Reading Francis

God is not so hard to find.

I sometimes hear four different homilies on a Sunday, in addition to a couple of written reflections. Thanks to technology, in addition to the routinely excellent homilies at my home parish, I listen to podcasts featuring compelling American preachers with varying styles – one focuses on young people; one is more erudite; one podcast highlights a range of good preachers. I really appreciate the opportunity to get multiple bites at the rhetorical apple, because I can’t predict who will have the inspiration from the day’s assigned Scripture readings that will speak to what I’m experiencing.

This past Sunday, the 15th in Ordinary Time, I heard great homilies, but none of them picked up on the takeaway I had from the day’s passages: God is not so hard to find.

The lineup for Sunday was Isaiah 55:10-11, Psalm 65:10-14, Romans 8:18-23 and Matthew 13:1-9 (or 13:1-23 if you like your Gospels long). 

Isaiah: “Thus says the Lord: Just as from the heavens the rain and snow come down and do not return there till they have watered the earth, making it fertile and fruitful, giving seed to the one who sows, and bread to the one who eats, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; my word shall not return to me void, but shall do my will, achieving the end for which I sent it.”

The Psalmist sings about God watering the land, too, culminating in “The fields are garmented with flocks and the valleys blanketed with grain. They shout and sing for joy.”

Paul: “For creation awaits with eager expectation the revelation of the children of God…in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery and corruption and share the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now…”

And Matthew’s Jesus tells the parable of the sower.

We tend to think that God is far away from this world. We think this place is just awful, and it’s not hard to find evidence to back that view up. If there is a god, we think, it’s got to be one who keeps His distance. Maybe He drops some clues around so that if we look hard, we can find him. But on the whole, this is no place for divinity.

Early Christianity really wrestled with a viral variant called Gnosticism that pushed hard the notion that this world was rotten to the core, and that only by escaping to some other spiritual world, like billionaires in a spaceship, could we find holy relief. Gnostics claimed there were some secret codes you needed to get out of this world, and that’s where God was. (Some of us are probably still wrestling with that a little.) And if you look around, you can see the attraction – whatever evil repulses you the most: immorality, injustice, hatred, corruption, it seems like it’s in your face everywhere you turn. Gnostic cheat codes sound like a good option if you think you need to get out of here to find rest.

But God is not so hard to find.

Francis of Assisi has a reputation as a nature lover; he’s the patron saint of the ecology and there are stories of him talking to birds and wolves (which, doesn’t everyone?) and he was know to relocate worms he found in the road so they wouldn’t get hurt and he popularized nativity scenes with live animals and he wrote a whole canticle about creatures. But he wasn’t so much a nature lover as he was someone who bought all the way into the weirdness of Christ in a couple big ways.

We say that Christ is the one “through whom all things were made.” When God creates, He speaks things into being, and Christ is the Word that makes it happen (cf Genesis 1: “And God said..and so there was.”) If that’s not enough, Christ, fully God, becomes fully human and walks around with us other humans, not only preaching and healing but eating and drinking and noticing flowers and birds and stuff. And then He is really, horribly lynched. And then He proves that lynching won’t stop Love.

You know how people will sometimes go nuts over being someplace where a famous person was – growing up, the clichè was signs that said “Elvis slept here;” I think before that it was “George Washington slept here”?  It’s as if the fact that you can inhabit the same place a famous person once inhabited brings that place extra specialness, even if it’s a Motel 6 or a rundown bed and breakfast?

Christ walking around on the Earth meant, for Francis, that every ounce of ground could have a sign that said “God walked here.” Everything about this place could have a sign that said “God made this special.” And, as Paul hints in Romans, “God’s got a claim check for this whole thing.” (Not a literal translation.) So Francis saw that everything and everyone was holy, not on their own, but because God cared about them enough to join us here. 

In the Peanuts’ Christmas special, Pigpen waxes poetic about how the dirt billowing off of him may have been trod on by Nebuchadnezzar; so, for Francis, every piece of dirt was spoken into being by God, was embraced by God made flesh, and is still deeply loved by the living God. So we ought to react the same way, not by running from it like the Gnostics, but by hugging it like it reflected the loving God who made it. If Isaiah got it right, and the Word is God and looks like water and seeds and fruit and dirt, then you can find reflections everywhere. God is not so hard to find.

But maybe the dirt just looks like dirt to you. And maybe the ugliness around us blots out the beauty. Even if God is rain and flowers and flocks and harvests, look at the weather and you see blistering heat and wildfires and destructive storms. Or maybe you’re expecting God to look like angels and stained glass and halos, and that’s not what you see here.

I’ve been asking y’all to join me in a sort of examen each week lately: Where did you see love? Where did you spot joy? Where did you see beauty? Where did you find peace? I’ll keep them coming. It’s a practice of God spotting.

We say that God is Love. We say that the fruits of the Spirit also include joy and peace and a whole lot more. When we see those things around us, they are reflections of the God who made them. And even in the ugliness, if you look, you can find them. 

God is not so hard to find. God may not look like what we expected. We may not see as much as we’d like. But I promise you this: the more you look for love and joy and peace and beauty, the more you will find.