The Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany, February 23, 2025

Do not fret yourself because of evildoers; do not be jealous of those who do wrong. Do not fret yourself over the one who prospers, the one who succeeds in evil schemes. Refrain from anger, leave rage alone; do not fret yourself; it leads only to evil. Psalm 37:1,8-9

I can never read these verses from Psalm 37, the Psalm appointed for this Sunday, without thinking of another saying. This saying is more contemporary, probably better known in popular culture than Psalm 37, likely more representative of the temper of our time.

“If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”

It seems to me that in our public discourse today, a person’s level of anger, their degree of outrage, is taken as indicative of their moral sincerity. The proof of one’s integrity, one’s right to speak out on an issue, is measured by the intensity of one’s rage. Indignation is the sign of righteousness.

And I can see where that would be true. There is a strong biblical precedent for righteous indignation. Prophets like Amos, Jeremiah, the first chapters of Isaiah, and John the Baptist are classic examples of how moral outrage is the operative sign of the proclamation of God. They are seen as modeling a vitriol against wealth and injustice and evil that resonates with many today.

And there are people in our society, groups within our communities, whose voices have been silenced and suppressed and ignored for so long that they have no language other than outrage. There are peoples who have been so marginalized from the “civil” discourse of our time that they have no way to be heard other than shouting their anger and venting their rage.

I can see the validity of the second, more contemporary saying.

But there are also people in our society who seem to have made outrage and resentment a central feature of their social identity. For these, it seems as though cultivating their grievance, and doing what they can to provoke anger in others, is deeply tied to their sense of their waning power and privilege. Too often, the encouragement of fury can function as an attempt to exert power over others when no other perceived channel of power is left.

And even apart from this extreme, for many of us there seems to be a continuous background buzz of frustration and irritation in our days. We ask ourselves why life needs to be so hard, why things are so expensive, why medicine and healthcare have to be so complicated, why everyone suddenly seems so mean-spirited. We feel dissatisfaction nibbling away at our edges; and we can begin to look around for someone to blame, something onto which we can shift our anger, some

reason for life’s difficulty with which we can justifiably be angry. Getting angry, after all, is so much simpler than trying to make things actually better…

For these reasons, I think it is still good to keep Psalm 37 in mind.

Speaking for myself, I know what anger can do to me. I know how corrosive rage can be to my ability to think clearly and listen compassionately and speak wisely. I know that when I let the emotion of anger take the upper hand in my response to someone who holds an opinion different from mine, or a happening in the community that causes pain and division, or a structure in society that I find morally offensive – when I let the emotion of anger take the upper hand in my response, then my response suffers. My response becomes less flexible, less constructive, less responsive. When anger takes the upper hand I become more reactive, and I am very much more prone to say and do and spout and spit things that I will regret later.

For me, anger does not advance the cause of righteousness, but makes it harder and harder for me to work toward right-relationship. I know from embarrassingly personal experience that when I fret myself because of evildoers, it leads only to me also becoming more evil.

And I do not think I am alone in this.

Psychologist Jeremy E. Sherman describes what he calls “maddiction,” and points out that people can get hooked on outrage: “Every attack they make feels righteous to them. They haven’t the bandwidth to wonder what’s fair when they’re busy vanquishing foes. They just assume that their foes are evil and that it’s their duty to beat them.” He goes on, “The more outraged we are at others, the more righteous we feel; the more righteous we feel, the more we feel duty-bound to be outraged at others. One can really rev out on that vicious cycle. It’s highly addictive.”

David Brooks writes, “Even when justified, permanent indignation is not a healthy emotional state. We’ve become a little addicted to our own umbrage, addicted to that easy feeling of moral superiority, addicted to the easy affirmation bath we get when we repeat what we all believe.”

Even venting anger as a form of catharsis, as a prelude to constructive engagement and change, can become counterproductive. A recent study found that venting and expressing outrage tended to increase physiological arousal, which actually prolonged the physical symptoms of anger. Even if the conscious intention was to discharge anger, the display of outrage unconsciously made it worse.

Running to anger, indulging in rage, can become a vicious circle. It makes it all too easy for us to dehumanize the objects of our anger. They become in our eyes something less than full persons. They are “evildoers,” they are “wrong,” they are the “enemy.” They cease to be in our eyes real personalities, who have fears and hopes and faults and loves – just as we have – and become reduced to opinions, stances, caricatures, weapons, identity categories, against whom we can fling our demands and chant our slogans as we like.

And the irony is that, when we treat others in such a less-than-human way, we diminish our own humanity in the process. When we fret ourselves because of evildoers, that very fretfulness robs

energy from the wisdom and truth-telling and accountability and compassion that are the only things that can really overcome evil with good.

A steady diet of outrage, even attentive outrage, impedes the deep and honest receiving and offering in freedom and gratitude that is the only way to build up the right-relationships that can heal personal connections, and create beloved communities, and transform functioning societies.

Psalm 37 helps to lead us in the direction of such creative and transformative action. Although “Do not fret yourself” may look at first like an admonition to quietism, to passivity, there is more to it than that. “Refrain from anger, leave rage alone” is indeed negative advice about what not to do; but it is also an opening into a positive vision of what we can do.

It is when we are not fretful, when we are not enraged, that we become more able to, as the Psalm puts it, “Put your trust in the Lord and do good.” Instead of dwelling in outrage, the Psalm advises that we should “Commit your way to the Lord and put your trust in him,” because it is in committing ourselves to the Way of God that God can work in and through us to “make your righteousness as clear as the light and your just dealing as the noonday.” Being not-fretful makes us more able to be co-creative with God.

For Christians, the Way of God is understood specifically as revealed to us in Jesus. It is the way Jesus practiced receiving and offering in freedom and gratitude. It is the way Jesus received aims from God, and embodied those aims in his living, and offered his actions as examples and guidance and love for others. Receiving and offering in freedom and gratitude is the way of building up right-relationships, relationships characterized by mutuality and justice and compassion and well-being, on all levels of our interaction, from interpersonal to intercontinental.

And the promise in the Way of God is that, when we offer ourselves to live in this way, when we discern divine aims for our occasions of experience and shape our experiences to embody those aims, when we make the effort to give freely of who we are and what we have, and to accept gratefully from others who they are and what they have – then God receives that effort into God’s own creating work in the world, and God offers to us co-creative energy to bring our best possibilities to embodiment. When we genuinely strive for right-relationship, then God also strives within our striving, to make our right-relationship “as clear as the light” and our equitable activity “as the noonday.”

We might even say, from this larger, divine-inclusive perspective, that it is precisely because we are paying attention, because we are paying attention to the Way of God in the midst of so-often outrageous human relations, that we do not give in to outrage. It is precisely because we are paying attention to the practice of receiving and offering in freedom and gratitude that we do not fret ourselves, that we refrain from anger, that we leave rage alone, and that we do the work it takes to co-create the just dealings that transform the world.

How will you turn from fretfulness to the practice of receiving and offering this week? How will you discern God co-creating with you right-relationships as clear as the light?

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The Rev. Dr. Paul Nancarrow is an Episcopal priest, whose theological work has focused on process-relational interpretations of religion and science, spirituality and liturgy, and especially on the co-acting of divine action and human action and natural action in sacramental work and worship. He is a co-author of The Call of the Spirit: Process Spirituality in a Relational World, and blogs on “Transfigurations” at paulsnancarrow.wordpress.com. He can often be found contemplating the Adventure of the Universe as One from the saddle of his bicycle on back roads and rail-trails in the Midwest.