Sermon on St Paul's Epistles

I should like to draw your attention to two passages from the Epistles of St Paul. In one passage (Romans 10), he says to us that faith comes from the hearing, and the hearing from the proclamation of the Word of God. And who would hear unless someone was speaking? In another passage (Galatians 1), he says to us that the faith which he proclaims is not a man-made faith, it is a faith that is of God; and that he has not received it from men but from a revelation of God Himself.

How do these passages apply to us? Do they contradict one another? Or is the first what happens to each of us, and the second what should happen to us all?

We do not discover our Saviour and the Gospel unless it is proclaimed, unless it is preached, unless the word reaches us. But then the proclamation is not sufficient in itself; when I say that the word must reach us, it is not enough that we should have heard something that makes sense, something that makes more sense than our previous lack of faith. A word reaches us when it reaches our heart, when it is light to our mind, when it sets our heart aglow, when it inspires us to live according to this word which has been spoken. And in that sense our faith in Christ, in the Gospel, is not a world outlook: it is life that has come to us, a new intensity, a new depth of life. And unless this is so, we are only hearers – we are not disciples. To be a disciple means to hear, to receive the message and to live accordingly – not as though it were a commandment, an order given from the outside, but as though it is a new understanding that has reached us; and out of this understanding, which has become our own existential conviction, we should live.

Then what St Paul said, that it is not from man but from God that he received his faith, could come true for us also, because it would mean that the word spoken, that had reached us through human agency, had reached us with the power of life that is of God alone. And St Paul spoke of his preaching and the preaching of the Apostles in these very terms when he said that they are not preaching the Gospel according to the wisdom of the world, the philosophical intricacies, but by the revelation of the power of God, the power to make people new.

Now, the relevance of these two passages for us seems to me obvious. On the one hand, if we are here it is because we have heard this word, we have read it, it has reached us to a certain extent. But to what extent? Has it made us into people whom one can call Christ's own? Can we say that we are disciples, that is, people who try with all our energy, all our mind and heart and will, to emulate our Master? He has said to us, «I give you an example for you to follow». He gave the example – but do we follow Him? Or do we stop at the moment when following Christ becomes a challenge, a problem; when our life is put into question by Christ's life, Christ's personality and Christ's teaching?

Yet it is only if we become The Message that we can say we have received the message. If we become disciples of Christ so that people looking at us are puzzled, perturbed, questioned by their own awareness that they have met men and women who are like no-one else, not because they think differently, but because they have become different.

Let us ask ourselves then, where we stand with regard to these two passages. We might well say that the word spoken has not even reached us intellectually, that we have shrugged it off as irrelevant, as too hard, as contrary to our desire. But even if we can say, «Yes, I want to be a disciple», how far have we gone in trying to mould our life according to the life of Christ, to reject what is abhorrent to Him, to become the kind of people in whom our neighbour can recognise an icon of Christ?

We have kept the Feast of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, which proclaimed the veneration of icons. It is not enough to venerate a painting, nor even to project our veneration onto Him, or Her, or them who are represented. We must ourselves become vivid images of the Incarnate God with all the awe-inspiring depth and vastness of what this means.

Let us pray day after day that God may give us courage to become what we are called: Christians, Christ's own people! And may the blessing of the Lord be upon you by His grace and love toward mankind, always, now and ever and world without end. Amen.