It is an old story, but a good one. Former baseball manager Billy Martin told it in his autobiography titled NUMBER 1. He says he and Mickey Mantle were doing a little hunting down in Texas. Mickey had a friend who would let him hunt on his ranch. When they got there, Mickey told Billy to wait in the car while he went in and cleared things with his friend. Permission was quickly granted for them to hunt, but the owner asked Mickey to do him a favor. He had a pet mule in the barn who was going blind and he didn't have the heart to put him out of his misery. He asked Mickey to shoot the mule for him. Mickey agreed.
On the way back to the car a plan formed in Mantle's mind. Reaching the car, he pretended to be angry. He scowled and slammed the car door shut. Billy wanted to know what was wrong. Mickey replied that the owner wouldn't let them hunt there after all. "I am so mad at that guy that I am going out to that barn and shoot one of his mules," said Mantle. He drove like a mad man to the barn.
Martin protested and said, "We can't do that!" But Mickey was adamant, "Just watch me," he shouted. When they got to the barn, Mantle jumped out of the car with his rifle, ran to the barn and shot the mule and killed it. When he got back to the car he saw that Martin had also taken his gun out and smoke was curling from its barrel, too.
"What are you doing, Martin?" he yelled. Martin answered, "We'll show that Sonofagun. I killed two of his cows." One of the questions we all have to deal with from time to time is what to do with our anger. We are aware of the negative results of anger. People do stupid things when they are angry like shooting someone's cows. Are there any positive aspects to anger, though? Are there times when we ought to get upset? Indeed there are.
THERE ARE TIMES WHEN A CHRISTIAN OUGHT TO GET ANGRY.
One of the angriest young men to grace the American spotlight over the past two decades was the black activist of the sixties, Stokely Carmichael. Remember Stokely, with his rhetoric of hate and rebellion? Why was he so angry? There were reasons. Let me give you an example.
A school was being desegregated and Stokely Carmichael took his six-year-old niece to the school to begin kindergarten. Six years old. Remember that. The cops in that southern town weren't about to let the school be integrated. One cop grabbed Stokely's niece, put the girl on the ground, put his boot on her neck, stuck his gun in her ear, and said, "This is the last time I'm gonna tell ya. You're never gonna go to school with white boys." Carmichael took his niece home in shock. Naturally, she was a frightened mess. At that moment Stokely Carmichael vowed that he would never let a boot hold down the neck of another black person again. He would kill the person wearing the boot rather than let it happen. (1)
Now, regardless of how you feel about Stokely Carmichael, regardless of how you feel about civil rights wouldn't you have been angry if you had been in his place? If someone had thrown your six-year-old niece on the ground, stuck a gun in her ear, and threatened and humiliated her, wouldn't you have been about to explode? If not, something very fundamental is missing in your character.
There are times when it is right to get angry. Jesus was angry when he drove the moneychangers out of the temple. They had turned a place of worship into what he called a "den of robbers." The money-changers were originally an answer to a problem raised by Roman coinage. The coins had on them the image of Caesar. Therefore they were unacceptable for Temple ceremonies. The people were thus forced to change their Roman coins into coins that were acceptable. Those of you who have traveled abroad have probably traded currency at a little shop set up for that purpose. It can be a very profitable enterprise for the moneychanger. The moneychangers Jesus confronted, however, had brought their little shops right into the Temple itself.
Even worse, they were also selling sacrificial animals right there in the temple precincts. They were clearly running the risk that an animal might get loose and violate the sanctuary. Worse than that was the competitiveness among the shopkeepers vying for the business of the worshipers. The most sacred shrine of the Jews had become a tawdry, commercialized circus. This made Jesus mad and he wasn't going to take it anymore. This was his Father's house and they had desecrated it. Suddenly he was turning over tables, scattering coins across the pavement. Then he took a whip and forced the traders out of the temple and drove the sacrificial animals out into the courtyard.
When the dust cleared, people probably wondered what had hit them. Nobody, however, protested. Everybody knew deep down Jesus was right. Christ's example tells me there are times when a Christian ought to get angry.
THIS IS TO SAY THAT THERE ARE THINGS THAT HAPPEN IN THIS WORLD THAT ARE NOT FAIR AND ARE NOT RIGHT.
Are you surprised at that? No, we all know it's true. Did you read about a Connecticut Supreme Court case in which the court reluctantly ruled that a Suzanne Benson is entitled to half the estate of her dead son? If the newspapers are correct, this mother abandoned her two-year-old son 13 years ago. Recently the son was killed in a car/bicycle collision. His dad's insurance company awarded $300,000 to the son's estate. Mrs. Benson showed up after all this time to claim half the money. Under Connecticut law if Mrs. Benson had officially terminated her parental responsibility, she could not have profited from the money. Abandonment of a baby, however, does not constitute formal parental termination. (2) So she collected $150,000.
That violates my sense of justice, doesn't it yours? It's not fair. It's not right. But listen. There are far worse injustices taking place in our world than that one isolated case. We all know it's true. There are racial injustices, religious injustices, economic injustices. One does not have to be a Stokely Carmichael to realize that there are some people who never get a fair shake. That's true all around the world and that is true right in our own backyard. The fear that many of us feel as we drive into the inner city of some of our large metropolitan areas is God's judgement on our failure to correct some of the injustices in our own land. For you see, as the saying goes, what goes around, comes around. The fruits of injustice are bitter indeed.
There is a most interesting story from American history about a man named George Wythe (pronounced with), a signer of the Declaration of Independence and perhaps one of the period's most noted legal minds. In 1776 George Wythe, Thomas Jefferson, and Edmund Pendleton began the task of reworking and updating the laws of the state of Virginia. The task took most of their time for three years. It was really an extraordinary piece of work. However, there was at least one flaw-a flaw that would one day haunt the family and friends of George Wythe.
In 1806, Wythe suffered for almost 2 weeks from what almost certainly was arsenic poisoning and finally died. It is also reasonably certain that Wythe's grandnephew, George Wythe Sweeney, had added the arsenic to his elder's coffee. However, the only person who saw Sweeney commit this act was Lydia Broadnax, Wythe's devoted mulatto housekeeper; and negroess and mulattoes were forbidden under Virginia law from testifying in court against whites-a law that George Wythe had chosen to let stand during his revision process. So despite fairly certain knowledge that Sweeney had murdered Wythe, the court had to let Sweeney go free. (3)
I suppose we might consider that a case of poetic justice. If he had recognized the rights of African Americans, George Wythe's killer would not have gone free. Justice does not always work out that neatly, of course, but we should tremble when we reflect that God is a just God. For eventually justice does prevail. There is a time when Christians ought to get angry about some of the inequities and injustices in our world. As Melvin Wheatley once said, "There are situations in life in which the absence of anger would be the essence of evil." There is a time for anger.
EVEN MORE IMPORTANT, HOWEVER, THERE IS A TIME FOR ACTION!
The danger with acting when we are angry, of course, is that we will act foolishly. You may have heard about the farmer who was plowing his corn one day when he spotted a mouse gnawing away at a stalk of corn. He thought of the long hours he had spent clearing, planting, and cultivating this field. Now this mouse was trying to destroy it. Anger raged within him. He grabbed a stick and rushed toward the mouse--beating, slashed, chasing until finally he dealt the mouse a lethal blow. A sense of sweet revenge swept over him. Then, he looked around and realized that he had destroyed nearly half an acre of corn to kill one little mouse that couldn't have eaten more than three stalks in an entire season.
The old Greek, Aristotle, once said, "Anyone can become angry that is easy, but to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way this is difficult." It is difficult. And certainly we are not advocating anyone to become a Stokely Carmichael. We are simply saying that anger can be a great motivating force in our lives. Sometimes that anger can be constructive. God has used angry people to cure some of the worst injustices and to solve some of the most perplexing problems this world has known.
Recently a man named Leonard Haslim got angry watching the 6 o'clock news. Hundreds of people had died in an airliner crash in Washington, D.C. because the plane's wings iced up, making it too heavy to fly. Haslim decided to make sure it didn't happen again.
Haslim came up with a brilliant, but rather simple solution. Everyone who has studied science knows that opposite charges attract and like charges repel. Haslim used that principle to come up with the ultimate wing deicer. He wrapped a thin sheet of rubber around an airplane wing, with wire ribbons carrying electrical current underneath.
When he threw the switch on, the positive wires jumped away from each other, as did the negatives, breaking the ice that had frozen to the layer of rubber above them.
"It's like snapping a hall carpet," drawls Haslim, "and watching the dust fly." His invention can pulverize ice an inch thick on the surface of a wing. Yet it uses no more power than a single landing light, and costs less than an airplane tire. "It's so simple, lightweight, and cheap, it's nauseating," says Haslim. It may be that over the next several years, hundreds of lives will be saved because Leonard Haslim got angry watching the 6 o'clock news. (4)
Is there something making you angry? I am not talking about shooting somebody's cows because he didn't let you use his farm to hunt. Is there some evil in the world that a voice within you keeps saying, "Somebody ought to do something about that."
1. Larry King, THE KING, (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1988).
2. "Mother Who Abandoned Son Wins Half of His $300,000 Estate," The Knoxville News Sentinel (May 10, 1989), Section A, P. 7.
3. Brother C. Edward, FSC. "The Law That Failed," AMERICAN HISTORY ILLUSTRATED: (Jan., 1973), pp. 38-45.
4. SUCCESS, October, 1990.