19 Pentecost/St Francis of Assisi

 

October 4, 2026

 + Today, of course is the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, one of the most beloved and revered saints in the Church.

 Especially the Episcopal Church.

 It is also the 800th anniversary of his death in 1226.

 And it is also the last Sunday in our Season of Creation celebration.

 Appropriately enough.

 St. Francis is kind of the patron saint of the ecology movement in the Church.

 He is the poster child for eco-justice.

 And, I think, rightly so.

 But, I’ll get into that more in just a bit here.

 For now, we have Francis.

 There is something about Saint Francis that makes people just love him.

 Even people who don’t particularly like the Church seem to like Francis.

 We recognize him immediately.

 That simple robe.

 Those birds.

 The fluffy little animals gathered around him.

 And I understand that attraction.

 I love that Francis.

 But I also think we sometimes make him a little too safe, a little too comfortable. 

We put him in the garden—and we have several statues of Francis in our gardens—and just leave him there.

 Meanwhile, the actual Francis has something very important to say to us.

 Something that might change how we live.

 Something about Jesus.

 Something about our neighbors.

 Something about this earth beneath our feet.

 Because, for Francis, all of those things belong together.

 His love for creation grew out of his love for the God who created it.

 And his love for God led him toward the lives other people overlooked.

 In his own account of his conversion, Francis remembered how difficult it had once been for him even to look at people suffering from leprosy.

 But God led him among the lepers.

  Francis replaced his fear with mercy.

 Something we can all do!

 And through that encounter, something in him changed.

 That is an important part of the story.

 The man we remember surrounded by birds also learned to draw near to people he had been afraid to approach.

 He learned to love beyond the boundaries of his own comfort.

 And that is where Francis begins to speak very directly to us.

 Here at St. Stephen’s, we talk about the worth and dignity of all God’s people.

 And we mean that.

 We live that!

 We have a window with those very words emblazoned on it!

 We try to make room for people who have been told there is no room for them.

 We try to be a place where people can bring their whole selves, including their doubts, their wounds, all of their complicated histories.

 Francis invites us to keep opening that circle of care.

 To notice the person we’ve overlooked.

 And to notice the living world we’ve learned to take for granted.

 The water.

 The soil.

 The trees.

 The birds overhead.

 The small, vulnerable creatures whose lives go on around us, often without our paying much attention.

 All of the animals in our world.

 In his Canticle pf Creation, Francis spoke of the sun and moon, water and fire, earth and wind in the language of family.

 Brother.

 Sister.

 He understood himself to be in relationship with the rest of creation.

  And relationships ask something of us.

 Think about what happens when we begin to see the world in the way Francis did.

 Water becomes more than something we turn on at the faucet.

 Soil becomes more than something dirty beneath our shoes.

 A tree becomes more than something we can remove when it’s inconvenient.

 We begin to recognize lives and relationships that deserve our attention.

 We begin to recognize that we belong here, among all of creation.

 During the Season of Creation, Christians around the world make time for this attention, this prayer, and this work.

 And that connection  with creation matters.

 Because we can come here into the church and thank God for all of creation.

 We can sing beautiful hymns about it.

 We can bless our animals—which we’ll do next week.

 And I’m glad we do all of these things.

 But eventually our gratitude needs to go somewhere.

 It needs to become a way of living.

 Look around us.

 This natural world in which we live shapes us.

 It enters our memories.

 It becomes part of the language we use to describe our lives.

 And it deserves our care.

 There is also a very human reason for that care.

 When water is polluted, someone has to drink it.

 When air is unhealthy, someone has to breathe it.

 Someone’s child.

 Someone’s elderly parent.

 Someone who may have very little choice about where they live or what they drink or what they breathe.

 Creation care brings us back, again and again, to that question Jesus asks of us:

 How are we loving our neighbors?

 At St. Stephen’s, we speak of walking humbly together in justice and mercy.

 There is something deeply Franciscan about that.

 Walking humbly means remembering that we depend on gifts we did not create.

 Every breath.

 Every meal.

 Every glass of water.

 Our lives are sustained by a world we could never have made for ourselves.

 We help each other.

 We make changes that we might struggle to make alone.

 Now, I know this can feel so overwhelming.

 We hear about environmental damage, and we doom scroll about climate change and we feed our fear and our anxiety, and we wonder what we can possibly do.

 After all, we’re one congregation.

 In a sea of Lutherans!

 We’re individual people with limited time and limited energy and limited resources.

 And some days, simply getting through the day is enough of a challenge.

 I think we need to be gentle with one another about that.

 But, we can waste less.

 We can pay attention to what we buy.

 And what we eat.

 And what we throw away.

 We can support decisions that protect clean water and healthy communities.

 And we can recover the practice of noticing.

 I know, that may sound small.

 But attention changes us.

 It’s harder to be careless with something we’ve come to love.

 Watch a bird for a few minutes.

 Look closely at an autumn leaf.

 Pay attention to the small lives moving through a patch of grass.

 Let yourself be glad that those lives exist.

 Let that gladness become gratitude.

 Then let gratitude become care.

 Francis helps us see that this is all part of following Jesus.

 God’s very Son came into this natural world among us, in a human body.

 Jesus knew hunger and thirst.

 He walked on the earth.

 He spoke about seeds and soil, birds and flowers.

 He shared bread with people.

 Our faith keeps bringing us into contact with this material world.

 Water at the font.

 Bread and wine at the altar.

 God meets us through these ordinary, tangible things.

 This is why holt water and the Eucharist are so important to us.

 Because when we leave this altar, sustained by that bread and wine, made clean with that holy water, we go back into the world from which those gifts came.

 We go back to our neighbors.

 We go back to the soil and water.

 We go back to the animals who share this place with us.

 We go back with a calling to love.

 That is what I hope we hear when we remember Francis.

 A calling to live more gently.

 To hold what we have with gratitude.

 To draw nearer to those who need mercy.

 To recognize the beauty around us and accept some responsibility for its well-being.

 We don’t have to accomplish everything today.

 But we can offer something today.

 One act of care.

 One change in a habit.

 One moment of attention.

 One decision shaped by love.

 And we can trust that God is already at work in this world we are still learning to cherish.

 So, today, let us give thanks for Francis, 800 years after his left this earth behind..

 Let us give thanks for the creatures whose lives bring joy to ours.

 Let us give thanks for this earth, this sky, this water that sustains us.

 And let us ask God to help us walk humbly here.

 With justice.

 With mercy.

 With our eyes wide open.

 And with enough love to care for what God has placed in our care.