Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity
“We…groan within ourselves”
Groaning is not the same thing as whining. We are rather good at whining and complaining. So what is our groaning? They are our prayers, the deep, heartfelt yearnings of our souls that far outrace the explicit thoughts of our minds. And yet, without a commitment to the articulation of the yearnings of our hearts and the stirrings of the thoughts in our minds, we remain in the uncertainty and the folly of ourselves, subject to a host of arbitrary and incoherent moods and fancies. Increasingly, it seems, our lives are but some celluloid or cyberborg fantasy. We live in the fiction of ourselves, the makers of our own unmaking. As the poet, philosopher, and Kentucky Farmer, Wendell Berry remarks, “the next great division of the world [may well] be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
The note of suffering and groaning confronts the tendencies of our age and culture directly. Neither are welcome concepts to a culture caught in its illusions. But do we have the capacity to see our own illusions? Or are we more quick to point out the deficiencies in others? In other words, “pull[ing] out the mote”, the insignificant speck that is in another’s eye while being blind to “the beam”, the great log, that is in our own eye. Hypocrisy is where we are and where we begin. The blind leading the blind is not just about the clergy, though you could be forgiven for thinking that.
The Gospel for today complements the Epistle. It illumines an interesting feature of the Epistles and Gospels in the Trinity season. The Gospels function as illustrations of the Epistles. In this case, we are given a powerful image of hypocrisy in the proverbial parable of “the blind leading the blind.” And what is that parable largely about? The blindness of our judgments and the wonder of God’s mercy. “Judge not” but “forgive and be forgiven.”
How is that even remotely possible? Only by the mercy of God. How do we know that?
