Oct. 8, 2017 (posted late)
Matthew 11:25-30
As we gather this morning to celebrate St.
Francis and bless our pets, I’m going to confess a sin to you, a sin for which
all you good dog owners can hold me in contempt. I bless my dog, Petey, with
cheeseburgers. Petey seems to have quite
a fondness for cheeseburgers, and I have erred and strayed in my ways by
getting into the habit of bringing him one when I stop by McDonald’s to get
something for myself. We stand there in our
kitchen, and I tell Petey he needs to sit and calm down, which he sort of
manages to do; and then I give him his heart’s desire. We do this bite by bite until that disc of
greasy, cheesy goodness is gone. Forgive
me, for I am a bad doggie daddy, blessing Petey with cheeseburgers.
I have a much better example of dog blessing
that comes from another member of my family. When we first moved here, we got a
Lab–Golden Retriever mix named Jenny.
Jenny was many times Petey’s size but also many times humbler. Petey, in fact, isn’t here this morning to
get a blessing because he doesn’t work and play so well with other dogs. Jenny, on the other hand, was the ultimate
good dog, both among other canines and with us, her pack. She wanted nothing more than simply to be
with you, regardless of whether you had a cheeseburger in your hand. And so our son, Dan, got into the habit, as a
boy, of getting down on the floor with Jenny and lying there with her to watch
TV or a movie. I imagine it was the best
thing ever for Jenny, having one of the people of her pack bless her with that
kind of presence, stooping down to inhabit her world.
I don’t know whether St. Francis ever had
a dog, but I’ll bet Francis would have understood what my son, Dan, was up
to. Francis of Assisi is maybe the
ultimate model in Christian tradition of embracing a life of stooping
down. Some of you know his story.1 Francis was the son of a wealthy cloth
merchant in Italy, born in the late 1100s.
In his early years, he lived into the very worst you might expect from
the spoiled child of a wealthy family – entitled, wasteful, drunken,
arrogant. Francis got the chance to play
soldier and go off to war against another Italian city-state, so he spent a lot
of his father’s money to buy a horse and fine armor. He was taken prisoner, as it turned out, and
spent a year waiting for his father to ransom him. He went back to his unsavory lifestyle until
he got the chance to play soldier again, this time leaving as a knight for the
Fourth Crusade.
But, you know, sometimes – all the time,
actually – God chooses the last person you’d expect and inspires that person to
change. A day’s ride out of Assisi, Francis
heard God calling him to turn back home.
It must have been quite a persuasive encounter, because the arrogant
man-child actually did go back home.
Again, he resumed his old lifestyle, but he also kept listening to God,
who apparently also kept knocking.
Francis began to see that his life wasn’t just shallow but contrary to
the call he’d heard from Jesus in the Gospels.
And one day, Francis encountered a leper – a broken, impoverished,
smelly man with an awful, contagious skin condition. The leper was the antithesis of everything
Francis had valued – fine clothes, fine food, beauty, power, strength, wealth,
all that. But Francis stooped down from
his horse and greeted the leper with the kiss of peace. Contrary to everything he knew, Francis found
joy in greeting that leper. And it sent
him even further along his journey.
Francis then heard God calling to him,
saying, “Francis, rebuild my church.” He
thought the instruction was literal – that he was supposed to rebuild a local broken-down
chapel. So Francis took some of his
father’s stock of fine cloth and sold it to pay for the repairs. His father had had enough; he dragged Francis
before the local bishop, demanding that Francis return his money and renounce
his rights as heir. Francis took it one
step further. He stripped off his fine
clothes, tossed them before his father, and renounced his connection to his
family, acknowledging God as his only Father.
Then Francis left with literally nothing to begin a life of wandering
service to people he would meet and preaching about following God’s call to
love.
Before long, others saw Francis’ joy in
the freedom he’d found, and they joined him.
Francis organized his companions’ life around a simple rule of giving
away their possessions, keeping nothing as they proclaimed the kingdom of God,
and taking up the cross daily – serving the people they encountered in acts of
self-sacrificing love. Francis and his
group lived the Gospel literally. They
had nothing but the joy that comes with the perfect freedom of being bound by
nothing but God’s command. They lived
Jesus’ model and his teachings. The
story is told that a thief stole the hood of one of the brothers, and Francis
made the brother chase after the thief to offer him his cloak as well. Against all the world’s expectations, this
movement caught on, with thousands following Francis’ model. Eventually, he had to organize them, and the
Franciscan Order was born.
Francis was all about stooping into love –
which, after all, is God’s practice with us.
The Psalms say that God “stoops to behold the heavens and the earth,”
taking “the weak up out of the dust and lift[ing] the poor from the ashes”
(Psalm 113:5-6, BCP). Jesus lived that out ultimately, God
incarnate born among the animals and crying in the dirty straw; the Son of God
who, like the birds of the air, had no place to lay his head. When Jesus identifies who is blessed in God’s
eyes, it’s not the people whose lives seem to reveal blessing. It’s the poor who receive the kingdom of
heaven, the meek who inherit the earth.
All of what we seek and value is window dressing at best.
There seems to be a pattern here. To practice love, both God and Francis
stooped down, renouncing power and possession, status and privilege. If that was true for God and Francis, it’s
probably true for us: We have things we need to lose in order to love as Christ
loves us.
Like what?
Well, there are the usual targets, of course, things Francis certainly
would witness against: Consumerism, waste,
and pollution that harm God’s creation. The
love of money, which “is a root of all kinds of evil and … many pains,” as the
apostle Paul wrote (1 Timothy 6:10). But
this week, as we reel from the news of yet another mass shooting, it’s violence
that weighs on my heart.
In our society, violence is a commodity,
whether it’s real or entertainment. And
as long as violence is profitable, we’ll keep pursuing it. Here’s my second confession for the morning: I
choose to watch violent movies sometimes; there is something in them that seems
real and raw and exciting. And at the
movie theaters, I see people there with small children … because, you know, the
violence isn’t real, not like a mass shooting – it’s only a movie. Well, I don’t think you have to be a social
scientist to see a connection: If violence seems normal, then violence becomes
normalized. Whether you’re talking about
movies or firearms, the government isn’t going to ban something that’s both a
freedom in this nation and a source
of immense profit. We have to exercise our freedom to renounce violence, and its
instruments, for ourselves. And we have
to pray that God will make use of our small examples to transform other hearts,
too, working with our witness as we live and narrate the choices we make. That’s how love happens – from the bottom up. Love is an insurgency, not a legislative
mandate.
So, as God’s insurgent of love, what do you need to lose? What binds you and keeps you from stooping
low, into the experience of another? Like
my son’s example, as he got down on the floor with our old dog Jenny, it’s the
stooping low that blesses those whom God places in the intersecting points of
our lives. So, here’s my prayer for us this
St. Francis’ Sunday: May we be the
people our dogs think we are, and may we practice the holy downward mobility of
stooping low into the kingdom of God.
1.
St. Francis’ story is taken from “St. Francis
of Assisi.” Catholic Online. Available at: http://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=50. Accessed Oct. 6, 2017.
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