Sermon, Feast of St. Francis of Assisi
St. Richards Episcopal Church, Winter Park,
FL
Sunday, October 7. 2013
Psalm
148:7-14
Matthew
11:25-30
COLLECT: 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, who lives and reigns
with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Let us begin this morning with a prayer from
the Franciscan tradition called
The
Absorbeat
May the
power of your love, Lord Christ,
fiery
and sweet as honey,
so
absorb our hearts
as to
withdraw them from all that is under heaven.
Grant
that we may be ready
to die
for love of your love,
who
were so good as to die for love of our love. Amen
I
would like thank you for your kind invitation to preach this morning. And I need
to point out that there is no small amount of pressure on the preacher who is delivering
a sermon on the feast day of a saint whose most famous statement was, “Preach
the Gospel at all times. Use words only when necessary!”
This
is a joyful day on the church’s calendar. The Feast of St. Francis of Assisi is
the event those of us who are owned by non-human animal companions look forward
to each year. In the name of this saint, we come to our parish with our beloved
furry, feathered, finned and scaled family members to have them blessed. In so
doing, we recognize in a very intentional way the blessing that they are in our
own lives every single day. All around us, creatures of G-d are making a joyful
noise, singing a wondrous hymn to the Creator of all living beings.
The Prince of Fools’ Conversion
Little
wonder that Francis is often seen as the second most beloved saint in the
Christian tradition right behind the Virgin Mary. So perhaps it would be
helpful to know a little about this very human saint in whose name we gather
this day.
Francis
was born the son of a prosperous cloth merchant in Assisi. As a well-to-do
youth with no small sense of entitlement, Francis earned a reputation in Assisi
as a hell raiser and rabble rouser. He was adored for his ability to sing and
tell funny stories and was dubbed “The Prince of Fools” by his comrades.
Like
every noble family of late medieval Italy, Francis sought to win glory through
service in the military. But he was captured by the nearby city-state Perugia,
cast into prison awaiting his family’s ransom money. Francis emerged a broken
man, without a sense of purpose or value. This was a man ripe for an encounter
with the holy.
Increasingly
Francis became convinced that a life of unearned privilege lived in the face of
abject poverty and suffering was indefensible. Leaving his father’s cloth
factory behind, he began to spend long periods in the nearby woods and
hillsides where he found immense beauty in the flora and fauna of central
Italy. Ironically, while virtually every pet owner feels a kinship to St.
Francis, we have no record of Francis every actually owning any pets. But he
was enchanted by the beasts of the wild and was prone to preach to the birds. And
he inevitably spoke of the image of G-d all
living beings evidenced.
What
made Francis a saint, however, was not his love of the non-human animals.
Rather, it was his love of very human animals living lives of misery - the many
poor people at the bottom of medieval society’s social pyramid. If there was a
single turning point in Francis’ life, it was his encounter with a leper
outside the gates of Assisi one day. Lepers suffered not only the physical pain
of deteriorating bodies, they also suffered from being outcast from family and
friends, required to live lives of begging and desperation at the edge of the
cities.
The
apocryphal story of Francis’ conversion resembles that of St. Paul. Francis
encounters the leper, gets down from his horse, embraces the leper, cleans his
sores and feeds him. Thus would begin a
long life of service to the poor and the sick that marks the Franciscan
charism. Indeed, there is fairly strong evidence that the famed stigmata
Francis bore was the result of his own contraction of leprosy.
For
Francis, the questions that would arise from that encounter would always be
these: Where is the image of G-d on this human face hiding under the
distressing disguise of poverty, sickness and social rejection? More
importantly, what prevents me from seeing it?
Can We Renounce Them Gladly?
In
our collect today, we ask G-d to assist us in gladly renouncing the vanities of
this world so that we might delight in the good creation – all of it. This, the collect tells us, is what it means
to follow the Way of Francis. But what are these vanities we must renounce and is
it possible for us to renounce them gladly?
Our
psalm today gives us a starting place in answering those questions. The
Psalmist implores us to “Praise the Lord from the earth!” and commences a
litany of the goodness of creation – fire and hail, snow and fog, tempestuous
winds – yes, even Tropical Storm Karen is a part of the good creation. It
continues with mountains, trees, wild and domesticated beasts, and finally ends
with the human animals - all peoples of all ages and every social rank. The good creation is the means by which G-d
is exalted. It reflects the divine splendor which extends over the whole earth
and all the way into the heavens. And it
is the place where all of the children of G-d may delight.
But
the Way of Francis demands more than merely installing a tasteful statue of the
good saint in our backyard birdbath. Following the Way of Francis is easier
said than done, particularly when the vanities of this world are so appealing.
One
wonders how Francis would respond to the news from the Intergovernmental Panel
of Climate Change last week. If the scientists are right, and they say they are
now 95% certain, it would seem that the good creation is in fairly serious trouble.
We might note that our own prayer book recognizes this concern in its reference
to “This fragile earth, our island home.” What happens when we ignore the fragility of
the good creation? To what other island home could we possibly escape?
What
might a serious undertaking to follow the Way of Francis mean for the vehicles
we buy, how we drive them and who rides in those vehicles with us? What might
the Way of Francis say to us about the diet we eat, the foods imported from
around the world that we take for granted, regardless of the impact on the good
earth their production might entail? What might the Way of Francis say to us
about our addiction to fast food, the hamburger whose beef is the most labor
and materials intensive food human beings consume?
Perhaps
more importantly, what might the Way of Francis say to us about our addictive
use of technologies that has become more dangerous than driving while
intoxicated and that has spawned a decline in civility, a decimation of
interpersonal skills and a deterioration in communication capabilities for
people of all ages? I find no small amount of irony in the fact that as the
state of our natural world deteriorates around us, we are less and less aware
of it because we spend more and more time in virtual worlds idolatrously
worshipping the work of our own hands.
Seeing the Little Ones
The
Way of Francis is also spelled out in our Gospel today. Jesus thanks G-d for
revealing to the anawim, Hebrew for the
little ones, the wisdom of the kingdom of heaven even as the Scribes and
Pharisees, those seen as wise and intelligent, simply miss the picture
altogether. No doubt, a G-d who reveals wisdom to the lowest members of Judean
society while ignoring those believed to be worthy of receiving it would have
been quite a shock to virtually everyone who heard Jesus say this. Indeed, imagine how we would hear it today –
“I thank the God who created heaven and earth who has hidden wisdom from the
Wall Street brokers, the federal court judges, this university professor and
revealed it to the hard hat construction worker, the HIV-infected prostitute and
the sanitation worker. It is they who evidence gentle and humble hearts.”
The
Way of Francis demands that we see the image of G-d in the face of every living
being, especially those in which that image is not immediately apparent. And
when it is not readily visible, the Way of Francis requires that we ask
ourselves what it is in ourselves that prevents us from seeing that image. For
the follower of Jesus and Francis, becoming aware of one’s spiritual blindness
is a life-long process. And it begins much closer than you might think.
Last
week in Pittsburgh, 83 year old Margaret Mary Vojtko, a languages professor at
Duquesne University in Pittsburgh for more than a quarter of a century, was
laid to rest. Margaret Mary was never tenured and worked as an adjunct
instructor. Her job provided no health care and barely paid a living wage. As
her health declined, her classes were cut by the university and at her death
she was making less than $10,000 a year. When her cancer returned, Margaret
Mary was scrambling to pay for treatment, was unable to pay to keep the
electricity running in her crumbling home making it uninhabitable in winter. Her
greatest concern at the time of her death was that she’d be turned over to the
Orphans Court.
There
are a lot of Margaret Marys in higher education. I know because I work with them
daily myself. Many of them virtually live in their cars, travelling from campus
to campus to teach their one or two classes. We who are full-time employed condescendingly
call them freeway flyers. But the dirty little secret of higher education is
that universities like my own, which now advertises itself as the University of
Comfort and Fun, find the money for Club Med dorms and multimillion dollar
fitness centers in part by paying graduate educated adjunct faculty less than a
living wage. To paraphrase the question I regularly pose to my undergraduates:
Comfort
for whom? Fun at whose expense?
For
this to work, all of us who are the beneficiaries of this system – including
myself - must engage in a systematic and sustained unseeing of that reality. We must refuse to acknowledge what is
right in front of us. We must pretend we do not see and reassure ourselves that
even if we did, there’s nothing we could ever do. We readily quote Jesus in
saying “The poor you will always have with you” even as we readily omit the remainder
of the passage in Mark: ”and you can help them anytime you want.” To unsee the other is to willfully enter
into spiritual blindness. And yet, both Jesus and Francis say to us this
morning, if you wish to follow me, you must see the working poor in front of
you, acknowledge their humanity and begin the hard process of asking ourselves
why we treat them as we do.
“Come to me all you that are weary and
carrying heavy burdens…”
Following Francis or Fetishizing Him
So,
I ask us to consider this morning, who are the little ones in our own lives,
the ones our culture tells us lack value and have no right to be recognized?
What prevents us from seeing the image of G-d which is always there, lurking
behind disguises of poverty, disease, social disapprobation? What do we have invested
in the unseeing of those whose lives we all refuse to acknowledge? And what
might we have to give up to see them long enough to recognize and honor the
image of G-d which has always been there?
Little
wonder that in the collect this morning we pray that G-d will grant us
sufficient grace to renounce the vanities of the world to follow the Way of
Francis. We will certainly need G-d’s grace if we are to meet the demands of
that calling. The question that remains for us this morning is whether we will
choose to undertake the following of Francis or simply fetishize Francis with a
tasteful statue in our birdbath and little more.
I
wish to close with a prayer actually written by a Benedictine, Sister Ruth Fox,
OSB for a 1985 retreat but which well expresses the spirit of the Franciscan
way. It is usually called the Franciscan Four Fold Blessing and I would ask you
respond to each blessing with AMEN.
May God bless you with a restless
discomfort over easy answers, half- truths and superficial relationships so
that you may live and love deep within your heart. AMEN.
May God bless you with holy anger at
injustice, oppression and exploitation of all living beings so that you may
tirelessly work for justice, freedom and peace. AMEN.
May God bless you with the gift of
tears to shed with those who suffer from pain, rejection, hunger or the loss of
all they cherish so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and
transform their pain into joy. AMEN.
And may God bless you with enough
foolishness to believe that you really can make a difference in this world so
that you are able, with God’s grace, to do what others claim cannot be done. AMEN.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, M.Div. J.D.,
Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino
Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy
of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
If the unexamined life is not worth living,
surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth
holding.
Most
things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
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