St. Martin of Tours

Saint Martin of Tours, icon written by Fr. Tobias Stanislas Haller, BSG

 

“St. Martin of Tours”

11 November 2021

Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

12 noon Healing Mass

Isaiah 58:6-12; Matthew 25:31–40; Psalm 15

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

Saint Martin of Tours is in many ways a contradiction.  He was a soldier, but one who is remembered for using his sword not to fight, but to cut his great military cloak down the middle to give half of it to a needy beggar shivering in the cold.  He was a soldier, but one who lived his day-to-day life as a monk would, and became a conscientious objector at a time when this was not recognized.  When he finally left the military and became a monk, he allowed himself to be maneuvered by an obvious ploy into becoming a bishop.  He was a great preacher and teacher, working to free people from the errors of Arianism and paganism, but was equally passionate and eloquent in demanding for mercy for heretics.   This contradictory man, Martin of Tours, was one of the first saints not to be martyred.  Because of his compassion and love, he became one of the most popular saints in the Middle Ages, particularly loved by the French.  His shrine in Tours became one of the great stopping-over places on the route to the Camino de Santiago del Compostela, and a place of refuge for those seeking justice.    

Martin was born about 316 CE in the central Roman Empire in the Balkans.  His pagan soldier father named his son after the Roman god of War and forced him to enlist in the army at the age of fifteen. Soon thereafter, to his parents’ dissatisfaction, Martin began to receive instruction in the Empire’s newly legalized religion, Christianity. 

While stationed near the city of Amiens in North-eastern France, one winter day young Martin saw an ill-clad beggar at the gate of the city. I used to live in that part of France, and it is very, very cold in the winter.  Martin had no money to give the man, but he cut his cloak in half and gave half of it to him. In a dream that night, Martin saw Christ wearing the half-cloak, bringing to mind a passage he had been taught as a catechumen—the one we read as Gospel today. This made a deep impression on Martin, who had wavered in accepting baptism even as he continued in military service.  The dream ended his wavering and Martin was promptly baptized at the age of 18.

He was said to have lived more like a monk than a soldier. At 23, he refused a war bonus and told his commander: “I have served you as a soldier; now let me serve Christ. Give the bounty to those who are going to fight. But I am a soldier of Christ and it is not lawful for me to fight.” He was accused of cowardice, normally punished by stoning or clubbing to death, but replied to this by offering to go ahead of the advance troops unarmed in the next battle.  He was imprisoned, but released when peace was signed.

He became a disciple of Hilary of Poitiers, a chief opponent in the West of the Arians, who denied the full deity of Christ and enjoyed the favor of the emperor Constantius. Returning to his parents’ home, Martin argued for Nicene orthodoxy so effectively that Arian Imperial officials saw him as a disturber of the peace, and had him publicly flogged and exiled. He was subsequently similarly driven from Milan, and eventually returned to Gaul. There, near Poitiers, he founded the first monastery in Gaul, which lasted until the French Revolution.

The people of Tours, seeing Martin as a compassionate man who lived a simple life, wanted him as their bishop, which he declined so he could continue as a monk.  The people sent a message asking Martin to come to Tours to give pastoral care to a gravely sick person.  But this was a ruse:  upon his arrival they took him immediately to the church, where he had already been elected the third bishop of Tours.  Out of a sense of duty from his military discipline, he reluctantly allowed himself to be consecrated bishop. Some of the consecrating bishops thought his rumpled appearance and unkempt hair indicated that he was not dignified enough for the office.  Again, the people of Tours loved hm for it. 

His was a mainly pagan diocese, but his unimpeachable manner of life, proven courage and trustworthiness won the hearts of most of the non-Christians.  In one instance, the pagan priests agreed to cut down their idol, a large fir tree, if Martin would stand directly in the path of its fall. He did so, and it missed him narrowly. When an officer of the Imperial Guard arrived with a batch of prisoners who were to be tortured and executed the next day, Martin intervened and secured their release. More and more people became Christians. 

In the year 384, a Christian ascetic Priscillian and six companions were condemned to death by the emperor Maximus.  Bishops had found them guilty of heresy in an ecclesiastical court, and Bishop Ithacius of Osonoba (in what is now Spain) pressed for their execution by the state because, he said, heresy was so grave a sin that God would punish the Emperor if he did not use all the tools at his command to eradicate it. Along with Saint Ambrose of Milan, Martin rejected Bishop Ithacius’s argument to put heretics to death and involve the state to do it. He urged the emperor to spare Priscillian’s life, successfully until Martin left town. Ithacius accused Martin of Priscillian’s heresy, and Priscillian was executed after all, the first Christian to be executed by other Christians for heresy. Martin returning was cleared of the charges, but all the same pleaded for a cessation of the persecution of Priscillian’s followers in Spain. He still felt he could cooperate with Ithacius in other areas, but afterwards his conscience troubled him about this decision.

Martin set the standard in the West, particularly in the Roman provinces of Gaul and Britania, what were to become France and Great Britain,  for the monk bishop and the association of an abbey with an episcopal see or cathedral, His model became one of the distinctive characteristics of Celtic Christianity and later Roman Catholic Christianity in the British Isles, a heritage we still see today in the Church of England and its daughter churches of the Anglican Communion.  

As death approached on or about November 11, 397, Martin’s followers begged him not to leave them. Characteristically driven by duty, Martin prayed, “Lord, if your people still need me, I do not refuse the work. Your will be done.”

A personal note:  Saint Martin played a role in my conversion to traditional Christianity.  As a graduate student of the Classics at Brigham Young University, in a Medieval Latin Course, I read Selpucius Severus’ Life of St. Martin.  During the Vietnam War, when I was about the same age as when Martin was baptized and still in high school, my draft board had granted me 1-A-O conscientious objector status, the one that made you eligible for the draft into the military for non-armed serve, usually as an on-the-front medic, a group with one of the highest fatality rates in the service.  When in college I read Martin’s life, I was deeply moved by Martin’s courage, sense of duty and willingness to serve even as he declined to bear arms out of conscience, and his compassion for the poor and marginalized people like heretics.  I realized that this very Catholic of saints was truly a reflection of our Lord.  Within a year, I had chosen the Catholic University of America for my Ph.D. program, and the formation I received there eventually led me to the Anglican Catholicism of the Episcopal Church.   I wanted to name our second son “Martin of Tours Hutchinson,” but Elena forbade me giving him such a strange name: whoever heard of a preposition in a given name? So we named him David, Hebrew for “beloved,” after the King of Israel and a beloved cousin of hers.  I have since always been thankful that Maryland Law at the time gave naming rights only to the mother, not the father.  

It was no coincidence when, in 1918, the governments of the countries involved in the overwhelming catastrophe they called “the war to end all wars” chose the Feast Day of Martin of Tours, the eleventh day of the eleventh month, as the day on which the Armistice ending the slaughter would take place, and chose 11 a.m. as the time.  St. Martin was the patron saint of France at that time, and this leading front-line state where much of the fighting had occurred wanted to set the return of peace on the feast day of this soldier-turned-peace-maker.  This morning at that hour, we tolled the Trinity bell three times eleven in remembrance of those who have risked or lost their lives in wartime military service and the ideal that the best way to honor them is to actually end war as a tool of national policy.   May we be blessed with wisdom, be compassionate, beat our swords into pruning hooks, and learn to “study war no more.” 

In the name of Christ, Amen.