October 19: Persistence and Faith: The Expanded Paschal Mystery

Rex McKee

 

Persistence and Faith: The Expanded Paschal Mystery

October 19, 2025

Rex Mckee

 

“When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

That is the question Jesus leaves us with today.

 

The question is not about whether churches will still exist or whether people will still call themselves Christian. It is not about the perfection of the music, prayers, incense, or coffee hour discussion. It is about persistence.

 

My favorite philosophy instructor would, on occasion, when faced with a complicated text such as this, take the lotus position on his desk, light his pipe, and sit in quiet meditation for an hour. I thought about this approach. Maybe next time.

Will Jesus find people who still pray when the world feels silent?

Will there be faithful communities that act for justice when systems around them resist change?

Will we be a beloved community of hope grounded in trust, even when despair feels so much easier?

Jesus explains that faith is not passive. Faith is persistence.

Before we dig deeper into this perplexing question, Let’s consider the memorial acclamation. In three simple lines we persistently repeat at Eucharist the entire gospel spirals before us past, present, and future intertwined:

Christ has died.

Christ is risen.

Christ will come again.

Christ has died God’s unwavering solidarity with human suffering and death. The cross is no abstraction; it stands at the center of our story as a symbol of unspeakable cruelty and state-sanctioned torture.

 

Jesus enters the worst humanity can inflict betrayal, cowardice, humiliation, abandonment, and agony and transforms it by refusing to return violence for violence. In his dying, God identifies with every victim of oppression, every person crushed by injustice, every undocumented immigrant demonized by government and ICE.

The cry of the crucified “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” becomes the cry of all who suffer. And through that cry, God promises: You are not alone.

The Christian faith turns the living toward the dead.

The cross and its terror shape our moral imagination and stretch our hope. In the Eucharist, we learn not to glorify death but to remember to allow Christ’s self-giving love form us.

At the table, we bow our lives toward the victims of this world’s violence, joining God’s unwavering solidarity with all who suffer.

Christ is risen the persistent power of resurrection among us.

The first witnesses were not emperors or priests, but women at the tomb Mary Magdalene and her companions who came in grief and left as apostles of hope. They did not encounter the restoration of what was lost, but the birth of something wholly new God’s re-creation beginning again.

Resurrection is not only a miracle in history; it is the divine pulse of renewal that moves through every act of healing, forgiveness, and liberation. Wherever life rises from death, when communities rebuild, when creation is restored, when mercy triumphs over fear, when courage refuses to die, there Christ is risen indeed.

Christ will come again our future hope that God’s justice will be made complete. The story is not over. The Ascension is not Christ’s withdrawal but an expansion Holy presence now filling all things through the Holy Spirit.

We live in that sacred in-between time, where the power of resurrection calls us to join the Spirit’s work of renewal.

When we say, “Christ will come again,” we pledge to live as though God’s future of justice and reconciliation is already breaking into the present.

This spiral of dying, rising, and coming again awakens us to the truth that divine persistence and human persistence are bound together. Each time we proclaim this mystery, we align our lives with a hope that outlasts despair: that love is stronger than hate, stronger than death, and that the Spirit still breathes new creation through us. We do not wait passively for heaven; we participate actively with the Holy Spirit, manifesting heaven’s love on earth.

In the parable, a widow faces a corrupt judge who fears neither God, the constitution, nor the people. She has no social power, no advocate, no leverage. Yet she refuses to quit. She keeps showing up. She keeps demanding justice.

That persistence is faith not a repetitive statement of belief, but endurance; not shallow optimism, but the stubborn conviction that God’s justice is worth crying out for.

“When the Son of Man comes, will Jesus find faith on earth?” Will he find this kind of persistence?

It is easy to proclaim when people are listening. It is harder when they are restless or distracted, Paul reminds Timothy: endurance is the mark of discipleship. “Proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable.”

Bishop Loya teaches in last week’s letter:

“If you are discouraged by the state of our nation, if you want to be a force for healing and good, then instead of just fighting harder in a world designed to lock us in perpetual warfare, try standing before God as one approved by him a worker who has no need to be ashamed. Try starting each day, each conversation, each encounter in that place.”

The widow’s persistence is not polite personal piety. It is public persistence in both prayer and action. She refuses to lose heart. She cries out for justice in the face of a judge that will not listen. And finally, her persistence breaks through.

Jesus tells this story so that “they would pray always and not lose heart.” Prayer here is not flight; it is resistance. Prayer aligns us with God’s mercy so that our action is not bitter but courageous, not vengeful but hopeful.

Jeremiah reminds us that our strength to persist begins in God’s persistence in love:

“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts… I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.”

Though God’s people failed the covenant again and again, God never gave up. Instead, God moved the covenant from cold stone to living hearts.

The covenant written on our hearts holds us upright. It calls forth courage when we falter, mercy when anger hardens, and strength to stand and act when despair threatens to silence us.

We persist because God persists. This persistence is not abstract; it is embodied in the struggles of our neighbors those who keep faith alive through endurance and love.

Bishop Steven Charleston, Indigenous Episcopal leader and elder of the Choctaw Nation, writes: We are still here.

That phrase We are still here echoes through Indigenous experience. For centuries, Native peoples have endured land theft, broken treaties, boarding schools, cultural erasure. They have faced violence and exploitation.

And yet they are still here. Still singing their songs. Still defending their water. Still teaching their children. Still praying in languages nearly ripped from them.

Closer to home, the Big Sandy Lake Band of Ojibwe persist even now, protecting their water from one-dimensional investors, resisting copper and earth-metal mining upstream knowing it will poison the living water given to them by the Creator.

From generations of struggle and our tangled, broken history, they know the truth: water is life, and when it’s defiled, it cannot be made whole again.

They proclaim that their wild rice is their Eucharist the sacred bread of their communion with creation. Their prayerful action is a cry for justice, a testament to hope that refuses surrender: faithfulness to the land, and persistence to renew covenants with we the people that have so often betrayed them.

Consider immigrant justice. Families torn apart in our own neighborhoods. Parents working in low-income, critical service jobs, paying taxes they will not benefit from, while daily fearing deportation. Fifty years of promises of reform and a pathway to citizenship that have gone nowhere.

And yet immigrants persist. They build communities, raise children, worship and pray, and bring their cultural experiences and gifts. They remind us of our Constitution, our core baptismal covenants, and the narrative stories of our faith.

This persistence insists we remember that every migrant as beloved of God, every family deserving of dignity, every stranger welcomed as Christ himself.

We rightly celebrate installing solar panels on our churches and homes a visible gesture of hope, a teaching witness to care for creation.

Yet solar panels on privileged roofs alone will not solve the environmental crisis. Our decision must be coupled with social action: legislation that hold greedy corporations fully accountable; advocacy that secures funding for low-income households to modernize heating, cooling, and water systems; and organizing that ensures everyone has access to clean, affordable water, earth, and energy.

Persistence is not content with symbolic gestures.

It presses for systemic change.

It prays, advocates, and bears public witness for the sake of the vulnerable, not exclusively for the privileged.

We, like the widow, show up again and again, confronting power that has grown indifferent and merciless.

So, we return to Jesus’ question: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

Persistent Faith that refuses to give up on love. The marginalized  faith that is relentless for justice. Faithful Indigenous peoples living survival as sacred resistance. Faithful immigrants holding onto hope through migration with dignity. Climate advocates using prayer, policy and care into restoration and renewal.

When the Son of Man comes, our answer will not be what we say, but in how we live. Where we have shown mercy and healed what has been broken. Where have we spoken out with courage that refuses to retreat when truth is costly. Where have we acted with justice for Indigenous peoples, for migrants, for creation, for all who bear God’s image.

We answer with prayer that refuses despair, with hope rooted in a covenant long inscribed within us, and persistence shown to us by a committed widow.

When we listen carefully, we hear Christ in the cries of Indigenous peoples defending their water, in the persistence of immigrants seeking dignity, in the groans of creation longing for healing, in the breaking of bread.

At the end of all things, may Jesus find in each of us persistence, endurance, and faithfulness, and an ancient covenant written upon our hearts.

Amen.

The Reverend Rex McKee

October 19 2025

10am Service