Passing Through Things Temporal
The Fourth Sunday after Trinity
The Rev. Michael Vinson+ Rector
The Collect. O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy; Increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal. Grant this, O heavenly Father, for Jesus Christ's sake our Lord. Amen.
We have just prayed one of the most searching prayers in the entire Prayer Book. I want us to go back and stand inside it for a moment, because if we rush past these words — as we so easily do — we will miss what the Church is teaching us to desire this morning. Listen again to what we asked: that God, the protector of all that trust in Him, without whom nothing is strong and nothing is holy, would increase and multiply His mercy upon us — so that, with Him as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal that we finally lose not the things eternal.
That is the whole Christian life compressed into a single sentence. Passing through things temporal. Losing not the things eternal. It sounds simple enough. And yet the Church has prayed this prayer across the centuries precisely because passing through things temporal without losing the things eternal is the great struggle of every human soul. It is the reason we need a ruler and a guide. It is the reason, if we are honest, we so often find ourselves lost on our Christian pilgrimage.
This morning, the Epistle and the Gospel are going to show us, from two very different angles, exactly what that struggle looks like — and where our help is found.
St. Paul, writing to the Romans, sets the cosmic framework. And it is important to receive it as such — not merely as a spiritual metaphor but as a description of real reality. The creation itself, Paul says, was made subject to vanity. Not by its own choice, but by reason of the fall. The whole creation groans and travails in pain, waiting. And not only the creation — we ourselves groan within ourselves, we who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, waiting for the adoption, the redemption of the body. The sufferings of this present time, Paul says, are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. But the sufferings are real. They are felt. And they are the sign of a world straining under the weight of its own disorder.
Why does Paul matter here? Because he names the exact condition the Collect is praying about. The course of this world — to use the language of another Sunday's prayer — is disordered. Not merely inconvenient. Not merely difficult. Disordered at its very core, subjected to vanity, groaning for a redemption it cannot achieve by its own effort. And we are caught inside that groaning. We are passing through a creation that is itself pulling against the eternal, even as it longs for it.
This is why passing through things temporal is so treacherous. We are not simply navigating a neutral landscape on our way to heaven. We are passing through a groaning world that has a kind of gravitational pull — pulling our attention downward, our desires inward, our vision away from the things eternal and toward the things that perish. And without a ruler and guide who can see what we cannot, we will not make it through. Without whom nothing is strong. Without whom nothing is holy. The Collect knows what Paul knows: we need help that comes from beyond the groaning.
And this is specifically where Jesus' two parables in this morning's Gospel land with such force. In quick succession, our Lord employs two of his most vivid word sketches: the blind leading the blind and a man with a log stuck in his eye. They are outlandish for effect — Jesus intends for his hearers to remember what he is teaching. But first, what truth is he illustrating? The verses immediately prior give us the answer.
Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful. Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven: give, and it shall be given unto you... For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again.
Jesus is preaching the Sermon on the Mount, and he is inverting every assumption his hearers have carried with them out of the groaning world. He is masterfully contrasting the Kingdom of God with the kingdom of this present age. He is saying: that which you think is right is wrong. You think your judgments are acceptable to God, but they are falling short. You claim the wisdom of heaven as your guide, yet you are being catechized by the world.
My friends, the world says mercy is weakness — what benefit is there in being merciful to others? Jesus says: "Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful." The world says you are the judge, jury, and executioner over those who wrong you. Jesus says: "Judge not, and ye shall not be judged. Condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned." The world says harden your heart, despise and exile anyone who offends. Jesus says: "Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven." The world says what's mine is mine; get your own. Jesus says: "Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over." Every axis is inverted. Every assumption overturned.
This is not a matter of spiritual temperament or personal preference — Jesus is drawing a line, and every soul stands on one side or the other of it. It is a matter of life and death, of the Kingdom of Heaven or the ditch. And it is the matter the Collect is naming when it asks God to be our ruler and guide: because the world is already ruling and guiding those who have not placed themselves under the governance of Christ. The question is never whether we are being formed. The question is always: by whom?
"Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?" A seminary degree is not required to answer this. A blind person cannot lead another blind person without catastrophe. The one in front cannot see where he is going; the one behind can do no better. Who is this blind leader? The blind leader is any person or thing that cannot see, nor desires to walk in the ways of Christ. It was the Pharisees in Jesus's day. It is the false teacher in ours. It is every societal, economic, and cultural structure at enmity with its Creator. We could sum it all under one heading: the way of the world is the fallen creation and its ruler at enmity with Christ, pressing hard against the things eternal.
This fallen world is a tenacious and relentless catechist, offering the easy path to self-flourishing, purpose, and fulfillment. It props up a pretend world without trouble or violence, selling a false vision of the good life without an ounce of effort required. The world is a master marketer because it knows how to scratch every natural itch and desire in us: a perfect body without discipline, wealth without sacrifice, significance without service, meaning without God. The best possible earthly version of me — without recourse, regret, or the inconvenience of the eternal.
The catechetical orthodoxy of this secular age is relentlessly shaping hearts, minds, and actions on the most fundamental categories of human flourishing: anthropology, sexuality, marriage, family, vocation, friendship — and most importantly, worship. The secular calendar keeps filling with days and even months devoted to the celebration of human depravity. And Christians, with divided allegiances between secular and liturgical time, struggle to order their lives according to God's higher time of feasts and fasts. My friends, secular time will always seek to displace the higher time of the Church, because the world and its ruler intensely desire your worship — and must blind you to the beatific vision of God to have any chance of receiving it.
It was not long ago that most Christians would never have conceived of missing the Holy Days of obligation. There have been times when the normative Christian life was ordered daily by Morning and Evening Prayer, when Sundays were but the first of seven days in which a Christian entered the presence of God. But this cultural moment makes it a challenge, for some, to worship the Lord of their salvation for a single hour on a single day. This is not a minor inconvenience. This is the groaning Paul describes, pressing inward — creation's disorder working on the soul, trying to loosen its grip on the things eternal.
Jesus concludes the parable: "The disciple is not above his master, but everyone who is perfect shall be as his master." You see, the student always becomes like his teacher. We are either being mastered by the world or mastered by the Lord. We will become what we behold. And this is why our guide must be the One who can see — who has His mind, speaks His words, and leads not into the ditch but into glory. The individual Christian does not have the entirety of the Lord's mind, nor does any single parish or denomination — but the Church, the great tradition whose apostolic origins have guarded, stewarded, taught, and disciplined the mind of Christ across the centuries, is the collective wisdom of her Lord given as a clear-eyed guide. My dear brothers and sisters, we have been given a good guide, a loving Mother, the Church — and we need to trust her, letting her cure our blindness by gently turning our eyes from the world and fixing them solely on the beauty of our Lord.
But there is a second parable, and it cuts closer still. Before we go looking for the splinter in our neighbor's eye, Jesus says, we had better deal with the log in our own. This parable is not primarily about how we look at others — it is about how honestly we examine ourselves. And this is the interior dimension of the same blindness Paul was describing. The beam in the eye is not only unconfessed sin in the abstract. It is the specific condition of a soul that has been trusting its own strength and its own holiness — a soul that has quietly forgotten the Collect's most searching phrase: without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy.
This is the cruelty of spiritual blindness: it is invisible to the one who suffers it. The beam does not feel like a beam — it feels like clarity. It feels like discernment. The man with a log in his eye is absolutely certain he can see — until he cannot find the door. And this is precisely why self-examination is not optional for the Christian. Not because introspection is an end in itself, but because unexamined sin is the very thing that blinds us to the things eternal while we are busily occupied with the things temporal.
Kingdom clarity demands self-examination. And if we are going to judge anything harshly, let us judge our own sins — taking them seriously, dealing with them strongly, not managing but mortifying them. The grace of being confronted with our sin is the Spirit's compulsion to repent and seek forgiveness. Knowledge of sin should drive a Christian to find mercy. The log is removed from our eyes when we face our wrongdoing and return to Jesus, who restores the eyes of the soul through His forgiving love.
The one who has been forgiven of sins sees with eyes wide open — a gaze filled with compassion and grace. This is the disposition from which we gently point out the splinter in our brother or sister's eye: through the eyes of having received compassion and forgiveness ourselves. Then, and only then, can we lead others into the same healing we have received. This is the Church: the company of the forgiven, each one guided by grace toward glory, and each one reaching back a hand to those still finding their way.
We prayed this morning that God — the protector of all that trust in Him — would be our ruler and guide. We asked Him to increase and multiply His mercy upon us. We asked, in so many words, for the very thing Paul says creation is groaning for and the very thing Jesus' parables are pointing us toward: eyes that can see the things eternal clearly enough to pass through the things temporal without losing them.
This Collect is the Church's answer to Paul's groaning — the cry of a people who know they are passing through a groaning world, who know the world will form them if Christ does not, who know that without Him nothing in them is strong and nothing in them is holy — and who have decided, nevertheless, to trust the one Guide who can see.
Beloved, pass through things temporal. Lose not the things eternal. This is our calling, our struggle, and — by the mercy and governance of God — our inheritance. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen+
