A few episodes back on five minutes in church history, I think I quoted to you from Charles Spurgeon, and we were talking about the value of tradition and the life of the church today.

Well, I want to take another look at this idea of tradition. of the

life of tradition. I'm gonna do it in a sort of odd way maybe. We're gonna look at a tradition that sort of, well, let's just say it, it sort of runs amuck. This is the tradition surrounding

Saint Sebastian. Now we don't know a lot about Saint Sebastian. What we can piece together

is that he was from Milan and he was

martyred around 288. Now the first historical record that we have of Saint

Sebastian comes to us from Bishop Ambrose.

Ambrose was the Bishop at Milan.

He had a reputation for being an eloquent, brilliant,

speaker and theologian, and it was actually Ambrose's preaching that factored into the

conversion of Augustine. In one of those sermons that Ambrose preached in his

sermon on Psalm 118, Ambrose reference that Ambrose

references Saint Sebastian and references his martyrdom.

Now this is a fitting song to be talking about martyrdom.

It's a song that stresses how those facing persecution should take refuge in the Lord.

But then after Ambrose, and as we sort of wind through the Middle Ages, the story of Saint Sebastian

takes some rather odd turns. It's not too long we began hearing that he was martyred or I guess we need to say he was attempted to be

martyred by having a series of arrows shot at him from a rather short distance.

And so here's this poor guy sort of riddled in arrows,

but as the legend went on, he didn't die from it.

So then Diacletian, the emperor at the time,

dispatched the soldiers to literally, and sorry to be so graphic here,

...