Sermon for the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity
“The wedding is ready, but they who were bidden were not worthy”
“I had not thought,” says Dante to Virgil, “that death had undone so many.” A passage and a scene from Dante’s great work, The Divine Comedy, he has pictured himself as contemplating the hordes of lost souls in the Vestibule of Hell as they run to and fro following this or that fad or fancy, souls who willed and then unwilled their will unable to commit to anything; unworthy even of Hell, it seems. It serves, perhaps, as a kind of metaphor for the age of distraction.
T.S. Eliot quotes that same line in his great poem about the ambiguities of modernity, The Wasteland. “I had not thought death had undone so many”, it is said, but in the context of contemplating “a crowd flow[ing] over London Bridge.” His comment is about the living as dead, the walking dead, as it were, in the “unreal city” of the modern world.
There is something wrong and not quite right with us. Yet precisely in the gloom and grey of November, we are awakened to the end of our humanity in the glorious vision of the Communion of Saints, “a multitude that no man could number.” Such is the meaning of All Saints. We have an end with God and with one another, as a community united in and through the diversities of human personality, a community united in prayer and praise of God. But when we neglect that vision, we find ourselves very much in the company of the walking dead, “cast into outer darkness,” as our Gospel puts it so frighteningly this morning, where “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth” and all because of our indifference and our hostility and our unreadiness; in short, our lack of commitment.
The contrasts between the communion of saints and grim realities of outer darkness could not be greater.
