The Bishop of Beverley - Sermon for the Northern Provincial Festival

A Sermon for S Francis Day,

Preached at S Francis Mackworth on 4th October 2007

Saint Francis of Assisi

As for me the only thing I can boast about is the cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Galatians 6 v14

Boasting is not a very attractive quality in someone. And, yet, in one way or another, you and I are often drawn into it. Whenever you and I feel a little bit insecure because someone else seems to be that little bit more impressive than ourselves, then there is the temptation to talk ourselves up. We might even, then, impress other people. At the very least, you and I try to raise our own self-esteem. It never works, of course. The truth about us and, indeed, the truth about everyone else, remains exactly the same, no matter what gloss you and I might try to put on it for better or for worse. Jesus is never boastful. That is the point that S Paul is making when he says that he is only prepared to boast in the cross of Jesus. For the cross of Jesus is the way that Jesus shows His humility before the world. In those great words of Charles Wesley, Jesus emptied Himself of all but love. To boast in the cross of Jesus is, at it were, to turn things on their head and to seek to live a life like Jesus, a life clothed in humility.

Now, there is a difficulty. If I set out to preach to you what I think is a good sermon it would hardly seem to be in the spirit of humility. If, on the other hand, I set out to preach you a not-so-good sermon, then I might well be insulting you by preaching it. Fortunately, though, the day has been saved for me. I have discovered that talking about the virtue of humility is really to talk about compost heaps! Anyone who knows me well will know that compost making is one of my consuming passions. I can talk about it for hours.

What do I mean? The word ‘humility’ means being like the humus. Humus, as any gardener knows, is just a fancy word for compost or, even, for the soil itself. Someone who is humble is someone who stands before God as mother earth. When you and I are humble it is because God has chosen to make us at all. You and I did not make ourselves. To be humble is to know that you and I are solely dependent on God for our very existence, just like any other part of His creation. You and I are just as dependant on God as anyone else, be they of a different colour, of different gender, of different faith, different age or of different intelligence. You and I know, then, that when we are humble, that we are not one bit more important than anyone of different colour, or gender, or faith , or age, or intelligence - even if we are British and from Derby! The dandelion and the lettuce both need God for their very being. On the compost heap both of them rot down equally well. Paradoxically, it is only God Himself, become man, who, nailed to a cross, can teach you and me what our dependency on God should truly be like. Only He can teach us the value that you and I are to put on each other.

Our world so often parades itself as one big rat race. We human beings try to prove ourselves better than one another. The sophisticated term we use for the process is competition. The important thing is to be a winner and not a loser. Those who refuse to join in are thought to be losers right from the start. They are thought to be the weak and the walked-over.

And so, our world makes its great mistake. For the humble of the world are not the weak of the world. Rather, the humble are those among us who have been strong enough to stand by a different set of values; strong enough, that is to stand out against the madness of so many of the games our world has decided to play; those who, in the language of our day, have chosen to be counter-cultural. Jesus was humble. Jesus was counter-cultural. By the ordeal of His passion, Jesus was physically weakened. But any idea of Jesus as a weak man, is plain contrary to the Gospel story.

The call, then to follow Jesus, to boast only in His cross, is the call to be, as it were, His small people. So many around us seek power in order to dominate and inflict their own viewpoints on other people. They want power in order to exploit others. Jesus, by contrast, carries supreme power and yet offers it only to serve. How confusing it must have been to Pontius Pilate, to Herod, to the High Priest, that the greatest power the world can ever know allows Himself to be nailed to a cross. How confusing it must have been for Simon Peter that his Lord and Master wanted to wash the disciples’ feet rather than to be served by them. When Saint Francis of Assisi, whose festival we celebrate today, founded his order of friars he called them friars minor. Minor was the Italian word for small. Those brothers were to be small people. To this day, those who are elected to office in the Franciscan Order are given titles like ‘minister’ or ‘guardian’. They are there to minister to and to protect their fellow Franciscans and not to dominate them.

Your patron, Saint Francis of Assisi, knew that the only true key to the building up of God’s Kingdom was in becoming ever humbler, like Saint Paul before him, boasting only in the power of the cross. That is an humility that runs contrary to almost every accepted standard in the world about us, even, dare I say it, so often in the affairs of the Church. Yet, if you and I want to follow Jesus in turning the values of this world upside down as He did on Good Friday and on Easter Day, then there is no better saint to model this for us that he in whose honour this church has been dedicated.

May Christ who comes, yet again, humbly as bread and wine yet His Body and His Blood make us more like Him that with Francis and all the Saints we may ever point others to that eternal, humble and self-giving love.

To know and to trust in Jesus, the prisoner of conscience, is to find freedom amongst the many varied ways in which others try to manipulate our minds, be it trivially, though biassed newspaper reporting, or acutely, through violent persecution. That is what Margaret our patron found and so knew freedom even through her martyrdom. It is that Jesus to whom we ever seek to open ourselves and be formed in his likeness, the Jesus who draws us to Himself in the mysteries of the Eucharist on this festival day.