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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.
Faith
Was Never a Promise of Comfort
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.
For I am
certain that neither death, nor life, nor Angels, nor Principalities, nor
Powers, nor the present things, nor the future things, nor strength, nor the
heights, nor the depths, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate
us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38–39, CPDV)
What
Eternal Life Actually Promises
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.
How
You Actually Keep Standing
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.
You
Are Not Alone in This
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
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