No Spirit of Slavery and Fear

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  A week or so ago I felt a little overwhelmed with all the stuff that had to get accomplished, and frustrated with things that I wanted to go a particular way and didn’t.  As I sometimes do, I called up my best friend to vent a little bit and hopefully get a little sympathy.  After I had finished my pity party, and explaining how tough my life was at that point, my friend said something to the effect of: “You act like life is supposed to be easy, and that you’re supposed to be perfectly happy on this earth.  Life is a fight until we hopefully make it to Purgatory or Heaven, and then we can rest easy and not have to struggle.”  What my friend lacks in empathy, he makes up for in straightforwardness.  
    I thought of that as I prepared my homily because of this line from St. Paul: “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but a spirit of adoption, through which we cry out, Abba (Father).”  When we look at the state of the world, and even sometimes the state of the Church (or at least parts of the Church), it can be very easy to give in to this mentality of “woe is me!”  We live in a fallen world, and so many things are not the way that they should be.  Further, as the world turns more and more away from Christ, the battle for us intensifies and calls for more fortitude to be loving but firm witnesses to the Gospel.  We also have to deal with others’ sinfulness and sinful actions (just as others have to deal with our own sinfulness and sinful actions), and it gets tiring.  And then there are simply the things that don’t go according to plan, not because of any ill will, but simply because our world is fallen and things don’t always go the way we intend or hope.

    How easy to wallow in the mud of self-pity!  And yet, we did not receive a spirit of fear, but a spirit of adoption, which gives us courage to keep fighting.  God does not call us to cower, but to fight on, each day, for His kingdom.  To return to the “Lord of the Rings,” which I reference all too often, we are each Frodo, carrying a heavy burden to Mount Doom, so that the world can be made right and evil can be vanquished.  And sometimes we say to Sam (those walking with us to Mount Doom) that we’re tired, that we can’t make it.  Sometimes Sam even has to carry us.  But in the end, Frodo finds strength to complete his task.
    Or, to reference another set of DVDs I own, I think back to EZ company in the HBO series, “Band of Brothers.”  Their task was monumental.  Nazi forces were well-positioned all throughout Europe, and fortified against external attacks.  Europe seemed lost.  But the men of EZ company decided to jump out of planes that were going to flying into Nazi-occupied France so that the men who would be storming the beaches of Normandy that following morning would have a better chance to establish their own foothold, from which they could liberate Europe.  EZ company had great victories, like on D-Day, but they also had epic failures, like Operation Markt Garden in Holland.  Days stretched into weeks which stretched into months which stretched into D-Day plus 336 days.  They sometimes didn’t have enough ammunition, were surrounded, lost friends, had to train new paratroopers, and even had to put up with bad leaders.  But they never gave up.  They never surrendered.  They kept fighting on.

    While we can apply this analogy aptly to the world, it also applies to our own spiritual life.  Our own souls are often battlefields, or have paths that lead to attitudes or habits that are contrary to God.  It seems like we all-too-often try to root out the same sins, sometimes taking two steps forward and one step back, or even one step forward and two steps back.  Opening ourselves to God’s grace to allow Him to sanctify us seems like a path that will never end, and fatigue can hit us after trying so hard and not always achieving the success we desire.
    In the midst of that, keep that phrase that we heard today in your mind: “God did not give us a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear.”  In Confirmation, the Holy Spirit gave us many gifts, including the gift of fortitude.  Fortitude is the virtue which helps us to keep pressing on when something is hard, to continue to fight in the face of danger, to stand up for what is right, no matter the cost.  If today weren’t a Sunday, we would celebrate St. Apollinaris in the 1962 calendar.  He was a disciple of St. Peter, and traveled with him from Antioch (where Peter founded a local church) to Rome.  He was then made the bishop of Ravenna, and preached the Gospel, while enduring many persecutions.  The pagans locked him in prison and exiled him.  St. Apollinaris died by being beaten to death in AD 79.  St. Apollinaris, like all of the martyrs, are great witnesses to us of what our acceptance of the gift of fortitude can look like if we seek it.  In those early days of the church, not much went as the Christians hoped.  Many rejected their message of the Gospel.  Those who did accept it often struggled with leaving their old life behind (as we especially hear from St. Paul in his epistles to the Corinthians).  Some converts tried to mix their pagan beliefs in with the Gospel (which is where Gnosticism starts to appear).  And more often than not, being a public follower of Christ meant imprisonment or exile at best, and, very likely, execution in a horrible manner at worst.  But they kept it up.  Not because it was easy; not because they were as successful as they wanted to be; not because everything went well, but because they had the spirit of adoption as sons and daughters in the Son of God.  And they knew that remaining faithful as God’s children was worth any punishment or seeming failure that could happen.  
    So today, recommit yourselves, as I also will do, to bringing the light of Christ into a world that prefers darkness.  Recommit yourselves, as I also will do, to staying faithful to Christ when so many walk away from Him.  Do not give in to the spirit of slavery and fall back into fear, but stand strong in the spirit of adoption as co-heirs with Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever.  Amen.