Monday, October 9, 2017

Make Us Instruments Of Your Peace

"If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.
Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus."
--Philippians 3: 4b-14

Most weeks I unpack something that Jesus said a long time ago, trying to get at what he meant back then and asking what it might mean for us now.  This week, though, I’d like to talk about two people who were followers of Jesus, who lived more than 1000 years apart, but who both embodied what it meant to love and follower Jesus as their Lord, and who serve as examples of what that looks like even now for us.  Their names were Paul and Francis.

Caravaggio's Conversion of St. Paul.

I've written a good bit about Paul, how he once persecuted Christians but then became one after he had a conversion experience on the road to Damascus.  He was transformed by this encounter, and it led him to minister amongst the Gentiles, those non-Jewish folks who had always been on the outside looking in when it came to the story of God’s love and mercy.  One of those groups of Gentiles was in Philippi, a city in northeastern Greece.  The Philippians were struggling with how to live into their new lives in Christ, but there was a tendency among the faithful to lord their titles and prestige over one another.  Arguments often arose among them, thus a letter to Paul was in order.  Paul, therefore, wrote to them to quell such arguments.  He began by laying out all of his own fancy credentials: he was Jewish since birth, which made him better than adult converts; he was descended from the tribe of Benjamin, which was the Jewish elite class; he had known Hebrew all his life, unlike those Jews who lived in areas where all they knew was Greek or Aramaic; he knew the law and followed it so zealously that he was a Pharisee, the most pious and highly respected folks in a Jewish society.  That's quite a resume, but in the letter Paul told the Philippians, that he regarded all of those accolades as loss, and that he suffered their loss so that he may gain Christ so that he may be found by him.  All of the prestige meant nothing to Paul when compared to Jesus. That’s the kind of guy Paul was.

Francis and the animals.

Francis was born in 1181 in the Italian port city of Assisi.  Like Paul, he came from a high-fallutin’ background.  His family were wealthy merchants, and as a young man Francis wore the finest clothes and spent money lavishly.  He joined the military and gallivanted around, but near the age of 24 he began to lose his taste for all this fun and excitement.  He started avoiding sports and feasts with his friends, and when one of them asked him if he was ever going to get married he said, ‘Yes, to a fairer bride than you have ever seen.  Her name is Lady Poverty.’  During a pilgrimage to Rome he joined the poor in begging near St. Peter’s Basilica, and while there he had a mystical experience.  Like Paul, he heard Jesus speak to him, saying, ‘Francis, go and repair my house.’  When he got back to Assisi his father was irate, but Francis threw off the fancy garments that his father had given him, renounced his inheritance and all other world goods, and set out to live a life of poverty, penance, and peace.  Others followed him, including his sister Clare, and in 1208 the two of them established the Order of Brothers Minor and the Poor Clares, which continue in both the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches. 

What Paul and Francis both understood was that ultimately their worldly goods and possessions, as well as the positions that they occupied in their respective communities, didn’t matter.  Both led comfortable lives before they knew Jesus.  Both could have skated by and been content, but they knew that in the end it was all vanity.  Most of us, were we in their positions, would wail and weep and gnash our teeth if we lost our jobs, our homes, our money, our titles, our families.  Not so with Paul and Francis.  For them Jesus was everything, all the rest was just stuff.  They knew that the only thing eternal, the only thing that endures is Jesus.  Truly and deeply understanding that, however, means emptying oneself of all the stuff.

That emptying is called kenosis in Greek.  Earlier in Philippians Paul wrote that Jesus emptied himself; that is, in taking human form the King of the Universe emptied himself of all divine power and prestige, and while ministering on earth he gave up all of his possessions, including his home, so that he could show others a life that knew only the love of God in a deeply intimate way.  That life was then emptied out for the whole world on the cross, so that everyone might see it and live into it themselves.

It is from the cross that Jesus offers that invitation to kenosis, to emptying ourselves of all of the things that we think make us who we are, of all of the idols that we have made.  Our jobs and money, our cars and homes, our possessions and hobbies, in the end mean absolutely nothing!  Jesus, the one who is pure, unbounded love, is the only thing in the world worth our worship and devotion, the only thing in the world that ultimately matters.  All the rest are idols and vanities.  Both of these saints exemplify what it means to empty oneself, but Francis does so in a specifically meaningful way.

This past weekend church communities of all kinds throughout the world--both Protestant and Catholic--celebrated Francis with the Blessing of the Animals. How did the connection come about between Francis and the animals?  It isn't so much begins Francis lived with and loved the animals, but more so because by emptying himself of all the stuff, Francis was able to see the world for what it really is:  one great big family of God.  He called the sun his brother and the moon his sister and often said that all of nature must honor and praise God in their own way.  There are legends that he brokered peace between an angry wolf and some townspeeople, and that he preached to the birds.  Even when disease would ravage him, Francis praised God, for the disease—also a living entity—was merely fulfilling its purpose as instituted by God. It is as if Francis never really left the Garden.  

The Garden is the place from which we all came, of course.  There humanity cared about nothing but being in relationship with God and all creation.  At some point we left the Garden, but our animal friends did not, which is how they are able to show us God's unconditional love in such amazing ways.  My dog Casey, who played a huge role in my senior seminary sermon on Saint Francis, greets people in our parish each day with the same enthusiasm and love.  She has no need of power, prestige, or possessions, and she serves as a daily reminder for me that those things are not what matter, that we are all have a place in the great Circle of Life, in the words of that great spiritual at the beginning of The Lion King.  

The one who reminds me what it means to be in the Garden.

As we look around we see a world that is not unlike the one Francis knew.  It is a world that is cold and cruel, where people place their value in objects and titles, rather than relationships.  It is a world where our pride prevents us from seeing one another as brothers and sisters in the family of God, where people’s accolades and prestige seem to be the only things that matter.  But thanks be to God for the example of blessed Francis, who invites us to empty ourselves of our pride and need to place our self-worth in the matters of this world, so that we may put on nothing but the love of Jesus Christ.  I wonder what would happen if we all could do that on some level.  So as we honor this particular brother of ours, may our eyes be opened to seeing all of our brothers and sisters—two legged, four legged, no legged—so that we may take our place on that great path unwinding.  Blessed Francis, pray for us!  

In the circle...

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