St Francis of Assisi Year A

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O God our Strength and our Redeemer.

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Francis of Assisi is probably the most well-known saint in the world. We’ve heard his story before, but it’s worth telling again. His popularity is ironic given how deeply he challenged, and still challenges, the power structures and values of the institutional Church.

Francis is beloved by so many because he was deeply and transparently humble, he embraced poverty, and reached out in love to some of the most destitute and rejected people in his society, especially those suffering from leprosy and those living in poverty. A voice from the 13th century, today Francis’ feast marks the end of our Season of Creation, and offers us a vision to sustain us in changing our contemporary ways of living, and so to care for creation.

Over these weeks of Creationtide we’ve been invited to see the world through different eyes: with Job, to recognise the vastness and wildness of a creation which does not revolve around us; with Hildegard, to glimpse the viriditas, the greening life of God within creation; with Wendell Berry, to understand creation as gift rather than commodity; and last week, with Annie Dillard, simply to pay attention – to look, to notice, to give thanks.

Francis gathers many of these threads together. For Francis, the love of God, the love of the poor, and the love of creation were not separate things. They belonged together.

Francis famously grew up the lecherous and lazy son of a wealthy cloth merchant, and was the life and soul of the party. But he was caught up in a local war and spent a year as a prisoner in captivity. Eventually returning home, he felt a deep contempt for a life being wasted on trivial and transitory things.

The story goes that one day he was kneeling in front of a Byzantine-style crucifix in a tiny ruined church dedicated to St Damian, praying, when the crucifix seemed to speak to him: “Francesco, do you not see that my house is in ruins? Go and rebuild it for me!”

Young Francis took this literally. He sold off rich fabrics from his father’s warehouse and used the funds to restore the little church. His father was furious when he learnt of his son’s actions, and apparently dragged Francis before the local bishop in order to sort him out. Francis refused to cooperate and from this time on embraced poverty, preaching the love of Christ.

And yet it is not Francis’ efforts at restoring church buildings which have had the greatest impact on the Church over the eight centuries since his death. It has been his spirituality – his unique and captivating vision of the life of faith, his love of Christ, and his sense of the place of humanity within God’s creation.

Profoundly moved by the misery of people suffering from leprosy, Francis began to visit hospitals and places where they were cared for. On a pilgrimage to Rome, he emptied his purse at St Peter’s tomb, then went out to the beggars at the door, gave his rich clothes to one of the poorest, dressed himself in the man’s rags, and stood there in that man’s place with his hands outstretched. The rich young Francis wanted to experience for himself something of the bitterness and humiliation of poverty.

It’s hard for us to understand the place of lepers in the medieval world. The term covered a range of diseases and conditions, and those diagnosed with leprosy could be subjected to profound fear and social exclusion, forced to live apart, and, in some places, required to wear special clothing or carry bells or clappers to warn others away.

Francis himself later wrote that encountering people with leprosy had initially seemed bitter to him. But something changed. He began to live among them, care for them, and recognise Christ in those whom his society feared and pushed away.

For Francis, then, rebuilding the Church came to mean much more than repairing the stones of St Damian’s. It meant rebuilding Christian community around those who had been held at its edges. His most powerful act of rebuilding the Church was not the restoration of a dilapidated building, but the creation of relationship with those who had been excluded and rejected.

So Francis was no easy, comfortable saint. He bent the rules, he disturbed and embarrassed the authorities, he up-ended the values and priorities of his Church. He did this because his values were profoundly different.

Francis was captivated by knowing God as Creator through all that God created – the beauty of this world and all who live in it. He was gripped by the fact of the incarnation, the birth of Christ, in its affirmation of the fundamental goodness of creation. He saw this goodness in all living and created things, whether flowers and vegetables, birds and animals, or people who were poor or leprous.

Francis has long been known as the patron saint of animals, of ecologists, and of the environment. But I think his vision is more profound than simply a particular fondness for animals or the natural world. Francis understood himself as belonging within creation, rather than standing apart from it.

In the last years of his life, around the year 1224, when he was in his early forties, Francis wrote the poem we know as the Canticle of the Creatures, or the Canticle of the Sun. We have been praying this Canticle Sunday by Sunday as part of our liturgy through this Season of Creation.

And it resonates beautifully with the ancient song we heard as our first reading this morning, the Song of the Three. That song calls upon the whole created order to praise God: sun and moon, stars of heaven, showers and dew, winds, fire and heat, cold and frost, light and darkness. Creation itself becomes a great chorus of praise.

Francis stands firmly within that biblical tradition, but makes it extraordinarily intimate. He calls the sun Brother Sun, the moon Sister Moon; there is Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire, and our Sister Mother Earth. This reveals the heart of the Franciscan worldview: God is the source of all being, and because all things come from the one Creator, we are bound together in relationship. Creation is not a collection of objects surrounding us, available for our use. It is a community to which we belong.

You may not have noticed before now, but we have a beautiful stained-glass window of St Francis here at St Luke’s. Francis is reaching out to touch someone who is covered, head to toe, in cloth – almost certainly someone suffering from leprosy. And up in the top of the window there is a tiny silhouette of the Nativity scene – Jesus lying in a manger.

Those two images belong together.

At Christmas in 1223, at Greccio in Italy, Francis arranged a living enactment of the Nativity, with a manger and hay, an ox and a donkey. He wanted people not simply to hear the story of Christ’s birth, but to experience the extraordinary vulnerability of it: the Son of God born as a tiny, helpless baby, lying in a feeding trough. That event lies behind the later tradition of the Christmas crib scene which is now so familiar to us.

And our window holds those two parts of Francis’ vision together. Below, Francis reaches out and touches the body of the person whom society fears and rejects. Above is another vulnerable human body: the infant Jesus lying in the manger. Francis could embrace the person suffering from leprosy because he had become captivated by a God who had embraced human flesh – a God who did not love creation from a distance, but chose to enter it.

God loved creation so much that God chose to be born within it.

Perhaps this is the gift Francis offers us as we come conclude our Season of Creation. He invites us to understand that we do not stand outside creation, looking at it, managing it, consuming it, or even saving it. We belong within it.

Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Sister Water, Brother Fire, Mother Earth – and alongside them our human sisters and brothers, especially those whom the world pushes aside. All of us creatures; all of us dependent; all of us held within the love of the Creator.

To live like that would change something. It would change the way we think about what we possess and consume; the way we relate to the land and water and other creatures; the way we see those who are poor or excluded; perhaps even the way we understand ourselves. Because Francis’ vision is ultimately not about admiring nature. It is about relationship – about recognising ourselves as part of a great, living, interdependent creation whose life comes from God.

Francis is a saint for our time. His challenge to the Church has not grown any less confronting in eight hundred years: rebuild my Church.

Towards the end of his life, Francis is remembered as saying to his brothers, “I have done what was mine to do. May Christ teach you what is yours.”

As we come to the end of this Season of Creation, perhaps that is a good place for us to finish too.

May Christ teach us what is ours to do.

Amen.