A Sermon Preached at All Saints Parish, Brookline
Observing the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi
October 6 and 7, 2007
By David Evett
We celebrate this weekend the feast of St. Francis of Assisi. The collect we heard a few minutes ago begins by calling attention to that holy man's readiness to turn away from the concerns with money and power and reputation that seem to dominate the lives of many people. "Most high, omnipotent, good Lord, grant your people grace to renounce gladly the vanities of this world." Francis conspicuously did this: the son of a rich man, he enraged his father my selling all his possessions and using the money to renovated a run-down chapel. Instead of the velvet and brocade of a nobleman he went barefoot, wearing a coarse brown robe fastened only by a piece of rope; instead of elaborately cooked meals he ate only the simplest food, bread and water. The power of his preaching and the example of his life attracted other people to join him; like him, they spent much of their time traveling, on foot, preaching and teaching and healing, eating the food that people were willing to give them, and sleeping wherever they could find some kind of shelter. The pattern comes from the passage in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 10, where Jesus tells his disciples to "go to the lost sheep of Israel," in poverty: "Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff."
The second part of the collect points to another aspect of Francis's faith and life. We are told to renounce the vanities of the world - which turn out to be things that we can regard as peculiarly human, such as fashion and politics and getting ahead - things that Francis came to see as wasteful and self-indulgent, things that came to be ends in themselves rather than ways to love and serve God. If we do that, we can come to see the world God has given us in a new way: "we may for love of you" (that is, God) "delight in your whole creation with perfectness of joy."
For St. Francis, that joy came to manifest itself most fully with regard to a particular element of the creation. These days, St. Francis is best known, at least in this country, as the saint who had a special relationship with animals - within a few years of his death people were writing down stories about how he preached to the wild birds and tamed ferocious man-killing wolves, and there are hundreds of paintings and drawings, like the one on the posters in the vestibule, that show him surrounded by assorted wild creatures. We recognize this part of his history by choosing his feast-day as the day on which we come together to bless our pets.
In a much earlier phase of our lives, our family lived in Madison, Wisconsin. Our oldest child, Charlie, desperately wanted a pet. The rules of the faculty housing development where we lived, however, forbade dogs and cats. So for his eighth birthday we gave him a cockatiel, a lovely small parrot, pearl-colored, with darker grey wings and back, a pale yellow head with a fine crest, and orange patches like a clown's on his cheeks. Charlie named the bird Puff, after the magic dragon, and although Puff chewed the gilt on the elaborate mirror that we had carried off from Marianne' family's attic into tatters, and ferociously defended the balled-up socks in the laundry basket as though they were his girl-friends, even his wives, we got on well.
Later that year, we moved to Cleveland, where we exchanged our little faculty apartment for a 6-bedroom house. It was August, and hot, and shortly after we moved in, it was not surprising that Puff got out of his cage and through an open door and out into the neighborhood.
We called and called; our new neighbors heard the calling and helped us look in the trees for a couple of blocks in all directions, but no Puff, and when we arranged on the next day to put an ad in the paper we had no great confidence in it. Imagine our joyful surprise, then, when a couple of days later, a Saturday, we were awakened at 7:15 a.m. by a phone call, taken by Marianne on the bedtime phone. "Hey, lady," said a powerfully cheerful voice. "I've got your bird."
It was, in its small way, a miracle. It was, indeed, Puff, whom the caller had found in a shrub while walking to work; being a bird fancier himself (and almost certainly an admirer of St. Francis - he may even have been named Frank), he had known how to coax the cockatiel onto his shoulder, and keep him happy in his office during the day, and get him home to the house in Little Italy at the bottom of the hill where we went to pick him up. Everybody was happy to have him back.
The event reminds us of the way pets and domestic animals help pull us altogether. Ranchers will drive or ride through a blizzard to help a neighbor feed his stock or deliver a baby calf. Our own family and then the neighbor children and then some of the adult neighbors had gathered to make the initial search and then gathered again to welcome Puff back. A few weeks later, we discovered what a social magnet a puppy or kitten can be, as we acquired the first of a series of family dogs and cats. Our pets have helped pull this congregation together today, when in asking God to bless our animals we recognize the ways in which they bless us, are part of the larger blessings of our life in God's creation.
Our Hebrew Bible lesson, from chapter 1 of the book of Genesis, recounts the final stages in that creation, in which God makes green things, then creatures of the sea, then birds, then the creatures that walk on land. At the end, God makes us, "humankind." We are, it says, like God in some important ways - created in God's "image," in His "likeness." It says, moreover, that as the being that brings the creative process to its climax, we are special: to us is given "dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." The implication seems to be that we are to rule over the world as God's viceroy or branch manager.
We get a re-vision of the process in today's psalm. It goes from the sea-monsters which are also mentioned in the Genesis story, through extremities of climate, to mountains, then trees, animals, insects, birds, and the "kings of the earth," who presumably have dominion over all that precedes them, and indeed , over the ordinary people, "Young men and maidens, old and young together," who bring up the rear.
Nowadays, at least in communities like the one at All Saints, we are not very comfortable with that last idea, of dominion. We understand better than the priests and scribes who put the Book of Genesis and the Book of Psalms together sometime in the first half of the first millennium before Christ's birth just how vast and ancient the universe is, and how relatively small our particular part of it is. Modern biology has taught us how profoundly complicated is the system of terrestrial life - all that immense biomass of mostly tiny creatures of whom the ancient Hebrews seem to have been unaware. Modern evolutionary science has taught us how humankind emerged, not in a discrete, individual moment and act of creation, but as just the most recent step in a slow, subtle process continuing over a couple of billion years. In almost every way, we are not special at all, though we are unique.
We know, indeed, how much power we do have to change things, by replacing trees with golf-courses or asphalt parking lots, by catching most of the codfish, by killing all the passenger pigeons and dodoes and Chinese river dolphins, by releasing billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from our smokestacks and exhaust pipes. We also understand more fully our vulnerability, to tiny organisms like the AIDS virus or large climatic phenomena such as prolonged drought. Between our new sense of our interrelatedness with the rest of the environment - the symbiosis, the living together that sustains or destroys us all - and our clearer awareness of the limits as well as the largeness of our power, many of us are now less comfortable with the idea of dominion and more comfortable with the idea of stewardship, which means, finally leaving things better, richer, more productive, than we find them.
That kind of stewardship is the central driving idea behind number 7 of the UN's Millennium Development Goals, which our national church has adopted as its own goals and which we have given a prominent place in our stewardship education program at All Saints for 2007-08. There is a sense in which we "own" our pets, as we can "own" a piece of land or a license to fish or mine; we can buy them and sell them, teach some of them, at least to sit or roll over or jump through flaming hoops. We also need to care for them, however - feed them and walk them and take them to the vet, sometimes at considerable cost in time, trouble, and money. We have to devote ourselves to them, as they are devoted to us. And when we think about that, we can go on to think about the way the interdependence of us and our animals points toward our interdependence with all of creation - to the natural world around us, but also the social world, the world of our neighbors, including those "lost sheep" - for us, I think, all those millions in the world, including quite a few who live just down the road, who are not allowed to rejoice in the richness of God's creation because that richness is so unequally distributed that they are starving and suffering and abused.
Stewardship, of course, is a concept particularly relevant in this portion of the year, when we prepare ourselves through a series of church services and other activities for that moment on October when we will walk up to put our pledge cards in the bowl on the common table - those cards on which we promise to give away a significant portion of our resources, of time, talent, and wealth, to help the church carry out God's mission. St. Francis's life and teaching, as summarized in the words of today's collect, assure us that this can be a joyous thing to do. Giving and sharing can seem hard. We recall the episode of the rich young man - a young man in many ways like Francis - who was eager to follow Jesus until told that he must first sell all his stuff and give the proceeds to the poor.
Today's gospel tells us, however, that it's not. It is, to be sure a mystery - a mystery, however, easier for children to understand that those who think of themselves as wise. If we can turn our back on the vanities of the world to follow Christ - can crucify the world, as St. Paul puts it in the epistle - we will experience a new creation. Thus Francis saw the world in a totally new way after his own true conversion, which, according to the legends, allowed him to return to the state of Adam and Eve in the garden, able to converse with the animals, and to look God in the face, and see there his own face looking back, radiant with joy. Turn away from the vanities of the world, Jesus says, and I will make the kind of covenant with you that you make with your animals. He uses a metaphor that invokes the relationship between men and domesticated beasts, oxen or mules, maybe a cockateil. "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." In exchange for your unquestioning love and obedience, I will love you, and care for you, and make you oftentimes so happy that you almost have to turn yourself inside out to express it. "Hey, lady," a cheerful voice will say. "I got your bird."