cherish them, and they cherish the anger that comes from their hurts. So Paul says: yes, be angry, express your anger, let it come out, admit it — but don't let the sun go down on your anger. In other words, deal with it immediately, and deal with it spiritually. Because what's happening with your anger is that it opens the door to spiritual attack from the evil one. Deal with it immediately — don't carry it over into the night and into the next day. Because what happens if you sleep on anger? You actually cherish it, and you carry it over, and Satan uses it unconsciously at night to build it up, and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Deal with it immediately — don't carry it over to the next day.

As I said, the goal of the devil ultimately is the destruction not just of individual believers — he's achieved little if he destroys me — his aim is to destroy the church. And he will attack those churches that are most faithful to Christ and his word. And the way he does it is not just through the front-door attack on people's faith, but — particularly with conservative churches like ours — through this back-door attack to try to destroy the church. From what I can see, from my vantage point across the Pacific, he's been having a bit of a heyday in your church. And that's not a matter of judgment — that's just an objective analysis, and I'm not even saying it's a bad thing; that's just what's happening, and we need to recognize it.

Unresolved anger is one of the worst problems in the church. And the worst kind of expression of anger, the way we take revenge on each other, is the use of our tongue. We brothers sin against each other, worst of all, with this most deadly of all weapons. Just think of the terrible gossip. Just think of our capacity to always think the worst of people who don't belong to our particular group, whatever it is. Just think of the gossip, just think of the slander, just think of the way we speak about people who disagree with us. Why is it that we, in the church, think the worst of each other, but at the same time we think the best of people out in the world? It should be the other way around — we should think the best of each other, in a sense, and the worst of the people in the world. Why is it that so many of us have been damaged by friendly fire, to use Dr. Senkbeil's term — friendly fire? And all of you probably have been damaged by friendly fire. You know what I mean.

Can I just pause there? Any questions or comments? Because I know I'm touching touchy stuff here. Yes?

Would it be proper to call anger spiritually useless material? No, because it's spiritually useful material — just as guilt is spiritually useful material. Where sin abounds, grace abounds. Where anger abounds, there's opportunity for ministry and spiritual growth as in no other place. It's not spiritually useless material — it's a matter of what you do with it that determines whether it's spiritually useful or useless. Now, I'm going on a razor's edge here, I know, but it's very important in your ministry, because the danger is that we see anger as spiritually useless, and when we face angry elders, angry members, an angry congregation, we ourselves become angry and loveless, and we write them off — instead of seeing that this is one of the most wonderful opportunities for ministry in the gospel that you could ever have. It's a field that's ripe not just for sowing, but for harvesting, if I can put it as dramatically as possible. The problem is that we don't see it, and don't recognize the opportunities that anger presents — within our own selves, but also in the people round about us. But it doesn't start out there; it starts here.

Yes? Rich? Can you simply label anger as guilt, as an emotion? I don't know if it helps. Yeah, of course it's an emotion, but it goes deeper than that. One of the problems is that we see guilt not in objective terms but just as an emotion. Guilt is objective. And so anger also is something objective — it manifests itself in emotions, but the problem is that you won't heal it if you only deal with the emotion. That's the psychological approach — psychologists say it's an emotion, and that doesn't deal with the spiritual dimension.

Yes — you get to this: just wait, but I want to ask about "do not let the sun go down on your anger." I'm thinking a lot of times it just comes up to me after the seven o'clock meeting. And so the dealing with that — is that just internal, that night, or is it dealing with the situation with the other person, which I'm probably not going to do at eleven at night when I'm stewing? Yes — call the other, I mean the situation, the person with whom I'm angry. Oh, yeah, well — you can't ring somebody up at eleven o'clock at night, and I don't think Paul means it to be understood quite literally, because you can't always do it in every situation. It's a good rule, however, not to go to bed angry.

One of the greatest legacies from my family was that my mother took this quite literally — if she had an issue with Dad, they wouldn't go to sleep until they'd sorted it out. And one of the memories I have is hearing Mum and Dad rowing in the bedroom — they'd never do it in front of us. Mum would never challenge Dad in front of us, but she would not let it go. And Dad was a very fiery Slav, a bit like me — he'd explode very quickly, and his anger was very evident to us, but she would never let him go to bed angry. And if we were angry, she'd insist that we sort it out before bed. So that was quite literal, and you can do it in the family — but in the congregation you can't do it literally. Notice that I said "sort it out," not "before you go to sleep," but as soon as possible. As soon as possible, you deal with it, because the longer you let it go, the more opportunity you give to the devil to start messing around in this area — and brother, does he ever mess in this area.

Anything else? Yes, back there? Just — the professor I had at university was complaining about the fact that people aren't even willing to argue anymore, really argue. Yes. And it seems that they're not going to debate — all they're going to do is preload for a fight. Yes. And it seems that in the church you almost have to teach people how to have a productive conversation, because they seem to think that credibility rests in the person, so they try to discredit the person rather than the argument. Yes. It seems to just create more and more fire, more and more anger. Yep. This is one of the devil's modern tricks — all this ad hominem stuff. Keep your eyes open — it's not just in the church, it's out in society. You discredit your opponents not by arguing, you try to get rid of the argument by getting rid of the person. Which is stupid, but we do it all the time, and all of us do it — liberals do it, conservatives do it, everybody does it.

Yes, back there — I found some value in the gift frame. Yes. And when I'm dealing with angry members, a year later, two years later, things being right in the silence — yes, there's a certain side to it. I still remember one of the best bits of advice I got when I first left seminary and began to teach as a chaplain in a school. There's lots of stuff that happens — teachers are lightning conductors, and they cop lots of stuff from the kids. I still remember a wise old teacher who said to me, again and again, when I was stewing over something: "John, sleep on it." Which meant — on the one hand, don't let the sun go down on your wrath; on the other hand, don't confront a person who has hurt you while you are still emotionally angry. Because you've got to let the anger simmer down, cool down — you've got to have that soundmindedness that Paul spoke about, that clearheadedness, so that you can express your anger, sure, but not in emotional terms, because that's damaging.

Okay, what's God's solution to the cycle of abuse, and what's God's help for angry pastors? How does God deal with the hurt that we suffer? He deals with it in the same way he deals with the sins that we commit. Jesus became a human being, lived a human life, in order to experience abuse. He didn't experience sin in the sense that he sinned, but he experienced being sinned against. So a large part of the ministry of Jesus was just to cop it all. And his whole life, death, and resurrection was to break the cycle of abuse.

Jesus died for our sins — now, there are two sides to it. He didn't just die for the sins that I have committed, but he also died for the sins that were committed against me. He didn't just die to rid me of the guilt of the sins I've committed, but he also died to free me from the shame and the contamination of the sins that have been committed against me. Just listen to the way St. Peter puts it — this is a dimension that we quite often neglect. Peter says: he, that's Jesus, committed no sin, nor was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled — reviling is verbal abuse — he did not revile in return. That's what we do. When he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to the one who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds we have been healed.

The wounds of Jesus heal us from the damage that the sins others commit against us have done. He cleanses us, therefore, not just from the guilt of sin, but from the stain of abuse. He heals us from the hurt of abuse. His blood cleanses us from abuse. His blood, his death, is healing for abused people. That is simply wonderful, and it's something I think we need to recover. I don't know whether you realize, in the liturgy, when we say "Christ, Lamb of God, you take away" — what? "The sin" — not my sin, but the sin of the world, have mercy on us. Notice the plural there. In the early church, this was understood not just as the sins of Christians, but the sins of the whole world — and not just the sins that were committed, but also the sins that were committed against people. Because that's the way Jesus experienced sin — by being sinned against.

Okay, then practically speaking, what's God's help for abused pastors and people? I'm running out of time — we'll see how we go.

Number one. The biggest problem that I face — as I said, as far as I'm concerned, I'm never angry, angry. I'm a big hero, nothing hurts me, I've got a thick skin, I like to fob off the hurts, and I like to deny the fact that I've been hurt, deny the fact that I'm angry. The most important starting point in dealing with the hurt of abuse and anger is just to confess it, to bring it out into the open. As long as it's inside me, Satan can use it against me — he uses that darkness to mess with me.

So the first thing is the confession of abuse. Just listen to what St. John says in his first letter. He says: if we claim to be without sin — notice, he doesn't say "if we claim not to have sinned," but "to be without sin." That phrase covers both sides of this equation — we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. We deny reality. But if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. Now, that word "unrighteousness" in Greek, as you know, is adikia, which is best translated not as unrighteousness but as injustice or abuse. So Jesus doesn't just forgive our sins — the sins we've committed — but he cleanses us from all injustice, from all abuse. Can you see? John's dealing here with both sides of the picture.

The way to deal with abuse as sin is to confess it to God, and God then forgives — not just our sin, but also our hurt and abuse. The problem lies partly in our English — we translate aphiēmi as "forgive," whereas in Greek it means "being freed, being released," and once again that term covers both sides of the picture: release from the sins we've committed, but also release from the sins that have been committed against us. And he deals with the contamination, the fact that we feel dirtied or stained in some way by being sinned against, by purifying us, dealing with our contamination and defilement. But best of all, he brings us out of the darkness, where Satan lives and works, out into the light. The best way of dealing with spiritual darkness is to bring it into the light of God's presence. And just by bringing it into the light, in a sense, you've dealt with the problem — it's out in the open, not just for you, but in the open before God. As you know, God's light drives out the darkness. So confession is the first, most important thing — and that's not easy in this case. In fact, I think it's much easier to confess sin than it is to confess abuse and hurt.

But listen, then, secondly, to what St. Paul has to say immediately after the verses we looked at in Ephesians chapter 4. Look at this — he says: let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and slander be put away from you, with all malice. Notice here the cycle of hurt: I've been hurt, I become bitter, I become angry — the wrath is the feeling inside, and the anger here is the temper, the expression of it, I externalize it, and that leads to quarreling, brawling, attacking each other, leads to slander, and leads to malice, which is ill will, wishing the worst for the person who's hurt me. Notice that — it comes from the inside out.

The most significant word here, in Greek, is "let it be put away." This is one of those curious grammatical oddities you find in the New Testament — the use of passive imperatives. Now, theoretically speaking, a passive imperative is a physical impossibility — an active imperative is "do something," a passive imperative is "have something done to you." Behind that passive imperative lies what scholars call the divine or theological passive. If we wanted to put it in simple modern English, we'd say: let God, or Christ, put away, or take away, all of this. You see, Jesus is the garbage collector — he doesn't just collect the garbage of our guilt, but also the garbage of all the hurts we've suffered, the shame that comes from this, the bitterness, the resentment, the anger that comes from them. He comes to us and says, "Look, I want to take this away from you." What we need to do, however — and that's why we have the passive imperative — Jesus can't reach out and, as it were, extract the anger, the hurt. Why? Because if he did that, he would destroy you, because you're holding on to it as part of yourself. So for him to take it away, you need to let go of it, release it — and until you release it, he can't take it away. How do you let him take it away? Quite simply, you hand it over to him. You surrender it to him, and you do that in prayer. In prayer, you unload the anger and hurt, and you dump it on Jesus and let him take it away, instead of taking it out on yourself and on others. There's something very profound Paul is touching on here, that you probably can sense from your own experience — the importance of this.

Yes, over here — practice, whether formally, ritually, or in the home study — confession and absolution — I think the focus is primarily on the guilt side of the equation. Yes. But there's an equivalent, and there's also an opportunity, not only in prayer but also in that context, to get it out, outside of ourselves. Yes. Except — that's a great supply. Yep. Except in this case, instead of having confession and absolution, you have confession and blessing. Okay, that's what I want, and that's an equivalent — and that's one part of pastoral ministry that seems to have been lost fairly substantially in the church. You don't have to confess your sin, but the sin that's been committed against you — and so absolution doesn't apply, but you still use the keys to free a person from sin. You use the keys not in giving the absolution, but in giving the blessing. I don't know whether you realize that in old Lutheran understanding, pastoral blessing was always seen as part of the exercise of the keys — positively, or negatively, withholding blessing — giving blessing in the name of the triune God. The giving of blessing is one of the most important healing ministries you have for hurt, angry people.

Yes — what about the person who hands it over, does these things, but yet the anger still continues to be their meditation? Okay, and I'm going to talk about meditation on anger, and it's very important meditation. Instead of you being angry with them, what does it show — if people continue to be angry, what's that evidence of, an index of? And that's where we go wrong. Very often, the greatest damage I've seen has been done by pastors who say "you're angry, you need to forgive the person who sinned against you," coming right in at the beginning. If I continue to be angry, then what does that show — that the hurt has not yet been healed. You still need healing ministry, because you'll only be able to leave it and stop meditating on your anger once the hurt has been healed. And when the hurt has been healed, then you can leave it behind, and then you can forgive the person who has abused you. There's a certain element of timing in pastoral care, and in exercising the keys.

Yes — I'm thinking of a person who says, "I want to forgive, I want to let this go, but I just simply can't." And so you pray with this person to do that, and less than that — and then they say, "well, I'm still thinking about it." Okay, and that's where the next point comes in.

One of the most underutilized and most valuable resources we have in the Scriptures are the lament psalms, the psalms of lament. Now, there are in all only seven penitential psalms, but I don't know how many psalms of lament there are — something like sixty or seventy, depending on how you categorize them. A lament psalm is a confessional psalm, and it starts off where somebody has been sinned against, somebody's been hurt. And the first stage of the lament psalm is always to confess what's happened. Typically speaking, and I can only do this very briefly, there are three parts to it. First, you identify the problem — what's happened to you. Secondly, quite often, you express your frustration with God, who hasn't fixed it up — somebody has sinned against you, somebody has hurt you, somebody has shamed you, and that's been damaging you for a long period of time. You bring it out into the open, you confess it to God, and you express your frustration with God — you say, "Why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from me? When will you do this?" You know those laments. And then thirdly, you identify your enemy and what your enemy has done — there's the identification of the enemy, the person who's caused the hurt. And then comes the prayer for deliverance, for help, for healing. And very often this is accompanied by a confession of faith, but also, at the same time, what scholars call an imprecation — that's a prayer for God to deal with the enemy, a prayer against the person who has dealt unjustly with you. And it always ends with a promise of praise, a promise of thanksgiving.

Now, why are these psalms so valuable? Because they help to lance the boil, they bring the poison out into the open — and they don't dump it on you, they don't dump on the person who's done the damage, they don't dump on innocent victims, but they dump the garbage on God. There's a kind of cycle that goes through this. And as long as the hurt remains, you've got to get people to keep on praying those psalms, or going through the process that those psalms model.

Just before, you mentioned a very interesting thing — you said "meditating on their anger." I don't know whether you noticed the psalm we sang last night, Psalm 4, from which Paul takes his text — Psalm 4, verse 4. In the NIV: "In your anger, do not sin" — or, "be angry, but do not sin" — and then it goes on: "when you are on your beds, search your heart and be silent." Ponder your heart and be silent — meditate on your anger. And that means voice your anger, express your anger, bring it out into the open before God. So God says: okay, be angry, but do not sin. How do you not sin? You meditate on your anger. And you meditate on your anger by going through that process of lamenting in the lament psalms.

How are things going? Look, there's a lot I could say there — I've touched a little bit on this in my book Grace Upon Grace. We have a whole section on this in our LCA Rites and Resources for Pastoral Care, in a section called "Dealing with Anger" — if you want some further help in this.

Now, can I go through the next two things fairly quickly, and then leave the last part altogether, so we have time for just a few questions? Okay. The first resource, then, is confession — bringing it out into the open, and then dumping it on Jesus, the garbage collector.

The second great resource we have is the cleansing provided by baptism. Just listen to what St. Paul says in Titus chapter 3. We're familiar with the last part of this, but not the first part. He starts off and says: for we ourselves were once foolish, passing our days in malice — malice is ill will against the people who've hurt you — and envy, hating and being hated by others, and hating one another. There you get the cycle of abuse — we're hated by others, and then we, in turn, hate each other. But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us by the washing of regeneration and renewal — notice, a renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

In and through baptism, we've been given a new self, a new person in Christ, which is free not just from sin, but also free from the stain of abuse and the effects of abuse. So anybody who has been sexually abused, greatly damaged, can go back to their baptism and become clean and whole and new again. It washes away our malice, our envy, and our hatred — not just on the day of our baptism, but, as you know, baptism then involves daily repentance. Every day we can get rid of the malice and bitterness and hatred and resentment that bedevils us.

I'd mention also the importance of prayer and blessing in pastoral care, which then takes what's given to us in baptism and applies it concretely in a particular situation. In recent times I've had to deal quite a bit with people who've been sexually abused — terrible damage, spiritually as well as psychologically. The normal way to deal with it is just to let them confess it all, over and over again, until they get rid of it, till all the dirt's gone. And then pray for them and bless them — not just once, but over and over again. Absolution you only need to give once. But when you're dealing with abuse, particularly sexual abuse, which is very perverse, it takes a long period of time — that's my experience, at least.

Secondly — or thirdly — we receive healing through the blood of Jesus in Holy Communion. Once again, we Lutherans have a fantastic resource that's not utilized. It's interesting — in our eucharistic piety we usually focus on the body of Jesus, but we don't focus very much on the blood of Jesus. Why is it that Jesus doesn't just give us his body, but also gives us his blood? Well, Jesus's blood does the following things. Let's have a look at what the Scriptures say. First of all — if the blood of goats and bulls cleanses people, the writer of Hebrews says, how much more will the blood of Jesus, who offered himself without blemish to God, do — cleanse your conscience from what? From dead works, to serve the living God. Dead works — anger is part of that; bitterness, resentment are among those dead works. We're cleansed from those dead works so that we can serve the living God. The blood of Jesus cleanses our conscience — you see, our conscience isn't just stained by our sins, but also stained by the sins that are committed against us.

Or — look at 1 John 1:7 — "If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin." Why does John say "all sin" there? I maintain he says it just to emphasize that it isn't just one kind of sin — all the aspects of sin, we're cleansed from in Holy Communion. Or, most obviously, something we say every Sunday when we celebrate Holy Communion, the words of Jesus which institute the Lord's Supper: "This is the blood of the new covenant, which is poured out for many" — we quite often say "for the forgiveness of sins," but I think in some of your orders you have "for the remission of sins," and I love that, because "remission" has both sides — remission is release from sins, freedom from sin. And this covers both sides again. So in Holy Communion you get remission from the guilt of sin, as well as from the stain of the sin that's been committed against you.

I've got some other material there, but I want to move fairly quickly. Let me just tell you a story. Some years ago — ten, fifteen years ago — I visited Malaysia, a place I love, for the first time, and I was asked to preach at the Lutheran cathedral in Kuala Lumpur by the pastor. I said, "Okay, what do you want me to preach on?" He said, "Well, most of our pastors are trained in ecumenical seminaries and have very little teaching on the Lord's Supper, and our people have very little teaching on the Lord's Supper, although the Lord's Supper is very, very important to the piety of these people" — Indian Tamil people. "They love the Lord's Supper, but the pastors haven't been well equipped, and the people instinctively reverence the sacrament, and they're hungry for teaching." I said, okay, I'll preach them a little sermon.

So I preached a very simple sermon, focusing on the blood of Jesus and just the words of institution: "This is the blood of the new covenant, shed for you for the remission of sins." And I had a three-part sermon: first, the blood of Jesus is life-giving blood — it gives life, John chapter 6. Secondly, the blood of Jesus is cleansing blood, and it cleanses us not just from the sins we commit, but also from the sins committed against us — and I happened to mention, in passing, sexual abuse, as well as all other forms of abuse. And thirdly, the blood of Jesus sanctifies us, makes us holy.

Now, I've seldom preached in a place where I had such an electric response. It's one of those occasions — you all know, pastors — where you're speaking from the heart into the hearts of people, and the hearts of people lie open before you, and there's hunger, and you can feel that you're reaching the spiritual depths of people. There was a Communion service, and I helped the pastor distribute Communion. And I noticed, as I was distributing the blood — he took the bread, quite rightly, and then I took the blood for distribution — that there was a woman, dressed rather drably, who came — they all come barefoot into the sanctuary — she came, and she kept on kneeling there. She stayed there until the end of distribution, and people just came around her and went back. And then she went back to her seat just before the final dismissal.

Then I went out into the vestry with the pastor, just before we went to the back door, and the pastor gave me a great big bear hug and said, "John, something fantastic's happened today." I looked at him and said, "What?" And he said, "Look, it's too complicated — I'll tell you afterwards." So we went to the back door and greeted the people — you don't shake hands, you go like this [gesture]; touch is a very touchy business in Indian society. And people were greeting me, saying "good morning, thank you," and so on. And then this woman who'd been kneeling came down, fell on her knees, grabbed hold of my hands, and kissed my hands. I've never been so embarrassed in my life. I got over it, and we went through it.

And then, afterwards, the pastor told me her story. Within weeks of being confirmed, she was sexually abused by a member of her family, a very close relative. And from that time onward, no matter what the pastors had tried to do to help her and to heal her, the shame was so great for her that she never, ever attended Holy Communion. Occasionally she'd come to church, but she'd always come after church had started, slip in the back door, take one of the back pews, and before church had finished, she'd slip out and go away. Awful shame. And she was dressed drably. The preaching of the cleansing blood of Jesus healed her that day.

The story doesn't end there — this is the short version. Two years later, I happened to preach there again, and was greeting people at the door after the sermon, and there was this beautiful woman, dressed in a gorgeous sari, with a handsome husband and a new baby in her arms. And she said, "Do you remember me?" I hate it when people say that to me — but I also love it. And I said, "No, look, I'm sorry." And then she told me, and identified herself as that woman. The blood of Jesus, cleansing from the stain of abuse.

Now, you've got people who've been sexually abused in your communities, and that's one of the most difficult situations to deal with spiritually. This is one of your great resources.

I'm afraid I'll have to stop there. I hope you can make sense of the rest yourself, but let me just conclude, to go back to a point I've already touched on. We see anger negatively, in ourselves and particularly in other people, but anger is an index that something is wrong — something's gone wrong and it needs to be fixed. And anger in the church always has a spiritual dimension — it has psychological sides to it too, but if you're angry, if your wife's angry, your kids are angry, if your people in the congregation are angry, it's an index that something is wrong. Not that they've sinned, but that somebody has sinned against them, and it means it needs to be fixed up. And so it's an opportunity for you to exercise pastoral ministry and pastoral care at the deepest, most decisive level. If you can minister to an angry person and bring them through, and bring healing, that person is very often healed for life — they're brought through the experience in a very powerful way that remains with them for the rest of life. In fact, I think it's one of the greatest miracles that happens in the church — where angry people are finally healed of the hurt.

Now, it's a bit like — it's as much a miracle as revirgination. If you've lost your virginity, you can't regain it, but what happens is a kind of spiritual revirgination, a cleansing. And that's so powerful, and has such a dramatic effect spiritually, but also psychologically and physically, on people's lives, that they can never forget it. So abuse is an opportunity for grace to abound. And on the other hand — and I haven't been able to touch on this — the New Testament has a lot to say about how Christians have been empowered to react positively to abuse. That's what I spoke about yesterday afternoon. Paul speaks about it there: when we are abused, we have been given the power of the Holy Spirit, the spirit of power and love and self-controlled soundmindedness, so that we do not retaliate in kind, but we repay evil with good. Instead of cursing, we bless. Instead of damning our enemies, we pray for our enemies.

So it's an opportunity for grace to abound. And there's no other situation that disarms the critics of the church as powerfully as this. This is impossible from a human point of view, because the human law is: if somebody does the dirty on you, you do the dirty on them. The law is payback. But where you not only get people suffering abuse — that's negative — but turning abuse into positive retaliation, repaying evil with good, that is the most powerful witness to Christ, the gospel, and the resurrection of our Lord.

Sorry if I'm over time.