Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity

admin | 13 July 2014

“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?

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, a 16^th century Flemish painter, has a wonderful portrayal of this Gospel story. Not only is a troupe of blind beggars in the process of falling headfirst into a ditch, being led by their fearless and blind leader who could not see even if he wanted, since his cap is actually pulled down over his eyes – “eyes have they and see not,” Brueghel seems to be suggesting – but right in the center background of the painting is a Church. This is, I think, quite significant. The Church is, or at least should be, the place where God’s Word is proclaimed and his Sacraments celebrated, the place where we think and participate sacramentally in the mercy of the life of God opened out to us in Jesus Christ. In him suffering takes on a whole new meaning; it is tinged with glory and gathers us into glory, the glory of Christ. But we have our backs to it!

Brueghel, only too well aware of the limits of renaissance humanism, its dark side, as it were, is hinting strongly at the problem of human sin. Judgments are as much about our wills as anything else. Our blindness is that we choose not to see what we have been given to see and think. In the painting, the blind have their backs to the Church. It is a compelling image for our own world and day. In turning our backs on the Church, we are blind to the things God wants us to know, the things that belong to the Church to proclaim and realize.

For centuries, this Gospel has been known as the “mercy gospel” and rightly so. But mercy only appears and has any weight or force of meaning in relation to justice or judgment. Mercy is incomprehensible without justice. “Mercy seasons justice,” as Portia says in Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice, meaning that mercy perfects and is a higher form of justice. As with Shylock in that play so with us: “though justice be thy plea, consider this:” Portia says, “that in the course of justice none of us should see salvation.”

This requires the realization on our part of our own incompleteness, an understanding of the limits of our judgments. Otherwise, we remain mired in the tyranny of ourselves without even recognizing that there is something wrong with the picture and that the picture is us! But in realizing this, our groans become our prayers. “We do pray for mercy,/ and that same prayer doth teach us all to render/ the deeds of mercy.” The Gospel of mercy indeed.

Mercy begins in the awareness of the limitations of our own judgments. That doesn’t mean surrendering our critical faculties, our thinking and our thoughts. Quite the opposite. What is needed is the commitment to the hard, hard task of thinking, the hard, hard task of making the right distinctions and seeing how things co-inhere in a unity and a whole. It means accepting our own incompleteness at the same time as holding ourselves accountable to what has been worked through by those who “have gone before us with the mind of Christ,” to use Wycliffe’s wonderful phrase; those who have traveled “the seas of logoi,” not merely words, but understanding.

Therein lies the rub for our world and day, for our church and culture. We lack the confidence in reason to be able to think the integrity of the images of Scripture. We lack the confidence to think the logic of Christianity itself. Such things are our betrayals of Christ and his body the Church. And yet not to know or understand certain things really only impels the necessity to learn. It can only mean more groaning; such is our learning through redemptive suffering.

The greater mercy is that our sufferings and our groanings are joined to the suffering and the glory of Christ whose first word on the cross is “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” and whose last word on the cross is “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” In Christ, we find the means to embrace the suffering and to share in the glory, “the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father.”

In a strange and wonderful paradox, hypocrisy becomes the vehicle of our awakening to the mercy and the forgiveness of God in Jesus Christ. It means making the effort to enter more knowingly and more lovingly into the mystery of God’s love for us. Such is the mercy to which even our groans belong if we turn back to Christ and his Church in prayer. It is time to be groaning.