Staying Power

Epiphany 2A: Isaiah 49:1-7; Psalm 40:1-12

1 Corinthians 1:1-9; John 1:29-42

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

January 18, 2026

Grant, O God, that your people, abiding in the strength of your love, may shine with the radiance of Christ's glory. Amen.

Good Morning, St. Aidan’s and St. Cyprian’s. My family and I had a wonderful several days after Christmas up in Humboldt county, visiting the water and especially the majestic redwoods. We walked in the living, breathing green. So much flowing water and fresh, cool air. So many ferns and mushrooms. Such reassuringly tall trees. I’ve been telling people that I feel like I’ve been through a spiritual-emotional car wash. The effects remain with me. And in fact on this second Sunday after the Epiphany, I distinctly hear in our readings that spirit of remaining or abiding, dwelling in the strength of the profound love of God. We are given a word of renewal and strength, of being equipped for our part in the work ahead in this deeply troubled world.     

Our reading from the prophet Isaiah speaks of God’s servant being prepared and called by God to bring God’s people back into the fold, and to illumine and encourage a wider world. God “made my mouth like a sharp sword,” we hear, and “made me a polished arrow” (Isaiah 49:2). Yet the call is not only to action: even as God prepared Isaiah for his distinctly prophetic purpose, God also “hid” him in the divine hand and as if in a quiver.  This combination of action, rest, and renewal could help sustain him amid a sense of demoralization: “I have labored in vain,” Isaiah declares, “I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity” (Isaiah 49:4). But God appears not to be convinced. Instead, God expands the call: “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, the survivors of Israel [only] … I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach [not only to the people of Israel but] to the end of the earth” (Isaiah 49:6). While by the end of the passage Isaiah describes himself as “one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slave of rulers,” he is called to be a light to the very nations that hate him: “Kings shall see and stand up, princes, and they shall prostrate themselves, because of the Lord, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you” (Isaiah 49:7). The same power that has refused and oppressed you will in fact come to recognize and respect you. Thus says the Lord.

Our portion of Psalm 40 conveys a similar arc. The Psalmist, like Isaiah, is in dire straights. Brought low, cast out, downtrodden. But God “lifted me out of the desolate pit, out of the mire and clay.” God “set my feet upon a high cliff and made my footing sure” (Psalm 40:2). Once uplifted and standing strong, the Psalmist can cry out to all in earshot saying, “put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God; many shall see, and stand in awe, and put their trust in the Lord” (Psalm 40:3).

Again in Paul’s first letter to the community in Corinth, the theme is of divine fortifying, enriching, strengthening. Paul begins his letter by declaring to the community, “in every way you have been enriched in [Christ], in speech and knowledge of every kind-- just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you” (1 Cor. 1:5-6) Lest they think otherwise, he states clearly, “you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Christ would strengthen them now and “to the end…” (1 Cor. 1:7, 8) The faithfulness of God would remain with them as they lived into the call God had given them, which was “to be saints,” to be holy ones among other holy ones “in every place” (1 Cor. 1:2).To announce the coming of God’s holy reign, suffused with a transformative power and unexpected wisdom that the world fails to recognize. [1] They would need strength to embody this message.

Particularly in John’s testimony about Jesus, that theme of strengthening rises to the fore. John conveys this pattern with a distinctive word: abiding, staying, dwelling or remaining. I’ve talked about this word before — the Greek verb is μένειν. The word first shows up when he says, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained [ἔμεινεν] on him” (John 1:33). John goes further: the very author of his ministry, “the one who sent [him] to baptize,” told him that the one on whom he would see the Spirit descend and remain was the one who would go on to baptize with that same Spirit (1:34). The Spirit not only came upon Jesus as he emerged from the water, but it stayed with him. Strikingly, it would not leave. I can’t help but remember when the wild turkeys started proliferating in the Boston area, as they do in some urban areas here. I remember being startled to come upon one in a median strip in Harvard Square, and most memorably, another not only alighting but remaining on a moving car… Less ridiculously but no less strikingly, the Spirit remained with Jesus, connecting and activating his ministry. It would be integral to the relationship of divine son to God the Parent. In Jesus the Holy Spirit demonstrated, we might say, staying power.

The very next day, as our gospel passage reports, this same theme continues as John points out Jesus in the most Epiphanic way. Behold the lamb of God!, he says, as Jesus strolls past. Two disciples immediately follow him, like imprinting ducks (friendly wild turkeys?). Their exchange with Jesus is even more compact than our translation suggests. “Τί ζητεῖτε” Jesus asks them: “what do you seek?” Here were the very first words spoken by Jesus in John’s Gospel. The disciples’ reply— the first question directed to Jesus in this gospel – is unexpected: “Rabbi…where are you staying?”(John 1:38)[2] A bit bold to ask out of the blue if we stay at the most literal level. But the Greek verb signals that we are meant to hear something deeper here: it is ποῦ μένεις – where do you remain, abide, dwell. Like the Holy Spirit who descended and remained upon Jesus, now Jesus was arriving in their midst with singular staying power. To ask “where are you staying” is to ask if they, if we, can stay there too (John 1:39). Can we follow you, can we dwell with you, can we link arms, join with you in an ever increasing, fortifying chain? Can you shelter us from the storm, hide us under the shadow of your wings? Or more to the point, can you strengthen us for the storms to come? Can we do this together? The disciples did just that. As we heard, “they came and saw where [Jesus] was staying [ποῦ μένει], and they remained [ἔμειναν] with him that day” (John 1:40).

Theologian Shelly Rambo, who teaches at Boston University School of Theology, has written powerfully of the term μένειν in John’s gospel in her book Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining. She notes that remaining marks “a distinctive kind of presence.”[3] Her book emphasizes how the term works at the end of John’s Gospel, as Mary Magdalene remains at the tomb and witnesses the loss of Jesus in the space between his death and resurrection. But μένειν is present at the very beginning of this Gospel, as our passage from its first chapter underscores. God dwells among us in the incarnate Word. God remains with us in the life and ministry of Jesus the Christ, God’s Son. God the Parent and Son abide with one another, and we dwell with Christ as branches connect to a vine (as the fifteenth chapter of John’s gospel relays). The Spirit abides with Christ throughout his earthly life and is given to us, strengthening us for the sheer difficulty, the challenge of this world and its traumas. This power stays with us to prepare us for the spaces in between, in the midst, when outcomes are invisible and our spirits are struggling – circumstances in which the Spirit specializes. As Rambo writes, that Spirit, shared with and among human beings, “is the persisting and remaining presence of divine love figured in and through their movements of witness… It is the power to persist, not triumph – to bear with and not to conquer.”[4] To persist, to bear with, to abide, to dwell, rooted in divine strength has deep power for all who struggle in the face of fear and outright evil.

This week Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe and Minnesota Bishop Craig Loya spoke passionately at an online vigil hosted by the Diocese of Minnesota and other religious groups in the wake of the murder of Renee Nicole Good by ICE agents and ongoing immigration enforcement raids. Bishop Rowe said, “I don’t know about you, but there were a few questions where I wanted to say, ‘OK, God… how hard do I have to, exactly, persevere in resisting evil? Because it seems like evil might have the upper hand these days, and we’re tired….Do I have to seek and serve Christ in all persons – all of them?’” Bishop Rowe was referencing the promises of the Baptismal Covenant, which we renewed last Sunday. He continued, “Jesus is with us, and the Holy Spirit is guiding us, and the kingdom has drawn near even when we are beset by rage and despair and we absolutely cannot see it.” Bishop Loya said, “The forces of evil in this world are always fed by mimetic anger and hatred. You can be sure those forces are out there tonight, as they ever are in a fallen world, daring us to become its food.” But do not weaponize your rightful anger, your rage, he went on to say. Do not play into the hand of evil. “We’re not going to do that. We, as followers of Jesus, are going, in this moment, to … turn the world upside down by mobilizing for love. We are going to disrupt with Jesus’ hope … because we know the cross of Jesus Christ settles forever that love is the most powerful force for change and healing in the universe.”[5]

On this weekend when we celebrate the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the resonances between these bishops’ remarks and the preaching and writing of Dr. King stand out. In our Advent series last month we explored theologies of nonviolence, including Dr. King’s. Following the Rev. Howard Thurman, he spent time in India learning about the nonviolent resistance of Mahatma Gandhi whom King called “the guiding light of our techniques of nonviolent social change.”[6] Nonviolent resistance, King wrote in 1959, is “a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love…”[7] Previously he had “almost despaired of the power of love in solving social problems. The ‘turn the other cheek’ philosophy and the ‘love your enemies’ philosophy are only valid,” he had earlier felt, “when individuals are in conflict with other individuals; when racial groups and nations are in conflict a more realistic approach is necessary.” But as he studied the teachings of Gandhi, his “skepticism gradually disappeared.” King read the Gandhian term satyagraha, truth-force, through a Christian lens of love — “truth… equals love” he wrote, literally speaking truth with love to render the concept as “love-force.”[8] “The experience in Montgomery,” he wrote referencing the bus boycott of 1955, “did more to clarify my thinking on the question of nonviolence than all of the books I had read. Living through the actual experience of the protest, nonviolence became more than a method to which I gave intellectual assent; it became a commitment to a way of life.”[9] It wasn’t that this model, this conviction, simply dispelled resistance or prevented any violence from taking place, he emphasized. “The nonviolent approach does not immediately change the heart of the oppressor. It first does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had.”[10]  

In this second week of Epiphany, as we celebrate the life of the Rev. Dr. King this weekend, God is abiding with us, strengthening us with staying power for the road ahead. God is fortifying and refreshing us — sending us through that spiritual car wash – equipping us for our vocation to be saints in this world, embodying the divine dream, as Verna Dozier called it, using language Dr. King made famous.[11] So if in this deeply troubled and weary world, we are asking Jesus, where are you? Where are you staying? His answer is revealed to us today: right here with you, among you, strengthening you. Come and see.

[1] 1 Corinthians goes on to describe this wisdom later in chapter 1 vs. 17-31, through chapter 2.

[2] Sandra Schneiders, Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (New York, NY: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1999, 2003 ), 141.

[3] Shelly Rambo, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 98.

[4] Rambo, 98-99.

[5] Shireen Korkzan, “Thousands join Episcopal Church vigil to lament violent immigration enforcement actions, unite in pursuing justice,” Episcopal News Service, January 14, 2026. https://episcopalnewsservice.org/2026/01/14/thousands-join-episcopal-church-vigil-to-lament-violent-immigration-enforcement-unite-in-pursuing-justice/

[6] The Rev. Dr. MarPn Luther King Jr., “My Trip to the Land of Gandhi,” in A Testimony of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King Jr. (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1986), 23.

[7] King, “My Trip to the Land of Gandhi,” in Testimony of Hope, 26

[8] King, “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” in Testimony of Hope, 39

[9] King, “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” in Testimony of Hope, 38

[10] King, “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” in Testimony of Hope, 39

[11] Verna Dozier, The Dream of God: A Call To Return (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Press, 1991)