This is one of my more challenging sermons so as the deacon says:- “Wisdom, let us attend!”

There is a Latin word, secta, (fem.) which sounds the same but has two different meanings: a following and a cut; from which we get the English words sequence, as in one thing following another and secateur as in pruning the roses.  The word “sect” borrows from both meanings.  A sect is a religious or philosophical group which follows a teaching of its own, cut away from the parent body and resulting in schism.  In choosing its own path of doctrine it isolates itself from the parent body which maintains a more fulsome and inclusive body of teaching.  This isolation leads to serious distortions and errors in teaching which are commonly called heresies. 

Christianity has also had its own share of sects, all of them deviations from the Orthodox Church, the one true Church that has maintained the fullness of the faith from the beginning.  Many of these deviations can be characterised as distortions in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and since it is today, Pentecost, when we Orthodox focus both on the Holy Spirit outpoured on the Church and then on the third day of the Feast, the Holy Trinity, it seems appropriate to consider how these sectarian doctrines have made an impact on Western Christian culture.  Having a better understanding of this will help our mission.

A good way of getting to grips with this is to consider the tripod which photographers and cameramen use to keep their camera equipment stable.  A tripod has three equal legs which sit firmly on the ground and enable the camera safely to take good pictures.  Should, however, one of these legs be a bit too short then the camera may wobble or even fall over and a poor picture or even no picture is bound to result.  Let us suppose that our tripod is the doctrine of the Holy Trinity where each leg is one of the Trinitarian persons or to state this better in Greek, hypostases, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  One family of sects may cut short the leg which is the Father and emphasise the Son and the Spirit.  Now it is the Father that reminds us that there is a Source of all that is good, an unseen Divine Presence that overshadows all humankind with goodness.  Jesus prayed to this, His heavenly Father, and taught His disciples and us also to do the same.  When a sect neglects the Father and talks only of Jesus and the Holy Spirit then the Christian life gets narrowed down to an impoverished vision of Jesus, my buddy, my friend, a domesticated Christ, a pietistic shrivelled up Jesus.  The Holy Spirit then simply becomes His spirit, effectively an adjunct to an individualistic and moralistic personality cult.

A second family of sects may neglect the Son and instead concentrate on the Father and the Spirit.  These have a good sense of the God who is over all but they may think that Christianity can be sustained by a Jesus who is simply an ethical teacher.  They have no account of how death, suffering, sin and evil might be vanquished in the incarnation because they do not think it credible that God should concern himself with such matters.  Instead Jesus fades into the background and we are left with an ethical monotheism, a social gospel with precious little to offer humankind in the more tragic aspects of life, effectively education without transformation. 

There is a third family of Christian sects which neglect the Holy Spirit and it is the Orthodox view that this is the characteristic heresy of the Christian West.  After all, what does the filioque in the Creed, Rome’s addition of the phrase “and the Son” signify except that both Christ and the Father send the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and thereby demote Him to second rank?  In supposing that Christ cannot be God unless He does what the Father does, this leaves the Holy Spirit out in the cold or as St Augustine would have it, simply the bond of love between the Father and the Son.  The eclipse of the Holy Spirit, His Person and His work in both the Catholic and Protestant Medieval west, prompted a reaction to restore Him to his rightful place of full equality as a Divine hypostasis in His own right within the blessed Trinity.  The trouble is that these Spirit reform movements which have energised many revivals in the Christian west, but usually spluttering out in a generation or two after their inception, have created yet more sects, distortions and schisms.  Some of these Pentecostal movements have even so emphasised the Holy Spirit that Christ himself has been reduced to a mere human being, albeit uniquely possessed by the same Spirit, but not truly God Himself in His own Person.  Practicing a sub-Christian form of ecstatic psychic consciousness some have embraced a world hating dualistic spiritualism, both irrational and even dangerous in the hands of powerful cult leaders who know how to manipulate vulnerable people.

So I think you can see what is happening here.  A number of the heresies and distortions in the Christian west have arisen from this unbalanced tripod of doctrine in which, successively, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit have each lost their distinctive focus.  It is, therefore, neither irrational nor arrogant to suppose that the Orthodox Church, in maintaining the balanced tripod of her Trinitarian life in God, has every right to consider herself as the one true Church.  Other Christian bodies, insofar as they approximate to this catholic fullness, may overlap with us to a greater or lesser extent but we have to be lovingly honest with both ourselves and our ecumenical partners that we are not all playing on the same level playing field where everyone has equal status as to the truth which is Christ.  All humans may be loved by God but that doesn’t mean that all have true doctrine. 

This is such a simple confusion of thinking that it may astonish anyone who carefully and critically thinks through these issues, rather than being mindlessly swayed by sentiment and a corrosive and strange desire not to offend.  The path to Christian unity lies in the Orthodox Church helping everyone caught up in these sects to discover both the true doctrine and the authentic life of the One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.  This must be done with great humility and love and without any arrogance or pride, but if we want the tripod of our own Church life to remain balanced and stable, we must first have a firm grasp on the truth of the faith ourselves.  Not one smallest aspect of this can be traded away for the sake of an easy life.  It is incumbent upon us all, therefore, both to study and fearlessly to proclaim by words and deeds our most holy Faith … which is that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one God in three persons, now and ever and unto the ages of ages.  Amen.