On Persistence and Faith

[Sermon delivered at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, October 19, 2025. For the readings assigned for this Mass please see https://www.episcopalchurch.org/lectionary/proper-24c/]

✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.

In this week’s The Angelus, we enjoyed a word of encouragement from Mother Samantha about persistence in the face of our trials and not to lose heart, that is, not to give in to despair. It is perhaps no accident that the message comes at a time when our readings today all focus on persistence and hope. We read about Jacob’s all-night struggle with the Angel of the Lord, with Jacob refusing to give up until he received a blessing. We read about St. Paul’s insistence to St. Timothy that he persist in the proclamation of the Gospel and teach the Faithful constantly and consistently to protect them from the trials to come. We read about Our Lord Jesus Christ’s insistence for His followers to be persistent in prayer, to keep the faith that the LORD God will keep faith with us. Even the psalm resonates with persistence, singing the praises of the faithful persistence of the LORD in being our help.

It sounds exhausting, does it not? Or perhaps maybe it feels like beating one’s head against the wall because it feels so good when we stop.

Persistence, not losing heart, not succumbing to despair all revolve around keeping faith. We talk about faith all the time. We “keep the faith,” we “practice the faith,” we “walk by faith,” we are “saved by faith,” we are “members of the faith,” we “live by faith,” but do we really understand faith? We hear that “faith is the opposite of doubt,” but I really doubt that this aphorism truly describes faith. We do have this absolute gem of a passage by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 addressing what love really is, we have St. John the Theologian telling us that God is love, but do we really have any one, single, defining passage defining faith, giving us the background and backbone to persist in the face of seemingly unsurmountable odds?

Perhaps this passage from the Epistle to the Hebrews may shed some light and serve as that passage:

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the ages were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.”[1]

Now, I should remind us all that nothing in Scripture should ever be addressed outside of context. The context here is that the writer of this Epistle goes on to enumerate the acts of various people from the Scriptures (keep in mind there was no such thing as the New Testament at this point) as illustrations of this “assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” gives us sterling examples of heroic acts of faith, and then throws a monkey wrench into the mix with these two statements:

“All of these died in faith without having received the promises,”[2]

And later on in the chapter,

“Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised…”[3]

The definition of faith here can be boiled down to another word: trust. It seems to be a rotten trade-off, however. This trust seems to be misplaced. Abel is murdered. Abraham and Sarah have only one child and no permanent abode. Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob, Leah, Rachel, Bilhah, and Zilpah have no permanent abode either, and generations of their descendants not only are sojourners but become slaves in a foreign land. Moses never entered the Promised Land. Many of the Prophets met truly gruesome ends. However, their persistence, while it sometimes flagged, never failed because they never lost their trust in God. The writer of this Epistle notes that despite not receiving the promises, “from a distance they saw and greeted them.”[4] Their faith, their trust was such that they understood there to be a bigger picture.

“What is that bigger picture?” we may ask. What is our assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen? What is it that we hope for, that we do not see that drives us to persist in hammering on the Doors of Heaven repeatedly with our petitions, that drives us to continue in the Apostles’ fellowship and teaching, that drives us to strive with God throughout this long and seemingly unending darkness? The bigger picture, my family in Christ, is that at the end of the day, when this all comes to an end, when we have come to the end of our struggles, God will defeat, no, that God has defeated our old enemy and captor, Death and Corruption. Our struggles and our tribulations all point to one thing, the realization of the Kingdom of God among us. This is the trust we have placed in God, that He will sustain us until the promise is fulfilled, that He would protect, guide, and be with us throughout all our difficulties.

There will be times when that trust feels stretched to the breaking point. Perhaps we are on the verge of or in the grip of homelessness. Perhaps we do not know whence our next meal will come and our last meal is a distant memory. Perhaps we are consumed with anxiety over the welfare and fate of loved ones who are ill, in distress, in captivity, or in grave danger or who have already died. Perhaps we are confronted with our own impeding deaths, indeed they may be only a few breaths away. Faith that our entreaties would be heard, that lives would be spared, seem misplaced at best or seriously delusional at worst. In what do we trust, what indeed is our hope?

This is our hope, and this is why God chose to become incarnate and walk among us in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord, that we might have life, and have it abundantly.[5] It is no empty promise, for “in Him is life, and that life is the light of the world. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”[6] When Our Lord says that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life and that no one comes to the Father except through Him,[7] it is by His sacrifice upon the Cross and His resurrection from the Dead that the old sentence of Death and Corruption has lifted and that our Nature has been restored to communion with God. The only thing in return which He asks of us is to love each other as He loved us.[8]

This is the promise, the thing hoped for, the thing unseen in which we put our trust and that fires our persistence in our trials. Therefore, it behooves us not only to persist in prayer, but also to allow ourselves to be the instruments of God as the answer to the prayers of others. If we truly fulfil our baptismal covenants, then we become for each other the visitation of God’s grace and the answer to our own prayers. We become for each other support in difficulty, comfort in anxiety and sorrow, and support and joy while we approach our final breaths.

 I have heard that the biggest problem we have in our modern age is our deepening isolation from each other. While we are super-connected with social media, ever-present communication devices (whose ringers I hope you have turned off!), and other modern conveniences, they ironically wall us off from each other, keeping us untouchable and unable to touch, true islands in a sea of nothing. Our abilities to become the answers to each other’s prayers are hampered or even eliminated by our digital lives, and with that isolation faith grows dim and even snuffs out. Truly, it is now more than ever conceivable of a world where, when the Son of Man returns, faith may not be there to find.

My generational cohort, Gen X, has been called the first nihilistic and truly cynical generation in memory, and events and developments have done succeeding generations no favours. It lies with us crippled generational cohorts hanging onto the Kingdom of God, the Remnant if you will, to restore that faith, and faith cannot be restored without rekindling hope, and hope cannot be rekindled without giving this weary age something in which to hope. This starts with actively proclaiming the Good News of Our Lord Jesus Christ in both Word and Deed, that God loves us so much He became Incarnate and walked into the jaws of Death to deliver us from the chains of Death, and that love for this God Who did this for us means to love our neighbours and model that love God has for us to them. Only in holding onto that hope and trusting in it can we make it real for those around us, and in doing so bring the light of God’s salvation to a world that has lost faith.

Persist in this, my family in Christ, never give up and never lose grip on our hope, for God is faithful, from this time forth and for ever more.[9]

✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.

[1] Heb. 11.1-3

[2] Heb. 11.13a

[3] Heb. 11.39

[4] Heb. 11.13b

[5] Jn. 10.10

[6] Jn. 1.4-5

[7] Jn. 14.6

[8] Jn. 13.34

[9] Cf. Ps. 121.8b