Night Travelers: Rage - Holy Disruption. Amos 5:21-24 & Matthew 21:12-13

Night Travelers: Rage – Holy Disruption Amos 5:21-24 & Matthew 21:12-13

Rev. Dr. Rhonda Abbott Blevins April 19, 2026

I hate, I despise your festivals,

and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,

I will not accept them,

and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals

I will not look upon.

Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

But let justice roll down like water

and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it a den of robbers.”

Today we continue our six-week series called “Night Travelers” — drawn from the ancient image of the spiritual seeker who turns toward the darkness rather than fleeing it, trusting that the light they are looking for is found precisely in the places they were most afraid to go. Each week we are turning toward one of the difficult human emotions — not to be consumed by it, but to discover that God is already there.

Last week we turned toward anger — and we said something the church does not always say clearly enough: anger is not a sin. No human emotion is a sin. Emotions are signals.

They point toward something real — something loved, something violated, something that matters. The fire is not the problem. What we do with the fire is where ethics enters.

As for me, “I just started anger management. Apparently it’s all the rage right now.”

It is, isn’t it? We live in an age of rage. It is everywhere — in our politics, our social media feeds, our families, our traffic. Rage has become so ambient that we barely notice it anymore, the way you stop hearing the air conditioning after a while. It is just the sound of the room.

And the church’s typical response has been to counsel restraint. Cool down. Calm down. Rise above. Be the peace you wish to see in the world.

But this morning I want to suggest that we have been so busy managing rage that we have missed something important about it. Because there is a kind of rage that is not the problem. There is a kind of rage that is, in fact, the most faithful response available to us.

And we just sang about it.

A Mighty Fortress Is Our God is one of the most beloved hymns in the Christian tradition. Most of us think about it as a song of confidence and strength. What we sometimes forget is where it came from.

Martin Luther wrote it in 1529, during one of the most dangerous seasons of his life. He had been declared a heretic. He had been excommunicated. His life was under genuine threat.

The church he had devoted himself to — the institution he had trusted to carry the gospel

— had become, in his experience, a system that protected its own power at the expense of the truth it was supposed to serve. He had nailed his theses to a door not as a stunt but as a desperate act of prophetic witness: this is not what the house of God is for.

And out of that crucible of fury and faith, he wrote: A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.

Luther’s rage at religious corruption did not destroy his faith. It deepened it. It drove him back to the God who was larger than the institution, more faithful than the system, more trustworthy than the leaders who had betrayed their calling. His rage became the fuel for one of the great reforms in the history of Christianity.

That is what prophetic rage can do. That is the kind of anger we are talking about today.

Because there is a particular kind of anger that doesn’t just flare and subside. It is the anger that accumulates — that builds over time as injustice goes unnamed, as the vulnerable continue to be overlooked, as the powerful continue to be protected, as the gap between what we say we believe and how we actually live keeps widening. It is the anger that has watched wrong things be normalized for so long that it has hardened into something with more weight, more gravity, more force.

We might call it rage.

And today I want to suggest that rage — at its best, in its most faithful form — is not a spiritual problem to be managed. It is a prophetic gift to be honored. It is the emotion that, more than any other, refuses to let us make our peace with what God has not made peace with.

The central question today is this: can anger be a form of love — and even a form of prayer?

Let us begin with God who says through the prophet, Amos:

I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

— Amos 5:21

I want to sit with that for a moment, because it is one of the most startling sentences in all of Scripture. God — the God of Israel, the God who instituted these very festivals, who gave

the instructions for the solemn assemblies, who commanded the burnt offerings — that God is now saying: I hate them. I despise them. They are noise to me. Take them away.

This is not mild divine disappointment. This is not a gentle course correction. This is rage. And it is coming from God.

The question we have to ask is: what has provoked it?

The answer is in the verses surrounding this passage. The people of Israel in Amos’s time were performing their religion with great enthusiasm and considerable expense. The temples were full. The offerings were generous. The music was elaborate. By any external measure, things were going well for organized religion.

But outside the temple courts, justice was being trampled. The poor were being exploited. The vulnerable were being crushed. The legal system had been corrupted so that those with power and money consistently won and those without consistently lost. And the people who were doing all of this — or tolerating all of this — were the same people showing up on the Sabbath, offering their sacrifices, singing their hymns, and going home feeling that they had done their religious duty.

And God, through Amos, says: enough.

Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

This is the verse we know. This is the verse that gets carved into the walls of civil rights museums and quoted at justice rallies and printed on banners. And it is beautiful. But we sometimes quote it as though it were a gentle aspiration — a lovely image of what we hope the world might someday become.

It is not gentle. It arrives at the end of a volcanic divine tirade. It is the demand that follows the rejection. God is not wistfully imagining a better world. God is furious at this one — and telling us exactly what needs to change.

Now let us go to Matthew 21, because here we see the same rage embodied in flesh.

Jesus has just entered Jerusalem on a donkey — the so-called triumphal entry, which is actually a deeply subversive act. He has chosen a donkey rather than a warhorse, announcing a kingdom that does not operate by the logic of military power. The crowds are cheering. The Pharisees are nervous. The city is in an uproar. This is the first of two staged protests Jesus leads.

Then Jesus goes to the temple.

What he finds there is commerce. Money changers. Dove sellers. The outer courts — the only space in the entire temple complex where Gentiles were permitted to worship — had been converted into a marketplace. The one place designated for the nations to come and

pray had been colonized by economic activity, turned into a revenue stream, made inhospitable to the very people it was supposed to welcome.

And Jesus — the same Jesus who blessed the children and told us to turn the other cheek and said the meek would inherit the earth — overturns the tables. The second of two staged protests Jesus leads.

This is not a quiet theological disagreement. This is physical disruption. This is bodies moving through space with force. This is Jesus, the Prince of Peace, making a scene.

Why?

The answer is in two texts that Jesus quotes back to back. First Isaiah: “My house shall be called a house of prayer” (Isaiah 56:7). And then Jeremiah: “But you have made it a den of robbers” (Jeremiah 7:11).

The juxtaposition is everything. What the temple was supposed to be — a house of prayer for all nations, a place where the outsider could draw near to God — and what it had become: a system that exploited the poor by extracting their money for doves (the wealthy would be sacrificing lambs, not doves). It was a system that excluded the Gentiles and baptized the whole arrangement with religious legitimacy.

Jesus’ rage is not about the money per se. It is about what the money represents: a religion that has turned the grace of God into a commodity, that has made access to the holy dependent on what you can pay, that has used the machinery of worship to serve the interests of the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable.

Sound familiar?

There is a thread that runs directly from Amos to Jesus to every generation of the church since. It is the thread of prophetic rage — the holy fury of those who love God and love people and cannot bear to watch one be used as a weapon against the other.

I want to be honest with you this morning about something — I shared briefly about this last week.

There is a kind of Christianity that has always made me angry. Not the faith itself — I have given my life to the faith, and I would do it again. But the version of it that has too often been used as a cudgel. The version that uses the language of God to exclude, diminish, and harm. The version that fills its sanctuaries and empties its conscience. The version that sings on Sunday and oppresses on Monday and never notices the contradiction.

I have watched religion be weaponized. I have sat with the people it has wounded — the ones who left and never came back, the ones who stayed and shrank themselves to fit, the ones who were told that God’s love had conditions they could never quite meet. I have

watched the outer courts of welcome be converted, again and again, into something that serves insiders at the expense of outsiders.

And I have felt the rage of it.

For too long, I stayed in an exclusionary religious system, telling people — and myself — that I was working to “change it from within.” Hah! Why did I stay too long? Part of it felt like a calling. But the more honest answer: I stayed too long because of fear. I didn’t know another way. I was unfamiliar with religious communities — churches like Chapel by the Sea — who would allow a woman to be its pastor, who would welcome LGBTQ+ folks in all forms of leadership, who live out a faith based on love of God and love of neighbor — especially our marginalized neighbor. My “change from within” mantra was mostly a cop out. I was afraid to leave.

What I learned through my own journey — what Amos and Jesus both model for us today

— is that there is a kind of rage that is not a failure of faith. It is an expression of it. It is the emotion that arises in us when we love what God loves, and we watch it be harmed. It is the fire of those who take the gospel seriously enough to be furious when it is betrayed.

Brené Brown writes that anger is almost always protecting something more vulnerable underneath. I have asked myself many times: what is my rage about the church protecting?

And the answer, every time, is the same: it is protecting the gospel. The real one. The one where the table is wide and the welcome is genuine and the love of God is not a transaction. It is protecting the people in the outer courts — the ones who were told there was no room for them, who were turned away at the door, who concluded that God must not want them because the church clearly didn’t.

I discovered that my rage is a form of love. And I suggest that yours might be too.

But here is where we have to be careful — and where Amos and Jesus both give us guidance.

Prophetic rage is not the same as personal grievance dressed up in theological language. The test is always: who is this anger on behalf of? God’s rage in Amos is not about God’s wounded pride. It is about the poor being crushed, the vulnerable being exploited, the covenant community failing its most basic obligations to its most vulnerable members. Jesus’ rage in the temple is not about personal offense. It is about the outer courts — the space for the Gentiles, the outsiders, the ones already marginalized — being taken away.

Holy rage is always, at its root, on behalf of someone. It is always oriented outward, toward justice, toward repair, toward the restoration of what has been broken. The moment it turns inward — the moment it becomes about our own wounds rather than the wounds of others, about our own ego rather than the violation of God’s love — it has lost its prophetic character and become something else.

This is the discipline that rage requires: not suppression, but direction. Not silence, but wisdom about when and how and on whose behalf we speak.

The Amos passage gives us the image: justice rolling down like waters. Waters do not rage randomly. They find the lowest places — the places of greatest need — and they fill them. That is the direction holy rage moves: always toward the lowest place, always toward the one most in need of the water.

There is one more thing I want to say before we close.

The temple Jesus disrupted was not destroyed that day. The money changers came back. The dove sellers set up their tables again. The system that Jesus overturned with such force was largely intact by the next morning.

And Jesus knew it would be.

He did not overturn the tables because he believed one dramatic act would reform the entire religious establishment. He overturned them because some things need to be named, and disrupted, and refused — not because the disruption will immediately fix everything, but because silence is its own kind of complicity. Because there are moments when the most faithful thing you can do is make visible what everyone has agreed to pretend is not there.

The prophetic act is rarely the one that changes everything immediately. It is the one that refuses to normalize what God has not normalized. It is the one that says, clearly and at cost: this is not what the house of prayer is for.

We are called to be those people. Not constantly enraged — that is exhausting and ultimately counterproductive. But willing, when the moment comes, to turn over a table. To name what is wrong. To refuse the false peace that requires someone else’s suffering as its foundation.

So here is the invitation I want to leave you with today.

Ask yourself this week: what have I made peace with that I should not have made peace with? What injustice have I slowly normalized? What wrong have I gradually stopped noticing because noticing it was too uncomfortable? Where have the outer courts of welcome in my own life — in my own community, my own church, my own relationships — been quietly converted into something less hospitable than they were meant to be?

Let the discomfort of that question be information. Let it be a signal. Let it be the beginning of a prophetic act — however small, however quiet — that says: this is not what the house of prayer is for.

Justice rolling down like waters does not begin with a flood. It begins with one person noticing where the ground is dry — and refusing to pretend otherwise.

In a few moments we are going to sing together a song that knows exactly what prophetic rage sounds like when it has been transfigured into something that can move mountains.

James Weldon Johnson wrote Lift Every Voice and Sing in 1900 — for a celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday at a segregated school in Jacksonville, Florida, where Johnson was the principal. He wrote it for a choir of five hundred children. He did not think much of it at first. He set it aside. But the song traveled — passed hand to hand, congregation to congregation, community to community — and within two decades the NAACP had named it the Negro National Anthem.

Listen to what Johnson was carrying when he wrote it: the fresh memory of slavery. The grinding reality of Jim Crow. The violence of a society that had promised freedom and delivered a different kind of bondage. He had every reason to be consumed by rage, to be destroyed by bitterness, to conclude that the God of the Exodus had forgotten his people again.

Instead he wrote: Lift every voice and sing, till earth and heaven ring, ring with the harmonies of liberty.

That is not the absence of rage. That is rage that has been carried all the way through — past bitterness, past despair, past the temptation to go silent — and emerged on the other side as something that can still sing. It is the sound of a people who have looked at the darkness directly, who have not pretended it was anything other than what it was, and who have refused — absolutely refused — to let it have the last word.

That is the night traveler’s song. That is what holy rage, faithfully carried, can sound like.

Martin Luther wrote his fortress hymn from a place of prophetic fury at a corrupted church. James Weldon Johnson wrote his anthem from a place of prophetic fury at a corrupted nation. Both of them turned the darkness toward the light. Both of them refused to normalize what God had not normalized. Both of them left us songs we are still singing more than a century later.

We are invited into that same tradition today.

Come, night travelers. There is holy work to do in the darkness. Let us lift every voice — and sing.