St, Andrew's Day (Nov. 30)

 

St. Andrew the Apostle, 30 November

The next day John [the Baptist] was there again with two of his disciples.  When he saw Jesus passing by, he said, “Look,  the Lamb of God!”   When the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus.  Turning around, Jesus saw them following and asked, “What do you want?”   They said, “Rabbi” (which means “Teacher”), “where are you staying?”   “Come,” he replied, “and you will see.”  So they went and saw where he was staying, and they spent that day with him. It was about four in the afternoon.

Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, was one of the two who heard what John had said and who had followed Jesus.  The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon and tell him, “We have found the Messiah” (that is, the Christ).  And he brought him to Jesus.  Jesus looked at him and said, “You are Simon son of John. You will be called Cephas” (which, when translated, is Peter).  (John 1:35-40)

In the Eastern tradition, Andrew is often called “the first-called (protokletos)” because of this story in the Gospel of John, where Andrew and the unnamed John (the Beloved) are described as disciples of John the Baptist who first became followers of Jesus.  Andrew is the one who introduces his brother Simon Peter to Jesus.   Andrew and Peter were both fishermen from Capernaum, who were called by Jesus to become “fishers of people.”  

The name Andrew is actually a Greek name, meaning “manly.”   A measure of the degree of intra-cultural mingling and convergence in the mixed populations of Galilee of the period is found in the popularity of such Greek names for Jewish boys there.   This, even in the presence of wildly popular but such stridently nationalistic Jewish names such as Simon, Judas (Judah), and Jesus (Joshua).  

 

Later in John’s Gospel, when a group of Greeks (or Greek-speaking Jews) wish to speak with Jesus, it is Philip and Andrew they approach, both disciples with Greek names (John 12:20-22; “Philip” means “horse lover”). 

Earlier in John, when Jesus realizes the crowds are hungry just before he feeds the Five Thousand, it is Andrew who introduces him to a boy nearby by saying, "Here is a lad with five barley loaves and two fish." (Jn 6:8f)

Andrew appears in all the various lists of the Twelve given in the New Testament, but these three passages in John are the only places where we see Andrew as an individual.  In each, he is portrayed as introducing people to Jesus.  As a result, he is seen as the archetype of the Christian missionary or evangelist.  The Fellowship of Saint Andrew among Episcopalians today is devoted to encouraging personal evangelism, bringing of one's friends and colleagues to a knowledge of Christ.

Since Andrew is seen as the first of the Apostles, his feast on November 30 marks the beginning of the Church Year. The First Sunday of Advent is defined as the Sunday on or nearest the Feast of St. Andrew.  This day is effectively the fourth Sunday before Christmas Day.  

In early Church tradition, Andrew preached in Asia Minor and along the Black Sea, and was martyred by crucifixion in Greece.  Tellingly, later tradition describes him not nailed to a Latin cross, like Jesus, but rather, tied to an X shaped cross (a “saltire”), where he valiantly preaches for two days before expiring. 

When the Emperor Constantine in the 4^th century set up his new capital Constantinople at Byzantium, the bishopric of the new city needed the cachet and authority of an appeal to apostolic tradition like those of the other major metropolitan sees or patriarchates.  Rome and Antioch both claimed that their churches had been founded by Peter and Paul; Alexandria, Mark, Peter’s assistant and scribe; Jerusalem, all the Twelve as well as James the brother of the Lord. The Patriarch of Constantinople reached back to the traditions of Andrew preaching along the Black Sea and the Bosporus to claim such status for his see.  The great Byzantine preacher John Chrysostom said that thus Andrew, the first-called of the apostles, the “Peter even before there was a Peter” founded what he claimed was the preeminent Patriarchate in the Church. 

Since missionaries went far and wide from Constantinople, soon Andrew was claimed as patron saint of Ukraine, Romania, Russia.   In the early Middle Ages, a missionary named Rule brought some of Andrew’s relics to Scotland, to a town known as Fife, but which he rechristened as St. Andrew's, where there is now the oldest and most famous course for Scotland’s national sport, golf.   Andrew thus became the patron saint of Scotland in addition to the Greek Byzantine heritage countries where he himself had been a missionary.   

The white X shaped saltire “St. Andrew’s Cross” on a blue field is the design of the Scottish national flag.  The St. Andrew's cross appears in the Union Jack of Great Britain behind the red X shaped cross of St. Patrick of Ireland and the regular +-shaped red cross of St. George, patron saint of England.

Most Merciful God, you make yourself known in the lives and examples of your saints.  Bestow on us, we pray you, the courage and loving friendly concern of your first apostle, Andrew, that we, like him, may stand as constant witnesses of your love, grace and truth, and bring our friends and colleagues to the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ your son our Lord, in whose name we pray.  Amen. 

Veterans' Day 2011

 

Veterans’ Day 2011
Beijing, China 

November 11, 1918 “on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month” marked the signing of the armistice ending the “Great War,” of 1914-18,  “the war that no one wanted,” “the accidental war,” that started the 20^th Century with the mechanized slaughter that resulted in 15 million deaths and 20 million wounded.  Since the U.S. commemoration of “Armistice Day” was transformed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower after the second World War into a general commemoration of U.S. military veterans in any armed conflict, we Americans often forget  the significance of this particular day.

Canadians and the British still preserve it as “Remembrance Day” with a heavy emphasis of the sacrifice and ideals of WWI, together with its futility.  The wearing of red poppies is a major part of the commemoration, bringing to mind the poem by Canadian Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae beginning “In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow, between the crosses, row on row.”

Since Australians and New Zealanders lost most of their people in that conflict in the battle of Gallipoli (a failed effort to capture Constantinople from the Ottoman Turks), they commemorate the anniversary of the start of that battle, April 25, as Anzac Day (after the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, which was decimated in the battle). 

When I was a young man living in the North of France, I had the occasion to visit several of the sites of the trench warfare in the Flanders Fields during World War I, including Verdun and Vimy Ridge.   
Verdun is where German and French soldiers faced off against each other in pitched trench warfare for most of the year 1916, firing about 40 million artillery shells at each other, killing 306,000 young men and maiming about a half million more.  It was the longest and one of the most devastating battles in the history of warfare, which ended as a minor French tactical victory but overall was a costly strategic stalemate.

The site of the battle is to this day a tortured, scarred landscape with overlapping crater upon crater caused by the burst of artillery shells.  Though now it is covered with green grass and is no longer the sea of mud and blood you see in the old photographs, you cannot go off of the marked roads and paths because the area still contains hundreds or thousands of mines and unexploded ordnance.

The battlefield cemetery there has a large memorial, the base of which is an ossuary—a mass grave for the bones of the dead, since thousands were recovered only in pieces. 

The Canadian cemetery at nearby Vimy Ridge, with its preserved trenches, graves, and haunting memorial with tower-like pylons and the overwhelmingly sorrow-filled statue of Canada Bereft, of a mother mourning her dead sons, is, one of those few places on earth, like Auschwitz, the Road of No Return (for Slaves) in Benin, the Choeung Ek "Killing Fields" Memorial in Cambodia, or the Memorial to the Victims of the Rape of Nanjing in Nanjing China, that brings a traveler face to face with great historical horror, overpowering and dreadful.

 
The U.S. “Flanders Fields” Cemetery across the border in Belgium is less theatrical in its presentation, but every bit as moving.

In the U.S., Veterans’ Day has become part of the Civil Religion.  I read a Facebook posting this morning:  “On Thanksgiving Day we thank God for our blessings; on Veterans’ Day, we thank him for those who fought and died for our blessings.”    In the degree that we thereby honor the dead, this is right and fitting.  In the degree, however, that we thereby celebrate the system of power and policy that produces such things as the “Great War” (or, indeed, that calls any war “Great”), the day is diminished and cheapened. 

Friends from New Zealand recently gave me the gift of sharing with me some recent Church music coming from their homeland.  One of my favorites is the following piece written for Anzac Day: 

A Hymn for Anzac Day

Honour the dead, our country’s fighting brave,
honour our children left in foreign grave,
where poppies blow and sorrow seeds her flowers,
honour the crosses marked forever ours.

Weep for the places ravaged with our blood,
weep for the young bones buried in the mud,
weep for the powers of violence and greed,
weep for the deals done in the name of need.

Honour the brave whose conscience was their call,
answered no bugle, went against the wall,
suffered in prisons of contempt and shame,
branded as cowards, in our country’s name.

Weep for the waste of all that might have been,
weep for the cost that war has made obscene,
weep for the homes that ache with human pain,
weep that we ever sanction war again.

Honour the dream for which our nation bled,
held now in trust to justify the dead,
honour their vision on this solemn day:
peace known in freedom, peace the only way.

Music: © Colin Gibson 2005 Words: © Shirley Erena Murray
Tune: ANZAC 2005

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8EhR44SUp4