Psalm 9:10-20
1 Corinthians 9:24-27
Matthew 20:1-16

Francis and the Once & Future Church

This morning we put on purple and head down a winding road. It is a sad road, for it leads to the door of a tomb and death. Yet it is a joyous road, for it alone will lead us to life and to life everlasting. Already we are plunged into mystery: dark, impenetrable, traveling as by night, yet always in faith.

We are few (as we look out on the wide world) though all have been invited to join us. We seek our older brothers and sisters, the saints in light, the holy ones who have gone before us, and the watchers who will guide us. They know the way.

This is not our first Lent. We have headed down this road before, year after year. Did you know that God made the year to be a round? It is a staircase, which ascends toward Him, yet also descends into darkness. Don't let anyone tell you that the round of the seasons is mere poetry. For the essence of the circle, the Greek symbol π, is a nano-century measured in seconds. Most assuredly, this is how God made it: year by year, round and round.

When I began my earliest journeys on Septuagesima Sunday as an Anglo-Catholic boy, my cheek was smooth. Later, I traveled it having a black beard, giving away my Black Irish heritage. Today, the beard is long and white. Several things stand out as I think back on all those purple Sundays. First, while it is true that my exterior has greatly changed, that essential person inside we call me has never changed. Yes, it is better educated and experienced in various ways, but that me is the same today as it was sixty years ago. It is, therefore, ageless, even eternal. For it is the only divine organ we possess, situated in time, but not governed by time. That me inside is our immortal souls.

Second, from our birth we are invited to ascend the staircase, for that is our inmost nature, to seek God. In the years of my childhood and youth I had ascended very high on that staircase. For God made us as perfect, and perfectly good — formed in His Image, intended to become One with Him. Yet, during the years of my late teens and early adulthood, I stumbled. I stopped ascending and did things that dragged me downward toward darkness.

Four centuries after the birth of Jesus, Saint Augustine would invent a theology of Original Sin. Augustine was embarrassed by his past. You see, he had become a great and famous Christian — something, no doubt, he did not foresee. He refused to accept blame for these choices, so he shifted blame onto Adam and Eve.

Yet, I have met perfectly holy people who never chose for evil, who never followed an unwholesome curiosity into sin and then became controlled by it. As we all were, they were born in perfect goodness and then went from height to height with spiritual deep calling to deep (Ps 42:7). Original sin is a cop-out, a grand, though not glorious, instance of blame-shifting and dodging accountability. Yes, I chose to sin, and I did sin, and it was my own fault, my own, most grievous fault. And, now, many years later, being forgiven, I ascend the staircase toward Heaven.

Yet again, we journey toward the door of a tomb. Last year and for decades before that, we made this annual journey as Roman Catholic Franciscans, more recently as members of Na Pua Li'i Hermitage, a Franciscan Community. One of us entered a Franciscan convent in 1962, and never veered or strayed in her faithfulness holding to her religious vows today. All of us have lived together for years in Haiti and then in Hawai'i in a Franciscan religious house, founding and then staffing Franciscan ministries and public charities, one being the largest NGO in Southwest Haiti and its principal public health institution.

I personally identified with Francis of Assisi, for his life, having fallen into error and vanity, yes, and immorality, was a guide away from these deadly destinations — away from corruption to integrity, away from depravity to purity, away from ego and selfishness to humility and lowliness. He stood upon the earth as a teenager bearing two names and seeing two worlds: first his baptismal name, John, the Beloved Disciple, betokening purity and faithfulness. His other name was Francis, which today might be translated as Gucci or Versace, for it was to signify the stylish, affluent, and haute couture, which at the time was centered in France — a name given by his father, who manufactured costly fabrics.

Francis would retain both names to remind himself and others of the world he rejected and the life he embraced. He stood upon a point on the earth and saw the Christianity of the past — pure, simple, available to any and all .... if only they would embrace it. When asked to write a rule of life, he replied that we already have a rule of life: the Gospels, the early Church. By contrast, he saw the Christianity of present-day Europe: corrupt, depraved, and unrepentant. All throughout this world, simple people cried out for the purity they saw in the Gospels. They dressed in white and cried out for holiness and rectitude, calling themselves Cathars, for they wanted to see catharsis (purification) in the Church. So numerous were they that the Roman Pontiff feared the Roman Church would fall, dreaming that the seat of papal power, the Basilica of St. John Lateran, was collapsing. And this Pope began slaughtering the peasants dressed in white, who rightly condemned the Church for its corruption and depravity and, mostly, for its sexual molestation of children. Indeed, it would be this occasion — the Roman Church's wholesale slaughter of the Cathars, which led to a new word, genocide, a term that had never been used before these heinous crimes.

Wishing to point blame away from the Roman Church, Pope Innocent III attempted to explain away this grass-roots movement from within the Roman Church as a conspiracy exported from Bulgaria. He claimed, the Bulgarians were trying to undermine the Roman Church. Indeed, the Orthodox Church in Bulgaria did represent a simpler and purer Church, free of the gross sins that plagued the Roman Catholic Church of Francis' day. But the Roman Church's sickness was not imported. It grew from within and had been growing for centuries.

Francis and his friends had reached the point of disgust ... they were disgusted to their very souls over the corruption and depravity they saw in their own families, in the society around them, and in the Church. Let us step back and see the broader picture of this Church seen in the longer view. The Church that Jesus founded and the world into which he sent His Apostles looked like this not long before Francis' birth:

It was made up of five Patriarchates, which in counterclockwise order were Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, Constantinople, and Rome. When Christians recite the phrase in our Creed, One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, this Church, together with its valid heirs, is what is meant.

For reasons that are far beyond the boundaries of this reflection, the Patriarchate of Rome by the eleventh century had become dominated by a homosexual culture both in its monasteries and dioceses. So manic and excessive was this behavior by 1051 that one of the heroes of the Roman Patriarchate, Peter Damian, sainted in the West and named a Doctor of the Roman Church, published a book to describe it: The Book of Gomorrah. In it he recounts every kind of sexual perversion:

For the next five centuries this reform was resisted throughout the Roman dioceses, which had always ordained married men. It would be the Council of Trent (1563) which would be the last Roman Council to issue decrees forbidding the ordination of married men. Needless to say, the culture Peter Damian condemned only grew faster with its excesses growing ever worse with each succeeding generation.

Sealing this distinctive culture off from the rest of the world, three years after the publication of Peter Damian's Book of Gomorrah, the Roman Patriarchate then broke off from the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church to become a splinter Church, founded 1054. Now all of the other bishops of the ancient Catholic Church were shut out, and the Roman Patriarchate descended into isolation and secrecy. It was to have a new name: the Roman Catholic Church, an independent Church now pressing a claim it was over and above all the others and began calling itself the Catholic Church. Ironically, no Roman Catholic bishop in the U.S. today is able to demonstrate descent from the Apostles (see Scipione Rebiba). Neither does it practice or teach the ancient Catholic faith having innovated radically from the time of its split from the ancient Catholic Church.

Thus did Francis stand on the earth, seeing not very far behind him a Church that was fully intact, the Church founded by Jesus, the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, but all around him in his own lifeworld a splinter Church mired in grave sin and unwilling to change. Together with the peasants he knew and loved, he yearned for Christian faith in its simplicity, seeking purity and, above all, safety for children. He read in the letters of the the Beloved Disciple, for whom he was named,

He could see the ancient Church of the past, all around him laying in ruins — ancient churches and chapels. He loved these vestiges of an earlier, simpler time and would sit gazing at them.

Still a teenager, he sat one day before a large icon Crucifix, betokening the ancient Church. Meditating deeply in the trance of love, which only the faithful know, he heard the Lord speak from out of this icon:

          "Francis, Francis, go and repair my House, for you see it is falling into ruins."

What mysterious words! The word repair matched to the word ruins?! One cannot repair a ruin. A ruin, by its nature is beyond repair, a total loss. It can only be restored. Francis does freshen up the Chapel of San Damiano where this life-changing encounter with Christ took place. But of all the places he might choose to restore, he turned his attentions to piles of ancient stones from a church built in the 350s, a vestige of the ancient and original Church. The Church of St. Mary and the Angels, known as Portiuncula (Little Portion), had been built by hermits of the Valley of Josephat in the Holy Land as a shrine to the Mother of God. Here was a virginal remnant of the Church's former intactness and wholeness!

Today we gently laugh at the idea that Francis should respond to the Lord's command by restoring an actual church. But should we not also laugh in that same gentle spirit that the Founder of the Church would ask Francis to restore only a splinter of the Church He founded? Would not the Founder of the Church see the "ruins" of His Church principally in fragmented and gored Patriarchies laying upon the earth? Francis makes a good start by restoring a church built in the 300s A.D. And he continues by restoring other structures — physical, spiritual, and social structures of the ancient and original Church.

Our only source for these famous scenes from Francis' life were written by Tommaso da Celano in late medieval Italian (the same language in which Dante Alleghieri wrote the Divina Commedia). Our English translation of repair traces back to the original verb riparare meaning to set right a wrong (especially a grave wrong) and to protect. Tommaso da Celano expressed it this way:

In a sense, the first simply happened to him. He struck out to live Gospel life and was joined by his fellows, ascending the great staircase to Heaven. (That's how easy it is to do!). They naturally formed a circle of friends. "You must write a rule of life!" Francis was told. "A rule of life? Don't we already have the Gospels?" he said. And in that Rule we hear a principle being taught over and over again: "whoever would be first among you must be your slave" (Mk 10:44). Or as we heard in our Gospel lesson this morning: "So the last shall be first, and the first last."

Francis rejected the structures of the Latin Rite, hierarchies inspired by Canon Law ranked in stones like a pyramid with its Abbots and Priors and Sub-priors at the top. He personally rejected Holy Orders offered by the Roman Church. Instead, there would be a circle of friends accountable to one another in bonds of godly love. The first religious order Francis actually intended to found was a society of men and women joined together in prayer, people of all ages and from all walks of life — raising families, working jobs, and sharing in a spirit of Apostolic love. In that same year 1212, he founded a religious order for women, necessary in a world where women were vulnerable to attack.

We here at the Hermitage understand his intentions, for we have lived under his Rule for Hermitages, written 1217-1221. (You see, he was finally forced to sit down and write rules.) In it he envisions a few friends in Christ who nurture each other. "Two of these should act as mothers, with the other two, or the other one, as their sons." They are to keep the world at a distance, "forbidden to allow anyone to enter the enclosure where they live, and they must take their meals there alone." Their roles will change as their needs guide them: "The sons ... may periodically assume the role of the mothers, taking turns for a time as they have mutually decided." And we here have thrived in this loving environment.

Francis said that he sought the early Church, the Gospel life. But what exactly did ancient Christian communities really look like? This is not easy to answer. As Francis did, we begin by reading the Gospels:

These insular people defined themselves in terms of their insularity. In a document accounted to be most holy by the Scottish people today, the Declaration of Arbroath, we read that the Celts

The vestiges of life we find in Celtic ruins reflect St. Paul's teachings, expressing the doctrine that all parts of the Body are equally necessary and important enjoying all the same high dignity as each of us do here. They built small, circular dwelling places, bespeaking common life, without separate quarters for an overlord figure. They worshiped in dome-shaped and circular worship spaces, not hierarchical spaces designed around a throne. Their sacred art was dominated by circles, loops, and intertwining designs, a knitting together of all things, with nothing left out. From what little we know of their social ideals, the Celtic saints eschewed leadership keeping their settlements small and seeking consensus rule. They favored the monastery as their spiritual center not the diocese. Ss. Columba, Brendan, Declan, were committed to monasteries and to Christian community while Roman Missionaries such as St. Patrick sought to found hierarchical dioceses and never communitarian monasteries.

I invite you to go back to the map of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church on our website and look at the lands to the upper left, to the North and West, beyond Roman Britain, to Ireland and Scotland. These were the territories occupied by the Celts evangelized by Saint Paul, who sailed out through the Pillars of Hercules between Spain and Africa. They began from the Steppes of modern-day Ukraine and Western Russia, called Scythia, that shadowy place out of the mists of time we know so little about. They claimed St. Andrew as their Apostle, whose Apostolic descent and ministry could have entered Scotland in no other way. Origen placed St. Andrew in Scythia (Eusebius, Church History 3.1). And "the Chronicle of Nestor adds that he preached along the Black Sea and the Dnieper river as far as Kiev, and from there he traveled to Novgorod, becoming a patron saint of Ukraine, Romania and Russia" ("Andrew the Apostle").

For centuries these simple Christians built their communities with life-giving monasteries, not chanceries, at the center, to be a shared place of worship and learning. Yet the Roman Church to the East in Britain would send their missionaries into Celtic lands attempting to subjugate their culture. Ultimately, when the Roman Patriarchy split off from the Church in 1054, the nations of Ireland, Scotland, and Britain elected not to follow them but to remain an integral part of the ancient Catholic Church.

The Roman Pontiff, Pope Alexander II, however, responded by invading Britain twelve years later in a so-called "holy war" carried out by Norman soldiers who were granted papal indulgences and bearing a flag blessed by him. The Roman Catholic faith that would follow these soldiers was one imposed by military conquest and then enforced by overlords who did not even know the Celtic or Anglo-Saxon languages. They crushed these people commtting yet another genocide.

The legacy of this Roman Church in Ireland alone and in our own time reads as yet another chapter from Peter Damian's Book of Gomorrah:

Together these two books reveal an important lesson about culture: culture is organic; it develops at an exceedingly fine level of natural selection. You see, you cannot go back because it is constantly self-begetting its own image. That which is "back" is lost. It has been "selected out." It unerringly begets itself, year after year, century after century. It cannot change. Yes, it may be eradicated and replanted and reformed — say as the United States reformed the militaristic culture of Japan during the mid-twentieth century — but to be reformed in situ without wiping the slate clean? That is not possible .... as the last thousand years have demonstrated.

As Pope Benedict XVI said many years ago, "We must root this filth out of our Church!" The reply came back to him swiftly: "Then you shall have no Church!" He rejoined, "Then let the Church return to her roots and begin again!"

Along with our brothers and sisters of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, we express our love for the ancient Church, for the legacy of St. Paul through the Celtic saints, through their monasteries and culture, and through their prayers which have reached us today through ancient streams. And we claim our birthright and our heritage. Far from leaving the Catholic Church, we claim the Catholic Church! We have become more deeply rooted in it. And we invite others to join us in these ancient treasures: the promise of purity, the reality of safety, and a haven in which to seek holiness.

Henceforth, please call us

As the Celts began in modern-day Russia, so we offer our deepest gratitude to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, which has granted us a home, a place where we might seek holiness in safety.

We at the Hermitage have received a pure gift: a kind of Heaven-on-earth. All the things that have happened in the last three years — our land, our vehicles, our farm, our ministries, and our standing as a religious house in the ancient Church — are a pure and undeserved gift from God. They have followed our prayers and through our lives of trust. We have known from the beginning that He is always with us. His rod and His staff they guide us. And He will never forget, much less abandon, the ones who love Him.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.