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Morning Meditation in the Season of Pentecost
September 12, 2025
Reading: I Corinthians 3:18-23
Do not deceive yourselves. If you think that you are wise in this age, you should become fools so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in their craftiness,” and again, “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.” So let no one boast about people. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.
Meditation by Peter Vanderveen
In his small dictionary of words given theological meaning, Frederick Buechner had this to say about anger: “Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll your tongue over the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor the last toothsome morsel both of the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back – in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”
This is one of the most available and insightful comments on anger that I have ever encountered. I have thought of this often in the forty years since I first read it. Indeed, anger often is fun. It’s also seductive and addictive and clothed in a false righteousness. Like almost nothing else, it can feel most appropriate and most demanding – as if nothing else can possibly matter in comparison to the settling of accounts that seems only just. No matter the cost.
Anger is consuming. It’s the most effective and efficient way that we cannibalize ourselves, with crazy, viral energy. It’s deadly.
Once again this week we have all become witnesses to yet another assassination – anger let loose. And the greatest danger that arises from it is that it will unleash only more of the same. Accusations will fly. Partisan divisions will be accentuated. And we may well get caught up in the raging spiral of an anger that knows no bounds or satisfaction. And it can all seem so inevitable, so necessary, and, on all fronts, so absolutely right.
Yet it is exactly here, in the midst of our most destructive desires, that Paul casts his words. They interrupt us. They halt our surest angry convictions with the possibility that when we are most certain we may, in fact, be most deceived. With us, wisdom slips to craftiness, and craftiness to boasting, and the results are the awful realization of futility. Is this what we want for ourselves, to be the carcass remaining on the table? Paul offers us a very different opportunity. For, in place of anger, there is the redemption made visible and visceral in Jesus. In him all divisions cease. In him we are all drawn together. In him, the wisdom of God, impossible to comprehend, has triumphed in the world. And anger no longer has its favored place. It is made irrelevant in quiet absence. This is what the church professes. And our world needs the church – and our witness to this – more than ever.
Prayer
We will stand before you, O Lord, at the last,
and we will know as we are known,
and we will see what we have failed to see;
open our eyes to see and know
that we stand in your presence now,
that you are here before us
in the needs of family, friends, and strangers alike,
seeking our response of love;
grant that we may respond now in such a way
that we may be prepared to stand before you at the last.
Christopher Webber: Give Us Grace
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