The sermon I will never preach (Part 1)

This is the sermon I would like to preach at St Nicholas. But since preaching is strictly limited to the priests (in Russian), I will never preach it in church. So I put it on the net.

At my wife’s insistence, I divide it into 3 parts, and will try and find some decent pictures…

Part 1:

  

(John and Charles Wesley, perhaps the greatest English preachers of all times)

‘Brothers and sisters, a fundamental rule of the Christian faith, clear in the Gospels, Epistles and the Fathers of the Church, is the importance of having some sort of evangelistic outreach – put better, to be a parish that is willing and able to bring newcomers into a relationship with Christ in His Church. A parish that fails to do so is missing an important part of its raison d’être, and will sooner or later turn in on itself and die. If you will permit the comparison, a parish being open to newcomers is a bit like a married couple being open to having children: if you close off this possibility because children (like catechumens) are time-consuming and troublesome; something is going to be lacking, will crab your style and prevent you arriving at full humanity. And yes, very simply, you will did out.

Neither the fact of being Orthodox, nor of being ‘Russian’, excludes us from this hard logic. It requires us at St. Nicholas to take a long, hard look both at who we are and the world around us. We are in the overwhelming majority not Russian (including in ‘Russian’ the Ukraine and Belarus) neither by origin (I guesstimate our parish to be about 40% Russian origin), nor more, importantly, in the sense of being part of the Russian cultural world (witness the difficulty of finding someone who can write the minutes of the parish meeting in decent Russian). Importantly, for most of us, Belgium is really our ‘home’ country: most of us are pretty much permanent residents, probably 70% of us will be here in ten years’ time, probably half of us will die and be buried in this country.

(A pretty typical Belgian funeral scene)

What we are is a pretty mixed bag, of people who have come (or whose parents or grandparents) came for very varied reasons, most of them including, if we will admit it, the fact that we prefer life in Belgium to that of our country or origin, whether Belarus, Russia, Moldavia, Kazakhstan, England or wherever. Our reference points are a curious mixture of Belgian and country of origin.