by CCW | 19 June 2016 15:00
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[1] 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.
It is the image of the church in ruins. Eliot provides two points of reference both of which are scriptural. The “Son of man”, ben adam, is a reference to Ezekiel, the book of the great prophet-poet of the exile; the second, the images of death and decay in “the dead tree” which “gives no shelter, the cricket no relief”, refers to Ecclesiastes, the book of the great poet-philosopher of the Hebrew Scriptures who contemplates wonderfully and profoundly the great truth that everything under the sun is but vanity; a futile emptiness without even the hope of meaning. The dominant picture is that of “a heap of broken images” again taken from Ezekiel, though unnoted as such by Eliot. “And your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken” (Ezekiel 6.4). Such is the biblical image of the church in ruins.
Yet there is another Scriptural reference also hidden and yet revealed in the idea of “com[ing] in under the shadow of this red rock”. Isaiah 32.1-2 speaks of “a king [who] will reign in righteousness, and princes [who] will rule in justice”. “Each will be like a hiding place from the wind, a covert from the tempest”, and, as the King James Version puts it, “as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land”.
“Fear in a handful of dust” refers explicitly to the custom of throwing earth on the casket or urn of the deceased with the words from the Burial Office, “earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes” that recall the mortality of our humanity in Genesis 3:19, “dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return”. But these words are said along with the words “in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life” that speak to our ultimate or eschatological hope in Christ.
The church is “a heap of broken images” when it no longer stands “under the shadow of a great rock in a weary land”. Then its voice and claims are very much like “the blind leading the blind”. Either the culture in the ideology of its gender and rights confusions leads a complacent and willing church or the church herself wanting to identify with the same spirit of the age seeks to lead the world. What is that spirit of the age? It is the idea that the real is not God in his majesty and truth. The real is the social, economic, political and psychological world of an unending succession of temporal events. There is no nature, no creation. There is only us in the vain imagination of our hearts. Everything is reduced to human constructs. The paradox is the loss of our humanity. To be blunt and yet perfectly clear: this is the world of no God.
I don’t think we realise just how much contemporary culture hates the church and in part for good reasons. I don’t think we realize just how much the various sex scandals, on the one hand, and the various attempts to accommodate the culture, on the other hand, have made the church either a joke or something utterly contemptible. It lacks all and any credibility. All the more reason to focus on the idea of the confessing church, the church which exists for the praise of the Trinity and which repents of its shortcomings with respect to what it is given to proclaim. The church is despised because it is seen as dogmatic, unthinking and uncaring especially when it doesn’t go along with the trends in contemporary culture on matters of life and death or sexuality. And it is equally despised when it slavishly goes along with all of it. Yet, at issue is really what it means to be human, what it means to be made in the image of the Trinity.
How to find our voice and our being as the church? First and foremost it will mean attending to the witness of the scriptures creedally understood and learning how to read them in our current context. It is not simply about accommodating the agendas of the day. It is more about having some confidence in the way of Christian thought and life and allowing that to be brought to bear upon our souls first and only then upon the issues of our world and culture. It is not about claiming to have the answers nor is it about retreating into our little ghettoes of comfort for that is really another kind of nihilism and a denial of the providence of God at work in human lives. The very real problem is a profound ignorance of the basic principles of the Christian Faith. But they are there to be learned again and again. The good news is that it is happening through a kind of humble, patient and repentant thoughtfulness. Such is the confessing church.
In George Bernanos’ classic novel The Diary of a Country Priest, the priest observes the poverty and the bleakness of his parish in the French countryside but concludes that “grace is everywhere”. And in a way, that remains the same for us in these times of confusion and disarray. To recall that grace is everywhere in spite of ourselves is to be recalled to the God whose “word is a lantern unto my feet, /and a light unto my path.” We have to learn the humility to attend to that Word and to summon the courage to live what we belief, the very things which we proclaim on the strength of the scriptures and the creeds. It will mean to “come in under the shadow of this red rock”. It will mean being a confessing church. And if not, then we will be the proverbial blind leading the blind, our destination the ditch.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 4, 2016
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2016/06/19/sermon-for-the-fourth-sunday-after-trinity-6/
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