Holy Persistence

When I ran an ecumenical fair housing project for the San Gabriel Valley, I could always count on four faith communities: the Quakers, the Universalist Unitarians, Disciples of Christ and Catholics who believed in the social teachings of the Catholic Church.

But day-in and day-out it was the Quakers who inspired me.  They never gave up.  Social justice ministries were their cup of tea.  If we needed someone to follow up on a complaint of housing discrimination, they would be at the ready. 

I first encountered them when I put together my application to be a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War.  I explained to my contact that I was not willing to kill anyone over this unjust, immoral war but I would be willing to help patch up some poor soul who had been shot or blown up.  With his guidance, the draft board accepted me under that condition and I served my two years in the Army as a conscientious objector medic.

At the church we attended in San Francisco, Jai and I were enlisted to help provide a Sunday dinner at the halfway house run by Quakers for those returning from incarceration.  This allowed a free day off for the couple who were caretakers and mentors for their housemates.

These Quakers were what the gospel looks like in action.  All around the globe their impact is felt.  Holy Persistence.

The persistence of this faith community mirrors the faithful persistence of God – the Hound of Heaven.  When the people of Israel have strayed, God sends prophet after prophet to bring them back.  To speak warning.  To speak justice.  To speak forgiveness.  All to woo them back to the life-giving path of Torah Righteousness.

Ezekiel speaks to that wayward people.  Yes, God will offer forgiveness but repair comes only after accountability.  Ezekiel’s words are a harsh warning.  If this community continues on the path of wickedness, surely it will come to ruin.  As sure as night follows day.  In the same harsh tones of a parent warning a child not to run out into the street without looking.  The parent is responsible for that warning every much as Ezekiel is responsible to speak truth to power.

What is also clear is the persistence, Holy Persistence, commanded by God.  Ezekiel is to repeat and repeat the message no matter its reception. Whether the wicked repent and turn to God, that is on them.  But Ezekiel is to be a faithful messenger no matter their decision.  Wash, rinse, repeat.  Wash, rinse, repeat.  That’s Ezekiel’s appointed mission.

“So you, mortal, I have made a sentinel for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me.  If I say to the wicked, ‘O wicked ones, you shall surely die,’ and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but their blood I will require at your hand.”

Whether the wicked heed the warning or not, if Ezekiel lets the truth die in his throat before it is heard, Ezekiel will have failed God.

Holy Persistence is demanded of him.  As it is of us all who would live in the Kin-dom of Torah Righteous and Gospel Goodness.  Holy Persistence.

And down through the ages we have splendid, life-giving witnesses to that calling.  Yes, the Quakers do come to mind.

Also do those who serve to bind up the wounded in combat.  One such was Clara Barton, who served in the Union ranks as a nurse.  Nurse and a most I came across this from the Library of America readings from the Civil War – a letter that Clara Barton had written of her experiences amidst that bloody carnage. Holy Persistence for sure.

In the volume, The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It[1] there is a wonderful letter of Clara Barton to a friend, John Shaver.  With the outbreak of hostilities, she left her job as a clerk in the Patent Office to begin nursing the wounded on the front lines.  She became know as the “Angel of the Battlefield.”  Her ministrations to the wounded were one of Holy Persistence.

In that letter of 1862, she writes (I have not changed any of the spelling or grammar in the original) of the evacuation of the wounded from the battlefield at Manassas. In it she describes the chaos and the inept attempts to get the injured onto trains for transport to safety:

“I can not tell you the scenes which awaited our eyes, –the wounded were constantly arriving—but no hospitals this time, only God’s great one under the blue canopy.  The men were brot down from the field and laid on the ground [that] was ‘littered’ like ‘bedding’ for the horses, — they came till dark and then it was dark indeed…

“…the men lay so thick we could not take one step in the dark, by midnight there must have been three thousand helpless men lying on that hay.

“…My one stew pan which I remembered to take, and this made coffee for them, all night we made compresses and slings and bound up and wet wounds when we could get water, fed what we could, travelled miles in the dark over these poor helpless wretches, in terror lest some ones candle fell into the hay and consume them all, at length morning came, and we sent up the train with 1250, next 1000, next 1100, next 950, and so on.  Still the ambulances came down, and cars went out and we worked on, took the meat from our own sandwiches & gave it to them and broke the bread into wine and water to feed the poor sinking wretches as they lay in the ambulances.

“On Monday the enemies Cavalry appeared in the wood opposite & a raid was hourly expected…On Monday PM all the wounded then were sent off, and the danger became so eminent that Mrs Fales begged to be excused from accompanying her, as the ambulances were up to the field for more, and I knew I should never leave a wounded man there if knew it, though I were taken prisoner 40 times. 

“At 6 clock it commenced to thunder and lightning, and all at once the artillery began to play joined by the musketry about two miles distant, we sat down in our tent and waited to see them break in but Reno’s forces held them back.  The old trusted 21^st Mass. lay between us and the enemy and they couldn’t pass.  God only knows who is lost…the next day all fell back…Poor Kearney, Stephens & Webster were brought in…and in the PM Kearney’s and Heintzleman’s divisions fell back through our camp on their way to Alexandria.  We knew this was the last.  We put the thousand wounded we had then into the train.  I took one car load of them, Mrs M another.  The men took to horse, we steam off, and two hours after there was no Fairfax Station (the aid station at that railway juncture, soon abandoned to onrushing Confederate forces), reached Alexandria at 10 oclock at night.

“Our forces are all back again in the old places around the city.  McClellans army here again and he in command of it all…I have told you nothing of the old friends who met me among the wounded and dying on that bloody field.  I have no heart to tell it to day but will some time.

Clara Barton, over those dreadful days, exhibited heroic Holy Persistence like few others.  She and just a handful of other nurses to tend some 5,000 wounded.  And would again and again for the duration of that war.

Later she would go on to found the Red Cross and bring many reforms to the medical treatment of the wounded and those beset by natural disasters.  Often against the strident opposition of doctors who objected to a woman knowing anything about anything.

She and those who waged that bloody struggle were themselves that “terrible swift sword” bringing freedom to over half the population of our southern states.  Freedom that has brought liberty and a future to half my present family.  A most righteous cause.

Now we suffer not under a great wartime leader as Lincoln or Roosevelt, but under a petulant man-child who knows nothing of the havoc he reeks.  Again, we find ourselves in an interminable, senseless war.  The kind he promised to keep us out of.

Open the daily paper.  Atrocity upon atrocity.  In Iran a girl’s school is bombed with the result of hundreds of deaths, mostly young students and their teachers.

The other day it was a wedding at a private home. 

That day began like any traditional wedding day.  Woman had arrived early with their hands elaborately decorated with henna.  Children played in the courtyard.  A festive meal was cooking as enticing aromas wafted through the compound.

It ended when a bomb brought down the roof, turning the event into a jumble of sandals, dust-coated rubble and blood-soaked rugs.

Dozens of guests had already arrived.  A woman who had come a day early for the henna party reports on a blog post, “Tonight was supposed to be a night of love and laughter…But the wedding turned into mourning, and a sweet night will forever be bitter.”[2]

Five wedding guests killed including a six-year-old boy, some 67 others wounded.  Another American disaster in a war of choice by the most ignorant Commander in Chief that we have ever had.  Not knowing in this tragic, misguided carnage he will have earned the bitter enmity of Iranians for generations to come.  Not a clue.

A war without notice to Congress or any accounting to the American people.  A war with no end in sight. 

As the ballad of the 60s puts it, we citizens of this republic are called to “hammer out danger…hammer out warning.”  Like the message to Ezekiel, if we lose this democracy, it’s on us.  We will have only ourselves to blame.  If I do not share the Word I have also received, it’s on me.  I have no right to stand in this pulpit.

And the perpetrators of this autocracy will give no quarter.  They will not quietly fold up their tents and vanish into the desert sands of the coming American desertscape brought on by global warming.  Yeah, drill, baby, drill.

Fredrick Douglass cautioned us when dealing with such as this ilk:

“Power concedes nothing without a demand.  It never did and it never will.  Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.  The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”[3]

And this wise counsel from one of our most intrepid legislators, Barbara Jordan:

“As a first step, we must restore our belief in ourselves…Let each person do his or her part.  If one citizen is unwilling to participate, all of us are going to suffer.  For the American idea, though it is shared by all of us, is realized in each one of us.”[4]

We wring our hands.  We toss about restlessly at night.  We tune out, drop out.  Yes, I know how you feel as we witness the slow-motion train wreck of this republic.  As we witness the destruction of cherished dreams of yore and dashed hopes for a livable tomorrow.  I know.  I feel it too.

But when I consider the sacrifices of those gone on before:  Clara Barton, those hundreds of thousands of dead of the Grand Army of the Republic – their Holy Persistence.  Their holy sacrifice.  What right do I have to get depressed and throw up my hands in surrender to the deadly imbecility of this current administration?  No, I will not go quietly into that dark night!  Nor should you.

Consider the valiant struggles of Gloria Steinem whom we recently lost.  Her Holy Persistence for the cause of her sisters of this nation.  And that, even in the face of recent rollbacks of victories previously won — she never tired.  Holy Persistence.  She never tired nor will I.  Nor should you.

If I do not honor in word and action the sacrifices, the toil of those gone on before, yes, and those who now assemble at the battlements of this present struggle to preserve the soul of this nation — what right to I have to stand at the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag?  It would only be an empty performative stunt.  Signifying nothing.

Each is now summoned by a Divine Word of Warning, implanted in hearts and minds. Each summoned to action.  We find ourselves, ordinary people now living in extraordinary times.

“We have to acknowledge that there is no cavalry coming to protect us.  No knight in shining armor to save us from the situation we are in.  It’s up to us.  We are the people who decide what happens next.  While daunting, it can also be empowering to know how essential we are in the fight for freedom and our democracy.”[5]

The Most Holy Spirit presently summons us, each and every one, to the greatness that God has created us to be.  To Holy Persistence in the struggle before us.  And our efforts, no matter how great or small, in and through the Grace of God, shall be sufficient.  We can retire to bed after this November 3^rd, knowing we have done our part for the future of this nation and our grandchildren to come.  Amen.

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[1] Stephen W. Sears, The Civil War, The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived it (New York: The Library of America, 2012), 413-415.  Spelling and grammar are as in the original text.

[2] Christiaan Triebert, Malachy Browne, Farnaz Fassihi, Erika Solomon, “Bomb Turned Wedding in Iran into Tragedy: Evidence It was U.S., New York Times, September 4, 2026.

[3] Quoted from, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times: A Guide for all of us, How to Reclaim Your Power, Fight for Freedom, Reimagine Democracy, Skye Perryman, Ten Speed Press, 2026. 7.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Op cit., 12.

September 6, 2026
Pentecost 15, Proper 18

  “Holy Persistence”
The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

Ezekiel 33:7-11; Psalm 119:33-40

Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20