The Rev. Linda McCloud
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
August 18-19, 2007

The Price of True Peace
Luke 12: 49-56 

Assisi, Italy is a tourist town. People have packed the Umbrian hill town for centuries to see the sites connected to the town’s most famous resident, Francis of Assisi. Victoria, Griffin and I spent a few days in and around Assisi earlier this year and we found it difficult to find Francis amid a centuries old pilgrim trade designed to assist the faithful in doing just that. 

Everywhere we went there were later buildings built over the sites. One end of Assisi is dominated by the Basilica of Saint Francis, the other by the Basilica of Saint Clare, a follower of his who started a religious order for women. In between are other churches and many stores offering Francis souvenirs. Down below is the tiny little church called the Portiuncula, which Francis rebuilt with his own hands. That small church is housed in the much larger Saint Mary of the Angels. When we visited, the Sunday worship service was underway in the big church as pilgrims continued to make their way to the church within the church, the little building restored with Francis’ own hands. 

Though the church within a church was perhaps preferable to what we found at another site made famous by Francis. In search of the plain near Perugia where Francis went in to battle pursuing his young dreams of becoming a knight and earning glory in combat, we found a shopping center. We ate lunch at the only restaurant at the mall on the battlefield where Francis was captured and made prisoner of war. The only restaurant was, of course, a McDonalds. 

But their were glimpses of the world of Francis. Walking from Assisi to the famed chapel of San Damiano was just such an occasion. San Damiano was a ruined church in Francis lifetime, a place where he prayed in front of a cross, that though much larger is that same design as the cross we use in processions at King of Peace. Francis heard God tell him there “Rebuild my church.”  

Being a literal sort of guy, he set about rebuilding the church of San Damiano. Later he came to understand this as more of a metaphor for rebuilding the spiritual lives of the people who are the Church. But it wasn’t in that church so much that I felt the Francis of the 12^th century as in the olive groves. Passing through the old trees, looking out on the Umbrian hills, a landscape little changed by the passing of time and the endless procession of pilgrims. 

We also visited a church that was built in and out from the home where Francis grew up. There in sight of the altar of a church that bore no resemblance to a Middle-Ages era house, was a small iron work door. No bigger than waist high, the door led to a small stone room, with cave-like rough rock walls. Room is too big a word for the space no wider than the altar here at King of Peace, though a little taller. This is said to have been the store room where Francis father, Pietro di Bernardone locked up his son. Pietro was driven to it by his son’s seemingly insane determination to an extreme life. Pietro had built up a successful textile business. He was an up and comer in Umbria’s rising middle class. A man of substance, he wanted his son to follow in the business and enlarge the family’s wealth. Francis seemed more interested in giving it all away. 

Pietro was the sort of father who felt a firm hand could work wonders and he locked Francis in a stone store room. Imprisoned in his own home; threatened by his father as jailer, who beat his son as well as locked him up in hopes that Francis would relent. But Francis did not, would not, back down on being the man he thought God called him to be. 

It was looking into that cramped stone space that I felt the determination of the young Francis to a life radically bent on living out the Gospel; a life conformed as closely as possible to that of Jesus. Not in the church that surrounded the room or in the basilicas that dominated the town’s skyline, but here in the unadorned rock was something of the man who today is most remembered in hundreds of thousands of garden statues. 

Francis would be let loose from the room, but his father had the one ace up his sleeve. The bishop was a reasonable man who knew the way of the world. The bishop would not let Francis go off the religious deep end in some crazed pursuit of Christ. After all a bishop had to teach that a child should honor his father and mother. 

And so Pietro and Francis came to stand on the stone pavers in front of the cathedral church to speak with the bishop. In front of all who cared to watch the proceedings, Francis cut himself off from all that was his father’s. He stripped off his clothes, standing before the Bishop and the townspeople having nothing from his family. Francis did this to honor God his father above Pietro his earthly father. 

 We went up the hill to see some caves that Francis and his followers used as a refuge, a place to get away. When the pressures of ministry became too much, Francis would retreat to these caves on Mount Subasio to pray. There I saw a second stone room, not much bigger than the first. Here Francis would willingly cloister himself to spend time with God the father in prayer. It was another point of contact with the real Francis. It seemed so fitting that his father thrust him into a cave-like storeroom to convince Francis to turn back from a radical life of faith. Yet, Francis in pursuing that radical life of faith would place himself in s similar space for times of prayer. 

Though our church is named King of Peace, Jesus cries out in our Gospel reading today saying,  

Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.” 

True to his word, Jesus divided Pietro di Bernardone from his father just as he has divided others through the centuries. Many of us get to live out our Christian faith with our families held together by that faith, but for some that same trust in Jesus divides. This is because Jesus called on us to make our faith in him the most important thing in our lives. Everything else is to be sorted out by that one foundational truth, even if the cost was division. 

Interestingly, we remember both Jesus and Francis as men of peace. How is this possible if the peace they professed could divide families? How could peace destroy peace? 

I want to show you a short video clip called Meet the Fines. 

[show video in which a family all says they are fine.
We can hear the sounds of an elephant in the living room.
We can’t see the elephant and nobody mentions it.] 

Everyone in the video is fine. But none of them mention the elephant. The elephant in the living room is a saying to describe something everyone knows and awkwardly avoids. There are lots of ways that a family can have an elephant in the living room. I have known families that went well out of their way to help someone with a drug problem by never bringing up all the signs of drug use they saw. Or you can help someone have an affair by never mentioning the all too obvious clues. And on it goes. We see problems. We say nothing. And so we keep the peace. 

But keeping the peace in this way is exactly what the King of Peace, Jesus, was railing against. Jesus wants no lesser peace to take the place of true and lasting peace. And unless the drug use stops, how can their be peace for the drug user or peace for the family. Unless the affairs stop, how can their be peace in the marriage. But all too often we grab hold of a lesser peace and we don’t rock the boat. Rather than having the courage to speak the truth in love, we hold our peace and prevent real peace from entering in. 

We can allow old wounds to be healed in this way. You get hurt by someone, but instead of dealing with the hurt and resolving the issues, you just act as if nothing happened. Then things heal over on the surface. But it’s like a stabbing wound where the outer flesh heals, but underneath infection takes hold, and when it finally erupts, things will be much worse. 

Francis could have taken the path his father laid out for him. It would have been easier to make peace with his dad and join the family business. But the price of that peace would have eaten Francis up from the inside out. Francis chose confrontation with his father as a way to become a man of peace. 

I don’t know what this sermon has brought up for you. But I trust that the same Holy Spirit who spoke to Francis in that little stone room, letting him know that it was better to confront now and have real peace later, will speak to your heart and let you know how to speak the truth in love. When you do so, it may divide a household two against three or mother against daughter. But if God is speaking this truth to your heart, you may be being led from a lesser peace to true and lasting peace. The cost is high. So high that most of us shrink back and become lesser men and women. We let coworkers steal from the company, friends cheat on their spouses, brothers fall deeper into drug use. We do all of this to keep the peace. But instead we are just ignoring the elephant in the living room and trading a lesser peace for the deep peace Jesus wants for you, your family, your friends and your place of work. 

Amen.