Worldwide Web of Belonging
Proper 22B-24—St. Francis, pet blessing
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago
Word of God Word of Life? For the second week in a row the declaration following today’s gospel feels more like a question than an acclamation. There’s a lot to trip us up here—about sex, gender, and relationships. Some commentators have said that as soon as the word ‘divorce’ is read out loud—a whole sermon spools off in our heads that listening to anything else difficult.
Thank God for St. Francis and St. Clare who teach us how to see the gospel in today’s gospel! We honor these saints, along with our furry, fluffy friends today. St. Francis of Assisi, Friar, and Renewer of the Church, and his co-conspirator, confident, and advisor, St. Clare, are among the most well-known saints outside of the twelve apostles of Jesus.
Giovanni Bernadone was born into wealth in the late 12th Century. He was called Francesco as a child because his father, who was a textile merchant, often traveled to France and admired the French. The name stuck. Francesco, or Francis, had a vision in the church of St. Damian where he heard God say to him, “Francis, go and repair my house which is falling into ruin.” Francis took this literally and sold a good sum of his father’s goods to repair St. Damian.
After being disinherited by his father, Francis took a vow to wed Lady poverty. He wrapped himself in a peasant’s smock and a rope belt and began his mission. Soon many followers also took up poverty as a calling, and they tried their best to live out the Sermon on the Mount.
Francis and Clare of Assisi, focused on imitating Jesus not just worshiping him. In fact, he often did it in an almost absurdly literal way. “He was a fundamentalist—not about doctrinal Scriptures—but about lifestyle Scriptures: take nothing for your journey; eat what is set before you; work for your wages; wear no shoes. This is revolutionary thinking for most Christians, although it is the very “marrow of the gospel,” to use Francis’ own phrase. He knew that humans tend to live themselves into new ways of thinking more than think themselves into new ways of living” (Richard Rohr, “Practicing the Gospel,” Daily Meditations, 9/30/24).
The more he found God within himself, the more he saw God outside himself where every detail of nature spoke to him of God. Francis saw that each of us are part of a great web of belonging. As the Franciscan penitent Angela of Foligno exclaimed: “All creation is pregnant with God!” Nothing is outside the embrace of God’s love. This is why we take this day to bless our animal companions, acknowledging our kinship with them and our shared joy in a shared life with them. (Ilia Delio, preface to Franciscan Prayer: Awakening to Oneness with God (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2024), vii–viii, ix–x.)
Both Francis and Clare valued orthopraxy (right and faithful living) as preferable to merely verbal orthodoxy (correct teaching). At the heart of Franciscan orthopraxy is the practice of paying attention to nature, people on the margins, humility, and mission instead of shoring up the home base. His early followers tried to live the gospel ‘simply and without sugar coating,’ as Francis told them.
Francis and Clare’s teaching are echoed by St. Paul, who wrote, “When we are weak, we are strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). These words of Paul’s could be the motto of the early Franciscans. The apostle Paul, following Jesus, forever reversed the engines of ego and its attainments, and it is this precise reversal of values—and new entrance point—that Francis and Clare of Assisi understood so courageously and clearly.
Centuries later, this way of living the gospel became known as the ‘little way.’ Until we discover the “little way,” we almost all try to gain moral high ground by obeying laws and thinking we are thus spiritually advanced. Then religion too easily becomes a weapon in our hands to subdue, control, and exploit the weak—the exact opposite of the way of Jesus that St. Francis and St. Clare revealed to us.
St. Francis is a reminder to me, and to the whole church, that sometimes less is more. Less domination, more companionship with creation. Less stuff, and more belonging. Less dogma, and more devotion to simple things. God has made us for each other as equals and not as part of a system of hierarchy and submission.
This is the insight that unlocks the gospel in our gospel and all the other readings too. The western Christian imagination has been haunted by hierarchies that were developed by Plato and Aristotle, and not Jesus, and certainly not God. This not-gospel is called the Great Chain of Being which imagines a ladder extending down from higher to lower, from master to slave, from God to angels, then to human beings who are sub-divided into hierarchies of gender, role, and race, then to animals and plants, and finally, to the earth itself. Unfortunately, this hierarchical lens stuck in western culture, forming a kind of template for the way we still think today.
Yet, when we swap Plato’s Chain of Being for Francis’ and Clare’s Great Web of Belonging today’s lessons read differently. Indeed, they become stories of radical reversal of hierarchy. “The Genesis story of Eve’s creation isn’t about some secondary, divine afterthought of femaleness. “Bone of my bones; flesh of my flesh” is the shocking recognition of sameness and equality — not difference or superiority…. The Hebrews passage lifts human beings to an honor higher than the angels — being crowned with glory and honor and subjecting all things to the work of our hands!” (Diana Butler Bass, “The Great Web of Belonging,” Sunday Musings, 10/06/24).
We see that Jesus’ teaching about divorce is shocking because it makes women equal to men. Women may not be cast into poverty at the whim of their husbands. Women as well as men may initiate a divorce. Jesus insists that the law was made for humanity, not the other way around. Devotion to God is demonstrated not in complicated codes, but in how we extend God’s love and mercy to one another—especially the “least of these.” Our concept of marriage is profoundly corrupted when the images it invokes are all negative: possessiveness, property, rigidity, stubborn adherence to duty. This is a travesty, a betrayal of true fidelity. We hold the forever promise of covenantal relationship in the earthen vessels of our lives. When they become shattered, God offers healing and new beginnings.
Perhaps most shocking is Jesus’ teaching about children. Children were on the bottom rungs of the old chain of being. But Jesus insisted that to them the Kingdom of God belongs! The Bible doesn’t uphold hierarchy, it subverts it. Yet tragically, there are many, many, Christian men who still insist they are the lord of their household. These also insist upon narrowly defined gender roles and would police our most intimate relationships, tell us who we are allowed to love, what constitutes a real family, and a meaningful life before God.
We’ve read the bible through a hierarchical lens for too long. Francis and Clare pierced this self-serving lens and showed us that we are part of a great web of belonging. We belong. Human community and all things now living are part of a great circle of empathy and mutuality. Thanks be to God.