October 5 2025 Pentecost 17, Feast of St Francis

Francis was a complex and diverse character during his lifetime, and his legacy has been both complex and diverse ever since.    Francis seems to have been someone who caused his superiors in the church considerable headaches.  I think that is something we are all capable of doing. During his lifetime, many people thought Francis (Francesco Bernadone) was insane.  In his 20’s he stripped naked to renounce his inheritance in front of his father, the bishop, and a large cohort of the population of Assisi.  He kissed and hugged lepers, cleaning their wounds with unprotected hands.  He preached to the birds, calling them his ‘little sisters’, and making comment that they paid more attention to the gospel than people did.

When he founded his community grounded in the belief that Jesus Christ’s disciples could live as their Lord had, owning nothing, begging for what they needed and trusting that God would provide for them as God does for the birds, fish, and lilies of the field, this attitude that he was crazy did not change.

People who had more possessions than they needed thought Francis crazy because he refused to judge between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor.  Francis gave to everyone who begged –he gave money or food when he had them, and when he didn’t, he gave a smile and a kind word.  Those who resented the rich could not understand why Francis would not condemn their selfishness: instead Francis asked his wealthy sisters and brothers to open their hearts to the Holy Spirit’s call and respond as their consciences commanded.

Even though many of his contemporaries already venerated him as a saint, almost everything Francis did was interpreted by someone as a sign that he had lost his mind.  Francis did not argue with this viewpoint.  He openly admitted that he was a fool, and not just any kind of fool.  He was fool enough to believe that Jesus actually meant his disciples to live as he had instructed.

As we reflect, today, on the legacy of Francis, the thing that appears most obvious is his capacity to live with an uncomplicated form of faith.  One of the core values of Franciscan spirituality is simplicity, which is often understood as a form of poverty and a voluntary detachment from wealth and property.  And I would invite you to reflect on the spiritual value of theological simplicity for us, for the Church at this point in its history, and for the wider society.

If we can imagine a spectrum of theological thinking which spans from an uncritical and naïve acceptance of everything that the tradition has told us through to a complex and highly nuanced understanding of faith, we will find Francis located at a healthy point somewhere along that range.  In this sense, simplicity is meant as a kind of uncomplicated approach to life and to faith.

Francis seems to have taken seriously, and even literally at times, the teaching of Jesus that we find in the Sermon on the Mount.  In that core wisdom from Jesus, we see a simplicity which is characteristic of both Jesus and Francis.

When, as a grown man, Francis experienced his conversion to a life of holy poverty, he became one of the ‘babes’ mentioned in our gospels.  Francis latched onto faith as firmly and single-mindedly as a baby latches on to a bottle that is its only source of nourishment.  And from that moment, he lived a life of deep vulnerability and deep joy, unconstrained by any of the barriers human beings erect to make ourselves feel safe.

He lived unconstrained by the barriers between us and those who have less than we do, in whose presence we feel ashamed; the barriers between us and those who have more than we do, in whose presence we feel jealous; the barriers between us and those we’ve hurt; and between us and those who have done us harm; the barriers between human and nonhuman animals, whom we often treat as objects, disregarding the fact that they have their own inner lives of which we understand very little; and the barriers between us and the rest of creation, which we often try to control rather than respect.

Francis called his friends, and us, to stop trusting walls- physical and emotional - to keep us safe.  Instead, he invites you and me to join him in a life of holy adventure, entrusting ourselves to the care of the one who entered this world as a helpless infant, who relied as an adult on the generosity of friends and strangers, who suffered torture and public execution – and who rose again as the Lord of all creation.

As the empire which has shaped our prosperity teeters on the edge of collapse, simplicity is an important value.  As our ecosystem seems poised for radical change, simplicity is an ethical choice.  In a society polarized and driven by fear, the song of simplicity sounds strongly.

In a church which has mostly lost its way and certainly lost its audience, a return to the ancient truth of living with simple confidence in God’s presence among us is timely.

The Feast of St Francis is a day to bless animals and to ask God’s forgiveness for our mistreatment of them and the Earth, the home we share with them.  And in celebration of our brother from Assisi, it is also a day to bless children, to bless the poor, a day to bless our enemies, and a day to bless holy fools who are crazy enough to live as citizens of God’s kingdom in this life, not waiting for the next.