RETURN TO THE ANCIENT PATHS: A SERMON FOR THE THIRD SUNDAY AFTER PASCHA

An Icon of Return to Our Ancient Patrimony 

By Bp. Joseph (Ancient Church of the West)

INTRODUCTION: A WORD OF CHARITY AND CLARITY

Beloved in Christ, grace and peace be with you on this radiant Third Sunday after Pascha. Before we delve into the sacred mysteries of today's liturgy, let us extend heartfelt congratulations to His Holiness Pope Leo XIV on his recent election to the Roman Patriarchate. We pray that his pontificate may be marked by wisdom, humility, and a fervent desire for the unity of all Christians in holiness, mutual submission and truth. 

As Anglo-Orthodox Christians, we hold the Roman Church in deep affection and esteem, recognizing her as a venerable sister in the faith. Our path, however, follows a distinct trajectory - one that seeks to preserve the ancient liturgical and theological heritage of the undivided Church, particularly as it was practiced in the British Isles prior to the Great Schism, in communion and love with the Orthodox Churches of the East. This commitment is not born of division but of a profound yearning to maintain the fullness of the apostolic tradition in our worship and doctrine. So, let us pray for peace, unity and the return to the ancient paths of the Undivided Church. 

SCRIPTURE READINGS

1 PETER 2:11-17

Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul; 

Having your conversation honest among the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation. 

Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme; 

Or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well.  

For so is the will of God, that with well doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men: 

As free, and not using your liberty for a cloak of maliciousness, but as the servants of God. 

Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king. 

ST. JOHN 16:16-22

A little while, and ye shall not see me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see me, because I go to the Father. 

Then said some of his disciples among themselves, What is this that he saith unto us, A little while, and ye shall not see me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see me: and, Because I go to the Father? 

They said therefore, What is this that he saith, A little while? we cannot tell what he saith. 

Now Jesus knew that they were desirous to ask him, and said unto them, Do ye inquire among yourselves of that I said, A little while, and ye shall not see me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see me? 

Verily, verily, I say unto you, That ye shall weep and lament, but the world shall rejoice: and ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy. 

A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world. 

And ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you. 

SERMON: WHAT ARE THE ANCIENT PATHS OF FAITH?

I. SCRIPTURAL FOUNDATIONS

The reading appointed for today immerses us in the themes of divine deliverance and the transformative power of our holy faith. From the Old Testament, we recall the Israelites' passage through the Red Sea (Exodus 14), a prefiguration of our own baptismal journey from death to life. In the Acts of the Apostles, we witness the early Church's unwavering commitment to the Gospel amidst persecution (Acts 5:17–42), reminding us that fidelity to Christ often entails bearing the cross.

St. Peter exhorts us: "Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul" (1 Peter 2:11). This call to holiness resonates with our ascetical identity as sojourners in a world that often stands at odds with the values of the Kingdom of God.

II. VOICES FROM THE EARLY CHURCH

The early Fathers do not speak to us as distant antiquarians, but as burning hearts bearing the very flame of Pentecost. They are not relics of a bygone era, but the living witnesses who received the apostolic Word and bore it through persecution, heresy, and empire. Their voices ring with clarity because they echo the voice of the Shepherd.

St. Ignatius of Antioch, writing as he journeyed to martyrdom in AD 107, perceived the Church not as an abstraction, but as the Eucharistic Body, visible, obedient, and ordered. “Let no man deceive himself: if any one be not within the altar, he is deprived of the bread of God” (Ad Ephesios 5). For Ignatius, the altar was not merely a piece of stone, but the mystery of the Incarnation extended in time. To be "within the altar" was to be within the sacramental life of the Church - where Christ is both Priest and Victim, where unity is not sentimental, but sacramental.

St. Justin Martyr, in the mid-second century, described the Liturgy in terms strikingly familiar to our own Western Rite. He wrote that “on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place… and there is read the memoirs of the apostles and the writings of the prophets… then we all rise together and pray… then bread and wine and water are brought” (Apologia I 67). This is not nostalgia; it is continuity. In Justin’s words we see our own lectionary, our Eucharistic offertory, and our sacred readings. Our Liturgy is not an innovation or a vein repetition - it is memory sanctified.

St. Irenaeus of Lyons (a bishop, mystic, and theologian of the second century) declared with luminous clarity, “Our teaching is in accord with the Eucharist, and the Eucharist confirms our teaching” (Adversus Haereses IV.18.5). Here, doctrine and sacrament are not divorced, but intertwined: the breaking of bread is the proclamation of truth; the chalice of blessing is the cup of apostolic preaching. Where there is Eucharist, rightly celebrated, there is the faith rightly taught. This is why orthodoxy cannot exist without orthopraxy; why to separate liturgy from doctrine is to shatter both. The old maxim is true: “Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi” - “The Rule of Prayer is the Rule of Faith, which is the Rule of Life.” 

St. Clement of Rome, perhaps the very Clement named in Philippians 4:3, urged the Church toward divine order, exhorting the Corinthians: “Let each of us, brethren, be pleasing to God, with a good conscience, with reverence and fear, just as He has commanded us by the apostles” (1 Clement 21). For him, true worship was not innovation, but obedience. Not enthusiasm, but awe. His is a voice crying against the arrogance of novelty, calling the Church always back to her first love, her first experience of the divine, and the memories that centralize this love story in our hearts! 

And who among the Fathers teaches us more clearly to tremble before the mystery of the altar than St. Augustine? “No one eats that flesh unless he adores it… and not only do we not sin by adoring, we sin by not adoring” (Enarrationes in Psalmos 98:9). To partake of the Eucharist without adoration is to consume without discernment, to receive the King without bowing the knee. As the Apostle warned, “he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself” (1 Corinthians 11:29). Adoration is the grammar of heaven. 

The Church Fathers remind us that worship is not an experience to be crafted, nor a preference to be indulged, but a theophany to be received. The Liturgy is not for us to understand in full, but to enter in faith. As St. Gregory of Nyssa taught, “Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything. People kill one another over the idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees.”

To be Anglo-Orthodox, then, is to stand with these Fathers - not as archaeologists, but as sons. We guard what they guarded, love what they loved, and adore what they adored: Jesus Christ, the true Bread from heaven, who gives life to the world.

III. THE ANGLO-ORTHODOX HERITAGE

Anglo-Orthodoxy stands not as a compromise between Rome and Geneva, or Rome and Constantinople - nor as an invention of modern ecumenism, but as a recovery of the ancient, undivided Church preserved in the British Isle and now amongst English-speakers around the world. It is not merely a liturgical aesthetic or a cultural preference - it is a theological claim, rooted in the conviction that the Apostolic faith, once delivered to the saints, found a true and unbroken home in the ancient Church, and that the Gates of Hell did not prevail against it! 

The genius of our English tradition, at its best, has been to hold together the fullness of Catholic order with the integrity of the Gospel. The Caroline Divines - Andrewes, Taylor, Laud - did not merely defend the past; they re-articulated the faith in a manner as beautiful as it was precise, fully submitted to the Consensus Patrum. In Bl. Lancelot Andrewes’ vision of the five-fold Church - Scripture, Apostolic Fathers, Councils, Bishops, and Reasonable and Prayerful Personal Application - we behold a Church both ancient and living, one that speaks the eternal in the language of every age. Bl. Jeremy Taylor taught us that holiness is not the preserve of monks alone but the vocation of every Christian soul. These are not museum pieces of a lost age; they are pillars of a living temple, a faith incarnated in prayer, beauty, discipline, and sacramental grace.

The Scottish Nonjurors, our Fathers, exiled and misunderstood, yet shone like stars in a dark firmament. In their refusal to abandon apostolic succession for political convenience, they bore witness to a kingdom not of this world. It was among them that the Western Rite was preserved most faithfully when the rest of Britain turned either to rationalism or Romanism. They preserved for us the Liturgy of St. James. They understood that fidelity to the Liturgy is fidelity to Christ Himself, for the Liturgy is nothing less than the enfleshing of doctrine, the Word made audible, visible, and edible.

What sets Anglo-Orthodoxy apart is not pride in our particularity, but gratitude for its capaciousness. Here, the Creed is not narrowed by polemic, nor worship confined by reaction. Here, the Fathers of East and West speak in complete harmony (and not the dissonant and strident tones of modern polemicists who rejoice in the damnation of Christian brothers and sisters), the Psalms resound with our ancient tones, and the Sacraments are administered with trembling reverence and evangelical clarity. The soul is not strangled by juridical scrupulosity nor left to wander in formless subjectivity - it is shepherded with both pastoral warmth and theological precision, innate to our ancient foundation. 

In our patrimony, reason is not set against revelation but serves as its friend; mystery is not obscurity, but depth; beauty is not ornament, but necessity. Anglo-Orthodoxy is not a third path - it is the “via media” in its truest sense because it returns to the timeless mean of our Christian tradition: not a compromise, but the golden thread that runs through Chalcedon, Antioch, Iona, Glastonbury, and Oxford. It is broad enough to welcome, deep enough to nourish, and clear enough to guide, without fear, hatred or irrational emotionalism and disgust. 

And this is why we love it. Because it has room for both the mysticism of St. Macarius and the poetry of Fr. George Herbert. Because it teaches us not merely what to believe, but how to pray, how to suffer, how to die, and how to rise. Because it has preserved the form and substance of Apostolic Christianity with an English voice that still trembles with the Word made flesh.

We are not Roman because we cannot accept innovations that obscure the Gospel; we are not Eastern because we cannot betray our father or spit upon our inheritance as so many self-righteous “converts” do; we are not Protestant because we cannot reject the Church through whom the Gospel is given. We are Anglo-Orthodox because we believe the Church must be both ancient and local, universal and particular, and because we have seen in our tradition the form of the Incarnate Christ: divine, human, historical, sacramental, suffering, risen, and returning. We receive the True Faith of Orthodoxy where we are, within our heritage, and through our Patrimony. 

IV. THEOLOGICAL DEPTH FROM OUR ENGLISH PATRIMONY

The spiritual inheritance of the Oxford Fathers lies not merely in the recovery of ceremonial beauty, but in a reassertion of what the Church is ontologically: the Body of Christ, extended in time, rooted in the apostolic tradition, vivified by sacramental grace. The Oxford Movement sought to re-appropriate the ancient truth that the Church does not merely remember Christ but re-presents Him - especially in the Eucharist, where time and eternity meet and we are drawn, body and soul, into the divine life. As Edward Pusey wrote, “The Church is not a school of thought, but the House of God, the pillar and ground of the truth, built upon the foundation of the apostles.”

In their sacramental theology, the Oxford Fathers resisted both the rationalist reduction of the sacraments to bare symbols and the juridical tendency to treat them as automatic mechanisms. Instead, they saw them as mysterious instruments of divine love, in which Christ Himself acts. This aligns with the words of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, who said: “Do not regard the Bread and Wine as simply that; for they are, according to the Lord’s declaration, the Body and Blood of Christ.” The Divine Liturgy is not a reenactment but an ascent - a ladder to heaven, where we commune with the Risen Lord.

In parallel, the Inklings offered a vision of the Christian life suffused with beauty, humility, and awe. C.S. Lewis, in his reflections on liturgy and devotion, understood that true worship is not found in novelty or stimulation, but in being absorbed into the eternal. He warned against the tyranny of self-consciousness in worship, urging us to forget ourselves in the presence of the Holy. This is one of the reasons for our repeated prayers in the liturgy, so that we may lose ourselves and enter into the spirit of prayer. True liturgy, for Lewis, is not stagecraft - it is absolute surrender. As he noted, “Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore.” It is the shape of a soul reaching upward, not the projection of a mood.

Here lies a profound Anglo-Orthodox insight: the purpose of liturgy is not to express ourselves but to be re-formed, refashioned, and reordered toward God. As George Herbert wrote in his poem “The Altar”, “A broken altar, Lord, thy servant rears, / Made of a heart and cemented with tears.” The altar is not only the table in the sanctuary, but the broken and penitent heart of man, offered up to be made whole in Christ.

Thus, in our Divine Liturgy of St. James, the most ancient known Eucharistic rite, we are reminded that what we do today is not a revival of something old, but a participation in something eternal, something that has never dissipated or been lost, but something that has always remained with us Christians since the lifetime of the Apostles! As in the days of James the Just, so now: Christ comes among us, in Word and Sacrament, to heal, to illumine, and to raise us with Him.

V. A MEDITATION IN VERSE

We close this morning’s meditation with a poem from Sir John Davies, 1599, "Nosce Teipsum", a euphoric vision of the divine and uncreated Light of Christ. 

O that I knew how all thy lights combine, 

And the configurations of thy spheres; 

That I might know thy councils and design, 

Even unto them that dwell among the years. 

But since in thee I cannot dive so deep, 

Let me be blessed with awe, and let me weep. 

For every tear a jewel is, when shed 

Upon the altar where thy saints have bled. 

And though my soul be but a broken shard, 

Yet take it, Lord - it bears thy royal guard.

VI. RETURN TO THE ANCIENT PATHS

Thus says the Lord: “Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls” (Jeremiah 6:16). This is no backward glance into sentimentality, no retreat into romanticism. It is a call to return to the way of Christ as walked by His apostles, preached by His martyrs, sung by His monks, and taught by His saints. These paths are not overgrown with time - they are the very arteries of eternal life.

We stand now at a crossroad. The world offers us novelty without substance, freedom without form, and pleasure without peace. But the Church, in her ancient wisdom, offers us repentance with healing, obedience with liberty, and sacrifice with joy. The way forward is not to build a new religion but to rebuild the ruins of the old - a temple not made with hands, a Kingdom that cometh not with observation.

To join us in this Anglo-Orthodox witness is not to escape the world, but to redeem it. It is to live the Gospel with both the mind and the body, the soul and the liturgy. It is to recover a way of being Christian that is generous without compromise, reverent without rigidity, and beautiful without vanity.

It means repenting - not just of personal sins, but of cultural forgetfulness, theological carelessness, and spiritual lukewarmness. It means reconciling - with God, with one another, and with the deep traditions we have forsaken. It means restoring the Church’s memory, renewing her worship, and rejoicing in the great inheritance once delivered to the saints.

This path is not easy. But it is good. It is the path of fire and light, of the Cross and the empty tomb, of mystery and mercy. As the Psalmist declares, “Thy way, O God, is in the sanctuary: who is so great a God as our God?” (Psalm 77:13).

Beloved, come walk with us. Not into a dead past, but into the ever-living future of the Ancient Faith. Come and taste the Bread that makes men holy. Come and drink from the Cup that reconciles earth and heaven. Come and see the glory of God veiled in incense, hymn, and silence. And in doing so, find rest for your souls.

VII. A COLLECT FOR LITURGICAL UNION WITH THE HEAVENLY CHURCH AND A RETURN TO THE ANCIENT PATHS

Let us pray…

O Eternal and Incarnate Wisdom, who in the fulness of time didst dwell among us, and in the breaking of Bread dost still make thyself known to thy faithful people: Grant us so to partake of this most venerable Liturgy in spirit and in truth, that being knit together with angels and archangels, and all the company of heaven, we may evermore be transformed into thy likeness from glory to glory; who with the Father and the Holy Ghost livest and reignest, one God, world without end. Amen.