who was saint martin?

Life of Saint Martin of Tours (316-397): Saint Martin in meditation (Saint Martin of Tours meditating) - Fresco by Simone Martini (ca. 1284-1344), Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, lower church chapel of Saint Martin, Assisi)

A sermon preached at St. Martin in-the-Fields, Edwardsville, KS

Happy feast day of Saint Martin of Tours! Today we remember Martin, a man whose life was complex, imperfect, and holy.

Last week we celebrated not one saint but all the saints. On that three-day festival when the veil between the living and the dead feels thin, we looked around us and realized we are never alone. Because of our baptism, we belong to a family - the communion of saints - that glorious mystery of all those who have gone before us in faith, who dance above as we dance below.

The stories of the saints can inspire us, challenge us, motivate us in our own journeys of faith. But they are not merely stories - they are people, with full, complicated lives, whose witness for the gospel is somehow a part of us. 

Think about your ancestors in your family - those stories of great grandparents and great-great grandparents, the stories told over and over again around holiday dinner tables. They are more than just stories - they are a part of us, a part of who we are. Perhaps you bear some resemblance to an ancestor you never met. Perhaps you share the same hair color, or nose shape, or name. Or maybe your grandparents told you about their grandparent’s wild side, which you seem to take after.

Even beyond ties of blood and genetics, the stories of our ancestors shape who we are. And yet we never have all the information; we know that we are told only the highlight (and sometimes lowlight) reels of their lives. We know them only through our lineage, through photos and memories passed down, memories that contain truth and legend. Our ancestors shape the people we become, often in mysterious ways.

Our connection to the saints is just like this: we have been adopted into a family that spans all of time and space, a family full of misfits and rebels who saw something of themselves in the gospel. And so when we look up and see the saints, joining hands in the dance led by Christ, we know that they are part of us, that their stories shape the way we live our faith.

And we, of St. Martin in-the-Fields in Edwardsville, Kansas, claim Martin of Tours as an essential ancestor in our spiritual lineage. 

Martin was born sometime in the first half of the fourth century, in what is now Hungary. His father and mother were pagans, and his father served in the Roman military. They were moved to northern Italy when Martin was young for his father’s military position. 

Before Martin was born and during his early childhood, Christians were persecuted for their faith. At the time, all good traditional Romans, such as Martin’s father, saw Christianity as the most dangerous threat to the old imperial order. Political leaders such as Diocletian went to great lengths to destroy the witness of the church. 

Under his leadership, Christians were forbidden from gathering, churches were to be destroyed, and sacred books burned. Priests were to be arrested, and eventually anyone professing Christianity was to be arrested too. And so Martin grew up hearing the stories of the Christians who resisted the empire, through non-violence and prayer. By the time he was ten, the official persecutions were over, and Martin was able to find his way to a church in his town, probably to the chagrin of his parents.

I love this image, Martin only a child, so drawn to the stories of Christ-followers that he sought out a villa at the top of a hill where Christians were meeting. At the time, gatherings of Christians were divided into two areas - one for the baptized believers, and a sort of porch space where anyone was welcome to look and listen in during the first half of the service.

Here Martin found himself in a group that he would never be in otherwise. Roman society was divided by class and rank. But here, the rich and poor stood side-by-side; the mentally and physically ill, men and women and children of all ages. This kind of community would have existed in no other place in Roman society.

It was at the young age of ten that Martin longed to be baptized, so he could go into that inner room and participate in the Eucharist, a mystery he was so drawn to. He heard preachers talk about hermits, those so committed to prayer that they renounced all worldly possessions in order to seek solitude in the desert. 

So if you were, like me, a kid who was drawn to the mysteries of church at a young age, you have some of Martin in you.

Martin became a catechumen - someone taking courses in order to be baptized - as a teenager. And so I think of our teenagers as they go through the process of confirmation in our church; they too have some of Martin in them. Even as a teenager, Martin wanted to renounce the finery of his parents’ life and become a hermit. But his father wouldn’t allow it. At age fifteen, he was forced to join the army, following in his father’s footsteps.

Anyone relate to that? Being forced or influenced into the path your parents want for you, despite your wishes?

As a soldier, young Martin had a profound spiritual experience. He was riding through a town with his retinue one day when he came across a man on the side of the road. According to legend, the man was naked, poor and destitute. The rest of Martin’s troop rode on by, not paying him any attention.

But Martin stopped. And taking his military cloak, he cut it in half, giving one half to the beggar.

Not a huge thing, you might think. Like stopping to put a few bucks in the hat of a musician busking on the sidewalk.

But the legend goes that that night, Martin had a dream. And in the dream, Christ himself came to him, dressed in the cloak that Martin gave to the beggar. For I was hungry and you gave me food; I was naked and you gave me clothing. 

This vision had such an impact on Martin that he then committed himself to being baptized, at only eighteen years old. And as he grew in faith, her grew to realize that his work in the army was at odds with his commitment to Christ. 

Just before a battle, Martin denounced his allegiance to the Roman ruler and said, “I am a soldier of Christ; it is not lawful for me to fight.” Martin was called a coward for refusing to take up arms; he offered to stand at the frontlines unarmed to prove his commitment to the non-violent way of Christ. His superiors planned to take him up on his offer, but peace between the warring parties was brokered and Martin was instead released from the military.

He was now free to devote his life to prayer and reading scripture. He became a disciple of bishop Hilary of Poitier. He eventually fulfilled his dreams of denouncing the world and living in a cell. One historian at the time sat outside Martin’s cell, hoping to get some wisdom from him when he came out. But this historian heard a chorus of voices inside the cell where only Martin resided; when he later came out, the historian got up the courage to ask him who he had been talking with. Martin told him; “Agnes, Thecla and Mary were there with me.” These were three popular saints among the early Christians, three women of faith whose witness shaped Martin himself.

Martin’s life was punctuated by visitations of saints and angels. And he would have been happy to remain an aesthetic, seeking only God for company.

But the church needed him; and so in 371, he was asked to become a bishop. Legend goes that he was tricked into the trip; someone told him there was a sick person who needed healing, and so Martin went. When he realized they were in fact going to make him a bishop, the stories goes that he escaped to a barn to hide. Unfortunately, the barn was full of geese, whose honking gave away his hiding spot.

I love this so much. And in this painting of the life of Saint Martin, you can see his face as a hand reaches out to wake him from meditation. I can just imagine him opening his eyes and rolling them to the back of his head. Another administrative task to attend to as the bishop? Just let me pray in peace! One younger member of his group of followers once said: “If you are looking for that crazy fellow, just cast your eyes in that direction. In his usual half-witted way he is staring at the sky.”

Martin lived in a time of great political and cultural upheaval. It was the end of many years of stable government, inflation had been mounting for a century or more, and everyone knew that the wealthy were seeking every possible way of avoiding paying taxes. The prevailing sense was the “the trouble lay deeper than in mere bad management, it was a complex exhaustion of morale in the inner minds and spirits of men and women everywhere - for the civilization of Rome had run its course.” Sound familiar?

It was a time of hopelessness: what’s going to happen next? People had stopped believing that hope would come from rulers and governors anymore. Increasingly, folks found hope in the witness of people like Martin, the monastic men and women who had completely withdrawn from the civilized world for the sake of prayer. Folks were rejecting the big institutions that had for so long held power. Instead, they were committing themselves to small communities of Christians who gathered around hermits like Martin. 

Martin’s initial encounter with Christ, after giving away half his cloak to someone in need, is emblematic of his witness as a saint. Martin embodied what Jesus taught - that no act of kindness, no matter how small, is every wasted.

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

We tend to fall into the lie that we need to be huge to be impactful. We need to be a big church in order to be important.

But Jesus himself tells us that it is in small moments of mercy that we find the kingdom of God. Filling up a glass of water for someone who is thirsty - that matters. It matters if we cook a meal for even one hungry neighbor. It matters if we listen deeply to the story of one person whose perspective is different from ours. 

It matters that in our church, a child can perform in a play and look out to see adults from her church who show up for her.

It matters that in a world obsessed with power and status, we are committed to authentically showing up as ourselves, are committed to prayer.

Saint Martin cut his cloak in half for the sake of one human life. It wasn’t a huge act; it didn’t change the world. 

But in that moment, Christ was present. In that small gesture, Martin’s heart was changed. 

Martin, our patron saint. Martin, the soldier turned non-violent activist. 

Martin, the bishop so committed to contemplative prayer that he was unwilling to bow to the pressures of the day and be bought with bribes.

As we grow as a community of Christ-followers, may we keep Martin’s life close to us - to inspire us, to challenge us, to motivate us to live out Jesus’s call to stand with the marginalized. 

The magic of a church like ours is that we don’t have to be bogged down by what doesn’t matter. We know what matters - people, prayer, service. Showing up. Faithfulness. Small acts of mercy. We are people of Saint Martin: rejecting violence, sharing what we have, staying true to our calling to be witnesses of the gospel in Edwardsville. 

We, like Martin, see Christ in every small moment. Thanks be to God.