Naming the Hurt
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – March 13, 2022
Naming the Hurt – Ephesians 4: 25-32
Is it okay to be angry? Nice Christians don’t always seem to think so.
I don’t know if it’s as familiar to you as it is to me, but there’s a scene in the beginning of The Wizard of Oz where Aunty Em is upset with Elvira Gulch. She tells her, “For twenty-three years I’ve been dying to tell you what I thought of you and now, well, being a good Christian woman, I can’t say it.”
She sort of gets her point across to Elvira who turns into the Wicked Witch in Dorothy’s dream of Oz, but in that line Auntie Em also evidences a conflation many of us carry that anger and sin as unbehooving of a good Christian are inextricably linked.
What then are we to make of today’s passage in which this early Christian letter written in honor of the Apostle Paul implores us to “be angry” but not to sin? How do we best tease those two things apart? And how might doing so help us to tell the truth and practice forgiveness?
In The Book of Forgiving Desmond and Mpho Tutu lay out a four-fold path to forgiveness which includes 1) Telling the Story, 2) Naming the Hurt, 3) Granting Forgiveness, and 4) Renewing or Releasing the Relationship. Like many other scholars in the fields of psychology and pastoral care, the Tutus point out that anger in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, what anger often tells us is that something is wrong or that we are hurt.
In explaining the second step of the four-fold path, “Naming the Hurt,” the Tutus point out that refusing to feel our anger and acknowledge our hurt often leads us to harm others or to harm ourselves. Today’s passage seems familiar with that human penchant to hide our hurt until it causes us to lash out at each other.
The letter of Ephesians advises Christ followers to “speak the truth” and “to not let the sun go down on [our] anger,” lest we “make room for the devil.” I don’t know about you but this passage has my number. My emotions are usually bigger, slower moving, and more uncomfortable than I often find convenient.
Anger for a woman can be an especially inconvenient emotion. Those of us who identify as men can often feel that anger is the only acceptable emotion to display rather than the hurt that lies beneath. Those of us who identify as women, in contrast, have often been taught to be nice, polite, and never angry. As an adult, it has taken me a lot of work to notice, acknowledge, and be curious about my anger instead of pushing it down and allowing it to fester.
Neurobiologists who study anger are now telling us that we have at most 90 seconds between the stimulus (whatever provoked our anger) and our response which can sometimes include physical or emotional violence and always includes a cascade of stress hormones meant to aid our survival. My belief is that acting out in violence is the kind of sin the writer of Ephesians would have us avoid. But letting the sun go down on our anger or ignoring that uninterrupted internal cascade of stress hormones can be just as harmful since it can lead to serious physical, mental, and emotional problems for ourselves and if undealt with can still lead to violent outbursts later on.
We can’t always catch ourselves in that first 90 seconds of anger, but whenever we realize we are still stewing on something, we can choose to slow down, care for ourselves, and name the hurt. It’s not weak to acknowledge hurt. It’s actually strong and courageous. It’s also truthful, and it’s what leads to the ability to heal.
In the Disney movie Encanto, Mirabel’s sisters Luisa and Isabel have big beautiful songs that describe the hurt they are holding in related to the pressure they feel to always uphold the image of being strong or perfect. But muscles and rose petals are not all these women are made of. Sometimes they cry. Sometimes they are more prickly than pretty. Acknowledging their hurt and their fears to their sister and to themselves is part of their family’s journey toward forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation.
I think that kind of truth-speaking is what the writer in Ephesians is inviting Christians to be about. “Speak the truth” the writer implores, “and let no evil talk come out of your mouths.” I’m glad it says both those things, because it helps me to understand that it’s okay to name my hurt. It reminds me that doing so is actually one of the best ways to avoid evil, hurtful words or actions. And it allows me to move along my forgiveness journey.
The Tutus’ book and the internet are full of amazing stories about forgiveness–about people who have forgiven the most heinous crimes against themselves or their loved ones and in some cases become like family with the very people who maimed and murdered their own family. But I don’t want to tell you those stories today. Because I don’t want any of us to be deluded into thinking that that kind of forgiveness comes easy or can always be wrapped up in the neat packages that make for a good NPR article. Those stories can be inspiring and instructive. But if we think that the work of forgiveness is done by someone else or some superhuman without big feelings then we will never catch it’s healing promise for ourselves.
The journey of forgiveness is not polite. It is not always easy. It cannot be done only with the head. It involves the heart and very often the body, where memories of hurt and trauma tend to reside.
Like the writer of Ephesians, I have no doubt that God in Christ forgives us our every transgression, and I find that to be a precious, genuinely life-saving-in-the-here-and-the-hereafter gift. Yet, we are not God or Jesus. Our practice of forgiveness can include a lot of messy, inconvenient naming-the-hurt times before we can feel ready to be anything like kind, tenderhearted, and forgiving.
Those beautiful stories of forgiveness can be our stories, too, if we’re willing to walk through the not so beautiful, hard, messy reality of anger and hurt. The path to forgiveness does not go around but travels through those dark woods.
Auntie Em is on the verge of it when she tells Elvira Gulch that “just because [Elvira] owns half the county doesn’t mean she can control the rest of [them].” Her anger is breaking through. It’s helping her stand up to Elvira. Maybe, just maybe it will lead her next to a place where it's safe to feel the hurt and let go of the pain she’s been holding those 23 years. How much stronger would that little part of Kansas be with an Auntie Em who could be angry and speak her mind with compassion?
I think that when we take time to really feel our anger and name our hurt, we allow all our defenses to be broken down–all our denial and pretending. That place, I suspect, is the place where we can best understand the humanness that connects us all and the way we are all connected in Christ. After we have been to that place, then we can better consider how to “speak the truth in love” as Ephesians chapter 4 tells us, and to hear the truth of others who are also part of the body of Christ “ joined and knit together… promot[ing] the body’s growth in building itself up in love.” After all, what leads to terrible violence between neighbors and between countries but unmet needs, unaddressed anger, and unnamed hurt?
We cannot single-handedly end all violence in the world. We can, however, hope to avoid adding to the violence by naming our own hurt, asking for God’s help to forgive, and acknowledging our connectedness to one another.
May it be so. Amen.
