Pastor Glenn McDonald: Francis of Assisi

Each day this Lent we’re looking at major “turning points” in Christian history – moments or seasons in which the story of God’s people took an important and often unexpected turn.  

People who end up as Catholic saints don’t always start out looking like saints.

Francis Bernardone, the son of a wealthy Italian cloth merchant, seemed destined for a life of affluence and influence. His teenage pals nicknamed him rex convivii – “master of the revels.” In other words, he was a party boy.

He also had an appetite for adventure.

When his hometown of Assisi went to war with their ancient enemy – the neighboring town of Perugia, just 12 miles down the road – Francis turned up in a full suit of armor and a plumed helmet.

Things did not go well. The rich man’s son, who was totally out of his element, was captured and thrown into an airless dungeon, where he languished for a year. Starved and stricken with malaria, he emerged a mere shadow of his former self.

Throughout the next year, Francis faltered. He resisted his father’s efforts to bring him into the family business.

One summer day in 1205, he slipped into the shade of a tumbledown church building, the chapel of San Damiano. Looking around at the evidence of neglect, his eyes fell on a painted image of Christ. He later reported that Jesus seemed to speak to him: “Francis, don’t you see my house is being destroyed? Go, then, rebuild it for me.”

A profound change overtook him, one which he could never quite put into words. Francis began to care for people on the margins – the poor, the sick, the abandoned.

His father could hardly contain his fury. He dragged Francis into a nearby piazza and earnestly tried to beat some sense into him. He next tried locking up his son in the family manor, but his mother conspired to set him free.

Finally, when Francis cashed out some bolts of cloth and used the money to help restore San Damiano, Dad brought out the big guns. The elder Bernardone forced Francis to stand before Guido, the Bishop of Assisi, in the cathedral square. He denounced his son as a thief and a monumental family disappointment. Guido, a man who plainly enjoyed the finer things in life, would surely be sympathetic.

How would Francis respond? 

What followed was a scene that no could have expected, and that no one would ever forget.

Francis stepped for a moment into the cathedral. When he returned he was stark naked, carrying his expensive clothes and a bag full of coins. He presented both to his father, dramatically announcing that from now on his true father was his Father in heaven, not Pietro di Bernardone. Guido, stunned, took off his enormous cloak and wrapped it around the young man.

Just like that, the Church wrapped itself around someone who was destined to become one of the greatest reformers in Christian history.

It wasn’t just a turning point in Francis’ life. It proved to be pivotal for Rome, too. In an era when reform was desperately needed – and top-down efforts were struggling to gain traction – what happened in Assisi provided evidence that the Spirit was able and willing to orchestrate bottom-up revival by means of the unlikeliest characters. 

Thoughtful historians have suggested that Francis is one of the five or ten most admirable characters in the last twenty centuries.

That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a bit off-kilter.

Donald Spoto, one of his biographers, acknowledges, “Real saints are not normal people.” The historian Thomas Cahill has floated the idea that Francis might have been bipolar. But once he found the north star in his life – once he fully abandoned himself to Jesus – he functioned “brilliantly, excessively, erratically, eccentrically.”

Francis, having renounced his family’s wealth, wore a plain brown tunic. He joyfully gave to the poor whatever gifts were placed in his hands. He famously celebrated “brother sun and sister moon,” and preached a sermon to a flock of birds. In an effort to dramatize the message of Christmas, he arranged the world’s first live nativity scene, complete with animals.

Christendom ached for such spontaneity.

Within a dozen years, Francis was surrounded by more than 3,000 followers. He composed a simple set of regulations for daily life which ultimately became the ground rules for the Franciscan Order. These “Lesser Brothers and Sisters” shared whatever they had with anyone who crossed their path, no matter how broken or pathetic.

Across the continent, Christians took heart that someone – not bishops, cardinals, or popes – was finally able to show what a surrendered life might actually look like.

Francis died in 2026 at the age of 44, his fasts and physical deprivations having left him nearly blind and covered with sores. His final words were, “I have done my duty. May Christ now teach you yours.”

It’s possible that the most enduring legacy of this medieval saint were his efforts at peacemaking in a weary, war-torn world. Here is his best-known prayer:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console,

to be understood as to understand,

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

One of the practical outflows of Francis’ commitment to peace was the blessing he spoke to everyone he met: “May God’s peace be upon you.”

Those words should not be mistaken as blanket approval of the misdeeds of others, as if someone should feel good about themselves at the end of the day simply because some follower of Jesus has asked for a shower of God’s peace.

Francis’ prayer, in fact, turns out to be genuinely subversive.   

Biblically, God’s peace is shalom – the deep peace that God has always intended for the world and everyone in it. Shalom means that justice will be done, and all that is right will prevail. 

To pray that God’s shalom might come upon another human being is to ask that they might catch God’s own vision of a healed and restored planet, and to feel genuine sorrow and repentance for whatever sins or selfishness in their own lives have become obstacles to that vision.

May God’s peace be upon you. 

That’s a prayer we can pray for both friends and strangers, allies and enemies, and everyone we meet today, tomorrow, and the day after that.

We can even pray that prayer for ourselves as we seek to be God’s hope for this hurting world.

May we be more like Francis, that most extraordinary child of God.