"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.
In the circle...
