Try and try again

Paul wrote to the church in Philippi: I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection…Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.

This weekend marks the 800th anniversary of the death of St Francis of Assisi, who died at the age of 44 after a severe illness. 22 years before, he had heard the voice of God calling him to ‘rebuild the church’ – not a literal call to physically restore the crumbling old church at San Damiano, but a call to renew the spiritual life of the community of God’s people. Francis was led to make more visible the gospel call to love God and love neighbor, caring for the poor and trusting utterly in God. Breaking with his family’s privilege and position, he dramatically stripped off all of his luxury and left it in the town square, heading off to the countryside to live the life of a poor beggar. Following Jesus, he felt, meant he had to make a total change, to follow Jesus’ command to let go of everything and follow him.

And his radical response ignited those around him, leading to the founding of the men’s and women’s orders of the Franciscans and the Poor Clares. Within 5 years of his own call, some 5000 men and women joined him, imitating his commitment to poverty, prayer, and service. Those orders continue today in the Catholic Church, with Franciscan orders of men and women in the Episcopal Church as well. They continue to practice a life of ‘solidarity with those on the margins of society and the Church.’ Francis’ life meant a powerful reform for the whole church.

But Franciscans haven’t always got it right – it was Franciscans who established the California missions, with their complicated legacy of conversion and also enslavement and brutality. When Pope Francis canonized Junipero Serra in 2015, a band of Ohlone from the Santa Cruz area protested in an open letter,

…The Catholic Church should not use today’s standards to judge Fr. Serra. Instead, the Catholic Church should judge Fr. Serra against the times and the words that Jesus Christ spoke when he was on earth; over 1,750 years before the time of Serra. Serra should have known that to follow Jesus Christ’s footsteps meant that he needed to have understanding and love for others and that no one could or should ever be forced to accept Jesus Christ.

And they were right. 500 years after Francis, things had gone awry. The Franciscans became caught up in the trappings of this world, entangling the mission of Christ with the territorial aims of the Spanish empire. Instead of trusting in the love and power of God, they lost their way, and inflicted generations of suffering as they did so – suffering that ripples out still in the communities that live here in this very valley.

Here’s the hard truth: Things in the church often go awry, over and over again. Francis wanted to reform a church he thought had strayed too far from following Jesus – so he started anew, with a more absolute commitment to poverty. And his wasn’t the only reform in his day. The late 12th and early 13th centuries saw a wave of reforms, reacting against the worldliness, greed, and corruption of the church and advocating a return to simplicity. And this was not the first time – the late 6th century had seen reforms of clerical abuses under Pope Gregory the Great, and there were successive reforms in the 8th-9th century under Charlemagne and again in the 10th-11th century. 300 years after Francis, the Protestant reformation swept the church, again protesting the church’s abuses and focusing on the individual believer’s experience of faith. And further reforms and restructuring have continued in the church on to this day, as new generations seek to correct problems in the institutions and hierarchy of the church and find a purer way of following Jesus more closely. We never really get this right, in other words. We tend to get caught up in the powers and principalities, the lure of money, the trappings. And we forget what is at the core of our call to faith. We are a flawed group of flawed people, who struggle to be faithful.

It is hard to be faithful. Our reading from Exodus reminds us of the seemingly simple, straightforward words of the Ten Commandments – commandments we’d like to think we’ve basically kept, a kind of baseline morality for the rest of our lives. We haven’t murdered anyone, we don’t steal, we’re ok. But then we look more closely. ‘You shall have no other gods before me.’ ‘Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.’ ‘You shall not covet.’ ‘Honor your father and mother.’ Commandments that have to do not only with basic morality, but with the disposition of our hearts – Do we put God first? Do we show that in how we spend our time? Do we love others completely, or are we envious of what they have that we lack? Are our family relationships good and loving, or is there trouble there? (St Francis, too, seemed to have difficulty with his father and family.) Think a little longer, and we realize that even this ‘basic’ list of ten things is harder to follow than we’d like to admit.

In one letter to his order St Francis confessed, In many things I have offended out of my own grave fault, in particular that I have not kept the Rule, which I have promised the Lord, nor have I said the office, as the Rule commands, whether out of negligence or the occasion of my infirmity or because I am ignorant and an idiot. 

If at first you don’t succeed, the old adage goes, try, try again. And no less in the life of faith. As individuals seeking to be followers of Jesus, as a church here in Pauma Valley, as a larger denomination of Episcopalians in this country, as a movement of God’s people all over the world, we fail, and fail again. The stories of saints like St Francis show us the possibility of what we could be; the scriptures show us the way to follow; our own prayers and community fuel us to do better – and yet we fall off, distracted, confused, following the wrong leads. Sometimes in ways that do terrible damage to others or to ourselves. And still, we try again.

But God’s message to us remains the same: as our prayer today says, God is more ready to hear than we are to pray, and more ready to give than we either desire or deserve. God wants us to be faithful in trying, to pick ourselves up and recommit yet again, to turn around and restart on the journey home. It is never too late. God’s love, God’s desire for us, burns as bright and strong as it ever did.

So if you sometimes look at the cycles of history and the news headlines and feel weighed down at it all – if you get angry with yourself for not sticking with the plan, the prayer or the exercise or the better attitude – if you are frustrated with the church and its ways – you are not alone. You are in good company. The company of those who long for things to be different – who long for the world to be a more just, kinder place – who long to follow Jesus better in our lives. And who try over and over again to do just that. The church is always being rebuilt.  We are always being called to rebuild it. And God reaches out to us in love, always, throughout it all. Thanks be to God!