Loving the earth while longing for heaven

Evensong Sermon for St Laurence, Deacon and Martyr

Wisdom 4.7-15, II Cor 9.6-10


The playwright Webster, we are told, ‘was much possessed by death’ (TS Eliot). I have been thinking of that phrase while reading through the martyrdom of our patron Saint Laurence in The Golden Legend, a 13th-century collection of the lives of the Saints (more accurately, the deaths of the Saints) by the Dominican Friar Giacomo de Varrazze, better known in Latin as Jacobus de Voragine.

Jacobus would never say that a saint had spilled a pint of blood if he could plausibly claim that they had spilled a gallon. No sacrifice was too painful to report; no death too gruesome. It might be argued that, in giving us such a chilling collection of early Christian executions (apparently with eighty-one different varieties of torture, mutilation and death), Jacobus is simply being true to the era which he is describing. The Romans did, after all, snuff out any whiff of resistance with extraordinary cruelty and psychotic skill.


Jacobus is also writing a source of sermon-material for priests to use to encourage their parishioners in faith and holiness. If, as the first Christians held, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church; and if it’s a rich harvest you’re after (like St Paul in the second lesson), then the more blood the better! The death of St Laurence was known to be an especially successful story in encouraging and deepening faith. St Ambrose said that, like the smell of roasted meat, it ‘infused the churches of the whole world with the aroma of his nobility’. Perhaps that’s why there are so many churches in England dedicated in his honour.


Consistent with his interest in the wilder side of death, Jacobus also encourages a strong sense of contempt for the world, as something bad and to be escaped quickly. This was the view held by classical philosophy and known to St Laurence’s generation. It reached a new intensity in the Middle Ages, not least in the writings of Saint Bernard of Cluny, author of this evening’s final hymn, Jerusalem the Golden, which expresses perfectly this contempt, and pins all human hope on the ‘sweet and blessèd country’ whose grace we hope to win.


The martyrdom of Laurence, then, is presented in The Golden Legend as the death of a man who is keen to leave; whose blameless life (as in tonight’s first lesson) will stand in lieu of the white hair he will never know, and never wanted anyway. Indeed, when he was ordered to be whipped and tortured, St Laurence told the Emperor that he was out of luck: such treatment was ‘the banquet he had always desired’.


Such portraits as these do not provide readers with examples of holy lives to imitate so much as sources of ‘spiritual power to harness’ (Duffy). The gory details are emphasised in order to show how they were endured by the saints’ powerful spiritual weapons. So Jacobus describes the three ‘extinguishers’ Laurence uses to counteract the flames and emerge ‘as an exultant victor’. His longing for the Kingdom of heaven, his meditation on the law of God, and the solace he derived from the purity of his own conscience are states to which we should all aspire, and which we may learn from studying our patron saint.


But such writing is far from palatable to everyone, and it did not survive the developing new tastes of both Protestant and Catholic reformers, who wanted the lives of the saints to be ‘sober and credible exemplars of virtue rather than chronicles of wonders’ (Duffy). So it’s no surprise that our own Anglican calendar has added many new saints in recent decades who were useful 19th- and 20th-century men and women who did not condemn the world, but who helped to make it a better place. Some preached or translated the gospel in far-flung outposts of Empire. Others were more practical. There was Wilberforce obviously, with his abolition of the slave trade. And there was a whole army of fearless women, like Mary Sumner of the Mothers’ Union (feast-day, 9 August), or Octavia Hill with her housing reform; or Elizabeth Fry and her work in prisons.


The Catholic calendar, too, has recently tried to focus on those who have lived a Christian life we can imitate, canonising not just Saint Teresa of Calcutta for her work with the poorest; but, more surprisingly, the London-born Italian teenager Carlo Acutis who lived a devout but quite ordinary life, not least through using computer technology to promote the Christian gospel.


And if you’re starting to regret the patronage of St Laurence as that of a more than usually eccentric archdeacon who wanted only to be burnt to a cinder and sent to heaven, then fear not: we value Laurence not only for the manner of his death, but also for his way of life; for his resistance to the political power wielded by wicked emperors; for his refusal to worship the pagan gods, remaining absolutely loyal to Christ, even following his Bishop into the jaws of death. Finally, we celebrate his championing of the poorest as an ‘eternal treasure’ committed by Christ to his Church.


If we can get beyond the unspeakable nature of his lurid and in some sense comic-strip death, our Patron Saint has much to teach us, especially as we seek to be ambassadors of what is for many in our culture a dormant gospel preached into an apathetic world. When we consider the danger of his fidelity, the purity of his generous heart, his absolute grasp of the topsy-turvy nature of the Kingdom of God, and his unwavering determination to be its servant, then we begin to see what it is we have to celebrate in Laurence. And while we would not put off for ever singing ‘the song of them that triumph’, there is still work to be done here, which, by God’s grace and the loving prayers of St Laurence, we will faithfully perform, serving any who are in need, and worshipping our God as we do so.