Francis of Assisi - Letting Go

Francis of Assisi | Il Poverello His father gave him a fortune. He gave it back, in the town square, naked. Francis of Assisi was a cloth merchant's son, a failed knight, and the most disruptive man medieval Christianity ever produced. Born in 1181 to Pietro di Bernardone, who renamed him Francesco, "the French one," and groomed him to be a merchant prince. Francis spent his twenties throwing the best parties in Assisi until a war with Perugia put him in prison for a year in 1201 and cracked something open. He rode out to be a knight in 1204, got one day down the road, and turned around. Back home he kissed lepers, traded clothes with a beggar in Rome, and heard a crucifix at San Damiano say, "Rebuild my church." He thought it meant the building, sold his father's cloth to fund repairs, and got arrested for theft. So in the public square, in front of the bishop and half the town, he stripped off every garment his father's money had bought, piled them at Pietro's feet, and said he had only one Father now, the one in heaven. He was twenty-four. Within a year he had twelve companions, within a decade five thousand, the first poem in the Italian vernacular, a face-to-face audience with a Muslim sultan in the middle of a Crusade, and eventually the wounds of Christ in his own hands. He was difficult, inconsistent, and impossible to institutionalize. He threw roof tiles at people he disagreed with. He was also the closest thing the Middle Ages produced to a living gospel. This sermon is the sixth entry in the family album, and it jumps the timeline from the early church into medieval Italy, where the institution Jesus started had become an empire handing God its leftovers. It asks the question the rich young ruler in Mark 10 could not answer: what are you holding that you will not give Jesus first? It argues that the issue was never money but first and best, that Francis gave Jesus the prime of his life instead of the retirement plan, and that the same Christ Polycarp died for, Athanasius defended, and Augustine wept over is the Christ Francis followed until his own body ran out of things to give. The rich young ruler kept his possessions and walked away. Francis kept nothing and we are still talking about him. First and best. Not last and leftover. Everything. Scripture: Mark 10:21-22 | Galatians 2:20 | Matthew 6:21