St. Lawrence and the Diaconate

St. Lawrence, from the choir of St. Lawrence Church in Nürnberg.
Photo: Jean Jeras, CVMA Freiburg, CC BY-NC 4.0 Permalink: https://corpusvitrearum.de/id/F21249

Today marks the great feast of St. Lawrence, a deacon in Rome in the third century, and likely the most famous deacon after St. Stephen the protomartyr. St. Lawrence and his fellow deacons, like St. Stephen before them, were tasked with the material wealth of the Church and the care of the poor. When, in AD 258, the Emperor Valerian issued an edict that all bishops, priests, and deacons should be put to death and their property confiscated, Pope St. Sixtus II was executed, and St. Lawrence was called before the Roman prefect and given three days to gather together the treasures of the Church and surrender them. St. Lawrence spent three days busily distributing the wealth of the Church to the poor, the injured, the lame, the maimed, and the blind. When the time came to turn over the wealth of the Church to the state, he gathered together all of those whom he had helped and presented them before the prefect, saying, “Behold,  the treasures of the Church.” Following this extraordinary display of fortitude, St. Lawrence was then sentenced to death by roasting over an open flame on a gridiron, and in the process, the indefatigable deacon told his executioners, “Turn me over, I am done on this side.” 

The witness of this courageous deacon served, according to Prudentius, to convert vast numbers of the people of Rome and thereby also hasten the Christianization of the empire:

Some noble Romans, who were led
By his amazing fortitude
To faith in Christ, then bore away
The hero's body from the scene.

A sudden grace inflamed their hearts
With ardent love of God Most High
And made them loathe the mummeries
Of their ancestral heathen rites.

From that day forth the worship paid
To sordid pagan gods grew cold;
The temples unfrequented stood,
While people to Christ’s altars thronged.

Thus Lawrence in that mighty fray
Had at his side no keen-edged sword,
But seized the weapon of his foe
And on him turned the piercing steel.

When Satan joined in mortal bout
With God's unyielding warrior,
He fell, transfixed by his own sword,
And lies prostrate forevermore.

That holy martyr's valiant death
Of pagan temples was the end;
Then Vesta saw Palladian fires
Untended with impunity. 

The Roman people, who were wont
The cup of Numa to adore
Christ’s sanctuaries now frequent
And hymn the holy martyr’s praise.

Illustrious senators themselves,
Once flamins and Lupercal priests,
Now kiss the threshold of the shrines
Where martyrs and apostles rest.

We see patrician families,
The parents, both of noble birth,
Their children dedicate to God,
The dearest pledges of their love.

The pontiff once with chaplet crowned
Is signed now with the cross of Christ,
And, Lawrence, to thy temple comes
The vestal of the Claudian house.

Prudentius, Hymn in Honor of the Passion of the Blessed Martyr Lawrence, 489–528, from Liber Peristephanon, translated by Sister M. Clement Eagan.

The excerpted hymn by Prudentius above and St. Ambrose’s De officiis (I.41, II.28) both recount the martyrdom narrative, as well as homilies by St. Augustine (302–305) and Homily 85 of St. Leo the Great, which concludes:

Let us rejoice, then, dearly-beloved, with spiritual joy, and make our boast over the happy end of this illustrious man in the Lord, Who is wonderful in His saints, in whom He has given us a support and an example, and has so spread abroad his glory throughout the world, that, from the rising of the sun to its going down, the brightness of his deacon's light does shine, and Rome has become as famous in Lawrence as Jerusalem was ennobled by Stephen.

St. Lawrence has been one of the most beloved saints of the Church, appearing countless times in artwork, poetry, and literature. He gave his name to any number of churches in Rome and throughout the world, including Nürnberg’s magnificent St. Lawrence Church, from which a number of Lutheran colonists departed in the mid-19th century to evangelize the Native Americans of Michigan’s Saginaw Valley, subsequently naming their own church after this illustrious deacon.

While St. Lawrence is likely the most famous deacon after St. Stephen, he is far from the last. St. Philip, St. Vincent of Saragossa, St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Ephrem the Syrian were all deacons who are still remembered today for their steadfast and enduring witness.

And so, on this feast of St. Lawrence, I would like to offer some suggestions on restoring this apostolic office within the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. You may have read yesterday’s post, which proposed the abolition of the vicarage program in favor of some sort of three year diaconate. I found myself less than convinced for a number of reasons:

• While the vicarage program is a relatively recent novelty, I think there are tremendous benefits to the final year of seminary after vicarage — if not in the classroom, then in the commons, the cafeteria, and the hallways. I would posit that some of the most significant formation in the current model of seminary education happens informally between seminarians in their fourth year as they discuss, muse, and ponder on their own and their classmates’ vicarage experiences together with what they are learning in class.

• The cost would be rather prohibitive for many of the current congregations who participate in the vicarage program, and a reduction in moving costs by half is not nearly enough to make up the monetary difference of a full salary.

But more importantly:

• The diaconate is not just a step on the way to the priesthood, it is an office with a dignity, history, and purpose all its own, as seen in the Acts of the Apostles, the early Church in the centuries following, and in the Church of the Augsburg Confession for centuries following the Reformation. As you have already seen above, deacons have contributed enormously to the life of the Church.

• There is a manifest need in our church for a permanent diaconate.

I’m afraid a fuller history of the diaconate is a little more of an undertaking than I have time for at the moment, so I will commend Acts 6, the Apostolic Tradition attributed to Hippolytus (don’t be intimidated by this edition, 90% of the book is comprised of notes that you can skip on your first read through), and this helpful overview to your attention.

Having read all of those items and having not just immediately moved on to this paragraph, you will now fully understand that a deacon has his own distinct dignity, history, identity, and purpose, and so you will also understand my hesitancy to slap a sticker that says “deacon” onto what is, in reality, a still a priest (yes, “priest,” the etymological descendant of presbyter — if you don’t like the language of  “priest,” try on the Smalcald Articles’  language of “divine order of priests”/divinum ordinem sacerdotum/göttlichen Stand der Priester, cf. also Ap. XIII) — a priest in an assisting capacity. While it became customary over the centuries to have a man pass through a number of minor orders and the diaconate en route to the priesthood, the diaconate is, in fact, an end in itself, not just a hallway to the priesthood.

In addition to all this, as noted above, there is a manifest need for a diaconate in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. There has been for quite some time the invention of a multiplicity of new offices to assist with the ministry of the Church, and it has manifested itself in an absolute alphabet soup of acronyms under the category of “Commissioned Ministers.” At my alma mater, some of my classmates trained in the “lay ministry” program, which is mercifully acronym-less, but it was no secret that the graduates of this program would be in the market for precisely the same positions as those who graduated from DCE/DCO/DFLM/DPS programs. The relative interchangeability of these various degrees, despite the diversity of acronyms, attests to a common purpose behind them: to support the work of the pastor in the congregation. Apart from college degrees, more localized programs such as “licensed lay deacons” or “lay deacons” have persisted and even proliferated across the Missouri Synod to serve many of these same purposes. The diaconate as it appears in the history of the Church is, however, an ordained office, which makes the oddly common language of “lay deacons” nonsensical.

This impulse toward a diaconate-by-any-other-name is not something new, but I would suggest that its more recent manifestations have resulted from the change in the status of the formerly overwhelmingly male cadre of called teachers in the Missouri Synod, which for a very long time served as a functional diaconate. A particularly colorful illustration of this understanding can be seen, somewhat idiosyncratically, in the practice of the Rev. Berthold von Schenk, who, in the early 20th century, began having the called teachers at Our Saviour in the Bronx vest and read the Gospel at mass. While von Schenk was certainly an outlier in the way that he exercised this understanding, the sense that the male called teacher was an office that was somehow closely related to that of the pastor himself persisted across the Missouri Synod for many years. This is also somewhat apparent in a number of older congregations that still have a “teacherage” in addition to a parsonage — whether or not that teacherage has actually housed a teacher in recent memory — a reminder of the time when the called teacher was recognized as being a semi-clerical state. This de facto diaconal understanding of called teachers seems to have changed across the Synod over the course of the twentieth century with the consolidation of schools, the subsequent multiplication of teachers, and with the increasing commonality of women teachers who were manifestly not in a quasi-priestly office.

It shouldn’t be terribly surprising that we have been reaching and striving to fill this void all these years. If the Church in the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles already recognized the need for deacons, if deacons continued to serve throughout the history of the Church, including in the Churches of the Augsburg Confession, it should be simply assumed that this need exists, and it should be expected that we would seek to bridge this gap in some way. So why not just do it in the way that the apostles did? Why not follow in the way of our forebears in the faith instead of incessantly inventing new arrays of acronyms and convoluted curricula? 

As far as the concrete realities are concerned, there are a great many possibilities. I would suggest that training might well consist of some of the existing CUS programs mentioned above, reordered for this purpose, and given a single nomenclature and consistency from institution to institution. The deacon training program would necessarily be comprised of men, and interested women applicants for the existing programs would be trained as deaconesses, likewise with a single nomenclature and consistency across institutions. The existing CUS programs directed toward deacons might well be augmented with some aspects of the SMP curriculum, and those programs directed toward deaconesses might replace seminary deaconess programs, or, perhaps, if an exceptionally robust interest develops over time, a deaconess motherhouse could be re-established for this purpose. If someone were feeling particularly ambitious, he might even suggest that the SMP program be simply converted wholesale to a diaconate, with undergraduate programs for men converted to a subdiaconate. There’s a great deal of discussion to be had, but one thing seems painfully obvious — we’ve been trying to have a diaconate by any other name for decades, and it’s time we just did the thing properly.