The Lion Sermon

There is a curious service held in an old church in the city of London. On October 16th, every year, is preached in St. Catherine Church, Leadenhall street, what is called the “Lion Sermon.” It has been preached every year in that same church for the last two hundred and fifty years (as of 1890).

If you want to be present, and would go a little earlier than the hour, you would hear the most lovely chime of bells—a chime beginning in the “Sun of my Soul,” “Abide with me,” “The Happy Land,” and the like. Then there is the service, made very short; then the event of the evening—the sermon, the “Lion Sermon.”

The story: There was once in the city a very pious man called Sir John Gayer (or Gair). At one time he was Lord Mayor of London. Sir John happened to be in Asia at one period of his life, and when with his caravan, was traveling through a desert place, he found himself face to face alone with a lion. Everybody of his company who could have helped him had gone forward. Sir John knew that only God could deliver him. He thought of Daniel in the den of lions. He perhaps thought of Paul, who at one time expected to meet an Emperor who was as cruel as a lion. And he fell on his knees there before the beast and shut his eyes and cried to God to shut the mouth of the lion.

When he had finished his prayer and opened his eyes, the lion was nowhere to be seen. So when he came back to London he set aside a sum of money to be given away in gifts to poor people every October 15th and to secure that a sermon should be preached to tell the generations to come how God had heard his prayer and delivered him from the mouth of the lion.
~ Cut Gems