The feast day for St. Francis was this past Friday. We’ll be celebrating the witness of this saint with the blessing of the animals at the 11:00 liturgy, out in the front yard, always a lively and festive event.
The Gospel lesson today is especially appropriate for a saint like Francis.
It’s about something very simple and very challenging, the great power of God with even a little bit of faith to work through, and the call to humility before God.
Apparently the apostles didn’t have even a little bitty bit of faith, not even the size of the mustard seed, and the apostles knew it, that’s why they asked for their faith to increase.
The little parable about slaves not being praised or thanked for doing their job was meant as a warning to the apostles to not be like the Pharisees, who acted like God owned them a favor because they worked so hard to be good.
The point is that we can never do enough to say that we went above and beyond the call of duty to God. The truth is that we are simply and absolutely dependent upon God, we will never be able to brag. All that we do is simply a response to all that God gives. We can never say to God, “Hey look at all I’m doing.” All we can do is be thankful and do our duty, humble, dependent.
St Francis embodied how a little faith lets loose the mighty power of God in the world, and he embodied humility before the Church, before all people, before all creatures. St. Francis stood as a servant to all and judge of none.
He lived in the late middle ages, when Church and State were trying to cope with the beginnings of the incredible wealth and power being produced by early capitalism, greed almost shut down both the Church and the State.
Francis walked in and his humility and simple faith humbled the world. Francis didn’t save or reform the world or the church, but he became a reminder of God’s kingdom, a figure of judgment always calling us to faith and humility. His refusal to judge cast a harsh judgment.
We try to make Francis safe and cute, relegating him to garden statues and tender moments with the natural world. But Francis is neither safe nor cute, he is a threat.
Francis’ example of faith and humility before the Cross of Christ is a threat to our pride, our greed, our judgmentalism, to our resentments and petty partisan bickering.
There is something and someone much bigger and beautiful at work in the world. Our anger, our fear, our addictions are overshadowed by the Spirit of God.
Humility and the smallest bit of faith that God is good, that God can be trusted, that the brokenness of the world can be transformed…that is all it takes.
Like the mulberry tree God’s faithfulness is uprooting us and planting us in the sea of God’s grace. Francis saw that and it stilled his heart and freed his soul.
Be uprooted, be replanted, be changed, be set free from all that enslaves the world.
That is what Francis shows us.