Sermon: 4th Sunday in Lent, 3/10/24

Grace, Peace, and Mercy from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

St. Francis of Assisi, whom we have depicted in our stained glass window, used to have a deep aversion to lepers. It was said by some early biographies that “So greatly loathsome was the sight of lepers to him…that, in the days of his vanity, he would look at their houses…from a distance of two miles and he would hold his nostrils with his hands”. But God had other intentions for Francis. God was calling Francis to love as He loves. As St. Francis focused more on God, the more the lepers, those he kept distance from, called him to come closer. So one day, Francis encountered a leper, and by God’s grace and power, he stepped down from his horse – he literally stepped down from his high horse – he was “made stronger than himself”, and kissed the leper. The leper stretched out his hand, and out of compassion, Francis gave him some money. His deep aversion began to be transformed to deep love. Many people consider this moment part of his conversion. This one leper led him deeper into the love by which God loves the world, a love that transgresses our own walls of prejudice, a love that envelops even what we at one moment find hostile and ugly. So Francis got on his horse, and then the leper disappeared from his sight. It was revealed in his heart that the leper he had helped was Jesus himself. There are so many stories like this in our tradition, where Jesus appears in the form of the most wretched of the earth and so challenges the believers in their charity: by whose love are you loving? God’s? Or from the limits of your world? Like in our text today, Jesus is the way that God lets the world know that He loves them. In Jesus, God has come close to us in our own wretchedness with the fullness of being Love itself. And so by witnessing Jesus in the leper, Francis was led into a deeper more embracing love. It became his mission to visit and be at the leper colonies just two miles down from the walls of Assisi. His followers would clean, feed, fundraise, and kiss the lepers around them. These marginalized people, these people that showed the real world beyond Francis’ former comfortable life up in his family’s estate, would show Francis the true life of the Gospel, the life of God loving the world through Jesus. Francis wrote: “When I was in sin, the sight of lepers nauseated me beyond measure; but then God himself led me into their company, and I had pity on them. When I became acquainted with them, what had previously nauseated me became the source of spiritual and physical consolation for me.” Once Francis learned that God loved and had mercy on him, he was compelled to love and have mercy on those he previously had contempt for. God in Jesus Christ completely reoriented Francis’ life to a deep embrace of the world, even into its most painful sides, which many prefer to ignore. St. Francis’ story reveals to us the meaning of today’s Gospel text, and the love of God which it describes. Beloved, I must confess something, it wasn’t easy writing this week’s sermon. So looking for inspiration, I re-read the sermon I wrote last year on part of this text, and I found a note-to self in the sermon and I quote myself: “I was told by my pastor a few year ago, that if you boil down all of Christian preaching, you get John 3:16, and if you are struggling with your sermon, just know there is a safe harbor for you, without a doubt, you should end at John 3:16”. John 3:16 is the Gospel in miniature as Martin Luther liked to call it: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him”. What a God-sent reminder that was! So today, you are getting the golden nugget that should fund your whole Christian life. God did not see the world and its hostility to His Way of Love and reject it altogether, rather He refused the world’s rejection and shared our condition and opened the way to salvation. And He opened this way of life and this salvation not for a few, but for the world, meaning everything and everyone in this realm of Creation. That same world that will crucify him, that same world distracted by its sins, that same world God embraces in Jesus Christ. Which turns the question to us, who is the world to us, that we are called to love? Who sits beyond our limits? Who do we have aversion to and are therefore called to love with this all-embracing love of God? This love by which God loves the world is actually extremely challenging! It is not easy, it can be a cross that we bear! Francis love for the lepers was a difficult development. It was by no means easy. Our text says as much: we are not always inclined, because of our evil deeds, or our attachment to evil ways, to step into the light of God’s way in Jesus Christ. We prefer to be closed up and look down, rather than open and look up to the wide world that God’s love is embracing. We rather not be challenged to love what is beyond the limits of our comfort. But that is precisely what God calls us to do in light of Christ. In Christ, God did not look away from the deathly reality of the cross. He accepted the consequences of His love within the world. By doing so, God gave us this eternal sign that we can look up to, to remind us of His abiding presence and promise to be with us through thick and thin. His Love did not stop 2,000 years ago, rather it has continued in an unbroken chain of relationship up until this very gathering. This is the gift that the Pauline author talks about in Ephesians: “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ–by grace you have been saved—”. Christ is raised as the eternal banner of God’s mercy and love for us, and therefore calling us to be carriers of this love and mercy for others.

So what do we mean when we talk about love? We talk about an embrace of the whole of creation with the Love by which God loves. Nothing is beyond it’s reach. Like the cross of San Damiano, the cross icon mostly associated with St. Francis, the arms of the crucified Christ seem to embrace the human world under it, the cross, while it is this deathly instrument, becomes the way by which God welcomes us to a new life that revitalizes the world with Love and Mercy. He welcomes us to do the same, to have outstretched arms to the world. So that means that this church is built around the foundation of God’s Love because it’s meant to be a school of love. Our gathered life here instructs us in the way of Jesus. So as we continue to gather together we are called to a radical openness. And perhaps we don’t have a rational or strategic solution to the problems we face in our society. But maybe that’s totally ok, because we are not called to have a solution. We are called, as the theologian Samuel Wells remarks, to be with the world with God’s love. In the small ways that we can, we can always manifest the love of God by fostering that openness and that embrace that characterizes God’s love. So we can cultivate a love that can embrace the Palestinian, and say we see what you are going through, we irreparably ache for your losses, and we want to see you live in peace and thrive. We can cultivate a love that loves the Israeli, and loves him enough to tell them the truth that they need to listen to the cry of their neighbor. We can cultivate a love that loves the Ukrainian and the Russian, a love that loves the immigrant and the undocumented, a love that loves the LGBTQ and embraces them after they were rejected by the church, a love that loves people no matter their race and ethnicity, but simply loves humanity with the great embrace of Christ. We are approaching a time in this year of 2024 that promises discord and instability. Divisionary attitudes will flare up and people will want to tell you to dehumanize those you don’t agree with. But this is the Body of Christ. We are called to a life anchored in the love of God in Jesus Christ, and He wants us to see deeper than what the powers of this world will want you to see. So what do we mean when we talk about love? It is the face of Jesus Christ in every person we meet. Glory be to God who loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

Let us pray: We give you thanks O God, for Your Son Jesus Christ. Through Him we get to love everything and everyone with an all-embracing love, a love that is truthful and just, a love that is merciful and willing to serve with compassion. Thank you for tasking us with this greatest of tasks, to bring Christ in acts of love, as You have done for us, by giving us Jesus. In your name we pray. Amen.