Feast of St. Francis/Creation Care Sunday
Oct. 4, 2026
The Creation Story (Abbreviated from Genesis 1:1-34)
Matthew 11:25-30
The very first sacred act of God was to create the world we live in. From microbes to Sequoia trees, ocean waters to fresh springs from the earth. It is all made as a holy act. The earth and all living things were created before humans walked in it. It was God’s Garden and it was good. We, too, were created from the very soil of the earth and however that form took shape, the earth has cared for us and sustained us for thousands of years. In this Garden of God’s, all was connected, everything that God created carried the living spark of the Creator. It was all one, united as God’s beauty, respected as holy. And our scriptures point to the reverence we are to have for the earth and its beings as caretakers, a mutually sustainable relationship where we thrive as one, God’s created blessings.
Restoring reverence for the Earth means holding fast to the deep biblical truth that God created, redeems, and sustains the whole of Creation, and that, as the psalmist says, “The Earth is the LORD’s and all that is in it” (Psalm 24:1). We remind ourselves about the sacredness of the created world not because we worship nature, but because God loved the world into being, has redeemed it, and fills it with divine Presence. We don’t believe in a far-away God in the sky, but about a transcendent God who is also intimately present to us. That’s why we encounter the crucified, risen, and ascended Christ in the natural world and why so many of us, in times of anguish or stress, find solace in turning our attention away from the noise of human chatter and toward the sounds and silence of wild creatures and landscapes. The Earth is the dwelling place of God.
800 years ago to this day, a man was born in Umbria, a region of what we call Italy today. His name was Francis di Bernardone. He was the son of a wealthy cloth merchant and lived a life of a well-dressed, privileged, spoilt, party boy, disconnected from who he was created to be, disconnected from all of creation, and disconnected from God. In a world where evil and corruption and greed had permeated even the church, the place where the humans God had created gathered to worship the God they professed to love, there was sickness, pain, and war. Humankind had forgotten to honor what was sacred and therefore humans forgot who they were and that they were to be stewards of all God’s created things, caretakers of the earth and all that was in it.
Francis was repulsed by the sickness, poverty, and pain he saw around him, so he tended to go out of his way to avoid it, believing that he was above those things, that he bore no responsibility for the way things were. He was just out to have a good time. But he began to dream dreams, and something in his heart began to pull away from the leisurely, good–timing life he was living. There was something far more grand that he began to aspire to and, in that day he thought, I must become a knight and go fight in the crusades and then I’ll really be somebody! He was given the finest horse, the richest and best armor, and heralded as a knight with a good deal of pomp and circumstance which all ended in a very rapid defeat, and the second time he went out, he was taken prisoner and put in a dungeon.
His father’s wealth could not save him from the very things he feared and which disgusted him. Through his own suffering and in the year he had to lay in bed not knowing if he was going to live or die, God got through to this pretty party boy. There are stories I have told you in the past of how he had to kiss the leper to recognize Christ and how he gave up his wealth and his access to it, to better heed the call of God for his life. He stumbled his way into the presence of God and where he found God, was in the beauty of God’s creation and in the poor and suffering. He went from the disrespect of the natural world and mistreatment of fellow humans, and became a young man who encountered God in the beauty of a sunrise, and the kiss of a leper.
And so, as the desire to be closer and closer to Christ, Francis gave up his possessions for the companionship of brother wolf and sister bird, brother sun and sister moon. Calling the created things brother and sister because he came to understand his interconnectedness with all living things as being a part of the one God. It completely changed him and introduced him to the love of Christ which he began to see in the least likely of places. He learned to pay attention. His perception of the world he was living in changed. As did another very young girl named Clare, who was nobility, living in Perugia, and enemies with the city-state of Assisi. She watched the ministry that began to flourish under Francis as others became drawn to the words Francis would preach and the prayers he would pray–disappearing for days to be with Christ in prayer. Everything created by God was sacred and God was to be honored through the unity and care of God’s creation.
And I wonder, how does our perception change when we begin to experience the natural world as sacred? What if we took a pause each day to pay attention and notice God in the creation around us? I think of the delight we had in the office this summer when we realized the office was not haunted, but we had brand new baby foxes chasing each other under the walkway and in the playground. It brought such laughter and joy to our hearts! Reflecting on that, I realize that is how God desires to delight us–and it is around us, even in the chaos and corruption of our world, much like that of St. Francis’ 800 years ago.
We have a responsibility, my friends, and as Christians we are bound in duty to worship God through our actions of reverence and care, to do all we can to take care of the earth God has given us. It cannot continue to sustain us, if we break the mutual bond we have with Creation. We are a part of it and to break that chain, not only breaks our earth, it breaks us.Let us recommit ourselves to this work we were given since the dawn of our existence. And let’s take a moment now to notice God around us–try not to analyze but notice how God speaks to you in these trees, from these pets you love,, and from these hills we look out on today.
