Posts Tagged ‘St.Francis of Assisi’
It is in Giving that we Receive – Br. Keith Nelson
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Br. Keith Nelson
Feast of Francis of Assisi
Preached at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Cleveland Heights, Ohio
What do we have that we can truly call our own, that is not a gift from God, our Creator?
Gratitude for the gift of life itself, embraced moment by moment, opens us to God’s infinite horizons.
In the same way, forgetfulness that all that we have and all that we are is a gift diminishes our spirits: in attitudes of self-reliance and self-sufficiency; in a mentality of scarcity, competition, or possessiveness; and at its worst, the failure not only to give others their just share but the impulse to take by force, or presumed privilege, what belongs to God.
At its heart, today’s somewhat difficult parable is a pointed reminder of the consequences of this forgetfulness in the face of God’s astonishing generosity.
First, it may help to grasp the thorns of this parable directly.
This passage has been read as a Christian justification of supersessionism: the claim that Christians have replaced Jews as God’s covenant people. This reading casts the vineyard as the house of Israel and its tenant farmers as the Jewish people. This reading must be rejected as both presumptuous and deeply harmful. The history of such interpretations and their consequences must be repudiated. Read More
Stripping Naked – Br. Lain Wilson
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Br. Lain Wilson
Feast of Francis of Assisi
Job 39:1-18
Galatians 6:14-18
Matthew 11:25-30
Happy Saint Francis Day, everyone! It’s truly humbling to be able to preach on Francis, a saint who has meant and means so much to so many.
Francis was born into wealth and privilege in the Italian town of Assisi, where his father was a prosperous silk merchant. He lived the life of a pampered young man of the late twelfth century, a period of immense cultural flourishing. Yet, by his late teens and early twenties, the shadows of that prosperity and flourishing began to weigh on him. Stories tell of his giving lavishly to beggars and of selling his father’s property to repair physical churches. He sensed a barrier between the haves and have-nots, the result of a system that benefited his family. This growing awareness all culminated in his great renunciation of his patrimony, where, as one story tells it, he stripped himself naked, casting off the very cloth that was the foundation of his own family’s wealth. Read More
The Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi – Br. Curtis Almquist
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Isaiah 52:7-10 Psalm 96:1-8 Galatians 6:14-18 Matthew 11:25-30
In the calendar of the Church, we remember today Saint Francis of Assisi, born in year 1181. In the Middle Ages, in Saint Francis’ day, the disease of leprosy, the oldest and most dreaded of all diseases, was a terrible scourge. Lepers would be seen with the most hideous of skin ailments: sores all over their bodies; bones protruding; eyes forever draining: wounded people, broken down, festering, stinking. A leper died a slow, repulsive, ignominious, lonely death. And yet the source of a leper’s problems was not with their skin or bones. Those merely showed the symptoms. The problem with leprosy is with the nervous system. The nerves become deadened to any feeling. The nerves sense nothing in the affected area. And as the disease would spread through the body, the person would not be able to feel anything in the affected area.
A person with leprosy affecting their hand would be working using, for example, a broom or garden trowel with a splintered handle. They might tear their hand but not feel it, not know it, and a resulting infection would settle into this lame hand. Read More