Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent
“And the last state of that man is worse than the first”
It is a terrifying picture really, the picture of the darkness of utter desolation. It is something which our contemporary culture knows about or, at least, experiences in one way or another. We have all been there. “I am desolate and in misery,” the Psalmist says. You know about desolations and miseries. It may because of sorrow and loss; it may be because of hardship and troubles. It may be because of the enmity of others or it may be because of our own sinfulness. “Look upon my adversity and misery, / and forgive me all my sins.”
It can lead to a sense of hopelessness, the sense of utter futility, the sense of the empty nothingness of life.
We live, of course, in a world that is seemingly full of everything; there is a fullness of images. We are constantly besieged and bombarded by a vast array of images which flicker and dance before our imaginations. The consequence is that our sensual imagination is overloaded. What are these images? They are the images of violence and self-indulgence; in short, the images of destruction and consumption.
And yet, there is a terrible emptiness to this fullness of images. They are, as it were, nothing worth and quite unsatisfactory. But, they consume us. We are possessed by what beguiles us. We find that we are strangers to ourselves. We are alienated from ourselves.
What shall we do? Shall we empty our selves of these empty images through some heroic effort of will? Just disconnect the internet? Pull the plug on the TV? Perhaps, but is it really “nirvana,” a state of empty nothingness that we seek? For in the culture of images even the emptying ourselves of the images of sensual immediacy is to find ourselves empty and lost. Whether we are full of these empty images or aware of their emptiness we are nonetheless empty and lost to ourselves. “And the last state of that man is worse than the first.”
