5th Sunday after Pentecost
July 13, 2025
Luke 18:18 – 25
In the 12th and 13th centuries, Europe was changing fast. The old feudal order, with Kings ruling over mostly agricultural areas, was beginning to fall apart. Cities were growing rapidly. People were leaving their feudal farms to move to cities, to start new kinds of work there. A kind of early capitalist economy was coming into being. Different regions of Europe developed their own economic specialties. Travel increased as these regions traded with each other. New businesses began to spring up, and with them a new economic class of people, middle to upper middle class business owners. The first recognizably modern banks came into being, so a traveling merchant could deposit funds in one city and withdraw them in another, or get a loan to expand a business. Suddenly there was less market for knights and warriors, and more demand for educated people who could draw up contracts and calculate the time value of money.
Around the year 1180, the wife of one of those businessmen, a wealthy cloth merchant in Italy, gave birth to a son who was baptized Giovanni Pietro di Bernadone. Historians think his mother may have been French, and his father was away when he was born, on a very profitable trip selling silk and other luxury cloth in France. So whether it was in honor of his wife or of his successful business dealings in France, when he returned, the child’s father started calling his infant son “Francesco,” “the Frenchman.”
The silk business was good, and the boy grew up extravagantly wealthy. He was well known and beloved in his little town. He was kind and funny, generous and well-educated and cosmopolitan, perfectly suited for this emerging new society coming into being around him. He could recite poetry in Latin. He loved to speak French and sing French songs and he was always up for a good time.
If you’d asked his father, his dad might have said that sometimes his son was a little too generous. As a teenager, the young man heard a reading of the passage from Luke that we read just a few minutes ago, about the rich young man who is told by Jesus to sell all he has and give the money to the poor. He didn’t quite do that, but he did give away a lot of money to poor people around the town where he lived. This annoyed his father to no end, because after all his dad was the one who started the business and built it up.
At the age of 20 the young man decided he would make his mark as a soldier. He went to war, one of the local regional conflicts between cities. But that didn’t go so well. He was captured in battle and spent a year locked up as a prisoner of war.
At the end of that time, he was released. By then he was very sick and almost died. When he recovered, he joined the Pope’s army to fight on behalf of the church in one of its wars. But he began to have powerful religious visions and prayer experiences that led him to leave the military and return home. One day, as he sat praying in an old, ruined chapel called San Damiano, he saw a vision of Christ and heard a voice say “rebuild my church, which is in ruins.”
He went home to his father’s estate and picked up a load of expensive cloth and a horse to carry it. He traveled to a nearby town and sold the cloth and the horse. Then he walked back to San Damiano and with the money to help rebuild the chapel. For some reason, the priest turned it down.
Now, speaking as a Pastor, I’ve got to say: I don’t understand that at all. That is the most unlikely part of the entire story, as far as I’m concerned. The rest of the legend may be completely true, but I have a hard time believing that the priest refused the money. I’ll tell you what: if one of you shows up with a bunch of money you want to donate to the church so we can renovate the building, if you got it legally, I’m not turning it down.
Anyway, the young man responded to the priest’s refusal by throwing the money out the church window, where it could be picked up by anyone passing by. His dad heard about that and decided enough was enough. He hauled his son up on charges and dragged him before the local Bishop. But before that conversation could even begin, the young man took off all his clothes and handed them to his father, because his father’s wealth had bought the clothes in the first place. He said, “until today, I have called you my father. But from now on, I call no one father but God in heaven.” He was about to walk out the door naked, but the bishop tossed him a cloak on the way out.
As I imagine a lot of you know, that of course is the beginning of the story of the remarkable man who would become St. Francis.
I thought we should reflect on St. Francis in worship, because today is the second Sunday in this sermon series on the relationship of faith and politics.
It’s funny how sometimes when I plan my sermons, things happen in the world that make them more relevant than they were when I was putting them together. I usually plan my sermons pretty well in advance. Right now, I have sermons roughed out until early January. And for months, I’ve been planning to preach on this faith and politics thing, because it’s kind of the elephant in the room for churches all across our country right now. Political tensions are high. Politics dominates public conversation and attention. It’s easy to feel like we have to walk on eggshells, because almost any conversation can blow up in our faces. None of that’s a good thing, but it is real.
There are churches now in this country openly embracing partisan political identity; they’re saying that only Republicans, or only Democrats, or only those who want a Christian theocracy, or whatever it is, only those politically righteous people, are following Christ. That’s alarming and wrongheaded, and it should concern all of us. That way of thinking confuses a human creation – a nation, a political party, a social position – with the will and mind of God. And because all these issues are front and center right now, I thought this sermon series seemed relevant. I figured I’d start the series on July 4th weekend, because, you know, birthday of our country and all that.
But then this past week, the IRS helped me out. (And that is a sentence I never thought I would say.) The IRS helped me out by making this sermon series even more relevant when they declared that churches can now endorse candidates for political office without risking our nonprofit status.
In case you’re wondering, I don’t plan to do that. I want to reiterate something I said last week, in case you weren’t here, or in case you were asleep, which is pretty common during my sermons. (Life is tiring. I get it.) When I say that this sermon series is about the relationship of faith and politics, I want to be clear: I will not be telling you how to vote on anything. I will not tell you that you should join the Republican party, or the Democratic Party, or the Libertarians or the Greens or the Socialist Liberation Party or any of the 55 nationally registered political parties in the United States. That’s not my job, and it’s not the church’s job.
At the same time, thinking through this series, I’ve been reminded of that famous quotation from Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi, of course, was the Indian political leader whose practice of what he called “soul force” inspired so much of the civil rights movement in this country. Gandhi said, “Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.” See, I believe the church’s role is not to tell you how to vote or what to think, but to help equip you with the spiritual resources, the prayer life, the Christian community and grounding to make those decisions for yourself.
Also, when I talk about politics I’m not just talking about candidates campaigning for office or legislation working its way through congress. I’m talking about politics in the broadest sense. Politics in that sense is the way we make decisions that govern our life together in community: as a church, as a neighborhood, a city, a state; and as a nation. All of that is politics. And politics understood in that broad sense is absolutely a religious issue, because the Christian tradition has a lot to say about how we should live our life together in community.
I know the stories of St. Francis may not seem political to us. But that’s why I offered that little bit of background at the beginning of the sermon about all the economic changes going on in Europe. Francis had a vision calling him to rebuild a church in ruins. Gradually, he came to understand that the church in ruins was not the little chapel at San Damiano. It was the whole church, all of it.
Now you wouldn’t know that by looking. By some measures, the church had never been more successful than it was in the 12th and 13th centuries. Monasteries grew and flourished. Majestic Cathedrals were built to the glory of God. The modern University was born, with priests and scholarly monks as Professors. The church was at the center of culture and life; it looked like it was thriving. But to Francis, the church existed to support Christians in following Christ, the poor and powerless Messiah who lowered himself so we might be lifted up. And in that mission, the church was failing on an epic scale.
In Francis’ time, instead of embracing poverty and powerlessness, instead of relying on the power of God that looks like human weakness, the church had become rich and powerful beyond the wildest dreams of Kings. It loaned money at interest. It raised armies and fought wars. It took on all the trappings and methods of earthly power: crusades, doctrinal purges, vast wealth, leaders living in absurd luxury while people starved and died outside the gates of their palaces.
Today, we tend to forget that Francis was not just some sweet-natured hippie who talked to animals. He was the most famous person involved in a widespread movement taking place throughout Europe, and he knew exactly what he was doing politically. In the Netherlands, in Italy, in France and England, communities of voluntary poverty and simplicity were springing up in protest against a wealthy and powerful church that had forgotten its origins. That was the church in ruins that Francis saw in his vision. Francis, like many others, decided that because he was a follower of Christ, he had to stand against the church – and there was no more powerful political enemy in his day. Many who protested the church with him were arrested and charged with heresy. They were tortured, sometimes even executed. But their movement changed the political landscape.
So what’s the lesson for us? What does Christian political involvement in the 12th and 13th centuries tell us about our calling as Christians today?
I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned from that time period. But one of them is that we Christians are called to challenge the hypocrisy of the existing order by the communities we form. We can’t just talk. We can’t just criticize. Those things are not enough, because we live in a world resigned to hypocrisy and power lust. If we think there’s a better way, we have to figure out what it looks like and do it. We have to show that it’s possible.
That won’t be easy. It will involve a lot of false starts and wrong directions. The voluntary simplicity movements of the 12th and 13th centuries had plenty of those too. But in the end, people who adopted lives of voluntary poverty, of prayer and simplicity and service, demonstrated for the world that a way of life thought to be impossible and backward was in fact rich, fulfilling, meaningful, and beautiful. And in that simple, humble way, those who refused to go along with the new order showed that things do not have to be the way they are. I think that’s the kind of faith community we’re called to be.