Ephesians 4:17-32
This passage reminds me about my parents when it says do not let the sun go down on your anger. My parents were divorced, my father moving out of the family home when I was five years old. I know that this affected my siblings even more than it did me. I was able to maintain a relationship with both parents and eventually found a great friend in my father for many years before he passed. I had the unique vantage point to see each of them and how they reacted to each other. Clearly there were some strong emotional problems that might have been worked out but they were not minor ones. What I noticed is that the love they had never diminished even though they had separated. The problems they each had may have been too much for them to work at or more than than they were willing to work at, who knows, but the love remained. It's a curious thing to me.
In the ensuing years after their separation, each made life decisions as is necessary for simply living but the result was that those decisions took them farther and farther apart. Reconciliation, though attempted several times, was made virtually impossible. Still the spark of love and concern remained. Why do I write this? It has less to do with being specifically a gay person as I would usually write about but has everything to do with any loving person, any relationship and specifically this passage. Do not let the sun go down on your anger. Make up before you go to sleep. Do not hold onto anger. All this anger is poison to a relationship to the point that eventually it overtakes the possibility of reconciliation like a scab that leaves the skin forever marred.
There are so many messages one could take from this passage, I chose the message of love and forgiveness that is universal to all humanity. It is necessary for life, relationships and continued growth. I saw a couple in love grow further and further apart with every choice made and never the need to say "I am sorry". Our pride perhaps or unwillingness to take a tough step forward. Loving thy neighbor as self is not easy but is what we are called to do in life, with friends, spouses and everyone.
Now this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer live as the Gentiles live, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart. They have lost all sensitivity and have abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practise every kind of impurity. That is not the way you learned Christ! For surely you have heard about him and were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus. You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbours, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labour and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.
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