5th Sunday in Ordinary Time (C) – May 18, 2025

St. Paul – Lyons, KS

Acts 14:21-27; Psalm 145:8-13; Revelation 21:1-5a; John 13:31-33a, 34-35

“What happens when I lose the drive?”

During this season of Easter I’ve been trying to focus our attention on a simple question, a simple problem: we don’t lose faith, people don’t really lose faith, they don’t stop believing Jesus rose from the dead (again, remember how full we were on Easter, and how then people drift away)—the issue isn’t that people lose faith, but that we cease to shape our lives by it. For example, last week we talked about how we can easily become “practical atheists,” and even though we believe God exits, practically we live as if he doesn’t. For example, we don’t listen to His voice, the voice of the Good Shepherd, the voice of His Church. Instead, we just listen to ourselves, or just the voices we agree with. And when that’s the case, well, all we’re doing is living as practical atheists: people who have faith that God exists, who have faith that Jesus rose from the dead, but whose faith doesn’t affect our life in any practical way.

Last week, though, someone posed a good question to me. They asked, “Great Father, I’m on board, I want the faith to shape my life. But what happens when I just … when I just lose the drive? When I grow cold, lukewarm? When it feels like I’m just going through the motions? What happens when the excitement wears off? What happens when something bad happens and I just lose the fire, the desire, the chutzpah?”

And that is a fair question! Because let’s face it, we all have good “seasons” in our faith: we love coming to Mass, reading the Bible, praying, serving—all the “Jesus” and “Church” stuff is great! But then, almost just as quickly, that can fade away. We hit a rough patch, miss Mass for a couple weeks, nothing about Jesus or the Church seems interesting, prayer is hard and boring, something bad happens and we feel betrayed by God or someone in the Church. What happens then?

And Paul—our patron, St. Paul, we heard about him in our first reading—so Paul and his friend Barnabas are in the city of Antioch. And it was actually in Antioch that these people following Jesus were first called Christians, so historically a pretty significant place. And these people are on fires! But then they start—just like that person asked me—they start growing cold, lukewarm, that initial excitement is wearing off. And so Paul—Paul does what? We read, “exhorted them to persevere in the faith, saying, ‘It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.’” They told them to persevere, and that these hardships (and any hardships) aren’t just “ok”—they’re actually necessary. In other words, Paul is saying that the answer is to develop an anti-fragile faith. A faith that grows in the midst of hardships.

Anti-Fragile Faith

So a little over ten years ago, a mathematician by the name of Nessim Taleb wrote this book called Antifragile. What he did is he looked around the world at different economic systems and biological systems, and, kind of, just the world, and he said, “Yeah, there’s things in our world that are fragile. They encounter the obstacle, the obstacle crushes it. Think of a wine glass: it falls off the table, shatters, it’s over. There’s also things that are resilient: resilient things encounter the obstacle and make it through.” For example, when a basketball hit the ground it doesn’t shatter, it actually rebounds from the fall, bounces back up. He said, “But there’s things that, when they encounter an obstacle, they don’t get crushed and they don’t just make it through…they get stronger.” And he looked around the world for a word for that. “What’s the opposite of fragile” Couldn’t find one. So he came up with a new term: antifragile. Antifragility is when you encounter the obstacle and that encounter with the obstacle makes you stronger. The encounter with the obstacle makes you stronger. This is the premise of our immune system: our immune system needs to encounter problems in order to grow. This is the premise of athletic training, lifting weight: you break the body a little, but then it grows back stronger.

And so this is what I mean by we need to develop an antifragile faith: we need a faith that isn’t fragile (obviously), and not just a faith that is resilient (even though that’s a good start); we need a faith that is antifragile, a faith that when it passes through hardships—sufferings, trials, rough patches—it doesn’t break or just stay the same, but it actually grows, grows stronger, deepens, matures.

Paul—again, our patron Paul—in his very famous letter to the Romans points this out! (Again, I know I sound like I make all this up, but I’m not.) Paul said, writing to the Romans, writing to explain what it looks like for a life that is completely and utterly shaped by this faith—Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “We rejoice in our sufferings”—we rejoice in our sufferings! Not just tolerate them, rejoice in them!—why? “We rejoice in our sufferings knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts” (Romans 5:3-5). Paul didn’t come up with the term “antifragile” or “antifragile” faith, but he knew exactly how reality works: suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.

In other words, the way reality works, the way God designed it—physically and also spiritually we are designed to grow, and grow stronger, even in the midst of hardships. Or as Paul said, “It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.”

Our Natural Reaction Transformed

But think: what is our natural reaction? We want to alleviate suffering, take all suffering away! But what happens when we do? What happens if you cut a moth or a butterfly out of its cocoon? You cripple it! What happens when you’re a lawnmower parent? You prevent your kid from ever running into a problem, and you handicap them; they can’t deal with adversity or problems later in life. What happens when you don’t embrace the sufferings of studying and instead just use AI? You end up really dumb, unable to think. And even in the most extreme, what happens at the end of life when you face the suffering of death, and not just physical pain but the intense experience of facing your mortality? Well, more and more, physical assisted suicide.

We want to alleviate suffering—sure!—but what if there actually is some suffering we need to embrace? Like Paul would say, suffering we need to rejoice in? Because here’s the thing: the secret to an antifragile faith, to growing in perseverance and endurance—the secret to an antifragile faith is a metanoia, a change of mind, looking at suffering and hardships differently. Not as a sign that God hates you or he isn’t real or this isn’t worth is, but as the path to a deeper faith and character and hope. Because that’s the mindset, the vision of a life that is shaped by faith, truly shaped by faith. Jesus’ own suffering and death and resurrection are a proof that suffering is not the sign that God is absent, or doesn’t care, or that something is off, no. The resurrection is a promise that even sufferings and hardships and challenges, when offered to God, are powerful means of transformation.

I think of the pilgrimage that we did over Spring Break: 75 miles, a 75 mile walk from Lyons to Pilsen. Our second day we walked 20 miles in negative one degree windchill and 60 mile per hour wind gusts. And after getting beaten up all day in that, the next day we walked another 27 miles. I guarantee there was some suffering. But the endurance, and character, and ultimately hope that were produced on that pilgrimage—that pilgrimage changed us.

And so really the question is this: have we accepted the lie that “faith” should be easy? That it’s just believing in God, and being nice? That if I lose “excitement” then I should try something else? OR, that faith, true faith, a faith which shapes our life entails taking life, and reality, and suffering, and trials, and everything seriously? And that perseverance through them will actually bring a deeper faith? An antifragile faith, a deeper and stronger faith than before?

Yes, we can lose the drive, grow cold, lukewarm. We can feel like we’re just going through the motions. The excitement can wear off,  bad things can happen. But as Paul exhorted the first people to be called Christians 2,000 years ago and exhorts us today: persevere in the faith, it is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the kingdom of God, to have an antifragile faith, a faith which shapes our lives.