God save Scotland!
I was able to preach at St. Paul's Cathedral in commemoration of Andrew the Protokletos on Nov 30, 2010. It was a great honor and distinct pleasure. Andrew's life holds so much of importance for us: examples of humble service, and an extended invitation to others to come and meet Christ.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
In his satirical autobiography Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris describes his attempts to learn French after moving to rural France as an adult. He struggled most with learning the gender of French nouns, and was constantly assigning the incorrect gender to objects around the house. He began to avoid the issue by always talking about things in plural, since plurals in French work the same for both masculine and feminine nouns. But he always ended up leaving the market with twice as many vegetables as he had planned on buying, and they would go bad before he could use them. Instead, he switched to a new way to remember the gender of objects: he came up with stories about the things surrounding him in his home. His hairbrush began to have a torrid affair with the mop, but the soap found out and jilted the doorknob in order to steal back the mop.
Mnemonics like the ones that David Sedaris used are most helpful when they are memorable. And they help us remember unimportant things like license plate numbers, mundane things like French genders, and important things like birthdays and anniversaries. The Church is aware that mnemonics are powerful ways to remember and to instill lessons, and so we’ve inherited an entire collection of them.
Today we commemorate St. Andrew, one of the Twelve Apostles, and the Apostle known in Greek as the Protokletos, the first-called. In St. John’s Gospel, Christ calls St. Andrew first, and St. Andrew goes home to tell his brother Simon about his encounter with Christ. Simon, of course, would have his name changed by Christ Himself, and be known to future generations as St. Peter.
Like many o the Apostles, St. Andrew is remembered for the way he died. The mnemonic associated with St. Andrew was the instrument of his torture and death. St. Andrew was crucified on a cross shaped like an X, and you’ll frequently see him depicted holding a cross of that shape. The X-shaped cross would eventually become the flag of the Kingdom of Scotland, a nation dedicated to St. Andrew, and through the Episcopal Church in Scotland, St Andrew’s Cross entered our American Episcopal Shield and our flag in the shape of crosses formed into an X. The mnemonic used to recall St. Andrew reminds us of his sacrifice in giving his life in witness to Christ.
But sometimes the devices we use to remember something or someone can’t capture the entirety of an idea. That is certainly the case with reducing St. Andrew to a pious story and to an X-shaped cross. Though St. Andrew is little mentioned in the Gospels, those places where his actions are recorded are powerful, and important insights into his life and his personality. He is recorded as bringing his brother to Christ. He is recorded along with St. Philip as bringing Greeks seeking the Messiah to come and meet Christ. He is recorded as telling Christ that there was a boy with five loaves and two fish, and invites Christ to feed the Five Thousand with the small amount.
St. Andrew brought others to Christ. His life’s work consummated at his crucifixion, was just as profoundly shown in his life of service and witness. St. Andrew invited others to listen to Christ’s words, to witness Christ’s actions, and to welcome Christ into their lives. St. Andrew had found in Christ the very reason for his own life, and made of his life an offering to the Lord who walked with him and offered him redemption. St. Andrew’s love for Christ and willingness to follow Him drove him St. Andrew to bring others to experience Christ as well.
We commemorate the saints generally, and St. Andrew today specifically, to recall the virtues they showed in their lives, and to pray for the grace to imitate those virtues in our own lives. We also recall that death does not separate us from one another, and we remember, then, that St. Andrew joins us at every Eucharist in praising and worshipping the Christ who came among us as teacher, king, and Lord. We pray that we might imitate St. Andrew in our willingness to witness to the action of Christ in our own lives and to invite friends, family, and strangers to join us in thanksgiving for God’s love shown to us in Christ. And we also ask St. Andrew to pray for us, that we might, like him, make our lives into confessions of the Gospel message to show forth God’s love to all those we encounter.
Amen
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