St. Andrew’s Day (observed), Year A
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
November 19, 2023
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
The Apostle Andrew, the saint for whom our church is named, tends to run somewhat under the radar, both in the Bible and the Liturgical Calendar. The formal date for his feast, November 30, always falls within the range of the final Sunday of the Church Year and the first two Sundays of Advent. With those three celebrations formally taking precedent over his festival, we in the United States don’t often recognize an opportunity to enjoy his feast. To try to remedy that, we’ve bumped our observation up a few weeks in hope of offering our patron saint the respect he rightly deserves.
There are plenty of legends that have grown up around Andrew over the centuries. Tradition’s earliest accounts place his travels mostly in the area surrounding the Black Sea, with added rumors of him wandering as far north as modern-day Kiev. Some relatively early sources tell us he was crucified at Patras, in western Greece. Much later, stories from the late Medieval period say his executioners tied him to an X-shaped cross at his own request, supposedly because he didn’t think he deserved the honor of dying in the same fashion as Jesus. His famous association with Scotland draws from the legend of a monk who, following a vision, stole some of Andrew’s relics from the church in Patras and ended up shipwrecking along the coast of Fife, where he built a shrine at what eventually grew into the town of St. Andrews.
Despite his lesser popularity than some of the other apostles, Andrew still lays claim to the patronage of quite a few countries (Barbados, Cyprus, the Republic of Georgia, Romania, Russia, Scotland, and Ukraine) along with several cities around the world. Similarly to how the Pope is said to hold Peter’s seat in Rome, the Patriarch of Constantinople is recognized as holding Andrew’s apostolic seat. Andrew is also said to hold sway over a number of occupations or aspects of human life, including fishers, fishmongers, rope-makers, textile workers, singers, miners, pregnant women, butchers, and farm workers. And on the medical front tradition says you can talk to him about protection from sore throats, convulsions, fever, and whooping cough.
But moving beyond the mythic, in the Bible, Andrew generally lives in the shadow of his more famous brother, Simon Peter. Matthew and Mark show the two being called together to be “fishers of men” while Luke doesn’t even introduce Andrew by name until a few chapters after we see Peter join Jesus’ followers. John gives him a bit more screen time, reporting that Andrew was initially one of John the Baptist’s disciples who, after hearing him proclaim Jesus as “the Lamb of God,” chose to look into this new prophet. After spending a day with Jesus, Andrew then brings Peter to meet him as well, telling his brother he had found the Messiah. Apart from those incidents, we only see Andrew active in any fashion on three other occasions: once in Mark as part of the group asking about signs of the destruction of the Temple, and then in John at both the feeding of the 5,000 and later interacting with some Greek converts to Judaism shortly before Jesus’ crucifixion.
Despite the limited information the Bible gives us, we can still draw a few conclusions about who Andrew was as a person. In the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus meets him up in Galilee, which was a relatively multicultural region in Palestine. John tells us he’s from Bethsaida, a city in that area. This fits with him being one of only two Apostles to have a Greek given name—the other being Phillip. As Peter’s real name, Simon, is Aramaic, it suggests a possible diversity within their own family—and would make Andrew a reasonable saint for a culture-spanning borderland region like our own!
But a person best reveals their character through their actions, not their background, and nearly every time we see Andrew, especially in the Gospel of John, we find him doing the exact same thing: bringing people to Jesus. After spending a day getting to know Jesus, he grabs his brother and carries him along for the rest of the journey. When a huge crowd of listeners is out of food, he connects Jesus with a boy who has some bread and fish. And once those Greek converts ask to meet Jesus, Andrew is the one who leads them over.
Yet he himself never seems to get in the way. He doesn’t keep stealing the scene with any sort of boisterous words or actions. We don’t see him making bold proclamations or performing his own miracles. He simply brings people to Jesus, allowing them to meet and experience him for themselves. Andrew “fishes for people” in the sense of what the word Jesus uses for fishing really means: “sunning” or “daylighting.” He doesn’t drag people out of the water kicking and screaming. We never see him using any sort of bait-and-switch techniques to trick anybody into jumping in the boat. He simply notes someone who could use some good news or recognizes a person with resources who might be interested in helping at a time of need, asks them to come along with him, and then he lets Jesus do his work.
I honestly hadn’t thought much about Andrew before preparing for today, and I suspect that Andrew himself might tell us that’s the point. He’s a background saint. Confident in the light he’s received, he guides whomever he encounters toward that light and then allows them to continue their own journey with God. He doesn’t ask for credit. He never begs for attention. He simply comes alongside to help at critical points in another person’s journey and then steps aside when he recognizes his role is done. And I imagine that’s what Andrew would ask of us today as well.
Las Cruces is, in a lot of ways, a transitional city, a town with many travelers set amidst many borders. University students, retirees, people fleeing violence or seeking opportunity far beyond their distant homes—ours is a land where people come not necessarily to remain but to rest and prepare, to recover before the next stage of their journeys. Andrew would probably be excited to see what this little namesake church has already done for our ever-shifting community, the hospitality and meals our congregation has provided over the years. Along with celebrating those successes, he’d probably encourage us to keep his legacy going, to continue to be present with people during this portion of their pathway, to be their companions and guides and hosts while they walk among us. He’d show us how to lead people to and in the light we have and then how to give them the freedom to move on, carrying some of that light with them into the rest of the world. And he would tell us it’s okay to step back, to let others do their work as we prepare to once again resume ours, to accompany yet more travelers with God’s light.