Beautiful the Struggle
- St. Aidan's
- Oct 25
- 5 min read
Proper 25C: Joel 2:23-32; Psalm 65
2 Timothy 4:6-8,16-18; Luke 18:9-14
The Rev. Cameron Partridge
October 26, 2025
There is a framed poster in our living room. It features simple, unremarkable flowers and a Greek phrase: Elpis megale, kalon to athlon. Great the hope, noble or beautiful the struggle, the contest.[1] Athlon is the word from which we get athlete. Kalon can be translated as good, but it carries both an aesthetic and a moral quality: I hear in the word resonances of beauty as Lisa da Silva often preached about that concept among us. Great the hope, beautiful the struggle. The phrase comes from a Greek hymn to Sophia, divine Wisdom, that Kateri and I sang at an event each October in the small, quirky liberal arts college we both attended. We bought the poster sometime in the last few years as younger graduates lifted up the power of that phrase amid this country’s tumult. The phrase speaks to me of the great journey of life, as early Christian writers often interpreted it through the Greek tradition, sometimes with the term agon as well as athlos: a struggle not simply to be endured but a contest to be engaged, a journey to be taken in fierceness and humility, trusting that the God who calls us into life and receives us in death, also draws us into resurrection renewal. The whole arc of this process has a beauty whose depth we can only begin to glimpse.
Our first reading from the Prophet Joel offers one. If it sounds familiar that may be because back in June we heard it embedded in the Pentecost story of the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2:16-21). In that story, the bewildered Jesus followers wonder what is happening as a great wind rushes through their upper room and tongues as of fire light above their heads. Peter tells them that they are experiencing something that the prophet Joel had described: God pouring out the divine Spirit on all flesh (Joel 2:28). In our reading, which starts earlier than Peter’s Pentecost quote, we hear a vision of renewing consolation: of abundant harvest and early rain, a lived balm for us here in recent days (Joel 2:23). Consolation, because this reading carries an acknowledgment of difficulty experienced. Joel prophesied among a people who had experienced calamity. They were depleted and traumatized. And God was with them. God was promising through Joel’s words the renewal of re-creation, the pouring out of the divine Spirit as a re-birthing of life on the other side of death. God was re-activating their imaginations – the dreaming of dreams and the seeing of visions for the world-building into which God was calling them (Joel 2:28). Beautiful the struggle, great the hope.
Our reading from the second letter to Timothy describes a kind of flip side of the Spirit’s outpouring. We are given a human life poured out in struggle. Writing in the name of the Apostle Paul, the author declares, “I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Tim 4:6-7). Here is an example of that early Christian depiction of life as an agon – the phrase translated as “the good fight” is τὸν καλὸν ἀγῶνα, the noble contest: beautiful the struggle. But it is not simply life that is being described here. It is vocation. It is our response to the life God has given us, the calling God has placed upon our hearts. The outpouring that the author of 2 Timothy describes, strikes me as a kind of mirror image of the divine Spirit being poured out upon all flesh. We into whom the Spirit was breathed at creation; redeemed in the life and ministry, the death and resurrection, the outpouring of Jesus Christ; set alight in the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost; are called to pour ourselves out in this world in gratitude for the life God has given us, thereby participating in the kingdom, the dream that God has for all creation. In that dream the hungry are fed, the captives are freed, unclothed are clothed, the dignity of human beings and of all creation is respected, and the varied gifts of human beings are enabled to flourish, to offer praise to God. Beautiful the process, often the struggle, through which we seek to make and hold space for one another in this world, to allow the growth and flourishing of human beings in all our difference.
We sang that beauty in our sequence hymn, one of my absolute favorites. Charles Wesley’s text describes this mirroring. Christ came among us “from above” to gift us with celestial fire, with God’s own redeeming life and light, to kindle that flame within our hearts.[2] That undying blaze is to be actively kindled through the outpouring of our lives, through our vocations. As we carry out our vocations, the whole of our lives—not simply our professions, but the unique constellation of our relationships, our loves – we offer ourselves back to the God who made us. We seek to return that holy flame back to its source, trembling in humility. And in the meantime, the hymn continues, we are right to pray that Christ would confirm that flame, strengthen us to guard it with our lives and “still stir up the gift” in us. This hymn was one I chose for my final service as the chaplain for Episcopal students at Boston University on October 31, 2016, almost nine years ago, as I was preparing to make my way across the country to be among you. I don’t know if Mina Marie was aware of that when she chose it for this service, but this hymn strikes me as very fitting for us to have sung for her final service with us today. So too the offertory anthem she chose for the choir to sing this morning, graced by Robert Bridge’s text and Herbert Howell’s music. God has most surely stirred up afresh the gift of music in us, even as that gift has continued to flourish in Mina Marie as she prepares to journey into a new chapter in her vocation at Washington National Cathedral. Truly, music sings God’s praise in and through her, drawing us to pour ourselves forth in gratitude for the celestial fire, the divine beauty, that God has gifted to all of us.
Beautiful the struggle, the life, the gift. We offer ourselves to God again and again, not knowing precisely what comes next, entrusting ourselves to the mystery of God’s grace and love. Beautiful the calling we each are given to give ourselves back to the God who made us, and not simply alone but together. We offer ourselves in worship and prayer, in speech and in song, here in this sanctuary and in the streets, as several of us gathered at 16th and Mission with Open Cathedral this week, or in Alameda, as people of various faith traditions did this week, even in the face of pepper rounds.[3] We offer ourselves as we share food from and within this space, reminded of God’s nourishment of body and soul. We offer ourselves in humility, knowing that we are finally held in God’s hands. Thanks be to God for the deep wisdom, the divine flame that enlivens and surrounds us even in the midst of calamity, the imagination that opens again and again to see visions and dream dreams, the hope that endures. Thanks be to God for being with us in the midst of struggle, calling us into being, into praise, again and again, in unfathomable beauty.
[1] The poster: https://www.redbubble.com/i/poster/Noble-is-the-Struggle-Great-is-the-Hope-by-kilobyte/22160476.LVTDI
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