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.
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