What makes you angry?  Justin opened up his sermon with this question on Sunday.  The first thing that came to my mind was bad drivers. I am not sure what it is about people in New Mexico, but they certainly carry a reputation for being terrible drivers. People either drive too slow or very fast, they merge unexpectedly without signal, or they are swerving all over the place. My personal pet peeve when people do not slow down and pull to the right for emergency vehicles, especially because I drive one of those emergency vehicles. 

Justin talked about when Jesus went into the temple and turned over the tables and drove out the money changers. This is such a different picture of Jesus than I typically have in my head. Many things that make me angry really don’t matter in the long run and are not worth my energy. However, there are things that should make us angry and definitely deserve our time and energy. So many injustices happen every day, people are trafficked and made to do horrible things, senseless violence hurt loved ones, & disease and death takes those close to us. These types of things happen in our city and across the globe.  Injustice and sin in our world should stir up anger in us and move us to action.  This means standing up for the powerless and defending the weak and most importantly praying for God to bring justice.  I am reminded of these lyrics from a song by Jenny and Tyler:

“Where there is hatred, let me sow love

Where there is injury, let me pardon

Where there is darkness, let the Light come, come”

My prayer is that as a church we would have a righteous anger for the injustice we see and the results of sin that we experience in our lives and in this city. I pray that it would move us to action, and that God would use us in a powerful way to help those we encounter know His love. 

~ Stephen Siebert