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The scripture reading of the morning consists of portions of the second book of Samuel, chapter 18. I will read the first, the fifth, and then the ninth through the fifteenth verses. "Then David mustered the men who were with him, and set over them commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds. And the king ordered Joab and Abishai and Ittai, 'Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom.'

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And all the people heard when the king gave orders to all the commanders about Absalom." "And Absalom chanced to meet the servants of David. Absalom was riding upon his mule, and the mule went under the thick branches of a great oak, and his head caught fast in the oak, and he was left hanging between heaven and earth, while the mule that was under him went on.

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And a certain man saw it and told Joab, 'Behold, I saw Absalom hanging in an oak.' Joab said to the man who told him, 'What, you saw him? Why then did you not strike him there to the ground? I would have been glad to give you ten pieces of silver and a girdle.' But the man said to Joab, 'Even if I felt in my hand the weight of a thousand pieces of silver,

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I would not put forth my hand against the king's son. For in our hearing the king commanded you and Abishai and Ittai, 'For my sake protect the young man Absalom.' On the other hand, if I had dealt treacherously against his life, and there is nothing hidden from the king, then you yourself would have stood aloof.'

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Joab said, 'I will not waste time like this with you.' And he took three darts in his hand and thrust them into the heart of Absalom, while he was still alive in the oak. And ten young men, Joab's armor-bearers, surrounded Absalom and struck him and killed him." And may God bless to us this reading from his word.

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Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. We live in very angry times.

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Most people seem to go about with their thermostats turned hot most of the time. In New York City, a man gets angry when troubled on a subway and shoots four young men. He is acclaimed by many as a kind of vigilante. Women get together to stamp out drunk driving.

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They call their organization MAD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. We read in the newspapers more about the abuse of women and the abuse of children in families that are torn apart with anger. Some people are so upset with abortion that they're ready to bomb abortion clinics. Other people are ready to get angry and to demonstrate over questions as diverse as the building of nuclear weapons or the slaughter of baby seals.

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You go to the supermarket. You get a cart that has one wheel that doesn't work, so your cart always veers to the left. You bump into a woman who's bending over trying to determine the unit price of a can of tuna. She gives you a very indignant look.

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You finally get to the line where you're going to check out. It's the express line, and the fellow in front of you has more than ten items. You're standing there choking in smoke, which is coming from the people who are standing there smoking in front of the store's "No Smoking" sign. You notice that the woman going out in the other lane is buying some luxury items and paying for them with food stamps.

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It started to rain by this time. At last you get out of the store, and halfway across the parking lot, your bag splits in half and everything goes on the ground, and you're ready to explode. A few years ago, there was a motion picture made called "Network." It was the story of a man who went berserk, a news analyst on television.

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And one night, in the fury of his state, he invited all of those who were watching him to go to the windows of their homes, to throw open those windows, and to yell out into the night, "I am as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore." And in the film, thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people do just that. Well, it was only a movie. But the fact of the matter is, there are a lot of people about us in these days who are as mad as hell, and they don't want to take it anymore. This is so much a characteristic of our times, that some psychologists, Dr. Lowe foremost among them, have said that anger is the greatest single problem in most people's lives.

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Why? Well, we're concerned in this Lenten season with victorious living. So how do we win out over anger? How do we deal with the gripes of wrath? Let me suggest first that anger can be a very positive thing. It can be highly motivational and used to good purpose.

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The scriptures say, in no less than 376 different instances, that God himself got angry. Anger does not have to be a sin. Paul is described as being angry. Jesus is described as being angry. And the Bible teaches us, "Be angry, but sin not." A few weeks ago, when I was preparing to take my part in our production of Honegger's "King David," I sat down and read all the Davidic pericopes from the Old Testament.

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And one of those I shared with you in the scripture reading this morning. There was a time when Absalom, the son of David, revolted against the leadership of his father and tried to steal his father's throne. Now, David was very angry about this, and he organized his armies to fight this rebellion. But at the same time that he was angry about this, he was deeply concerned for his son.

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And so he said to those who would go out to carry out the battle for him, "Deal gently, for my sake, with the young man Absalom." Well, when the battle was over, the runners returned to tell David about it, and David asked not a single question about the battle. Instead, he asks on two different occasions, "Is it well with the young man Absalom?" You know from the scripture reading that it was not. He had been slain while hanging by his hair from the branches of an oak tree.

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But notice David's concern for this young man. Now, this young man had entered into a treacherous act. He had been treasonous against the king. He had rebelled against his own father. He had organized an armed insurrection, striking at the very heart of the nation. And David was angry about this and used military force to put it down.

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You see, his anger was controlled. His anger was disciplined by love. His anger had a positive purpose. Very great and powerful, good, motivational things can come out of a proper anger. Not too long ago, the Wall Street Journal said at the time when Lee Iacocca was taking over the leadership of the Chrysler organization, that he should simply let Chrysler die with dignity.

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And after that, Iacocca gave a speech which has been widely quoted. And in that speech, he said, "The Wall Street Journal has advised me to let Chrysler Corporation die with dignity. After all, we were flat broke. Our plants were industrial museums. The Michigan State Fairgrounds were full of our unsold cars. But I got mad. And my colleagues in Highland Park got mad. And tens of thousands of Chrysler people all across the land got mad.

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And our labor unions and our suppliers and our lenders got mad. We got so mad, we banded together, we talked things over, and working together, we fixed what was wrong at Chrysler." And then he concludes with this, "Wonderful things can happen indeed when Americans get mad. I think some well-directed anger can cure most of what's wrong in America today."

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Now notice what he's talking about, well-directed anger, the kind of anger that gets people to band together and talk things over and work in unity. That kind of anger can be used to positive purpose. It even moved the Apostle Paul. We read in Acts chapter 17 that Paul, when he was in Athens, was provoked. It was provoking within him when he saw that city full of idols. And so, it says, he preached.

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You see, out of anger can come good. We've seen it in the Philippines in the last weeks. A president who was not a president, a woman at his side who was apparently endlessly greedy, running roughshod over the people until finally a little lady named Apino, having seen her husband murdered and her land raped and her people pillaged, got mad. And she called other people to get angry with her, and they went out in their anger and laid down their bodies before tanks

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and lined up to become politically active, even at the risk of their lives. And thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of them began the process of cleaning up the Philippines. And Marcos is gone. Anger can have positive purpose. It can be used. But anger can also be abused.

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I read about a lady who had a very bad temper. She died. And at her funeral, just as they were lowering the casket into the grave, a storm came up, and the wind blew, and the rain fell, and the thunder rolled, and the lightning smashed and hit a tree right there in the cemetery. And as the lightning hit the tree, this woman's husband looked up toward heaven and said, "Well, she has arrived." Well, there are people who go about in a perpetual state of storm, and they do themselves a lot of harm.

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The physical response of the body to anger is quite overwhelming. Adrenaline is pumped into the blood. The heartbeat and the blood pressure go up. Red blood cells are multiplied in the bloodstream. The digestive processes stop, and many of these people lose their anger while they're at the table. The salivary glands stop functioning. The rectum and the bladder tighten up.

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The liver begins to pour sugar into the bloodstream. You begin to sweat. Blood vessels begin to contract. You know how people talk about anger. They say, "My blood boiled," or "I was hot under the collar," or "I really got uptight." That kind of thing can be very destructive to a person's body. And it can also lead to a dangerous depression. Depression is a distorted way of coping with stress. But there are some people, you see, who take their hurts and their disappointments and push them down inside.

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And eventually those hurts and disappointments concealed there will begin to turn into anger and hostility, and they create things like high blood pressure and ulcers, and even in some instances cellular decay and eventually death. The gripes of wrath are not something to smile about. And people who get angry like this, this abusive kind of language, of anger, they do not see or hear very clearly.

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You've heard people say, "I was so mad I couldn't see straight." And you know when you're encountering one of these people, you can't argue with them, you can't reason with them, you cannot expect them to think rationally because they have thrown away the control of themselves. Later they'll come and apologize and say, "I wasn't thinking." And that's true, they weren't thinking.

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See, anger can be used for motivational, positive purpose, but anger can also be very stupid and very cruel and very destructive. It led two doctors, a Dr. Frank Minnerth and a Dr. Paul Meyer, in a book called "Happiness is a Choice," to say that anger, either expressed or repressed, is probably the leading cause of death in our society. And anger of this kind, of course, ruins your Christian witness.

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Leonardo da Vinci, when he was working on "The Last Supper," had one of his assistants fail him. And he became very angry and lashed out at the man and verbally abused him and drove him out of his place. Well, the picture was being painted on the wall there in Milan. And then he went back to his work.

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And part of the picture he was working on was painting the face of Christ. And he found he couldn't paint it. He just couldn't paint the picture until he had gone to that man and apologized for the way in which he had treated him. And then, having gotten that straightened out, he could go back and paint again.

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And you cannot display the picture of Jesus when you are filled with wrath and indignation. Calm waters will reflect the beauty of the heavens above them, but storm-tossed waters do not reflect that beauty. And that's the reason the Scriptures say, "Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger be put away from you."

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Anger, you see, the gripes of wrath, can be very abusive. So how do we deal with this abusive kind of anger? Well, psychologists differ. Some say that we are to conceal our angers, push them down inside, repress them.

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Others say that we're to ventilate them, get it out of your system, let it fly. Interestingly enough, medical authorities and the Holy Scriptures differ with both of those viewpoints. You see, anger repressed often leads to depression, and anger expressed can lead to destruction. But what the Scriptures teach and what science echoes is this.

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Anger should be expressed, but not in a ventilating form. It is to be expressed in a disciplined and controlled manner. As David expressed it, he moved against that which had to be moved against, but his concern was for the individuals.

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Is it well with the young man Absalom? This is the kind of anger which we see in Jesus. It had purpose, but it was always disciplined by love. So when a situation happens in the home, and someone violates the rules of the family,

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and then, let us say, lies about it, you don't explode. You confront that person. You admonish that person. You deal with that person in the way that person should be dealt with.

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If it is a child, for example, handling out the punishment that is appropriate. But you don't make a big scene. The purpose, you see, is to use the anger constructively, and not destructively. You see, when you're dealing with anger, you always have a choice.

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Unless, of course, you are pathologically ill. Any normal person has a choice. Viktor Frankl, the great psychologist, was a prisoner of the Nazis during the Second World War in a concentration camp. And on one occasion, he was standing naked with a group of other Jewish prisoners in front of some Gestapo guards.

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And one of the guards noticed that he was wearing a gold wedding band, and he insisted that he take it off and give it to him. And as Frankl took the ring off and gave it to the guard, he said, "There is one thing that you can never take away from me,

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and that is my freedom to choose how I will react to whatever you want me to do." You see, the fact of the matter is, you can't blame it on fate, and you can't blame it on destiny, and you can't blame it on your genes. We are not animals.

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We are made in the image of God. And that means that we do not lose our tempers. If they go, it's because we throw them away. The person who forces you into an intemperate anger has conquered you.

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John Powell, on one occasion, was walking down the street with Sidney Harris, the columnist, and they stopped at a newspaper stand, and Powell bought a newspaper. And the newspaper fellow was very, very rude and gruff, slapped down the paper, slapped down the money. In fact, he was downright discourteous, even though Powell had approached him in a very kind and generous way.

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Sidney Harris said, "Do you stop at this newspaper stand often, every morning?" "Are you always nice to this fellow?" "Yes, I am." "And does he always respond in the same way?" "Yes, he does." "Well, why don't you tell him off?"

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And John Powell responded, "I don't want him to decide what kind of day I'm going to have or how I am going to respond." Now, we all know that we can control our tempers. Have you ever observed, for example, who you lose your temper with? You don't lose it with your boss.

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You lose it with your wife or with your husband. You lose it with somebody with whom you can get away with it or think you can get away with it. And that demonstrates to me that that kind of infantile behavior, while it is acceptable in an infant, is not acceptable in any adult. No person should so lose himself.

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Even a two-year-old learns very quickly just how far he can go with his temper tantrum. So when we're dealing with anger, remember, we're dealing with a matter of choice. You can choose to control it or you can choose to let it fly. And what Scripture calls us to is a controlled anger like that of David and like that of Jesus.

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Now, if you don't believe that you can make that kind of a choice, then there's another alternative, and that is this. You can learn how to change. That is, you can go to God for help. Even Vincent Peale, in his book, The Positive Power of Jesus Christ, tells of meeting a movie producer who was speaking about his father.

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He said, "My father had the worst temper of any person I have ever known. He used to break things, smash furniture. I was terrified of him as a child. And then my father became a Christian.

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And from that day on, his style of life was changed, and I never saw that kind of uncontrolled anger in him again. And I said to him one day, 'Dad, how is it that you have come to so control your temper?' And he responded, 'I have become Jesus' man, and that has made all of the difference.'" And the producer went on to say to Norman Peale, "Ever since the day my father told me that, I have never doubted the power of God."

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God can change you. That passage in the Bible that says, "Be angry, but sin not," which implies control, you see. You're angry, but you've got it under control so that it isn't sin. That passage is preceded by these words, "Be renewed in the spirit of your minds,

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and put on that new nature which is created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness." Then it says, "Be angry, but sin not," once you have God's Spirit inside of you. You know, Thomas Jefferson said, "If you got angry, you should count to ten, and if you got very angry, you should count to a hundred." Mark Twain read that, and he wrote, "If you get angry, you should count to four, and if you get very angry, you should swear."

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But the Holy Spirit of God, moving in the heart and the mind of James, caused these words to be written about anger. He said, "Be swift to hear," that is, learn to listen. "Be slow to speak," that is, measure your words. "And be slow to wrath."

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Now, when one moves, you see, in sensitive hearing and careful speaking, all guided by the presence of the Holy Spirit of God in a heart, then you can make that choice between an anger that is useful and an anger that is destructive. You can be changed if you want to.

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There was a young man studying medicine in his residency in one of our Pittsburgh hospitals. He had had polio when he was very young and was paralyzed from the waist down, went about the halls on crutches. It was obviously very hard, difficult for him. One of his classmates said to him on one occasion, "How did you become paralyzed?"

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He said, "I had polio when I was five years old." And the fellow said, "Well, it's really amazing to me that your polio has not made you bitter and angry at life. You always seem to be so much filled with goodness and concern for your patients. How is that?" And the young medical man said, "Well, you see, the disease paralyzed my legs. It never touched my heart."

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If you're serious about wanting to change, if you want your anger to be useful and purposeful and not destructive and abusive, if this is a desire of your heart, if your heart is not paralyzed, then Jesus Christ can enter in and make the changes that bring about the power of choice.

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So make a prayer like this, your own. "O Jesus, drop thy still dues of quietness till all my strivings cease. Take from my soul the stress and strain, and let my ordered life confess the beauty of thy peace."

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If you'll pray a prayer like that, and pray it again and again, especially in the testing and stressful moments, and if you will open your heart, the Holy Spirit of God will enter into you, and you will never again have to worry about the gripes of wrath.

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My friend, it is true of you as it is true of everyone else. Tell me what ticks you off, and I will tell you who makes you tick. Let us pray. O God, we pray this morning especially for those of our number

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who sometimes suffer and lead others to suffer by their uncontrolled anger. In stressful times like these, it's easy to rationalize, deliver them to a spirit of truth, help them to understand that choice in behavior is theirs.

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And as they open themselves to you, move into them to make them strong, to make them ones not mastered by anger, but ones who have mastered anger and can use it to good purpose and never abuse it to the hurt or harm of others. We pray for these, and we pray that thy Spirit will enter into them

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and work in them a mighty work that they might become more thine own, and thus richer blessings to all who know them and to all the world. We pray our prayer in Jesus' name. Amen. [Music]