St Barnabas - faith persisting
A Sermon preached by The Revd Lucie Spiers at St Barnabas Jericho on the Patronal Festival of St Barnabas, the Apostle, 14 June 2026.
Readings: Acts 11:21b-26: 13: 1-3; Ephesians 2: 19-22; Matthew 10: 7-13
Someone once told me that the purpose of a sermon is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Clever words, but I’m certainly not convinced it’s my job to decide who deserves to be afflicted. While I’m fairly sure we all need words and signs of comfort, encouragement and consolation from time to time. And in life and ministry of St Barnabas, we can find this.
In the reading from Acts, we find him summoned from the early church in Jerusalem to Antioch as news of further Gentile conversions reaches them. He himself is a figure of the in-between; he is a Levite of Cyprian birth. He speaks their language, which is also his own and the mother tongue of the Jewish faith - his faith. He knows both the anxieties of Jerusalem and the power of the Gospel. Not everyone who believes in Jesus is ready for newness or can come into the unanticipated places of the Spirit’s work. Some Saints do not like surprises, but Barnabas is not one of them. He has seen the grace of God before, and his eyes are ready for the new. He yields to the Spirit and goes to Antioch, rejoicing as they had in Jerusalem. There, his continual offer of the Good News, refused by the Jewish congregation, is gladly accepted by the Gentiles. The church that is for everyone is born.
That same spirit of perseverance Barnabas brought to the early church - faith persisting and pressing on even when words run out - can be found centuries later, written at the top of a piece of organ music composed in the 1920s by a young French composer, Jehan Alain:
"When the Christian Soul can find no new words to beg for the mercy of God in distress, it endlessly repeats the same invocation with a vehement faith. Human reason reaches its limit. Only faith continues its ascent."
The piece is called Litanies, and Martin will play it at the end of the service. Alain wrote it after his sister's death and his grief had stripped him of everything except this one raw instinct — to keep calling out to God even when language had given up. The music reflects this: the same urgent, insistent repeated phrase because the heart refuses to stop.
Alain was 29 when he was killed in the Second World War while on a reconnaissance mission. Confronted by a German patrol, he engaged them single-handedly before being killed. That image, standing alone, of faith outlasting reason, I want to hold before us today. As I believe, it reflects some of the image of St Barnabas too.
We don't always know quite what to do with Barnabas. He tends to live in Paul's shadow. But study him, and you find a man whose faith has exactly the quality Alain describes - a spirit-filled faith that keeps ascending when human reason has long since reached its limit. His name tells us something of his character. Born Joseph, he was renamed Barnabas, the Son of Encouragement, or, more boldly, the Son of Exhortation or Consolation. His first instinct was joy - the joy of drawing others into new life.
We see this earlier in Acts too: he sells his land and lays the money at the apostles' feet, holding nothing back and calculating no return. He simply empties his hands. Not the act of a cautious man. The act of one who has already decided that God is enough. But it is what comes next that I want to focus on today, because it is here that we see Barnabas's endurance.
Saul of Tarsus met the risen Christ on the road to Damascus and arrived in Jerusalem, claiming to be a changed man. The church doesn't believe him. This is the man who stood by at Stephen's stoning and who hunted Christians house to house. So the doors stay shut to him. Then Barnabas steps forward, vouches for Saul before the apostles, and refuses to let suspicion prevail.
Why does this matter for a sermon about endurance and sacrifice? Because I think we sometimes imagine Christian courage as something exercised only at the moment of death. But Barnabas shows us that the endurance of faith is practised long before the final test. When reason urged caution, he trusted. Every time he encouraged others who pulled back, he was deepening a faith that would, in the end, carry him all the way.
Tradition tells us that Barnabas was martyred in Cyprus. A man who had given everything away so freely at the start of his ministry could, in the end, give his life in the same way, having long since learned that none of it was his to hold on to in the first place.
Christ instructs the disciples in our Gospel reading: "you received without pay, give without pay." These words encapsulate the entire gift of salvation. We cannot proclaim the kingdom without the inner certainty that it is entirely free, all grace. When we act without leaving room for this, the Gospel becomes lifeless. But with faith, prayer becomes not only asking, but truly praising God.
Barnabas never stopped turning towards God. Through the slow grind of missionary journeys, the pain of his break with Paul over John Mark, the hostility of synagogues, the violence of crowds, and the weariness of the road, he kept yearning and kept ascending.
I wonder what it is, for each of us, that brings us to a point where words run out? It might be grief, as it was for Alain. It might be illness, disappointment, or a prayer that has gone unanswered for so long that we've forgotten what we were even asking for. It might be a world that seems so broken that the words of faith sound hollow when we try to speak them.
When Alain sat down to write Litanies - raw with grief and loss - he could have concluded that God was absent, that prayer was futile, and that the words had run out for good. Instead, he wrote repetition. He wrote insistence. He wrote a piece of music that, at its heart, is an act of defiance against despair. It is a lament hammering on heaven's door when heaven seems closed. How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? The same cry goes up again, and again, and again. This is not a weak faith; it is one of strength. A faith that has let go of the need to say something new, to be eloquent or reasonable, and has simply decided to keep turning towards God.
St Barnabas continues to speak into our lives today, encouraging us to keep going. Not with false cheerfulness. Not by pretending the hardship we feel isn't real. But with that vehement, insistent, unreasonable faith. The faith that reaches its limit and then, somehow, keeps ascending.
Jehan Alain's Litanies ends not in resolution but in affirmation. The organ continually cries out until the sound fills everything. It is neither a comfortable nor a tidy ending. But it is one of faith.
May St Barnabas give us the encouragement to pray without ceasing, to trust without reckoning, to turn towards God when words fail us, and to know that when human reason reaches its limits, our faith, through the mercy and love of God, will continue its ascent.
