How many of you pictured him with a monk’s tonsure – bald on top? If you did, you’re right, he had the tonsure. How many pictured him in a simple, coarse brown robe with a hood and a rope tied around his waist? If so, you’re right, he pioneered the use of the simple brown habit.
How many of you pictured him as a statue in a garden next to a bird bath, with birds and squirrels perched on his arms? Yes? It seems this is what we remember him for the most – supposedly he was fond of animals and would preach the gospel to them when he had no people around to listen – and the animals apparently listened attentively. This is sort of thing we tend to remember about people – quirky undemanding traits that allow us to caricature them – so we remember Francis as a lover of animals and bless them on his feast day. And in fact, he was truly a lover of God’s creation, and wrote some beautiful poetry about its beauty – he called the sun, moon, trees, rocks etc., his brothers and sisters.
But we tend to forget other things that are maybe a bit more challenging. How many of you pictured Francis as a young soldier, marching off to war? No? But that was his first career – he was captured and held as a prisoner of war for a year, during which time he may have had his first conversion experience. How many of you pictured Francis standing in front of the sultan of Egypt, attempting to make peace between Christians and Muslims during the Crusades? No? But this is a true story too.
How many of you pictured Francis in a dramatic confrontation with his father and his bishop, getting so angry that he renounced his inheritance, tore off all his clothes and threw them at his father, and walked away naked? This happened too: Francis gave away all his property, his claim to any inheritance from his wealthy businessman father, threw the clothes he was wearing at his father’s feet, and took a lifelong vow of poverty. He began to wander around the countryside, preaching the gospel; he was soon joined by many other devoted Christians who answered the call to spread the kingdom of God, founded an order of monks and missionaries, and went on to be one of the most influential saints in Christian history.
Francis explained his life this way: "(The Lord) looked down from heaven and must have said, 'Where can I find the weakest, the smallest, the meanest man on the face of the earth?' Then he saw me and said, 'Now I have found him. I will work through him, for he will not be proud nor take my honor away from myself. He will realize that I am using him because of his littleness and insignificance.'" In his own smallness, Francis found his greatness.
In fact, you could say Francis was the perfect embodiment of today’s gospel from Luke. He embraced poverty, hunger, humility, poor reputation – when he could have had wealth, plenty, advancement, position.
So here’s my question – do you have to be like Francis to be a saint? Well, here’s the answer. On All Saints Day, we remember three kinds of saints. We remember great heroes of the faith like Francis, people who were leaders and martyrs and examples for all time of how Jesus asked us to live. We also remember all those who have died in faith, who are now in the arms of God’s mercy, and we rejoice for that mercy which is our destiny also. And third: we remember that all of us are saints – every single one. If we are baptized, we are holy and sacred members of Jesus’ family, and the Bible calls us saints.
We misunderstand Jesus if we think that in this gospel he is laying down the rules we have to follow to get into heaven – God’s grace does this for us. It’s already been done. What Jesus is doing is way more radical than that: he is calling each one of us who are baptized children of God, otherwise known as saints – to join him in his quest to live out the kingdom of God right here on earth.
God has already given us the gift of the kingdom in our baptism – we are already saints of God. The question is, what happens after we become saints. Because I firmly believe that God has a special calling for each one of us, a special way he asks us to live out our sainthood right here on earth. You know the old saying: if you were arrested and put on trial on charges of being a Christian – would there be enough evidence to convict you? Jesus wants us to live our lives to show evidence of our sainthood every day.
And yet, in the world we live in, that is exceedingly hard to do. We live in a world that values possessions, money, success, achievement, more than almost anything else – certainly more than sainthood. We live in a world where people brag about how busy they are, and where our busy-ness consumes our lives so that we fall into bed exhausted each night with no time even to think about God or about how God might be calling us. I think it’s to people like us that Jesus is talking today. He is saying, why are we filling ourselves with empty things that take all our time and energy and attention? And forgetting that it is God who truly can fill us up with the joy of heaven?
St. Augustine said: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless till they find their home in you.” Someone else said it more simply: We have a God-shaped hole in our hearts. We try all kinds of things to fill that empty hole –possessions, busyness, worry. But ultimately, only God can fill that hole. God’s kingdom is an upside-down world, where wealth, satisfaction and achievement are misfortunes that separate us from God by encouraging us to believe that our own efforts are enough to get us whatever we want. And good fortune comes in the shape of self-emptying that reminds us that true blessing comes from God alone.
Today marks the beginning of our stewardship campaign here at Nativity. Stewardship in the church often becomes a euphemism for asking for money, and some of our lay leaders will be asking you for money for our mission. But in this sermon, I want to explain to you why I think money is a spiritual issue. Let me tell you a story.
My husband Tom and I moved here in 1996, leaving our house in Houston. We were confident that our Houston house would sell soon, so we went ahead and bought a house here. But the Houston house sat, and sat, and sat without selling, and every month we wrote two mortgage checks and watched our savings account drain away. We joined a church immediately when we moved here, and the church began to mean a lot to us. The church was in the middle of a capital campaign, and so we would often hear appeals for money, but every time, we would say, we just can’t right now. We’re paying these two mortgages. One Sunday, about 6 or 8 months after we’d moved here, sitting in church one Sunday, we just looked at each other and said, “It’s time.” We wrote a check equal to one mortgage payment on the Houston house and put it in the plate. After church, there was a church picnic, so we got home about 2:00. As we walked into the house, the phone was ringing. It was our agent, telling us that we had an offer on our house. And a month later, we were the proud former owners of a house in Houston.
Now I can’t tell you it would be the same for everyone. I can only tell you how it worked for us. We realized that we had been relying on ourselves instead of putting our faith in God. We had to take a step of faith, to stop being anxious about our money and put our trust in God instead. And when we did, we found it was easy. Giving for us wasn’t about the church’s need to receive – our little check didn’t make much of a dent in their capital campaign. No, it was about our need to give. It was about our need to let go of what we were clinging to and depending on. And when we learned to let go, we found that we were blessed. Because giving always blesses the giver more than it does the receiver.
Stewardship is a word that’s about much more than money – it’s about sainthood. Stewardship is recognizing who we truly are, claiming the sainthood that Christ has given us in baptism, understanding that we are made in the image of God. Stewardship is asking ourselves how we can empty ourselves of all the things that distract us – the quest for achievement, the hope for prosperity, the busy-ness that consumes our days, the clinging to possessions – and open ourselves to God, who fills us up with true joy and gratitude. Stewardship is asking ourselves how we can model the virtues of poverty, humility, generosity, peace-making, love, in our lives as saints of God, because that is what our Savior did – in his gift of himself on the cross.
Sainthood is not something extraordinary that only miracle-workers can achieve, sainthood is something that can and should be lived out by every Christian. And so
in honor of St. Francis, please pray with me a prayer that for me embodies the virtues of stewardship and of sainthood, in the Book of Common Prayer p. 833 – a Prayer attributed to St. Francis:
Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
