Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity
“Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?”
It is a powerful and a familiar image, I think, that speaks rather profoundly to our current distresses within and without the institutional church, distresses which are really about our collective blindness about what it means to be the church as much as anything else.
The confessing church is, I think, what we are called to be regardless of the circumstances of each and every age and culture. What undermines our confidence in the Faith, however, is the overwhelming desire to accommodate the faith and the church to the prevailing winds of the contemporary culture. This means to forget that we have a teaching and a way of thinking and being that can speak to our world and day but not if we are taken captive to the underlying assumptions belonging to its agendas. It is after all a post-Christian and post-secular age. The institutional church is, I fear, completely compromised. For Anglicans in Canada, it seems, going along with majority opinion in the secular culture on the questions of the day appears to be the main concern and probably so for most of you.
I am not much interested in mere morality. That can only lead to the kind of dogmatic judgmentalism and hypocrisy so clearly indicated in today’s Gospel. On all of the moral questions of our day, the greater question is about the doctrine of God as grounded in the doctrine of revelation. This is always the question to some extent. But the church is in ruins because the scriptures have been reduced to a heap of broken images. It is an image from T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land.
The first section of his poem is entitled, The Burial of the Dead, which intentionally recalls the Order for the Burial of the Dead in the classical Book(s) of Common Prayer. So, too, today’s epistle reading is familiar as being one of the traditional readings in the Burial Office.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
