Troubadours of Christ - Matthew 21:33-46

Troubadours of Christ
Year A, Proper 22
St. Francis Day
Matthew 21:33-46

I recently found myself on TheKnot.com’s list of the greatest love songs of all time. Like many such lists, its contents are easily contended, but I was surprised to find that even with my limited knowledge of pop, there were plenty of tunes I could easily hum. First was Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes,” followed shortly after by “Time After Time” by Cindy Lauper. Celine Dion was the only artist with two songs in the top ten with her “The Power of Love” and “My Heart Will Go On,” the theme song to the movie Titanic. And of course songs by Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Elton John and Whitney Houston all had their representation along with some more surprising picks further down the list by bands such as the Foo Fighters and Radiohead.

Though we may not all agree on the top love songs of all time, or even this time, I think we can agree that there is something sappy at the heart of the human soul. Whether its from the most aloof hipster or the hardest rocker, the fast rhyming hip hopper or the honky tonk circuit singer—we’re all suckers for a good love song. And it is a real art to write a great one.

In the Medieval world of France and Northern Italy there arose a special class of performers who specialized in love songs. They were called the troubadours, traveling singers who created poems and songs celebrating chivalry and courtly love. Sometime in the 12th century, a few of these troubadours wandered down to the Perugia, a province in central Italy. There they caught the attention of a romantic young man and sparked in him a dream of the valor and glory.

This young man was Francisco Bernardo, the person we now know as St. Francis of Assisi, whose feast we celebrate today. Obviously his plans to be a chivalrous knight didn’t work out. After a brief battle Francis was captured and spent time in a jail cell where he began to feel the call to a different kind of adventure, one that embraced lepers and disdained material wealth.

Francis’s was a life that we must admit was extreme by most measures of practicality and common sense. Francis wore an itchy and uncomfortable hair shirt, he diluted his food with water so as not to enjoy it, and frequently fasted. He did wild things like diving naked into the snow and preaching sermons to the birds. He had such a disdain for money that when one of his followers accepted a coin Francis made him drop it into a dung heap. And yet many claim that there has been no better Christian, before or since. Even now there is something in Francis that captures our imagination more than any tale of chivalry.

To understand Francis and all the beautiful and bizar things he did we must know that Francis named himself a “troubadour of Christ,” recalling those traveling poets of his youth. In Francis’s case he was both the singer and the subject of a love song.

Francis embodied the truth that Elvis Presley, that later troubadour, would sing in his famous “Fools Rush In”:

“When we met
I felt my life begin
So open up your heart and let
This fool rush in”

Francis was a fool for Christ, made foolish by love, and he traveled the countryside singing the songs of that love to all who would listen. His wild, impractical life was the life of someone in love with God. As G.K. Chesterton puts it in his brief biography of Francis, “He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubadour. He was a Lover. He was a lover of God and he was really and truly a lover of men; possibly a much rarer mystical vocation.” And not only of people but also all the creatures he encountered for he knew that they were God’s creatures, made from God’s love and delight.


Lovers make wild promises to one another, promises that would seem strange and problematic apart from love. When my wife and I were married, here in the very space of this church, we promised that we would forsake all others, restricting the boundaries of our relationships. We made promises we couldn’t have even understood at the time, agreeing to a rule and limit to our lives because we knew that such a limit was necessary for the fullness of our love. We can only understand passages like the Ten Commandments we read this morning in the context of a loving covenant, the rules of a marriage. When the enclosure of love is taken from them, they become nothing more than cold, abstract laws.

To remedy this, the people of Israel had their own troubadours, the prophets singing love songs, often of a jilted lover longing for reunion. One of the most famous of those songs came from the prophet Isaiah, who sang of a lover who planted a vineyard that would bare celebratory wine, the drink of lovers. That vineyard, the people understood, was Israel—the people who were to be God’s lovers in the world.

It is this image of Israel as a vineyard that Jesus has in mind as he tells the parable in today’s Gospel. The problem here is that those who were meant to be the troubadours, those whose role it was to inspire and cultivate love, had failed. They had become interested only in their own power, their own ambitions and sense of righteousness. They had turned the covenant rules of lovers into abstract laws and then had used those laws to put down the people on the margins.

Jesus came to pick up the song lines of love again, to renew the romance with God. This is what his mission was all about from his healing of the blind to his teaching about who is really blessed, from the cross to the resurrection. Francis, a lover and imitator of Jesus followed in that way. In doing so he learned the particular loves that are at the heart of any true devotion. For there is no good in an abstract love. As the essayist Charles D’Ambrosio has put it, “If you can love abstractly, you’re only a bad day away from hating abstractly.” And perhaps that was the problem of the religious leaders, the Chief priests and the Pharisees. They had made their love too general and it had slowly turned to a murderous hatred.

“A philanthropist may be said to love anthropoids,” writes Chesterton, “But as St. Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ.” Francis was a lover of the particular people and creatures around him, the God he found in Christ, and if we want anything of that joy of his that seems still to radiate across the centuries, then we too must learn to be lovers of the particular, lovers of God and people and creatures in the concrete individuality of the man named Jesus Christ, our neighbors right around us, and the wild lives just beyond our doors.

What the world needs now is a love song, a tune that calls us toward the God we find in every present moment, the people and creatures we find right around us. This is the song Moses heard in the wilderness, it is the song that Jesus sang in Palestine two millennia ago and still sings in the hearts of those who listen, it is the song that Francis heard and belted out to all who would hear it, be they his brother friars, displaced lepers, or the wild birds. Will we too sing that song of love in a world filled with the noise of narcissism? Will we too hum it in the silence of our hearts and share it with every creature we encounter? I hope we all can become like Francis who became like Jesus, a troubadour of love. Amen.