Dear Friends
There are some who believe everything is provable. We can study a problem, a situation, a challenge, examine every variable and work out the best way forward. Science is at the vanguard of this movement and is used, and abused, to prove nearly every conceivable point—those points which cannot be proven are considered either irrelevant or else science has not got to that position yet but will do soon. Members of this movement, modernism, will prove “that the universe is 13.8 billion years old,” or “that the Earth is flat,” or “that this is what Shakespeare meant,” or “do x, y and z to make your company successful.” Such people like to argue over texts, “You don’t understand, this is what it means,” and are found in courtrooms and parliaments around the world.
There are others who have rejected this modernist way of understanding the world: they relativise truth. “This is what it means to me,” is their calling card. “Speaking as a [blank], I think that …” And the blank could be anything, any category, any subdivision, but is used to make the statement unarguable. There can never be anything false, anything wrong, just differing truths; that is until someone believes himself to be offended, to be wronged, and if enough people feel the same way, or enough significant people feel the same way, the speaker would be ostracised—in contemporary language, “cancelled.” This postmodernism rejects the idea of a knowable truth and replaces it with truths.
And we are stuck, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, between these two poles. The more we try to reject modernism the more we enter the camp of postmodernism and vice versa. Yet this has infected Christianity, there are some who want to “prove that the world is ten thousand years old according to the inerrancy of Scripture,” and others who say “this is what St Paul means to me.”
The Church, in her wisdom, upsets both sides. To the former she says, “that is not how the Church Fathers have read Scriptures and neither will we,” and to the latter, “and does what he means to you resonate with what he actually has written?” Since we take the words of St Augustine seriously,
If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don’t like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.
And this is how we should be too. There are good things in both modernism and postmodernism, and we are stuck with them, but we hold to what has been passed down to us in the Church, the Tradition. There is Truth because there is Christ,
I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.
— John 14:6
He is not knowable through scientific study but by the revelation of God. There is room for personal knowledge, personal understanding, but this must be evaluated against the Tradition rather than on its own.
My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, let us walk carefully the path between modernism and postmodernism, neither being tempted by the one nor lulled by the other but keep pure what has been traditioned to us.
But we are bound to give thanks to God always for you, brethren beloved by the Lord, because God from the beginning chose you for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the Truth,
to which He called you by our Gospel, for the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle.
— Second Thessalonians 2:13–15
And, standing fast, bending neither to the right nor the left, we may remain faithful to Him and inherit eternal Life.
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Sermon
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, one God, Amen.
To someone who wants to know more about the Church, more about the Christian life, it is very easy to tell them to read something, or to watch an online video, or to listen to a podcast. “Read the Bible,” we tell them, “watch this, do that: and you will find out what you want.” And we can feel vindicated and justified, we have done our part, we have played our role in Christ’s command to “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations.” (Matthew 28:19)
And we hear accounts, such as that of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, of thrice-blessed memory, who read the shortest of the Gospels to disprove the “profoundly repulsive” Christ he had been told about.
“While I was reading the beginning of St Mark’s gospel, before I reached the third chapter, I became aware of a presence. I saw nothing. I heard nothing. It was no hallucination. It was a simple certainty that the Lord was standing there and that I was in the presence of him whose life I had begun to read with such revulsion and such ill-will.
This was my basic and essential meeting with the Lord. From then I knew that Christ did exist. I knew that he was ‘thou,’ in other words that he was the Risen Christ. I met with the core of the Christian message, that message which St Paul formulated so sharply and clearly when he said, ‘If Christ is not risen we are the most miserable of all men’.”
This is a reality for some people—who can discover Christ through their own reading and research—yet this is not a fulfilment of Christ’s command; he does not say, “Go therefore and hand out a reading list,” nor “Go therefore and enable people to research for themselves,” but “Go therefore and make disciples.” Because Scripture itself tells us it is mysterious and difficult to understand, we should not rely on it as a missionary text—not all will have the experience of Metropolitan Anthony.
…
Read this Sermon, Introduction to Christ.
Archive of Past Sermons.
Services this week
Friday 18th October
Discussion on the Gospel of Matthew, 8 pm.
Online only
Saturday 19th October
Great Vespers, 6.30 pm.
At 3rd URC Scout Hall, Chandlers Ford
Sunday 20th October
Matins and Divine Liturgy, 9 am.
At 3rd URC Scout Hall, Chandlers Ford
Online session is via Google Meet: please get in contact for the details.
Please join us: all are welcome, come and see.
Attending Church
We meet at 3rd URC Scout HQ, Kings Rd, Chandlers Ford SO53 2EY. The Scout hall is behind and to the left of the URC Church. Come and See.
Can I help you?
I am here for you, you need only ask. Is there a way I can support your life of faith? Get in touch.
Can you help the parish?
Yes, absolutely. Offer yourselves to the Lord: pray! Make available to him all your talents and ask him how he would like you to use them — listen for his reply.
Your prayers!
With love in Christ
Fr Alexander
[email protected]