A Great Cloud of Witnesses

On June 10, 2009, I published a post about our first weekly saint, St. Columba.  Since then, the list has grown considerably.  Most of them get the big ST, but not all.  The principle has been the examination of the lives and teachings of those who have gone before us.  Not all Christians of interest get the big ST.

We have looked at ancient, mediaeval, and post-mediaeval (‘modern’) Christians.  We have looked at Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Protestants, and one Ethiopian Orthodox.  Apostolic men stand alongside poets who shake hands with mystics and martyrs.  All of these people have lived lives for Christ, and I hope that all of them can help bring us nearer to Christ by their example and teaching.

My selection has sometimes been from the Church Calendar.  Sometimes it has started there, as with Edmund James Peck (see in the list) and then extended by association; following Peck I wrote about other missionaries to the Arctic.  Sometimes they are chosen because I am reading about them or studying their work.

Often, if you have been following these weekly saints, you will have noticed that I give a brief biography of the saint, but not always.  Sometimes I offer a meditation on some aspect of the saint’s life and teaching.  Sometimes I ponder how best we might be able to honour or learn from a particular saint.  I hope these have been a blessing and will continue to bless!  Enjoy!

There are no women.  This is too bad.  I should fix this.  I meant to St. Margaret, Queen of Scotland, when her feast rolled on by, but posted about no saint that week.  She and others shall make their way into the saints for 2011.  Here are the Weekly Saints thus far:

St. Joseph the Carpenter

Pope St. Leo the Great (here & here)

St. John of the Cross

St. Ambrose of Milan

St. Andrew the Apostle

St. Albert Lacombe

St. John the Baptist

St. Thomas the Apostle

St. Matthias the Apostle

St. Boniface

St. Augustine of Canterbury

St. Anthony of Padua

Emperor Constantine the Great

St. Athanasius

Dante Alighieri

St. George the Dragonslayer

George MacDonald

Thomas Cranmer

St. Cuthbert

St. Gregory of Nyssa

John Wesley (here & here)

St. Polycarp of Smyrna

St. Valentine

St. Antony the Great

St. Jean de Brebeuf

St. Francis of Assisi

Hans Egede

St. Juvenaly of Alaska

Edmund James Peck

St. John of Damascus

Abba Giyorgis Saglawi

St. Bernard of Clairvaux

St. Maximilian Kolbe

CS Lewis

St. Alban the Martyr

Sts. Peter and Paul

St. Basil the Great

St. Columba

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Saint of the Week: St. Andrew the Apostle

St. Andrew on a Column in Nicholson Square, Edinburgh

Since St. Andrew’s Day was this week, and St. Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland (where I live), he’s this week’s saint.

St. Andrew, judging from the Gospel accounts, was originally a fisherman, and then a disciple of St. John the Baptist.  But when the Baptist declared, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” Andrew and some of the others decided to go check out Jesus’ digs.

After having spent a little bit of time with Jesus, Andrew ran off to tell his brother Simon that he’d found the Messiah.  Simon is important because later on, Jesus calls him the Rock (Petros in Greek), and he goes on to be a great leader in the apostolic band.

During the brief years of Jesus’ ministry, although not of the closest three (the Rock, James, John), he was of the inner four, often coming in lists with the other three.

He also spoke up and pointed out the boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish.  He is mentioned once in Acts.

So much for the biblical record.

As my previous post about St. Matthias tells us, there is a document known as The Acts of Andrew and Matthias in which St. Matthias goes to the land of the cannibals, and St. Andrew rescues him from being gormandized.  The OE poem Andreas (alluded to here) is about Andrew realising Matthias’ trouble through a dream and his journey there.  Jesus is the helmsman of Andrew’s ship and awesomeness ensues.  Andrew shows up and preaches to the cannibals then sets Matthias free.  More awesomeness follows this.

Following this, I believe that these apostolic fellows go and preach to some barbarians.  They show a little caution this time, not wishing to be had for dinner.  But the barbarians prove not to be cannibals.  Thankfully.

As tradition has it, Aegeates, a pagan proconsul whose wife Andrew converted, was angered by his wife’s Christianity.  He accordingly had Andrew crucified in the shape of an X — hence the Saltire on Scotland’s flag.

What do we take from all this?  St. Andrew was a man who found the Messiah and wasn’t afraid to bring others to him.  He brought his brother.  According to the old stories, he brought the good news about the Messiah to the cannibals as well as the people of Greece.  We may not all be the Rock — a great public leader — but can we not all be Andrew?  I reckon we can.

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