I'm Just So Angry

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Rev. Carrie Holley-Hurt
October 12, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Anger, like all our emotions, can be a powerful tool for awareness, motivation, and value creation, but it has also been misused and abused. So what do we do with all this anger, and how do we disentangle it from all its baggage? Rev. Carrie explores anger and how we can cultivate a healthier relationship with it.

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

“But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification. For it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies and those with whom we have grave differences. Anger is loaded with information and energy.”

– Audre Lorde

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Reading

BLESSING IN THE ANGER
by Jan Richardson

Let it be no stranger.
Let it be visitor, teacher, guide.
Let it be messenger.
Come to tell us what we most need to know,
hard though its words may be to hear.
Trust Even when you cannot believe it,
that it will carry its own constellations,
that it knows what to do with what has shattered.
Trust that the other face of anger is courage,
that it holds the key to your secret strength,
that the fire it offers will light your way.

Sermon

Before I begin this sermon, I want to let you know that I am going to be talking about anger and some of that includes a discussion of abuse. I want to encourage you to take care of yourself. If you need to get up and walk around, leave, come back, not not come back…Please do not hesitate to tend to yourself.

I also want to remind you about our caring companions and that both Rev. Chris and I are here for you if you need pastoral care.

Now with that said, How many of you have uttered “I am just so angry.”

I have said this so many times lately and I have heard it so many times lately “I’m just so angry.”

When I hear this, I affirm and bless that anger.

I’ll say, “Yes it makes a lot of sense that you would be angry.” “Yes, anger is the appropriate response to the dismantling of our democracy.”

To the scapegoating.
To all the oppression, violence, marginalisation, and erasure.
To the absurdity of calling good things bad and bad things good.

Yes, to your anger!

And because of that I wish that this sermon could just be…. Your anger is holy because it is pointing you to action, its helping you hone and refining your values and skills, and it means you still have hope.
Blessings on you.
Blessing on your day.
Let’s go have some coffee.

But while anger is holy, and it does those things It also carries a lot of baggage and we have to acknowledge that baggage before we get to blessings and coffee.

Anger is holy …except when its policed.

The Harvard Kennedy Center did a study that showed that, and I quote,

“expressing anger decreases influence for women and African Americans but does not decrease the influence of white men.”

First off – duh!

Secondly, this is a pretty milk toast way to say that for marginalized groups… and I’m going to say that this includes most anyone who isn’t a white, cis, hetro, male … for those of us, anger is policed, it is policed differently depending on our set of identities, but it is policed and that can lead to real world ramifications.

For example, Bryan Stevenson, who by all measures is successful. Harvard Law Graduate, won cases before the supreme court, has received award after award often has judges assume he is the defendant because he is black. And when he corrects them, he has to be polite and not show his anger.

He said of one particular horrible encounter when the judge and prosecutor were mocking him he had to tell himself “you can’t get angry, you are going to have to smile” because he knew if he got angry, which would be a reasonable response. If he got angry it could impact the outcome for his client, which is exactly what the Harvard study showed.

Anger is policed differently depending on your unique identities but all of this policing is about power and control. Its about keeping you in your place – often with a threat attached to it.

Anger is holy but not everyone can express it freely and safely. And when we can’t express we trap our anger. It gets stuck.

Lama Rod Owens, wrote “If I am afraid of my anger and not dealing with the energy of anger, …that energy keeps cycling in our experience with no way for it to be expressed or metabolized.” It builds up and as we know what we push down, what we repress hurts us. It causes mental health issues like depression or even physical health issues like autoimmune disease.

And because white supremacy and patriarchy hurt everyone.

For white men, anger is often the only emotion that is socially acceptable to express. Not sadness, not hurt, not fear but anger. Thats what’s allowed. What awful feeling that must be.

Which brings me to my next point. Anger is holy… unless it’s protecting the wrong thing.

A few months ago I was doing that horrible ritual of doom scrolling when I came across a post from a relative that said “Y’all need proverbs not pronouns.”

My first thought was “Y’all is a pronoun”…kind of famously.

My next thought was… I’m going to comment that. That’s funny and its going to make this person look so stupid….

Y’all, my anger can make me mean and trust I was angry! And then, mercifully, the angels of my better nature closed my laptop.

Sometimes its easier to be angry then hurt, or scared, or sad. I wanted to lash out, to take this energy that came with the anger – blame that person for my feeling but something deeper knew that wasn’t going to help. I need to, as Lama Owens teaches, turn towards my woundedness. Or as Rev. Chris preached so beautifully last week, I needed to meet myself with compassion.

While anger can often be protective, it might actually be protecting us from something a bit deeper. Something we need access so that we can metabolize and process it.

For me that something a bit deeper was my sadness and grief. Grief over not getting a loving and supportive extended family. Grief over the state of the world. And the sadness and fear that I feel about how trans, non-binary, and intersex people are treated in our society.

I have a lot of sadness and grief that I am dealing with these days… and I know I am not the only one.

Anger is holy but sometimes it’s protecting the wrong thing. It’s preventing us from those other emotions that might feel too big or too scary to face.

Finally, anger is holy… except when it is used as an excuse for abuse.

For many people and probably some in this room, the anger of a parent, a partner, or even a random stranger has led to abuse. To pain, to violence both emotional and physical.

For those of us in this room who have had to shrink, had to do the impossible task of controlling everything so that their parents or partner wouldn’t get angry, wouldn’t hurt you. I am so sorry.

That should have never happened to you.

If you have complicated feelings around anger, yourself, or others, I completely understand.

I can understand how anger can be scary and unstable. I can understand how you might have felt the need to suppress your own anger and/or how you would have really complicated feelings around it.

But abuse isn’t about anger. Anger is often the excuse used but abuse is using behaviors in order to maintain power and control in a relationship. Abuse is about power and control.

Abusers weaponize anger as an excuse to exert their power and control. They take anger, which is an innate emotion and they weaponize it.

If you have experienced or are experiencing this, please know we are here for you. And If you are the person who has or is committing the abuse, please know we are here for you as well. You can reach out to a caring companion after service, or to me or Rev. Chris. We are here for you.

Anger is holy, but not when it has been weaponized for abuse.

If anger has been weaponized, it can be difficult to feel safe in yours or others feelings of anger. I get that.

And I still believe anger is holy.

I believe it is holy because it is an innate emotion and our emotions – all of them – pleasant and unpleasant are there to tell us something.

If we come to a place with our anger. If we can recognize all the ways anger has been misused and abused and start to separate that from what we are experiencing, I believe we can begin to listen to what it is telling us and use it as a tool.

One of the things that anger tells us, is that what is happening goes against my values. When we find ourselves faced with atrocities and we feel our anger rise, that is a powerful thing.

Because It helps us to hone in what we believe. As, our call to worship from Audre Lorde told us: “Anger is loaded with information and energy.” And right now, having a strong and clear understanding of your values is of the utmost importance because our values guide our actions and actions are what are needed right now.

Anger can help us activate to help others or even to protect ourselves and our loved ones… Like standing up for someone who is being harassed.

But I think that the reason we are sitting with so much uncomfortable anger these days is that there aren’t any immediate actions we can take.

Like when we watch videos of families being ripped from each other hundreds of miles away or we read dehumanizing proclamations about ourselves or our loved ones.

So what do with that anger then?

I don’t have all the answers – I have way more questions than answers, but I think that these instances, this activating anger, can be a way to motivate us into either the actions we can take.

For those big instances of injustices like what is happening with ICE or the dismantling of democracy, there is always something we can do, but there probably isn’t anything you can do alone.

I believe our anger calls us into community. Calling us to take our energy and our focus and place it with others. Whether through donating or volunteering, its calling us to join something bigger than ourselves that is holy work. This is the work of this church!

But let’s be honest, there are a lot of atrocities and donating to an organization isn’t exactly going to expel all that energy.

Which is why we need to, as our kids taught us, work to become aware of our anger. When we can listen to our bodies and name our anger we start to have agency over it. This skill, this building a relationship of agency with our anger is such an important skill for us to have.

And maybe, like our kids taught us, once we identify what’s going on we choose to move that energy throughout by moving our body or tearing up some paper. or another action.

And sometimes, anger might be calling us to learn to sit with our discomfort.

The work of transforming lives, doing justice to build the beloved community, isn’t going to be comfortable work, especially if we are doing it right. Sometimes we are going to have to sit with our anger.

And the good news is that if we acknowledge it then its not going to get stuck in us, cycling with no way to metabolize. When we acknowledge our emotions we can watch them like we would a wave, rise, peak and fall.

And from a place of agency we can learn from our anger. We can ask it- “Is it that there is a deep woundedness and I need to address? Is there some action i need to take?”

Or could it be that I am just human, having a human experience and my heart is open and because of that this is what I am feeling at this moment.

Finally, your anger means you still have hope. Because, even if you don’t feel hopeful, anger is a sign that you do believe that change is both necessary and possible.

Right now, we are experiencing a barrage of injustices. I believe the all the actions and messaging are to make you feel helpless and in despair. But I will not comply with despair. And we are not helpless.

Not a single word of the future has been written.

And so to remain hopeful when everything else is trying to make you give up, is to take back the narrative and act in a way that will write a different future than the one they are so desperately trying to sell us.

My friends, Your anger is holy, It is pointing you to action, It is honing and refining your values and skills, and it is full of hope.

May the fires it offers light our way.

Extinguishing the Chalice

We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.

Benediction

Our benediction today comes from Robert Monson.

I pray that love finds you today.
Love that reminds you that there is more than enough room in this world for nuance, for beauty, for grace overflowing.
And I pray that unconditional love and care and support be the anchor that holds you when the cruelty comes.
I pray that beauty and love show you how to be brave.

Go in peace.

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