Stand Fast in the Arena of Faith
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
written by Rev. Dr. Mike Hegeman
“Stand fast in the faith, and love one another, all of you, and be not offended at my sufferings.” These are the last words of St. Perpetua just before she was martyred in the public arena, in Carthage, during a celebration of Emperor Septimius Severus’ birthday, in the year 203 AD. This she said just before she guided a young gladiator’s shaking hand to pierce her heart with his sword. Perpetua died alongside her companion Felicity and fellow catechumen Saturus*.
I spoke of these martyrs in Sunday’s sermon because I was inspired by the scripture passage from Romans 5 that said, “Hope does not put us to shame.” We all face disappointments in life, even suffering, but scripture says that love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, and this love is the basis of our hope. Christian martyrs hoped in Christ, even in the face of death, and we claim as Christians that love sustained them and fulfilled their lives.
Speaking about ancient martyrs in a Sunday sermon is a tricky thing, mostly because the kinds of difficulties we face as modern-day American Christians do not compare with what 3rd-century Roman Christians faced at the hands of agents and emissaries of the Roman “pax” (a hard-won and brutally maintained “peace” where conformity to Roman ideals superseded individual belief and religious expression). It’s also tricky to use the ancient martyrs as role models for our faith, often because their circumstances were much different from our own. Before the year 381 AD, Christians held a very tenuous place in the Empire, mostly because their perceived abandonment of the “gods” for their one God threatened the primacy of the Empire. If enough people turned from the gods, the Romans thought, then the gods would stop “blessing” the Empire and its capacity to hold onto its territorial, economic, military, and cultural hegemony.
Granted, there are today some American Christians who perceive that they indeed suffer, and they are quick to name ways that either the US government or US culture oppresses them. Other Christians say that they experience great freedom here to live out their faith.
There are moments when Christians genuinely suffer here in the US. Ten years ago today (June 17, 2015), a white supremacist gunman shot and killed nine people inside the Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, SC. Did he kill them because of their faith or because of their race? This is tricky to disentangle. Emphasis is usually placed on a racial motivation; little is said about their being Christians who were engaged in Bible study as the reason they were executed.
When Christians suffer here, there is often a close entanglement between politics and faith. At the end of this past May, a young Israeli, Jewish-Christian diplomatic couple was gunned down in Washington, DC by someone who reportedly shouted pro-Palestinian slogans. Just a few days ago, a Roman Catholic couple, Minnesota Democratic lawmakers, were gunned down by a “Christian Nationalist” and sometime missionary. In these two instances, it seems that the political dynamics factored more keenly than the Christian identity of those murdered. Yet, they were Christians, who died at the hands of political extremists.
When we speak of ancient martyrs, often we make them out to be paragons of faith, larger than life, facing death with supreme dignity and courage, role models for the faithful. Today, we look at the death of Christians at the hands of extremists as just tragic.
We are called to pray to God in memory of ancient martyrs and the more recent ones. We are to pray that we turn from our warring ways and that each heart may be changed by the love of Christ. Family members of those who died and church members of the Mother Emanuel Church sought to express forgiveness for the man who took the lives of their family members. This expression of forgiveness was not uncontroversial. Such forgiveness, that we pray leads ultimately to healing and redemption, should be what we, each and every one of us, strive for, even as we pray for love and reconciliation in these troubled times.
*If you want to read the full account of these martyrs’ story, follow this link: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0324.htm