A
Sermon for the Feast of St. Francis, 2008
Let us pray:
Most high, omnipotent,
good Lord, grant your people grace to renounce gladly the vanities of this
world; that, following the way of
blessed Francis, we may for love of you delight in your whole creation with
perfectness of joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Today we celebrate the Feast Day of
our patron, St. Francis of
Francis may well be best known for
his love of God’s creation. Many stories – some rooted in fact, some legendary
– reveal his delight in the creatures of God. One story tells of him preaching to a flock of
birds in roadside trees, calling them always to praise God because God cares
for them. Since God has given them
freedom to wing through the sky; food to eat, rivers and fountains for their
thirst; mountains and valleys for
shelter, tall trees for nests and feathers for clothing, they are always to
praise their gracious God.
Another story tells of how Francis persuaded a wolf that had terrorized the
people of Gubbio to make peace with the townsfolk. Bringing the wolf into the city square,
Francis made a pact between people and predator: they would feed him regularly and in turn, the
wolf would no longer prey on their flocks.
But Francis’ love of God’s creation is best revealed in his own words in
the Canticle of the Sun, which will be our closing hymn today. Francis thanks God for making all that is, and
in turn calls upon his brothers and sisters of the created order-- sun, moon,
stars, wind, water, fire, humanity, even sister death – to praise their loving
Creator with him. Francis’ love of
Creation has come down to our day in the Blessing of Animals we will celebrate
today and the lawn statues in which the saint is surrounded by birds.
Pleasant as these remembrances are, however, they risk taking Francis’ love
for God’s world too lightly. Francis’
loves of God’s world was deep and passionate, and were he with us today, I
believe he would call us to an impassioned work for the healing of our planet. As we all know, the world God made and gave us
to care for has been damaged in ways Francis could never have imagined. Human beings have raped mother earth and
polluted sister water; we have so filled
the air with particles and chemicals that at times brother sun and sister moon
can be seen only through a brown haze We
have destroyed thousands of species of the plants and animals Francis loved; and climate change now threatens the globe
with destruction we cannot predict.
Our profligacy and selfish use of God’s generous gifts is nothing other
than sinful, and Francis, were he here, would call us to repentance – a
repentance of action, and not just words. Those actions include recycling household
waste; being energy efficient in our
homes, work places, and churches; driving
less and buying more fuel-efficient vehicles – not because gas has gotten
expensive, but to reduce the carbon emissions that threaten the world. We must also call on our political leaders to
use their positions to protect the creation God has entrusted to our care.
This is nitty-gritty day in and day out stuff, and it may not seem terribly
“spiritual.” The truth is, our spiritual
call to care for God’s creation requires concrete action to become real. If we are to love creation as Francis did, we
need to work for its restoration each and every day.
Francis’ love of God’s creation was not limited to animals nor to the
beauties of sky and sea. Francis cared for the poor, needy and outcast of the
world with acts of hands-on love. This
work of love is less attractive than preaching to the birds but was how Francis
drew closer to Christ. In some accounts,
a crucial event in his conversion came in his encounter with a leper on the
road – a story Nikos Kazantzakis dramatized in his historical novel about
Francis’ life.[1]
The narrator, a companion of Francis named Br. Leo, tells that one day,
Francis spoke of how lepers filled him with disgust. Yet that very night in
prayer, Francis heard a voice within telling him that the next day, he would meet
a leper, and that Francis was to “run to him, embrace him, kiss him.” Francs knew it was the voice of God.
The next morning on the road, they heard in the distance the bells that
lepers rang to warn other travelers to keep their distance. Francis fought the urge to flee and as the
leper emerged from the trees ran towards him with outstretched arms. “I came close,” Br. Leo recounts, “and gazed
at [the leper] in horror. Half of his
putrescent nose had fallen away; his
hands were without fingers – just stumps;
and his lips were an oozing wound. Throwing himself upon the leper,
Francis embraced him, then lowered his head and kissed him upon the lips. Afterwards, he lifted him in his arms and,
covering him with his robe, began to advance slowly, with heavy steps, towards
the city,” [seeking a shelter in which the leper could be cared for.] [As we approached the city], “suddenly I saw
Francis stop abruptly. He bent down and
drew aside the robe in order to uncover the leper. But all at once he uttered a loud cry: the
robe was empty!… It wasn’t a leper; it was Christ himself who had come down to
earth in the form of a leper in order to test Francis.”
[After some hours of stunned silence
lying in the road, Francis spoke of what he’d learned]: “This Brother Leo, is what I understood: all lepers, cripples, sinners, if you kiss
them on the mouth – they all…become Christ.”
“All lepers, cripples, sinners, if you kiss them on the mouth – they
all…become Christ.” There is challenge
and gift in these words. Like most
middle-class Christians in this country, we are genuinely concerned about the
lepers of our time: the poor, the
cripples, the sinners and outcasts in our community and throughout the world. We gather clothes for them; we make blankets, give food; write checks and we pray. All of that is well and good and we should
keep doing it all.
But if we are to meet Christ in these people, we will need to do more. We will need to kiss them on the mouth – that is,
to meet them in the flesh, embrace them and minister to them in whatever ways
they need, face-to-face and hands-on. I’m new enough here that it would be
presumptuous of me to say how we at St. Francis would best do that. But I know that opportunities exist in our
community for us to meet and embrace the lepers, cripples, and sinners of our
time and place. Since those people are
not always pleasant to see, touch or smell, such hands-on ministry can be a
challenge, as it was for Francis. But here
is the gift: when we embrace and serve people in need, we can meet Christ.
Francis offers one yet greater challenge to us – his joyful embrace of
total poverty. Francis was the son of a
rich cloth merchant. As a young man, he
lived well, partied hard and enjoyed the good things of life. Yet in response to God’s call he gave up every
last possession – even the fine clothes that came on his back. One story says that when his father publicly
disowned his troublesome son in front of the gathered people of
For Francis, his marriage to Lady Poverty was a joyous act that brought him
ever nearer to Jesus. Quite simply, he
believed that to grow closer to God or, more truly, to experience how close God
already is to us, one needs to get everything else out of the way. In giving up all possessions, Francis
committed himself to a total identification with Jesus – so much so that near
the end of his life, he received in prayer the stigmata: the marks in his own body of the five wounds
of Jesus’ Crucifixion.
Giving himself to complete poverty also set Francis free from the economic
fears that plague us these days. Trusting
that God would provide for his needs, Francis didn’t worry about where his next
meal would come from or where he would lay his head. If he were alive today, he would feel nothing
of the anxiety that have gripped our nation as banks fail, stocks fall and
credit is squeezed. Those realities are
frightening only to those to whom money and possessions matter – that is to
say, all of us here. We do not – indeed,
cannot -- know the joyous freedom of Francis that was so infectious that people
from all walks of life joined him in a life of total poverty.
It’s been said of Francis “that of
all the saints, he is the most popular and admired, but also the least
imitated.” [2] Though
we as a church are dedicated to Francis, I don’t imagine that any of us are
about to give away all we have and embrace Lady Poverty as our patron did -- though we may well be poorer for our refusal
to imitate his poverty.
But maybe, just maybe, we can take some small steps along Francis’ path and
find some of the freedom and joy which so marked his life. Maybe even in these uncertain times – especially
in these uncertain times – we can become less attached to our possessions
and freer of their possession of us.
We can abandon ourselves just a bit more to dependence on God for what we
really need, and not be consumed by what
our consumer culture tells us we have to have. We can focus our energies
not on financial self-preservation, but on the needs of God’s creation and the
lepers of our day. We can give to the poor more money than
prudence would suggest is wise. We can
seek to identify with Jesus by sharing some of the suffering he undergoes to
this day in the suffering people of the world. And if we do even a small bit of that, we just
might find our hearts stretched, our spirits widened and our faith growing. We just might know a bit more of that joyful,
rich and blessed freedom that was shone so brightly in the life of our patron,
blessed Francis of Assisi.