St. Francis Day Sermon

What do you think St. Francis preached to the birds?
Here's what I preached to people, dogs and cats during our celebration of St. Francis day in 2009.

Transcribed from a sermon

Given on the feast of St. Francis

October 4, 2009

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

At St Barnabas Episcopal Church

Arroyo Grande, CA

Matthew 11:25-30

One day St. Francis was walking along and saw a huge flock of birds.  Now, Francis couldn’t help himself, he had to preach the Good News.  So, he preached it to the birds and he said to the birds, “Oh birds, you are so loved by God.  You are so special in God’s sight. God knows everything about you.  God cares about you, and loves you, and thinks that you are wonderful.  And, oh birds, sing and praise God because that’s what you are made to do.  Praise God because you are so loved and so cared about.” 

This is what Francis preached to people as well - that we are incredibly loved by God.  Now, we’re not sure that he actually preached to the birds.  That is one of those stories that you’re never quite completely sure of because saints develop stories around them.  But it is a wonderful story.  And we know that Francis loved creation -all of creation.  So, we can imagine him preaching to the animals. 

He also loved what he called ‘sister poverty.’ It is a way of living a simple life while owning nothing.  Of course he didn’t start out that way.  This was a choice he made.  His father was a wealthy entrepreneur.  He was a merchant in the city of Assisi and sold cloth.  They had a huge home, wealth, power, beautiful clothes, everything you could want growing up.  His father was a little worried about Francis because he was a dreamer and his father wanted him to be brought up to take over the business. On the other hand, his mother, who also had a spiritual dreamer side, encouraged her son and his dreaming. 

But, he was a pretty typical wealthy young man. He was handsome. He played the flute very well. And the girls loved him. The young men followed him for he was obviously very charismatic. He had a group of young men that would follow him around and they would do whatever he wanted to do.  He had it all.  He was at the top of his form. He was what every young man in our culture would say they would want.  Then he decided he wanted adventure and glory.

So, in order to get some adventure and glory, he joined the army.  His city was in an ongoing constant war with another city. So Francis got some armor to become a kind of knight.  He went off to war, to this glorious thing.  What he discovered is that war was not that glorious an adventure. He saw the pain and the suffering. Then he was taken prisoner.  He was in prison for a number of months in a small cell at the bottom of a castle where he was ill and miserable. When he came out, he had a different attitude about what was important and what wasn’t important. 

He was trying to figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his life.  He was praying in a church where some of the walls had tumbled down, a very old church.  As he was praying in front of the crucifix, he heard the crucifix saying to him – “rebuild my church”.  Francis took it literally, thinking that Christ wanted him to rebuild this physical structure.  He started rebuilding it and put all his money into it.  He used up all his money.  Then he started taking money from his dad and his dad got tired of paying for rebuilding this church.  So Francis started begging for bricks.  And even though he had never done physical labor before, he was physically rebuilding the church.

Then he went a step further, realizing that he needed to renounce his wealth.  But, I get ahead of myself… He had a choice between living the life that the culture said was good and living a different kind of life. 

On Friday night this week, I went to see the Michael Moore film, Capitalism: A Love Affair.  Whatever you feel about Michael Moore, I’m not going to go into the politics of it - but there was one thing that I found very interesting.  He was asking the question – “Is capitalism Christian?”  And, “What would Jesus think of capitalism?”  He made his point by taking some clippings from a movie about Jesus. These clips present different images of Jesus.  We have the rich young man coming up to Jesus and saying, “What should I do?”  And, Michael Moore dubs in a different statement then you’d expect.  Then, the young man says, “How do I have eternal life?”  Jesus goes up to him, takes his face in his hands, looks directly in his eyes and says, “Maximize your profits.” 

I think that made the point very clearly that Jesus is probably not concerned with our profits.  Jesus actually said, “Sell all you have and give it to the poor.”  Jesus is not concerned about our profits.  He’s not concerned about our 401K.  He’s not concerned about our retirement.  He’s not concerned about our new car.  He’s not concerned about any of that.  That’s not relevant. 

Now, Francis heard this story of Jesus and the young man, where Jesus said, “Sell all you own and give it to the poor.”  Once again, Francis took it literally and went out and sold everything he had.  He went to his father and his father was upset.  So, he said to his father, “Here take all my clothes.” and he stood naked.  He gave it all up and embraced poverty.

I remember when I was in high school and I read my first book about St. Francis.  I got to that point and I was very disheartened because I knew I wasn’t about to give it all away.  I still haven’t gotten to the point where I can give it all away.  There aren’t too many saints like Francis.  And, even the Franciscan brotherhood, by the time Francis died, had given up absolutely poverty, the idea of owning nothing and had started to own their own homes.  Francis’ ideal of absolute poverty frees one, but it takes a very special kind of person to do that. 

In the reading that we have today in the gospel, Jesus says, “Come ye who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, for I am gentle and humble of heart.”  This is an animal image.  When two animals are yoked together, they do everything together.  They eat the same food.  They go to the same watering hole.  They pull the same load.  It is all shared. 

So, if we yoke ourselves with Christ, Christ shares our burdens and helps to carry them.  All that Christ has, and all that Christ is, becomes ours.  Christ, the creator of the universe. If we are tied in with him, what is there to worry about?  What is there to be afraid of?

Those of you who have been in the church for a long time and used to use the “old prayer book”, the 1928 prayer book might remember growing up and hearing these words every Sunday, “Hear what comfortable words our savior Christ says to all that turn to him.  Come onto me, all that ye who travel and are heavy laden and I will refresh you.”

When we trust Christ, when we offer ourselves to Christ, our burdens are lightened and our worries are less.  We may not be saints like Francis who can give it all away, but, when we are yoked to Christ, our priorities change and it’s easier to be generous, and to be fearless, and to be joyous.  Amen. 

Proper 20 A

"It's just not fair!" Who hasn't thought that at some point in their lives. The parable in this Sunday's Gospel reading suggests that God's idea of fairness may be very different than our own.

Proper 20 A

Transcribed from a sermon given on

September 18, 2011

By the Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Today I’m going to talk about the economy. Not the U.S. economy, that’s much too depressing. No I’m going to talk about the economy of God. Or what might be called, Kingdom economy or the economy of grace.

We have in the Gospel today one of the rather difficult parables. In it Jesus tells a story which could be lived out today. You see, like now, back then there were some people who didn’t own any land, and some people who didn’t have a craft, who didn’t have a job and didn’t have a family with right connections to get an income, so they would gather in the marketplace hoping that someone would give them some work for the day. We see that today. We have places where people who have no job hang in hopes of getting some work for the day. There are places in Grover Beach and around here that are known by both the laborers and the land owners. Those seeking to work gather in the morning and hope that someone will hire them for the day. Like in the Palestine of Jesus, we grow grapes here, and farmers have the same dilemma as the landowner in the parable. When you have a grape crop, when it is time to harvest, you don’t have very much time to gather the grapes. You have to wait until they are sweet enough, but if you wait too long there is a danger of rain coming or of some other way that the crop will be ruined. So when it is time to harvest the crop it is important that it gets done quickly and efficiently.

In this parable we have a land owner who has a vineyard and the grapes are ripe and it is time for harvest. He may have a few employees, but he needs extra hands, so he gets up in the morning and he drives his pickup down to the place the guys are hanging out. It is early in the morning and he looks around and he says “A-hah, there’s a couple that are big and strong and young. You can tell that they are going to be hard working and get a lot done.” So he fills up his truck with the strongest, healthiest people he can find. Drives them back to the vineyard. They are working for a couple of hours and he sees they are not going to get this done today. They are going to need more help. So he drives back into town and he looks around. The best, the crème of the crop have already gotten hired, but there are still some people who could put in a good day's works and haven’t had too much to drink yet. So he fills up his truck with those guys. A couple of hours later he realizes he still need more workers. The pickings are getting more difficult now. The ones who are standing around tend to be older or maybe disabled or too fat or too thin or don’t speak English or may have been hitting a little bit too much of the bottle that’s being passed around. So he picks the best he can find and puts them in the truck. The same thing happens again in the middle of the afternoon, and then finally its only a couple of hours before sunset but they need more workers and he goes in and gets what’s left. He knows they won’t get a whole lot done, they are not your reliable workers. They are the ones that everybody else has overlooked. Yet he gets them in the truck and puts them to work too.

Now the landowner had agreed with the first ones for a reasonable wage. Let’s say, $100 for the day. A generous wage. Now the sun is setting, the work is done. The workers come up. That last bunch that hadn’t done a whole lot and weren’t that good to begin with, they each get a hundred dollars and it is a joyous and wonderful thing for them. Some of them will be able now to get food for their families. Others may now be able to go get another bottle of wine. It’s not important what they do with it. But they have gotten a hundred dollars. And the next ones came and they get a hundred dollars and they are very thankful and happy. Until you get to the ones that were hired at the beginning of the day. They saw how much work the ones who were hired at the end of the day had done. And they say, “It’s not fair. We worked all day, we worked hard, we accomplished and harvested much more then they did. We should get more.”

And the land owner says, “You were happy with a hundred dollars at the beginning of the day. It’s just because you are looking at these others that you want more. If I want to be generous I can be generous.”

But we all know what that feels like. We can all identify with those ones that were hired first.

Do you remember as a kid, “It’s just not fair! His piece of cake is bigger than mine!”

“Yeah but her piece of cake has more frosting then mine does.”

It doesn’t matter what you are arguing about, it just isn’t fair! It wasn’t fair.

Somehow we have some image in our mind of what is fair. We have some idea that those who do more should get more. That those who work harder should have more. That those who are smarter should have more, that those who have an education or those who speak English, or those who have the right connections, whatever it is, we have in our minds an idea of what is fair. But that doesn’t seem to be how God figures out what’s fair.

Look at the first reading today. We have the Israelites. God has led them out of slavery and like most of us they have a clouded memory of the past. Now that they are no longer in Egypt and they are wandering around in the desert they are thinking “You know, it wasn’t so bad. Remember all the meat we had and all the bread you could want.”

The truth is they were poor and in slavery and starving, but you know the good old days. We all remember the Good Old Days with kind of a glaze.

God says, “I’ll take care of you.”

At night the birds just land on the ground and they can pick them up and they can have all the meat they could possibly want. In the morning when they wake up there is this stuff on the ground that when they gather it and eat it it tastes like honey cakes, the Manna. It is there for them. It is there for everybody. There is enough for everyone, all they have to do is go out and collect it.

Now there were some who said, “I don’t know if we are going to have enough tomorrow.” So they collected more than enough for one day of the manna. They ate all day and they had some left over, just incase it didn’t show up the next morning. Well, sure enough the next morning the stuff they collected the day before was full of bugs and couldn’t be eaten, so all that extra work of collecting twice as much was just a waste of time. Why would you need to do that if you trust God and God is providing for you, why do you work so hard. It’s all there.

Everybody had enough and everybody had the same amount, and it didn’t matter how hard they worked or how smart they were, or who they knew. It was there for them. That’s how God’s economy works. That’s how the economy of grace works.

If you think about this earth, God has provided this earth with abundant resources. There are fish in the sea, animals, grains, fruits and vegetables – an incredible amount. There is enough food for everyone on earth. The reason there are people starving is because we don’t know how to share. God provides enough.

God has provided abundantly for this country. The natural resources that we have are phenomenal. God provides it all. The question is what do we do with it? What is fair?

For some reason we think that it is about merit, and not just in terms of our financial economy but also when we think of grace. What we are really talking about is not just food, we are talking about God’s grace and God’s love. God’s grace is given abundantly to everyone.

God’s relationship with humanity is not like the business world. It’s more like in a healthy family, where whatever the family has is shared among all the children.

Can you imagine what you would think if you found out that there was a family where since the boy has been studying really hard in school he gets to have steak every night, but the little girl hasn’t been doing well in school so she just gets a bowl of soup. We would find that outrageous.

The family might respond, “But he works so hard and she doesn’t. He’s smart and she’s not.”

Your response might be “but she is precious, she has her own gifts and her own things to add. How could you do that?”

God’s economy sees us all as children in one family. God’s idea of fairness is not the same as our idea of fairness. God’s grace is there for everyone, freely given. You can’t earn grace. You can’t work really hard and then get God’s grace. There is absolutely no way to make God love you any more than God already loves you. And there is absolutely nothing you can do to make God love you any less then God loves you. Grace is not about how many times you come to church, or how many prayers you make, or what you do for other people. Grace is a gift. And gifts aren’t earned - they are given.

And this is as scandalous as that parable was to the people who heard it 2000 years ago. Or that parable is today. We want, somehow, to earn it, to be in control, to merit it. But that is not the way God works. That’s not the way love works. God’s love is freely given to everyone. And if you feel jealous about that, well you have to read this parable and sit with it until you understand and give thanks for the fact the all of us are loved children of God.