A Sermon delivered by Tamara Lebak, Associate Minister
At All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, OK
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Growing up in Oklahoma, I remember
seeing bumper stickers that said, “I’m mad too, Eddie!" I didn't really know what everyone was
particularly mad about, but at even as a kid I could sense that there was
something not quite right in the world. I
was beginning to experience a palpable hypocrisy – a sense that adults really
didn’t have it all figured out. And it would
fuel my teenage angst for years to come.
Do you remember those
bumper stickers? They were all over Oklahoma and Texas.
Do any of you know Eddie’s
Last name? Eddie Chiles. For those of you who may not know, Eddie
Chiles was born in Itasca, Texas,
and worked as an oil patch roustabout before hitchhiking to Norman in 1930. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma
with a Bachelor of Science in Petroleum Engineering in 1934. After working as a Sales Engineer with Reed
Roller Bit Company in Houston, he founded The Western Company of North
America, which served the petroleum industry with technical
services required in the discovery
and production of oil and gas.
In a sense, Chiles was a
walking example of the American Dream. He
started his company with little more than two trucks, three employees, and the
will to succeed. At its peak, the
Western company had over 5,000 employees and annual worldwide revenues of over
500 million dollars.
I can only imagine
how angry my own grandfather was at the time. He was a member of the International
Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Union when the popular commercials for
Western came out with the memorable tag line: “If you don't have an oil
well, get one—you'll love doing business with Western!" Our family was far from capable of
purchasing an oil well, so this suggestion that regularly aired on the radio
seemed completely absurd. Yet, it was a sign of the times, in a booming
oil economy.
You may know Chiles’ name in
association with baseball if not with petroleum. In 1980, Chiles purchased the Texas Rangers
and served as Chairman of the major league club until 1989. Through his radio commentaries, Chiles became a
folk hero in parts of the nation. His
trade-mark sign-on was, “I’m Eddie Chiles, and I’m mad!” which created an
incredible demand for bumper stickers that read: ”I'm mad too, Eddie!” They were everywhere in Oklahoma
and Texas –
oil country.
Why was Eddie Chiles
mad? Eddie Chiles was mad because the
federal government was beginning to take a more active role in regulating the
Oil and Gas industry. Eddie Chiles was
angry about baseball's high-spending battle to sign free agents. Signing stars like outfielder Richie Zisk to
a ten-year, 2.9 million dollar contract made a perennial money loser of the
Texas Rangers. To Chiles, his 4
million dollar investment in buying the Texas Rangers was another example of all
he had done to cure the country's ills. Chiles said, "I
bought the club as a general civic duty.
We have to improve the quality of life here." Eddie Chiles felt that the American Dream was
threatened by the then Democratically dominant Congress, and by the rising
costs of a quality baseball team.
Chiles
also participated in a conservative radio campaign that peaked just before the
1980 presidential election that sounded like this:
Announcer: “Are you mad today, Eddie Chiles?
Eddie Chiles: “Yes
I'm mad. I'm sad for the Americans who
are trying to raise a family and trying to buy a home
when the liberals in Washington
are spending more and more to destroy the American dream. – You get mad, too.”
Interestingly, when
they tried to go national with these ads, they were met with another kind of
resistance. During a test of the radio
spots in Manchester, New
Hampshire, residents said they were “irritated” by his Texas accent.
Chiles' critics began to get mad too.
Chiles
was under fire for using
the Government when it suited his purpose. Even though he was opposed to the government’s
involvement, Chiles
gladly accepted almost $108 million in federal loan guarantees to build
offshore drilling rigs. Texas radio stations carrying Chiles' messages were accused of
violating the Federal Communications Commission's "fairness
doctrine," which requires the airing of opposing views.
A lot has changed
since 1980. On the air waves, in
politics, in the oil and gas industry, and with the economy. With current $4.00 per gallon gas prices not
even related to infrastructure taxes, I would doubt that Chiles or his critics
would consider this future the one they imagined. Although my guess is that they would still
blame each other for the current state of union. They would each blame the other for the
economy, whether or not they agree with Phil Graham that “we are in a mental
recession and are a nation of whiners.” I’m
sure Chiles
and his critics would blame each other for the state of the government – our
current situation being a direct result of the legacy of that particular democratic congress or
that particular Republican President. Although Chiles and his critics might
actually agree about the state of baseball, with Barry Bonds tipping the scales
now at over 188 million dollars in career earnings (without bonuses.)
According to a recent study conducted by researchers at New York University’s Department of Psychology, people
who see the world as essentially fair, maintain this perception through a diminished sense of moral outrage.
So in order to maintain a perception that the world is fair they must be disengaged enough to have a diminished
sense of moral outrage.
Even though we may be sitting in considerable privilege,
even though there is considerable beauty, and love, and friendship, and
compassion and grace, we still see unfairness.
Rabbi Abraham Heschel, civil rights leader and Jewish Scholar, wrote, “There
is no justice; there is only injustice. And
there is only one response to injustice, and that is outrage.” So as religious people we can say with
honesty and pride, “I’m mad, too, Tamara!”
As a religious people, we should
be outraged, incensed, and down right ticked off at the state of the world. Why? Because
what we are outraged about demonstrates to the world what we value. What we are outraged about shows the world
that we are invested; that we are taking responsibility; that we will not sit
idly by while someone else defines what is important to us, or makes choices
that disregard our values.
Those who penned the Hebrew and Christian scriptures knew
something about moral outrage. God is in
no way neutral. Yahweh is pretty
incensed and, might I say, so is Jesus, who happens to be my example for moral
outrage. For these stories to echo in
the hearts and minds of human beings for centuries we must assume that they
have something to say about human nature: that we too are not outside the realm
of anger, of judging, and judgment. What
I mean is, that we must make judgment and we are called to take a stand (as
Marlin said last week) to be invested in what we value enough to be angry about
it. What I fear the most is that we are
so overwhelmed with our own outrage that we do not even know where to begin, and
so we numb ourselves to the state of the world.
We choose ignorance over outrage.
In The Dance of Anger, Harriet Lerner
writes: "Those who are locked into ineffective expressions of anger suffer
as deeply as those who dare not get angry at all." All week I have been immersed in the physiology
and the psychology of anger. And the
reality is, that anger doesn’t feel good.
When angry, we are fearful of losing control. Too much anger causes stress, and even has
negative effects on our health. One of
the themes in all of my reading on anger is the question of whether or not anger
is an inevitable part of life. Is anger
just another emotion that must be controlled and tempered by reason? I don’t know about you, but reason never
seems to work when
I’m angry, or when I am with someone who is angry. When we have reached the full state of anger
we are
no longer reasonable. In the midst of
anger it is not reason we
need. When we are in the midst of anger
we need beauty, or humility, or humor, or love.
We need something to unhook us from our dehumanizing defenses, and then
we can revisit reason.
Abraham Heschel has
also written, “In a controversy, the instant we feel anger, we have already ceased
striving for [the] truth and have begun striving for ourselves.” When we are angry, when we truly feel
threatened by our circumstances, we move to protect ourselves. Our faces flush, our hearts race, our
breathing quickens, our jaws clench. Inside
our brains, neurotransmitter chemicals are released causing us to experience a
burst of energy lasting up to several minutes. This burst of energy is behind the common
angry desire to take immediate protective action. The blood literally moves to our large muscle
groups and away from our brain, and we can only focus on the target of our
anger and our response. The person we
are angry with becomes an object trapped in time. They become trapped by our single experience
of them as a threat. One side of them,
or one facet, or one word they have spoken, triggers a chain reaction and we
can no longer engage with them as whole person.
They are no more than that
event, that comment, that perceived threat.
“Anger storms between
me and things, Transfiguring,“ says the poet Mary Oliver.
Buechner says we begin to
“lick [our] wounds, to smack [our] lips
over grievances long past, roll over our tongue the prospect of bitter
confrontations still to come, savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain
[we] are given and the pain we are giving back— it is a feast fit for a king! The chief drawback is that what [we] are
wolfing down is [ourselves]. The
skeleton at the feast is you.”
We must learn to put the
fork down. We must learn how to not act
out of that pain and realize that that kind of hunger does not ever make us
feel full. We must learn how to
be angry.
With our significant
others, with family, and at injustice. With
our significant others, we can use these instances of anger to shed light on
who we are and what we value – on our own story. The kind of anger that points to the path of
transformation, of integration, when we are aware that our anger is out of
proportion with the context of what is happening… this is a key opportunity for
transformation. That is the moment of
opportunity, when we are angry and some voice inside knows that we have a
choice. We can recognize that we have
been here before in some way, and face the decision: will we put on our armor
and defend ourselves? Or will we step
completely outside the frame of the argument and into humility? Have you been there? It happens when a situation calls for an ouch and you strike back with an
arsenal. It happens when you stay in the
fight long after you know that your response is exaggerated. Maybe it is to protect your ego, or because
it feels familiar. But what would happen
if you named to the person you lashed out at that your anger felt bigger than the situation? What if you acknowledged that kind of anger
is likely not about the content of that particular argument or that particular
circumstance?
So why were you so
angry? Because something you truly value,
that you really want to protect, was threatened. You’ll have to do some searching to figure
out what that thing is. Or some old narrative has been tripped. Sometimes that anger is about an unfinished
situation in the past that you have brought into the present moment. It can be about a time when that thing you
value was threatened before and you brought it into this moment, because something about the
circumstances felt familiar.
The same thing
happens with our families. This weekend I
saw the production of Are We there
Yet, starring our very own All Souls Choir member Mike Pryor. It is all about families and family dynamics. There is a great song in the show that points
to the familiar poking of our families that can really hook us. The lyrics are: “Your parents push your
buttons because they put them there!” The
point is that the narrative of anger is sometimes ingrained. It’s old.
We have grown and changed since then, and with a little humility we have
the option of making different choices.
We do need to pay
attention to what pushes our buttons. We
need to identify what draws us out of the moment and into a narrative of
threat, because what pushes our buttons is directly linked to what stirs the
depths of our heart. It seems to me that
the anger itself is not the problem. We
must learn how to be angry. And we must learn how to respond
to the anger that we feel. For it is a
spiritual teacher. It reminds us when we
have hurt, or what we value most in our lives.
When we can articulate our grief and our pain around those things that
have angered us in the past, we can respond to our own anger with integrity.
The Greek word for anger
actually carries the meaning of grief and sadness. Responding to our anger with integrity – with
our moral compass intact – requires
us to sort out the anger from the grief.
Sort out the anger from the sadness.
We respond with integrity to our anger when we are more assertive in the
moment about articulating those wants and needs, and when we are open to the
fact that the means to achieving those wants and needs might actually be
different than we expected. When we
learn the difference between being assertive and being aggressive, we are well
on our way to responding morally to outrage.
I would actually argue for a re-evaluation of including anger
as a deadly sin, for it is the inappropriate expression of that anger that is the sin. When our behavior is out of context with what we believe. When we are acting out of the ordinary, and
not of our moral character. The sin, I
believe those early church fathers were pointing to, is actually aggression, or wrath, or vengeance,
not anger.
In the letter to the
Ephesians, the early church wrote, “Be angry, but do not sin; do not make room
for the devil.” Our anger – our moral
outrage – in my opinion, points to hope.
When we are angry at the
way we are being treated, or the injustices in the world, we are acknowledging
what we value. We are acknowledging that
we have a stake in and an investment in this life. And that we will not be apathetic or
ignorant. I believe that when we are
angry, we are acknowledging our hope in the possibility of a world that could
be different. That is moral outrage.
Our sense of what is
right and what is wrong in this world, and our anger toward it means that we
are invested in seeing that the wrongs of the world are righted. I’m Tamara Lebak and
I’m mad. I am sad that there are
children in the world and in this country who go to bed hungry. Are you mad, too? Maybe we need a little litany. Try it with me: “I’m mad too, Tamara!” I’m angry that we are still at war. I’m angry that our veterans do not receive
the respect they deserve and the care they need. I’m angry that our planets limited resources
are being squandered by a system that I am a participant in. I’m angry at homophobia: that my primary
relationship is discounted and dismissed and that Oklahoma will not let my partner and I
domestically adopt or foster a child. I’m
angry that everyone does not have access to quality health care. I’m angry that we imprison the mentally ill
and the addicted. I’m angry that people
kill in the name of God.
I am angry at absolutism, classism, and dualism. Egoism, fatalism, and hedonism. Ignore-a-tism,
imperialism, and materialism. Over-intellectualism,
nihilism, and pessimism. Racism,
reductionism, sexism, and triumphalism.
Are you mad, church? Let us get angry about what really matters to
us. Let us remain morally outraged
together, so that this world knows what we care about, and what we will not
tolerate.
Amen.
______________________
Buechner Wishful
Thinking: A Theological ABC
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