St. Francis, 2009

 

While I was trying to recover from a cold this past week, I re-read a mystery by Laurie King, one of my favorite writers.     The story concerns the murder of a homeless man in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, but the chief character is Brother Erasmus – a possible witness to and/or suspect in the murder – who serves as spiritual leader to the city's homeless while also being a welcome guest at the Episcopal seminary across the Bay in Berkeley.                     The detectives investigating the case have a hard time making sense of Brother Erasmus, and for good reason. He is obviously quite learned – in fact, he never speaks in his own words, but seems only able to communicate by using quotations from the Bible, Shakespeare, the Prayer Book, ancient theologians – even Gilbert and Sullivan— in hopes that his hearers will catch his meaning through the oblique references he makes.      At the Seminary, he juggles while preaching in the courtyard;

In the tourist district, he performs a masterful ventriloquist act with his staff using only quotations, during which he exposes a macho young man who has been abusing the  woman at his side.                                      Brother Erasmus barely escapes serious injury from the angered tough guy.    

Sometimes, Erasmus seems racked with guilt, yet his compassionate listening and spiritual depth are valued by the homeless, who become more fully human in his presence.      At first, the cops don't know whether he is quite sane, let alone how to question a man who cannot – or will not -- tell them “just the facts.”                      Yet one of them, at least, finds herself drawn to the deep goodness that seems to dwell within him.

 

Eventually they discover that they are dealing with a Fool –   not a simpleton nor a sucker, but a Holy Fool, a modern practitioner of an ancient tradition.  Like the Trickster of Native American traditions or the medieval court jester who was the only one who could get away with speaking the truth to the King, a Holy Fool is a person whose unsettling words and strange deeds serve to warn society that the “status quo [is] in grave danger of smothering the life out of the spirit of the individual and the community...       “The Fool is [one who] seeks to save his community by appearing to threaten it,”  the detective reads in a scholar’s article.       “The essential ministry of the Fool is to undermine beliefs, to seed doubts, to shock people into seeing the truth.” [i]

 

I’m wondering whether you see some connection between Brother Erasmus, the fictional Holy Fool of the Bay Area in the late 20^th century, and the Patron Saint whose life we celebrate today: Brother Francis, the Holy Fool of Assisi in the 13^th century.                                 Mystery writer Laurie King certainly does:                       the quotations that head each chapter of her novel are taken from G. K. Chesterton's biography of our patron Saint. King uses Chesterton’s words about Francis to describe her fictional Fool, Erasmus.      For Francis was indeed a Holy Fool.       The son of a wealthy merchant, he chose to abandon the life he'd been brought up to and to live in total poverty –

a foolish act by the world’s standards, for sure;       and a Holy Fool’s challenge to those standards, as well.    Francis’ challenge was an embarrassment and distress to those who continued to cling to the usual verities.

It is told that when his father finally publicly disowned his troublesome son in front of the gathered people of Assisi and their bishop, Francis stripped himself of the family clothes he was wearing and stood naked before them all - a Fool’s way of saying that he would have nothing more to do with the values of the world in which he’d been raised.    This provocative act of the Fool spoke with power to a society obsessed with appearance and status.           Francis soon gained in followers from among the young noble men of Assisi.    It is also an example of what Francis is reputed to have said to his followers when he sent them out on mission:

Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary use words.  

 

Francis was known as the Jester or Juggler of God. He gave himself to joy in God and God's creation, to an awareness that praying and playing go hand in hand,[ii] and was open, always, to laughter – laughter at himself and at all human pretension.    “He was,” Chesterton writes, “emphatically what we would call a character.” [iii]

Yet Francis' life as a Fool, like that of Brother Erasmus, was also shot through with suffering.     It is no accident that our 2^nd Lesson today begins with these words of St. Paul:   May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. [iv]                                             Francis is, of course, famous for receiving the stigmata, the marks of Jesus' wounds, in his own body.                                      This happened not long before his death, a sign of the many years he had sought to  identify with the suffering of his Master through bare-bones living, care for the poor, compassion for the sick and willingness to reach across the barriers of society to embrace outcasts such as lepers.

Yet, as today's Gospel says, he found his Master's yoke to be easy and his burden light.       “The whole point of St. Francis of Assisi,” wrote Chesterton, “is that he certainly was ascetical and he certainly was not gloomy.” [v] Suffering and joy managed to co-exist in Francis’ soul.

 

Francis' life of Holy Folly found its source in that Holy Fool who was his Master, who “[preached] to the poor, the prostitutes, the scum, [while] scratching his lice and calling himself the son of God – and [then] the ultimate absurdity, God's only son strung up and executed with the other criminals:     A royal diadem made from a branch of thorns, a king's cloak that went to the high throw [of the dice], his only public mourners a few outcast women with nothing to lose.”[vi]

So here we are today:            people who claim to be followers of one Holy Fool, Jesus; in a Church dedicated to another Fool, Francis.                                  What are we to make of this Holy Folly in our own lives?     It is tempting for a preacher to say that we should live in the same sort of Holy Folly ourselves --                                           to be as unconcerned with the normal ways the world does business as were Jesus and Francis;                                 to strip off our usual clothes, and with them, our place in society;        to take to the streets and preach the Gospel in provocative action, using words when necessary;                                       like Francis, to become Fools for Christ’s sake.

It is tempting to say that, and maybe I should be enough of a Fool myself to do so.               But such sobriety as I have makes me think that urging you to do what I’m not prepared to do myself isn’t quite fair.         Chesterton may be some help to us who are not ready to take that path, for he articulates how rare Holy Fools are in human experience and how they are often beyond our capacity to comprehend or imitate.

[People]  like Francis are not common in any age,”  he writes.                                             Nor are they to be fully understood merely by the exercise of common sense. [vii]

Something happened to him that must remain greatly dark to most of us,

who are ordinary and selfish [people] whom God has not broken to make anew.” [viii]

 

Still, if we recognize that Holy Fools like Erasmus, Francis and Jesus are different from ordinary, selfish people like us, that doesn’t mean we are free to ignore them and go our way without letting them challenge our complacency.     Indeed, if Laurie King is right, we need Holy Fools to show us how trapped we often are in ways of living that are limited, unfree, joyless and deadly.                            We need their provocative words and deeds to shake us up, tell us unwelcome truths and to make us laugh, especially at ourselves.   Above all, we need to be touched by their willingness to let go of absolutely everything for God’s sake –

so that even as we hold on to way more than we should, we might have a chance to go enough to take a step or two closer to that deep intimacy with God that marked Francis’ life and is what makes him at once so attractive and off-putting.    That’s the wonderful and scary thing about Holy Fools.      They show us a quality of life – a freedom, a joy, a compassion, a goodness – that we yearn to have for ourselves;     And they show us that we will not find what we so much desire if we do not let ourselves be stripped bare of whatever – whatever – gets in the way.

We, in this parish, are blessed to have the Holy Fool Francis as our patron, to show us what a life totally given to God’s love and joy can look like.              Even if we do not yet dare to become Fools for Christ ourselves, we can let his Foolishness shake us up and set us a bit more free to serve the Master and Fool he loved so dearly.