Fr Matthew Reese

“But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.For if some one comes and preaches another Jesus than the one we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you submit to it readily enough.”
—2 Corinthians 11: 3-4

Dear Friends in Christ,

This morning’s second lesson comes from Saint Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians, and I think it speaks as much to us today as it has to any Christians in the last two millennia.

How do we know if the Gospel we are following is the true Gospel? How do we know that the priests and preachers we are listening to are the true ministers of Christ? How do we know that the Church in which we claim membership is the true Church? Are we being led astray, as some of the Corinthians were, in our “sincere and pure devotion to Christ?”

Surely, there are strands of Christianity so diametrically opposed to the Gospel of Christ that we can see the inherent falsehood immediately (though surely not everyone does).

I think here of the excesses of the “Prosperity Gospel” shunning the poor, or of the kind of rank fundamentalism where we find love subject to hate.

But what about everything else? What about all the other Christian difference which is more nuanced, more complex? We pray in the Litany to be spared from “all false doctrines,” but these are not always so easy to spot.

Anglican theologians have spent 450 years subtly distinguishing our little corner of the Church Catholic from our Protestant, Roman, and Orthodox brethren. They have given substance to our claims, have armed us with a scriptural and theological vocabulary for why we believe this or that, and why it might differ from what other Christians believe in their “sincere and pure devotion to Christ.”

This is good and needful work. But in our day-to-day lives, on the street and in the workplace, in family dinners and parish potlucks, we will probably not have recourse to this vast body of learned scholarship and precise theological thinking. 

In the moment we must distill all this wealth of Christian doctrine to a few verses of scripture:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22: 37-40).

If we proclaim this Gospel, we may be sure that it is true.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Matthew