An Instrument of Your Peace: Preaching Francis of Assisi

"Like" the Patheos Evangelical Page on Facebook to receive today's best commentary on Evangelical issues. Churches spend a lot of time and energy strategizing how best to be the church, the body of Christ on earth. Committees meet, books are read, websites scoured, congregations visited, consultants consulted—all with a view toward figuring out the best way to build community, spread the gospel, feed the hungry, make peace, and care for the poor and sick. Yet despite all this time, energy, and effort, surprisingly few of these same churches ever conclude that the best way to accomplish Jesus' mission is Jesus' way. Like the way he told his disciples in Luke's gospel: "Take nothing but a walking stick, no food, no bag, no shoes, no change of clothes, not a dime to your name. Live like lambs among wolves. Wherever you go, stay there until it's time to leave. And if anybody refuses to welcome you, shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them. Warn them that the Kingdom of God is near."

It worked of course. The disciples returned and reported to Jesus how the gospel had spread, the poor were fed, people repented, the sick were healed. Not that any of this matters. What church or parachurch agency, or even faithful individual in their right mind, would ever take Jesus' instructions so literally anymore?

However, verbatim compliance with Jesus' commands was the hallmark of St. Francis of Assisi, the 13 th -century mystic who turned medieval Europe on its head by doing nothing more than simply and humbly emulating Christ.

Francis was born and raised the spoiled son of a rich cloth merchant in 12 th century suburban Italy. He was known throughout his youth as a party animal, reportedly labeled "the very king of frolic." No one liked a good time more. Cocky, brash, and impetuous, Francis once joined up with a group of his Assisi buddies to take on the Perugians, a rival gang of sorts from a nearby town. The rumble didn't go so well. Francis was beaten up pretty badly and taken hostage. He remained hostage for more than a year while his dad worked to come up with ransom. Then, after his release, Francis contracted some nasty fever that took yet another year to recover from.

However it was during these dark, difficult days that something inside Francis started to shift. He turned to God. One day while on his knees in this dilapidated church on the edge of town, Francis heard Jesus speak to him three times from the crucifix, "Francis, go repair my house which is falling completely into ruin." Looking around, Francis figured Jesus to be talking about the little run-down church he was praying in. Taking Jesus literally, as he would do for the rest of his life, Francis went off and sold off some of his father's expensive cloth to pay for repairs.

However Francis' dad went ballistic and hauled Francis down to the local bishop, intent on forcing Francis to pay the money back, and according to some accounts, forego his inheritance for acting so impulsively and passionately. Right then and there, impulsively and passionately, Francis took off his clothes and laid them neatly in a pile before his father. "Up to this point I have called you my father on earth," he said, "henceforth I desire to say only 'Our Father who art in Heaven.'" Not long afterward, Francis heard read from the gospel of Luke: "Take nothing for the journey except a walking stick—no food, no bag, no shoes, no change of clothes, not a dime to your name. Lambs among wolves." From that day forward Francis owned nothing and became nothing in obedience to Christ; and out of his nothingness, European medieval spirituality was transformed.

Francis lived in an era, like so many, where greed and political power contaminated the church. Christianity became so entangled with culture that it lost all of its bite and ability to inspire anything more than jaded indifference from the pews. Into the midst of this Francis walked, radically committed to a simplicity and humility so stark and so engaging that people could not help want a piece of it. The gospel takes on irrepressible power whenever Christians actually live it out. As one contemporary put it, because of St. Francis, "men and women, rich and worldly renounced possessions and, for the love of Christ, turned their backs on the world." Francis and his Franciscan adherents ignited an enormous, widespread religious revival. "Start by doing what's necessary," Francis said, "then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible."

Typically the image that comes to mind when thinking of St. Francis is either some ceramic lawn ornament or that of a docile, sprouts-eating peacenik, clothed in hooded burlap and Birkenstocks, playing with the birds and padding about in flowered fields—just praising God for the sunshine. True, Francis did wear hooded burlap (or something close to it). And he was a peacenik. "While you are proclaiming peace with your lips," he said, "be careful to have it even more fully in your heart."

Francis is known to have walked all the way to Egypt as the Crusades raged in order to attempt a truce with the Muslim Sultan of Egypt. He was not docile, but he was passionate about birds and flowers. He said, "If you have people who exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you have those who will deal likewise with other people." Francis cared intensely about creation, but was not an environmentalist for environmentalism's sake. For Francis, all of his passion for creation derived from his passion for the Creator. The creation, reflecting its Creator, resonated with God's powerful presence and thus elicited worship.

It's the kind of praise of which we read in Psalm 148: "Praise the LORD from the heavens, praise him in the heights above. Praise him, all his angels, praise him, all his heavenly hosts. Praise him, sun and moon, praise him, all you shining stars. Praise him, you highest heavens and you waters above the skies. Let them praise the name of the LORD, for he commanded and they were created. He set everything in place for ever and ever; he established an order that shall never change."

Psalm 148 is a psalm of summons; it inventories all things and orders them into allegiant submission. Note however that the creation is not cause for praising God, but instead creation is summoned itself to join the worshipping congregation. The voices of people alone are insufficient. "Praise the LORD from the earth, you great sea creatures and all ocean depths, lightning and hail, snow and clouds, stormy winds that do his bidding, you mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars, wild animals and all cattle, small creatures and flying birds." Only at the end are humans included. "The kings of the earth and all nations, you princes and all rulers on earth, young men and maidens, old men and children. Let them praise the name of the LORD, for his name alone is exalted; his splendor is above the earth and the heavens." To praise God is to join in a cosmic choir glorifying God.

"O how happy and blessed are those who love the Lord," Francis said, "and do as the Lord himself said in the gospel: You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and your whole soul, and your neighbor as yourself. Therefore, let us love God and worship him with pure heart and mind. This is his particular desire when he says: True worshipers adore the Father in spirit and truth. For all who adore him must do so in the spirit of truth."

The tendency when speaking of worship is to envision Christians gathered on Sundays enthusiastically singing songs about God to God, after which we typically go home and go about our business. But to praise God goes far beyond enthusiastic singing. Praise denotes a reordering of reality, a literal "casting down" of self and everything else in the face of God's supremacy.

Francis said that "Above all the grace and the gifts that Christ gives to his beloved is that of overcoming ourselves." To praise is to be humbled by God. It is to declare our allegiance, but also our defiance. In praise we resolutely dismiss all other gods and decisively break with all other loyalties and claims of truth that counter God's will and purposes—consumerism, militarism, materialism, nationalism, secularism, and all the other isms; praise denounces them all by exalting God above them all.

In a world where affluence and influence are prized, praise bears witness that life does not consist of achievement, control, self-esteem, objectivity, or even reasonableness. After all, what is reasonable, humanly speaking, about praise? What's reasonable about ceding your entire life over to one whom you cannot touch or see? What's reasonable about following the radical, counter-worldly, unpopular ways of Jesus?

Praise summons us to trust by faith in mystery, gift, and wonder—a trust that often confounds our ability to understand. But as Augustine once explained, "We are talking about God; so why be surprised if you cannot grasp it? I mean if you can grasp it, it isn't God. When it comes to God, let us rather offer a devout confession of ignorance instead of any brash profession of knowledge."

One day, St. Francis was returning from the forest, where he had been in prayer, and a friend named Brother Masseo walked over to him and asked, half jokingly: "Why all the rage?" To which Francis replied, "What are you talking about?" Brother Masseo said: "Why is it that the whole world seems to be running after you and everyone wants to see you and hear you and be like you? You're not that good looking and you're not very smart. You're not of noble descent. So why is everybody running after you?"

On hearing this, Francis was thrilled. He lifted his eyes toward heaven and reportedly stood for a long time, his heart absorbed in worship. Then giving thanks, he turned to Brother Masseo and said, "Do you want to know why people run after me? Do you want to know why they seek me out? Do you want to know why so many seem so eager to hear what I have to say? I'll tell you why. It is because the Lord—who is in heaven and who sees the evil and the good in all places—the Lord has laid his holy eyes on me and found no creature more vile or insufficient than I am. And thus to accomplish the wonderful work He intends to do—for God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put shame to the wise—He has chosen me, to confound all strength, all beauty, all greatness, all noble birth, and all science, that people may know that every virtue and every good gift comes from him, and not from any creature, that none may boast before God; but if any one boasts, let him boast in the Lord, that praise and honor may belong to Him alone forever."

To praise the Lord is both a declaration of allegiance and defiance; it denotes a total reordering of reality, both outside and in. "What a person is before God," Francis wrote, "that he or she is and nothing more." Yet as Francis showed, nothing more can be something else.

"Lord, make me an instrument of your peace," Francis prayed. "Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in forgiving that we are forgiven; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen."