How to Keep Standing

I want to talk today about how to keep standing when the ground underneath you does not feel steady.

I do not think anyone reading this needs me to catalog the darkness in detail. You already know it. You are living inside it with the rest of us: the wars that do not end, the rise of open fascism dressed up as patriotism, the cruelty that gets called conviction, the abuse that hides behind scripture, the sheer exhaustion of watching hatred win news cycle after news cycle. I have spent a great deal of this year naming all of that from this pulpit and in this blog, and I am not going to stop naming it. But today I want to talk about something else: how faith actually holds up under that weight, and why it can.

I think one of the most damaging ideas that has crept into modern Christianity is the notion that real faith should feel like peace all the time, that doubt or exhaustion or fear are signs something has gone wrong in you. That has never been what scripture actually teaches.

The prophets were not comfortable people. Elijah wanted to die under a juniper tree. Jeremiah cursed the day he was born. The disciples spent a night terrified in a boat while a storm raged around them. Paul wrote from prison. The Psalms are full of writers demanding to know where God has gone. Faith, in the biblical sense, was never advertised as a feeling of constant safety. It was a decision to keep facing forward, toward God, even when nothing around you offered any evidence that facing forward made sense.

If you are tired, if you are frightened, if some mornings it takes everything you have just to get up and keep believing that love is stronger than what you are watching on the news: you are not failing at faith. You are practicing exactly the kind of faith scripture actually describes.

I want to say something plainly about eternal life, because I think it gets treated too often as an escape hatch, a reason to check out of the present and simply wait for something better later. That is not what the promise is for.

Eternal life is not primarily a promise about what happens after we die. It is a claim about the kind of life God is already living inside us right now, a life that death itself cannot interrupt, let alone anything smaller than death: not fascism, not hatred, not the cruelest email or the loudest troll or the worst news cycle. Paul's list in Romans 8 is exhaustive on purpose. He names literally everything a first-century reader could imagine as a threat, and then says: none of it. None of it can reach the thing that actually holds you.

That promise does not make the wars stop. It does not make the fascism less real or the abuse less damaging. What it does is give you ground to stand on that none of those things can actually take away from you, no matter how hard they try. That is not a small thing. It may be the only thing sturdy enough to build a life on right now.

I do not think standing firm in faith during a dark season is a single decision you make once. I think it is a practice, repeated daily, sometimes hourly, and I want to name a few concrete things that have kept me upright this year, in case they help you too.

Community. Faith was never meant to be carried alone. Whatever this parish looks like on a given Sunday, in person or online, it exists so that none of us has to hold our exhaustion by ourselves. Find your people. Show up for them. Let them show up for you.

Small, concrete acts of love. When the scale of the world's cruelty feels too large to fight, the answer is not despair. It is doing the next small loving thing in front of you: a Blessing Bag handed to a neighbor, a kind word to someone who has been made to feel unwelcome everywhere else, a prayer said honestly instead of performed. Those acts do not fix everything. They keep you anchored to what is actually true while everything else tries to convince you otherwise.

Honest prayer, even when it is short. You do not need eloquence. Three words is enough of a prayer to be heard. Say what is actually true, even if it is only: Lord, save me.

Refusing to let hatred write the story. This is the hardest one. It would be so much easier some days to let the loudest, cruelest voices define what this moment is about. Faith, real faith, insists on a different narrator. Not one who denies what is happening, but one who refuses to let it be the last word.

If you are reading this and you are barely holding on, I want you to hear something directly from me: you are not alone, and you are not failing. The darkness you are naming is real. The fear is reasonable. And the promise still holds anyway: nothing in all creation, not death, not life, not any power on earth, can separate you from the love of God.

Keep standing. We will keep standing with you.

Pax et Bonum,

Bishop Greer