“Francis, We Hardly Knew Ye”
If I look a little
tired this morning, I apologize. I’ve been up since 3:20 a.m. tweeting out
insults to my detractors.
Today All Saints
Church celebrates St. Francis of Assisi, and I was glad when they assigned me
to be inside at the service inside rather than with the animals on the lawn.
Don’t get me wrong. I love animals. But as the owners of two terriers (one a
scotty, the other a cairn) Kathy and I are always mortified by their behavior
around other dogs. Our terriers don’t need blessing. They need absolution.
You and I don’t
know Saint Francis very well. As with many saints, we have a collective
cultural cartoon of him. We tend to see Francis as a kind of blissed-out
medieval hippie who walked round Italy picking daisies and smiling at wolves—a
monastic version of Doctor Doolittle. Like all cultural cartoons, this version
of Saint Francis trivializes him. Yes, he loved animals as he loved all
creation. But there was a lot more to him than that.
When the current
pope took the name Francis three years ago, I decided to read up on the life of
the saint. To be sure, Francis did love animals. But he loved them as part of a
larger openness to all of nature—his “Canticle of the Sun” famously praises
brother sun, sister moon, brothers wind and air, sister water, brother fire,
and sister earth. Francis saw God in all creation, and one of the reasons we
respond to him in this moment is that his medieval nature mysticism anticipated
our own postmodern love for an endangered earth and its creatures. But Saint
Francis saw God not only in animals. He saw God in the poor, and that’s why he
gave up a life of affluence for one of prayer and poverty and service to the
poor and sick.
Francis did not live his life of prayer
and poverty alone. Like Jesus, he gathered a community around him. Early in his
ministry, Francis was viewed with suspicion and ridicule. His family disowned him. He and his brothers
in the order owned no property or money, and they begged for their meals. Even more shockingly, Francis did not shun
lepers but would embrace them and kiss their sores. The first responses to St. Francis were
fearful and hostile. He was considered a
dangerous madman before he was revered as a saint.
If Cardinal Jose Mario Bergoglio felt
the need to call himself Pope Francis in 2013, he must have felt that Francis
had something important to say to the 21st century. What can we take
from this saint’s example to help us with the living of our lives?
You and I are
living through an overheated moment in American society. While the presidential
election may be the most visible evidence of the emotional process at work
among us, the election is really more of a symptom than a cause. As a
compulsive consumer of news, it seems to me that everywhere I turn I see people
overwhelmed and overwrought, blaming their problems on scapegoats and behaving
badly at every turn. I think this is true at all levels of our society. Our
political life is overheated. Our personal lives are overheated. Our
friendships and our households are overheated. Even people in churches can get
a bit testy. The enmity on view in the election is only the tip of the cultural
iceberg.
And then, of
course, there is the unfolding of the story Friday’s killing of Reginald (Junior)
Thomas at the hands of police here in Pasadena and the attendant protest
yesterday. I have cops in my family, so I understand the pressures the police
are under. But when is this seemingly endless drumbeat of police killing
African American men going to end? The best way we can show that black lives
matter is to stop taking them.
I’m not a
sociologist, so I won’t hazard a guess as to underlying causes of this
overheating. But I will try to put this moment into a religious context. Like
the societies that surrounded Jesus and Francis—each one a holy fool who
refused to accept the cultural norms of his moment—you and I have bought into
some fairly pervasive and pernicious illusions—and that’s a religious problem.
We have come to see the world as essentially competitive and not collaborative.
We think there is not enough to go around and so we feel compelled to do
everything to get ours first. We put our trust in leaders or systems or ideas
that promise to make and keep us safe by giving us a leg up on someone else. We
think that if we get and hoard enough we will be invulnerable to the risks and
depredations of life.
For
all its greatness, Western culture has consistently fallen prey to these
illusions from Jesus’s day to our own. As these illusions collapse, things
become overheated, as they are today. It is
a sign of God’s forbearance, mercy, and grace toward us that holy fools like
Jesus and Francis keep showing up in our lives to show us a way to bring our
own personal and social temperatures back down to normal.
In today’s gospel [Matthew 11: 25-30], Jesus says two
things we need to hear this morning. Here’s the first:
I thank you, Father, Lord of
heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the
intelligent and have revealed them to infants.
Maybe it’s important that we bless
animals because, unlike us, dogs and cats have no intellectual pretensions.
Both Pope Francis and Saint Francis have what we could call a “simple” faith,
and here “simple” is a good thing. The
more that we live in our heads, the more we make following Jesus more
complicated than it needs to be. Francis of Assisi believed in God and Jesus in
a way that was simple and yet deep. His life and action were grounded in the
basic teachings of Jesus: love God, love people, treat everybody—including
animals—with decency, compassion, and respect. When Jesus says that God has
“hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and [has] revealed them to
infants” he is telling us something simple yet deep about the meaning of life.
Really smart people can do really stupid things. Really smart people can do
really cruel things. Our intellects can often mislead us. When I have done
something incredibly stupid or cruel, I’ve usually done it as part of a
carefully-reasoned well-thought-out plan. Jesus and Francis call us to get out
of our heads and into our hearts. That’s a lifetime journey for some of us, but
Jesus would remind us that only as we approach profound simplicity will we be
open to the depth and beauty of life.
And here’s the second thing Jesus says:
Come to
me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you
rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in
heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my
burden is light.
Francis
gave up a life of relative affluence for a life of voluntary poverty. He spent
that life in solidarity with and service to the poor and sick and outcast. And,
like Jesus, he found the life of social solidarity finally easier and more joyful
than the life of comfort. To the extent that you and I have bought into the
values of an affluent, competitive society we have placed ourselves in
comfortable traps. We strive to attain
and keep our culture’s signs of success—an important job, impressive houses and
cars, exotic travel—but at what cost? Francis did not give those things up as a
way of self-punishment. He gave them up as a way of personal and social liberation.
In taking on the yoke of Jesus, Francis discovered that loving and serving the
poor, treating others with compassion, regarding the whole creation with
reverence and respect—these actions were rewarding in and of themselves. They
were not punishments. They were gifts.
In
one way or another, each of us is a prisoner of our culture and its values. We
are like fish swimming in the water of affluence which we can’t even see. It is
part of God’s mercy to us that people like Jesus and Francis, others like
Dorothy Day, come among us and show us that there is another way to live. It’s
not that we all have to drop our jobs and pick up begging bowls. It is, rather,
that we can follow Jesus and Francis at least by questioning the truisms our
culture offers. He who dies with the most toys does not necessarily win. She
who opens herself to God’s presence in the world, especially in the ones or
things the world does not value, can live a life of generosity and joy in the
here and now.
I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you
have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed
them to infants. . . Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy
burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me;
for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For
my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
In
this overheated season, let us stop and listen to Jesus and Francis. We can
survive and actually flourish in this moment by seeing and living life as it
is, not as our culture portrays it. Life is not scary. Life is beautiful. Life
is simpler than we make it and easier than it seems. Like Francis, let us see
each other as blessings rather than threats. Like Jesus, let us rejoice not in
our sophistication but in the elemental values of love, compassion, reverence,
and respect. Once again, let’s try to move out of our heads and into our
hearts. And if we need some guidance in how to do that, let us turn to brother
dog and sister cat, our teachers gathered this morning on the lawn. Amen.
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