A sermon for the Twelfth Sunday of Pentecost, the Afterfeast of Transfiguration and the Feast of the Holy Martyr Laurence, from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, by Priest Paul Siewers.
Today we commemorate the memory of Saint Laurence of Rome, who was martyred in 258 AD. Orthodox icons of him sometimes show him holding the gridiron or grate on which he was burned to death. He refused to give up information against Christianity to the authorities. According to tradition, he said, while being burned alive on the grate, “I’m done on this side! Turn me over and eat!”
This was one of two remarks for which the Archdeacon of Rome is especially remembered. The other occurred earlier, when pagan officials persecuting Christians tried to force him to lead them to the church treasury in Rome, to take all her money for the government. St. Laurence led them to a hall filled with poor and crippled and sick people, and said, “these are our treasure.”
Archdeacon Laurence could have been tempted by survival, by comfort, by riches, by conforming to power in hopes of power, or all of the above–or by thinking his work was so important he needed to conform and thus be spared. But he did not entertain such temptations. He acted in the spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ’s teaching in today’s Gospel reading (see text at the end below), by standing for his faith against all temptations to compromise.
Our Lord Jesus in the Gospel today shocked the young man by telling him that although he obeyed the commandments of God he still needed to give all his worldly riches to the poor. That answer inspired monastics like St. Anthony the Great throughout Orthodox history. It was a challenge to martyrdom or witness then, and is a challenge to those of us Orthodox Christians living in the world in 2026. Consider how in our modern culture to dispense with worldly riches on any small to large level would be considered by many devoted to materialism and careerism to be a kind of death.
Jesus’s command follows His New Commandment, to love one another as I have loved you. Orthodox teachers on Scripture relate this to the message to the Church of Ephesus in Revelation. It called that Church back to its first love in the sense of the spirit of the apostolic Church, when people did not keep their worldly riches, but gave them to each other to meet the needs of others.
This involves emptying ourselves in Christ rather than asserting ourselves. In today’s world of economics and careers and professionalism and so forth, that is a kind of martyrdom, too, whether unto physical or social death. But remember that all of us will die anyway.
The result of self-emptying in Christ, note the Fathers and Mothers of the Church, is a sweetness in life and a true freedom that is always with us no matter what we encounter each day.
Elder Zosima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov memorably noted this, in a novel that presented Orthodox teaching to a global laudience. The real-life St. Paisius the Elder in the last century did, too, explaining how the less we have in the way of possessions, the less stress we have in our life as Christians.
How can we accomplish this? Partly through the Jesus Prayer. That simple prayer said continually, “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me,” challenges us to surrender in humility our false sense of self, to lose our self in Christ.
There are other things we can do, such as saying an Akathist daily, reading a chapter from the Gospel daily, and challenging ourselves each day to meet the discipline of fasting, including confession and alms-giving and making it to Church including for Vigil and mid-week major feast days, no matter what else is going on. Such a framework for our daily lives is a type of spiritual self-care that also leads to loving others more than our self. That’s because it leads us to empty ourselves in Christ as a martyr or witness, as did St. Laurence.
The paradox is that this is indeed spiritual self-care. to love our neighbor as our self or, following our Lord’s New Commandment, more than oru self. For, as the Bible commands, we first have to love Christ with all our heart, mind, strength, soul—in other words, we need to empty ourself in Him. So, we love ourself in the truest way as we love Christ. Then to love our neighbor as we love ourselves is to love him as we love Christ. And to love him more than our self, according to His New Commandment, well that is a glimpse in our experience of the mystery of the Holy Trinity, of the love between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. That is the core source and ultimate essence of a reality that lies beyond our conceptualizing.
To follow St. Laurence in witness, without tempting God but with a desire to bear witness without compromising our faith in our Lord, is not just sentimental idealism, but a form of spiritual warfare.
In St. Laurence’s case, such warfare meant not giving in to the temptation that to divulge information about Church members or the Church treasury used to help support the poor and mission work, would just be a worldly matter that wouldn’t matter spiritually. He in effect waged a spiritual war to protect the vulnerable of the Church, as a necessary war, so to speak.
There can be different dimensions to necessary war, from the interior to the external, local to global. But all necessary warfare in a spiritual sense requires us to partake deeply with God’s help of humility and repentance, even as martyrs or confessors, confessors being those martyrs who face persecution without death. The mystery of confession is a necessity in all such warfare.
The Orthodox Christian Tradition distinguishes between necessary and just war. It does not see war as ever just as do Protestants and Catholics often. There are no Orthodox Crusades. But Orthodox Christians sometimes see warfare as necessary, a necessary evil, and thus right but not righteous, as the Orthodox philosopher Ivan Ilyin put it (or even, controversially, in a certain sense a holy war but not a righteous or just war–the words for righteousness and justice incidentally being related in biblical Greek).
That’s why St. Laurence took a stand in what was spiritually a necessary war. He did not compromise. The devil could have tempted the Holy Archdeacon: “Don’t lead the pagan Roman authorities into sin, just divulge the information they seek, it is only worldly information that belongs to Caesar and not Christ, and you want to be able to continue in your spiritual work.” Turn the other cheek, the tempter would say, twisting words from the Gospel. But to give in would have endangered the vulnerable, St. Laurence’s fellow believers, the local Church in Rome, and would have been a denial of Christ and blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.
Such immoral compromise sadly is a way of life today in the most acceptable way. A friend of mine at a top university says that people in graduate school won’t go against false authorities to stand for truth because they fear for their careers. Then they become professors and won’t speak up because they want to get tenure. Then the same thing with getting promoted to full professor. Then the same thing for getting grants and higher-paying administrative positions and emeriti status. Then they retire and then he says they are dead, without ever standing for truth. This is true in other walks of life today in different forms, as well. The same is seen in a lack of real spiritual conviction about all manner of moral challenges in our decadent society today.
The Orthodox writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn noted after years in communist prison camps (amid the numerically greatest world persecution of Christians under Communism) that the line between good and evil is not between political parties or types of people, but the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. That’s where necessary spiritual warfare as practiced by St. Laurence must originate, involving continual repentance and humility and the mystery of confession, but also unyielding obedience to our Lord Jesus Christ — the Way, the Truth, and the Life, in devotion to His Church, the Body of Christ. This involves not blaspheming against the Holy Spirit.
The early 19th century Anglican writer Reginald Heber fell in love with an Orthodox Pascha service that he witnessed in Russia. He wrote a famous English hymn related to spiritually necessary warfare. It includes these verses that can remind us of St. Laurence as well as the dilemma facing the rich young man in the Gospel, and all of us who today hear the Holy Gospel and reflect the Life of St. Laurence.:
A glorious band, the chosen few
On whom the Spirit came;
[The] valiant saints, their hope they knew,
And mocked the cross and flame.
They met the tyrant’s brandished steel,
The lion’s gory mane;
They bowed their heads the death to feel:
Who follows in their train?
A noble army, men and boys,
The matron and the maid,
Around the Saviour’s throne rejoice,
In robes of light arrayed.
They climbed the steep ascent of heaven,
Through peril, toil and pain;
O God, to us may grace be given,
To follow in their train.
Holy Martyr Laurence, pray to God for our mission! And Glory to Jesus Christ!
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The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew,
§79 [19:16-26]
At that time, a young man came and said unto Jesus, bowing unto Him and said: ‘Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?’ And He said unto him, ‘Why callest thou Me good? There is none good but One, that is, God. But if thou wilt enter into Life, keep the commandments.’ He said unto Him, ‘Which?’ Jesus said, ‘‘Thou shalt do no murder; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not bear false witness; honour thy father and thy mother; and, thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’’ The young man said unto Him, ‘All these things have I kept from my youth up. What lack I yet?’ Jesus said unto him, ‘If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in Heaven; and come and follow Me.’ But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. Then said Jesus unto His disciples, ‘Verily I say unto you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. And again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.’ When His disciples heard it, they were exceedingly amazed, saying, ‘Who then can be saved?’ But Jesus beheld them and said unto them, ‘With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.’
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(Fyi, Heber’s hymn quoted above was made famous in the fictional film The Man Who Would be King, an anthem there of outlaw heroism, based on its use in an earlier story by Rudyard Kipling. But in real life it was the favorite hymn of Gen. George Patton, scourge of the Nazis, and sung at his funeral.)