Fragility and the Fight or Flight Response

This message confronts a truth many of us feel but struggle to name: we are living in an age of profound fragility. Yet this fragility doesn't always look weak—it often appears loud, certain, even militant. We see it in the fight response, where people grasp for control through ideologies, grievances, and the pursuit of dominance. We see it in the flight response, where others withdraw into anxiety, despair, and numbing distractions. Both responses, though seemingly opposite, share the same root problem: a lack of spiritual resilience. The sermon draws us toward a radically different path modeled by Christ himself—a resilience that comes not from reclaiming power or retreating from pain, but from being malleable to suffering without being destroyed by it. Like iron hammered on the anvil of the cross, we are shaped by our trials into the image of Christ. The message explores Mark's account of Jesus' baptism as the beginning of the gospel, where the Spirit descends and immediately drives Jesus into the wilderness. This pattern reveals a crucial truth: the Spirit doesn't make life easier; it makes us more resilient. Through the story of Franz Jägerstatter, an Austrian farmer who refused to surrender his soul to Nazi ideology, we see what Spirit-filled endurance actually looks like—not revolutionary heroics, but quiet faithfulness, prayer, and love even unto death. This is the call for us today: to resist the cultural pressure to organize our lives around grievance or escape, and instead to receive the Spirit who makes us fervent, alive, and unshakably rooted in God.