So, just remember, we talked about Peter last week,
and we talked about how Peter’s center,
as leader of the Christian church,
put him firmly in Jerusalem.
And so, if you’re looking at your map there,
of course you see Jerusalem there in the land
bridge in the orange between Egypt on your southwest,
and then you make your way up to
the more European peninsula there.
And of course, that is essential because Jerusalem is this busy crossroads between Rome’s work
in the south as they went to Egypt,
and it’s important because it’s this place of both
commerce and also of that sort of military movement.
We know that Peter left Jerusalem,
and last time we were together we talked about how he went northeast.
So we talked about how he went into the Jewish community southwest there of the Caspian Sea.
Between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea,
there was a substantial amount of Jewish community,
and Peter very much saw himself as being an evangelist for the Jews.
And the reason there were so many Jews in that region is because that’s where,
during the exile,
the Jews had been essentially taken by the Persian Empire,
well, by the Assyrian Empire, and then released by the Persians after the conquest of Assyria.
So that northeast area is where we’ve really been in our conversation thus far,
and Peter’s work is attributed to that region.
Today we’re going to be looking at two additional disciples.
We’re going to be looking at Andrew,
and we’re going to be looking at James the Great.
And I’ll talk with you about why he’s been given the name “The Great.”
But Andrew himself was a native of Galilee,
so he’s born in Bethsaida and lived by the Sea of Capernaum.
So if you’ve got your map here,
that is the tiny little dot that you have there to the northeast of Jerusalem.
And he was a successful fisherman.
That was his career.
We know a decent amount about Andrew.
Actually, we know that his mother’s name is Joanna.
We know his father’s name is John.
You might be interested to know that what we translate as John would have actually been pronounced Jonah.
And if Jonah rings a bell,
Jonah was a person thrown into the water,
right?
He was trying to escape away from God’s call on a boat.
So it turns out that Jonah is the family name of fisherman.
So like, you know, the Smiths were originally metalsmiths.
The Jonas are considered to be boat people.
And so here we have Andrew as a disciple whose father is Jonah.
He’s a boatman.
That’s their profession.
And Andrew is significant because his brother is, you might know,
Peter.
So we talked about Peter.
We talked about his significance.
And as we talk about Andrew here today,
I think an easy way to summarize how these two
individuals are both important but different in their influence is Peter has this global
kind of impact.
You remember that at the end,
he’s considered the first leader of the Roman church,
which later then becomes this long procession of leaders in the history of the church.
Here Andrew has not that kind of reputation.
If Peter was interested in the large evangelism of the first century,
Andrew was far more
instrumental in particular individual evangelism.
He was a witness or an inviter at a substantial way in the early church.
So to make that point,
we have to go back a little bit.
You might know that Andrew was working the family business.
He was working in the boats and the fishing.
And he heard of this guy called John the Baptist out in the wilderness.
And Andrew, apparently, among all of his brothers,
was not incredibly rooted at home because
he decided he was going to leave the family business to go check out what this John was
talking about.
He goes,
he hears John, he’s compelled by it.
And what we don’t have in the scripture is an account of Andrew’s conversion.
We don’t know when he decided,
the moment he decided,
that he would leave John for Jesus.
But we know that he was there the very day when Jesus comes to be baptized,
which is clearly a moving moment in any person’s life.
John has been proclaiming the Messiah is coming,
the kingdom of God will be at hand.
And here, Jesus shows up and John suddenly says,
this is the Messiah,
right?
And then you hear the heavenly voice of God and the heavens are parted and down like a
dove comes the spirit,
right?
There’s this beautiful moment.
And what we know of John’s life is John angered some really important people.
And so for that reason,
he was captured and then ultimately killed.
You probably know that story.
And somewhere in the midst of that,
John both being taken captive and killed and this amazing
movement towards Jesus’s ministry,
Andrew attaches himself to Jesus and becomes known
as one of the 12.
He personally,
as scripture tells the story,
personally invites his brother Peter and invites
the disciple Philip to be followers of Jesus.
So I don’t want to make a statement that I can’t back up,
but I believe he’s the most
he has the most disciples to his credit
scripturally that he invited to be followers of Jesus personally.
He was a partner.
Wait a minute.
Oh, yeah, flip the page.
Wrong side.
He is then listed in the at the end of the book of Acts as one of the 12
disciples.
The acts details the 12 and his name is listed.
But beyond the stories that we have of him inviting his brothers,
that we have of him
leaving to go to John,
there’s not a whole lot with Andrew.
He appears a few times,
but the scriptural text doesn’t give us a lot about him.
Where it gets really,
really interesting is church tradition that follows him.
So you’ve got your map here.
We’ve already been to the sort of northeast there.
Now we have to look north of the Black Sea because tradition says a writer by the name
of Eusebius tells us that he goes to Cynthia,
which is sort of on that northern of the
southern side of the Black Sea and up and around to the to the north of that,
which would be modern day Russia.
And what’s interesting about Andrew is the story is told that he goes to Russia to
evangelize and there’s differing accounts.
But I’m going to tell you my favorite.
I’m not saying historically factual.
I’m going to tell you my favorite.
The story is that Matthew was up north preaching the gospel and that word came that he had been captured.
So Andrew, being a person of some ability,
goes north to provide assistance to Matthew.
When he arrives,
he finds out that Matthew has been captured by a group of people who are cannibals.
And so Andrew comes and he is able to secure the release of Matthew at great personal peril.
And he is able to convert the tribe of cannibals to Christianity,
leaving behind their
former pagan ways.
Now,
there’s zero historical evidence that this is true.
What scholars suggest is it may truly reflect a story in which Matthew was indeed in trouble
and that Andrew did indeed come to his aid.
As a character told in the Bible,
at least there’s some reason we can believe he was that kind of person,
that if there was a problem,
he would be willing to meet it.
So the cannibal story,
that will leave you to your personal interpretation.
The witness in Russia,
we have good reason to believe happened.
In fact,
the Russian Orthodox Church claims Andrew as their patron saint.
And we’re going to actually have this twice today.
We’re going to talk a little bit about this idea of sainthood and actual different streams
of the Christian church,
because I think these two particular disciples help us with this.
But following his time in Russia,
and this is really interesting,
we’re told that he goes to Greece.
So, of course, you now you’re going to have to go west on your map.
He goes from the northeast and he’s going to go west.
And the thing I think that Andrew can teach us about the early church was whether it was
intentional or not, there seems to be a repeated pattern
of the disciples evangelizing
important people’s wives.
This happens in Acts and it happens again in Andrew’s story.
So you have in Greece a Roman ruler.
His name is Agites.
And he’s the pro council,
he’s the Roman pro council in the region.
So he’s the person who somewhat like Herod in Palestine is in control of this area.
And here Andrew goes and he evangelizes his wife,
whose name is Maximila.
This happens multiple times.
And like I said,
I’m not sure scripture doesn’t tell us if this is a strategic goal.
I think it’s striking that they come to places and seats of power,
but they won’t be heard
by the ruler themself,
but they are heard by their wife and it causes great disruption.
Because suddenly you have in a moment which the clarion call is there is no other Lord but Caesar,
right?
These men report to Caesar directly.
And here their wife is compelled by the gospel.
They hear the good news.
Acts goes out of its way to point out you have someone like Lydia,
who’s a very prominent
business woman in her community.
She’s counted as one of the first leaders in her Christian community.
It is striking here that women often become the first field of evangelism.
And in many ways,
it later disrupts the whole fold.
And in some ways, to his credit,
a G.D.’s is right.
And later, Greece does become prominently Christian.
We’re going to talk more about that in a little bit.
But strikingly,
he decides that he is unable to put up with this continued disruption.
And he decides to have Andrew crucified.
You remember that we talked about Peter was crucified,
tradition says, but he has to be crucified upside down.
Andrew tradition says was crucified,
but in the shape of an axe.
And so to this day,
Christian tradition says that whenever you see an axe, that is St.
Andrew’s cross.
But what makes him different,
as tradition tells it,
is that he was not crucified with
nails, but crucified with ropes.
Because if one was not crucified with nails,
you wouldn’t lose blood.
And so your death would last longer.
So it’s said that he hung on the cross for two days before finally giving up his life.
And as the story tells it,
he evangelized everyone that was there at the foot of his crucifixion.
Now,
what I think is interesting about Andrew is that his skull was essentially found and
it was taken to the church in Constantinople.
And what makes him an interesting is he’s one of the few disciples where there’s actual
record of providence of his skull.
So we have many relics of the ancient church,
many of which the evidence is dubious.
That’s actually going to be the case when we talk about James in just a moment.
But we have legitimate reason to believe that his skull was held at the cathedral in Constantinople,
which you might know is the center of the Greek Orthodox Church,
right? The Eastern Church, the Byzantine church.
His skull was taken to Naples because you had the Islamic conquest and essentially
Christians were taking their prize items away from the oncoming collapse of the Eastern Empire.
And so in 1462,
this is great.
Bear with me.
There’s a cool story here.
1462,
Pius II goes to Naples,
which is now itself under military threat and takes Andrew’s
skull to Rome and says,
we’re going to keep this for you.
Now, if you know your church history,
you know there’s not a very positive relationship
between the Eastern Church and the Western Church.
They have lots of reasons to mistrust each other politically,
economically,
not to mention culturally.
And so this is a big deal.
This is a little bit like,
I want to be clear,
they’re not hostile to each other in the way
that like Russia would be hostile to the United States.
But let’s say it’d be like Canada coming and saying,
we’re going to take the Liberty Bell and
the Statue of Liberty.
We’ll give it back to you someday.
Right.
That would make us very uncomfortable.
What are you going to do with it, you Canucks?
Right. And so there’s this weird kind of holding happening as the Roman Church holds St.
Andrew’s skull.
This is where it gets really interesting.
This happened in some of our lifetimes.
1964,
Pope John Paul VI gives it back to the Greek church.
And so it gets even more interesting than this.
The Roman Church had built for Andrew’s skull a golden,
we wouldn’t call the statue,
but it was a golden jar that was shaped to be as if it looked like Andrew’s face,
which the Protestants, that’s very weird.
That crosses lots of our lines.
We won’t go into that.
But regardless,
it was golden and it was shaped into the face of Andrew.
So the church, when they returned it in 1964,
brings this whole ensemble to a new
sanctuary that was constructed by the church to hold St.
Andrew’s body at the place where it’s believed that he was crucified.
Gets more interesting because a member of the Greek Orthodox Church snuck into the church,
grabbed this skull held inside this statue,
and they took the skull out and shattered the container.
You ask why?
Because in the Greek church,
any object shaped in three dimensions to look like a person of
faith is considered an idol.
So they were so offended that Andrew’s skull was held in a thing that looked like Andrew,
they destroyed it.
So you’ll be glad to know the Orthodox Church went and built a cylindrical vessel that doesn’t
look like a face that now holds Andrew’s skull inside the church.
Now, this seems odd to a reformed person.
And you might know that the Eastern Church is all about icons.
They call it iconography,
if you’ve heard that term,
but they’re only comfortable with it in two dimensions.
So how do you I’m going to break this down.
How what why does this matter?
The the Greek Orthodox Church now has a 2D image of St.
Andrew in their space of worship.
The Roman Catholic Church has these three dimensional statues that they’ve created to
represent these people of faith.
And the Reformed Church has white walls.
All of that’s intentional and important.
And so I think Andrew’s a helpful touchstone for us here,
because what’s unique about Andrew is
that he has been claimed by all of the families of the church.
We as Reformed people have no clue what to do with the Eastern Church because we have no
connection to it.
If you remember our heritage,
we split from the Roman Catholic Church.
So our beef is with them.
But the Roman Catholic Church,
their frustration,
of course, later came to be with the
reformers, but they originally had this ultimate split with the Eastern Church just about three
or four hundred years.
You saw this divisions after Jesus Christ.
So you have this striking sort of move where here this disciple is claimed by both sides of the
church and in some ways looked up to both sides of the church.
But they disagree with how you should honor him.
And I think that’s really,
really interesting because we would disagree with both of them and say,
keep his picture out of your church because the reformers,
we would say that we don’t want to
make a mistake and accidentally start worshiping Andrew.
Right. We’d say like when you put his head in the middle of your sanctuary,
maybe you slip up at some
point and start thinking he’s the important one.
Are you following me?
But however you land and there are people,
there are Christians seeking to be faithful in
different traditions, I think the point helps us to ask ourselves the question,
what are we comfortable with symbolically in worship?
We honor these disciples as these disciples are trying to do, right?
But we’re going to be uncomfortable bringing their skull into our sanctuary in a thing that looks like them.
But how do we honor them?
How do we honor that tradition?
Because there’s something compelling about the man who says,
I’m not going to be crucified like my savior.
I’m going to be the one to help another disciple in the time of deed.
We,
if we have a temptation,
I think, as those in the reform tradition,
is to let these
people not live in our imaginations,
is to not tell their story,
is to not say that these
are values that should be reflected in our own lives.
We don’t need graven images in our sanctuary to do it.
But to preserve the fact that these original disciples did go and give their lives to be a
witness, I think is a compelling kind of story.
So whether you thought it’s compelling or not,
I’ll leave to you.
That’s Andrew.
Questions?
Then we’ll press ahead.
Let’s talk about James.
All right,
James is tricky because there are three James,
James the Great,
James the Lesser.
Both of them are disciples of Jesus Christ.
So we’ll talk about James the Lesser later.
And then you have James James,
who’s the James who wrote James.
So we got three James to keep track of.
If you are a Roman Catholic,
you believe that James the Lesser is James James who wrote James.
But that is very dubious.
So I’m going to just sort of follow the people who study this who have credentials.
And I’ll tell you that there are three James.
That’s sort of the scholarly accepted idea.
And you can come to your own conclusion on that.
But today we’re talking about James,
the son of Zebedee.
I love James the Great because he is the younger brother of John,
as in the John who wrote the Gospel of John,
as is the John who is called Jesus’s beloved disciple.
So what I love about him is that by nature of who he is,
he has conflict with the brother who gets a
lot of attention and it is humanizing,
I think, in a pretty powerful way.
He and his brother,
he’s, by the way, a business partner with Peter,
who we’ve already talked about.
And he’s in business with his brother, Andrew.
They’re in the fishing trade,
sons of Zebedee.
So you have James the Great or most of the time in the Bible are referred to as James of Zebedee.
The reason he’s referred to as James the Great is because ultimately he is spoken of personally more in
the scriptures than the other James.
So he’s greater in our witness to him,
while as the other has less content.
Not greater as in one’s a better person than the other.
So we actually hear James’s story in Matthew chapter 4,
18, 21 through 22.
I want to read this to you.
So Jesus is walking beside the Sea of Galilee.
He sees two brothers,
Simon, called Peter, talked about Simon,
and his brother, Andrew.
They were casting a net into the lake for they were fishermen.
Going on their way there,
he saw two other brothers,
James, some of Zebedee and his brother,
John.
They were in a boat with their father,
Zebedee, preparing their nets.
And then this is where Jesus calls to them.
And immediately they leave the boat and their father and follow him.
This is a thing in the scripture I’ve always loved.
And, you know, maybe someday there will come a sermon where I get to pull this out.
How do you like to be the dad in the boat as your business partners,
literally get out and say,
see ya.
I mean,
that is incredible.
And I’m sure Zebedee would not say incredible.
I’m sure he’d have a different word for it.
The thing that we read over as,
well, yes, of course, that’s how the story goes,
was to these people’s life,
completely disruptive,
a fissure of family relationship.
Can you imagine Thanksgiving that year?
Right.
And it’s a little bit like the kid who goes to school and mom and dad say,
yeah, what are you going to major?
And they say, yeah, I’m going to major in theater.
And mom and dad are like,
and what are you going to do for a living?
Right.
That’s wonderful.
We have a job and a business,
right.
And you left the business to go follow this guy around who’s preaching.
What are you thinking?
Right.
I think there’s something compelling about these individuals who find themselves in Jesus’s most close circle.
You have James running in the same circle as Peter and as in John.
And I think it’s really,
really striking how James is different than Andrew is.
He does not appear in the story of John the Baptist.
When Jesus calls,
James comes immediately to follow Jesus.
He doesn’t seem to cross paths with John the Baptist,
but he does seem to be in that circle.
One of the things I love about James is that he and his brother,
Jesus calls them in the gospel.
What is translated the sons of thunder.
And scholars have some fun conversations about this,
but there’s some reason to believe that these guys were a little brash and maybe a little violent.
So there’s a story that comes in the book of Luke chapter nine, verse 54.
Jesus had just previously sent out his disciples a two by two,
and he had sent them out to the community.
And he said, go minister,
cast out demons,
heal the sick, come back to me.
They come back and James had been treated poorly in the community where he had been sent.
So he comes back.
This is this is verse 54,

They ask,
Lord,
do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?
And it says,
this is the beauty,
beautiful economy of scripture.
Luke says,
Jesus turned and rebuked them.
But the sons of thunder,
right?
Can we just call down fire on them and get this over with?
It is a it’s a striking kind of image here that you have impulsiveness,
that you have people who are somewhat relishing this power that Luke just told us that they had.
And, you know, I think pastors,
we tend to emphasize the that the part of Luke,
which is the central message of Luke,
that is, Jesus comes to serve the lost and the least.
That that’s what Luke wants us to know.
But we may not emphasize how Luke uses the disciples to illustrate the opposing side of that.
While Jesus comes to cast out demons and heal the sick, right,
he’s doing this restorative work.
The disciples are behind the scenes jockeying and James is coming to Jesus like,
hey, just one fireball,
right?
All we take would be one.
And we could show those people the kind of mercy that they deserve,
which is judgment, not mercy.
Right.
I think that this accentuates Luke’s message and it shows us a different side.
James has a great mom.
We’ve all known one of these moms.
A mom who their kids grow up and they’ve always been that sort of tip of the spear.
They’ve always been ahead to help their kids.
And even into adulthood,
they’re still kind of doing that.
Okay.
That this is James mom,
as told in the Bible.
This is a wonderful story.
So what ends up happening is there’s a night and I’m just going to read you the scriptural account so that I don’t give it my own flair here.
James’ mother comes to Jesus with her sons.
By the way, this is Matthew 20.
I’m not making this up.
She kneels down and asks the favor of Jesus.
What is it you want?
He asked.
She says,
grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in the kingdom of heaven.
I love the Bible because here the sons who want to call down fire on the people who reject them,
their mom comes to Jesus and says,
now,
could we get one of them on the right hand and whichever other one you pick?
I don’t really care.
Get him on the left,
right?
There’s a kind of jockeying happening here for authority inside the early church and the scriptures tell it.
It’s not like it’s hiding it.
I mean, it’s right here in plain day.
So Jesus being Jesus,
he’s always ahead of this self-interest.
He says, you don’t know what you’re asking.
Can you drink the cup?
I’m going to drink.
Sons of thunder,
right?
So here’s the response we can.
Oh yeah, bring it on Jesus.
Jesus says you will indeed drink from my cup,
but sit at my right or left is not for me to grant.
By the way,
I haven’t told you this yet,
but James is the first disciple
recorded to be martyred.
He’s only two,
one of two of the disciples whose martyrdom is recorded in scripture.
And so a one scholar pointed out and I thought very helpful.
James, in terms of what we are told about him as it relates to characters like Peter or John because of the emphasis given to those two disciples and their later historical significance,
James doesn’t get a lot of time in the scripture by proportion.
But where he is mentioned is striking because his mother comes to negotiate for him being at the right or the left.
And Jesus asked, can you drink from this cup?
And they say, we can.
James is there at the transfiguration.
James is there at the moment in which Jesus raises Jairus,
his daughter from the dead.
And guess where else James is?
James is in the garden of Gethsemane to see Jesus at this very edge of life.
And it’s striking to me that he will be the first disciple willing to lay down his life for the sake of the gospel.
And to whatever extent he is the son of thunder and he’s impulsive,
he’s clearly willing to,
if you let me say,
put his money where his mouth is.
And as the story goes on,
we move beyond the actual biblical record and we do have just a little bit of time for me to fill this out for you.
You may know that James is considered the patron saint of Spain,
which is odd because we know somewhat due to historical records that James died at the hands of King Agrippa the first.
He was one of the ruling leaders that the early church was squaring off against.
King Agrippa had him killed by sword.
Theologically we’re told,
sorry, church tradition says that he was beheaded.
That was at the year 44 A.D.
So we’re talking a full 30 years before the dissolution of the Jerusalem church.
And so because of the fact that he died in 44 A.D.,
we believe that Jesus life,
death, resurrection was somewhere around the 30 to 33 A.D.
Mark scholars debate these things.
But just use 30 as an easy round number.
You’re looking at about 14 years realistically from Jesus’s ministry
to the death of the first disciple.
And so the question is asked,
how did Spain come to claim James as their patron saint?
Because there’s really very little reason to believe he could have gotten to Spain.
But I’ll give you the prevailing theory of how that could have been.
So King
Agrippa is cracking down on Jewish dissenters in his region.
And as was very popular to do,
he enslaved a thousand men.
This is actually historically recorded.
So we know this happened.
He enslaved a thousand Jewish men and he deported them to Spain.
This is one of the reasons why King Agrippa was so hated was because he was essentially deporting Jewish fathers.
And the story is that James knew of this deportation
because he lived in the region and he decided that the Jews in Spain needed to be evangelized.
So tradition
withhold it that he got on a boat and he made his way to Spain so that he could evangelize to these a thousand men who had been deported from Palestine.
There is zero evidence that this happened.
There is no reason to believe that it did happen.
The next time in history that
James shows up in the historical record as it relates to Spain is in the year 800.
Why is 800 important?
Because the Islamic army is making their way across Europe and suddenly they
are moving Christian relics out of the way.
They’re moving it ahead of this opposing force.
And here the bishop of Spain with warfare on the on the horizon says that we have found James body in a tomb hidden as we know it always has been.
Because interestingly though there’s no historical record that James made it to Spain.
There is historical record of the Spaniards talking about it all the way around 100 to 200 AD.
So however the story got put in it’s very very old and it’s deeply deeply held.
So story goes on.
This actually became unbelievably important.
Jerusalem and Rome were the only two more popular place for pilgrims to go than the cathedral holding James body at
least reported to.
And so this becomes this important kind of pilgrimage community and I should have told you that the place where that you can go today remains is called Santiago de Campo Lesta.
There you go.
In 1884 the pope solved the problem.
So good for us.
We don’t have to have any questions about it anymore.
The pope declared that the body is indeed James’s body.
So handle scholars would say that we don’t know.
But the interesting thing is that the earliest record that we have is that by the year 200
the church had successfully evangelized in Spain.
And so I think I want to say to my credit.
I told you three weeks ago that we were going to have conversations like this so that there’s a lot that we don’t know.
But what we do know is that to this day the Spaniards trace their
ancient Christian roots to this disciple and we know that they were doing it not far after the earliest evangelism of Spain itself.
And what I find really really interesting is regardless of what we care about as people who live in the Enlightenment and in modernity is when we think of history we want to know what happened.
But when we only engage in that question and I admit to you we don’t actually know what happened.
What we do know is that the Christians in Spain not only heard the gospel but to them it was important that the gospel that they heard was the first gospel.
That they could say our roots go back to the inner three to these people and whether or not James made it to witness to these thousand men who had been enslaved and he had done that very early in his ministry.
We don’t know but what we do know is that these folks find in James a kind of witness to that original
centrality of the gospel and
maybe to their credit that that is a thing that the reformers really threw out you know they they said that ultimately our apostolicity does not lie in the people that we know.
But rather in the gospel as it’s been proclaimed right the reformers saw themselves is going back to scripture what does scripture mean what do we see in scripture and that’s beautiful.
But I just want to submit to you this week I walked away with a big smile because as someone deeply in the reform tradition I mean you know that these are I’m with the reform people.
There’s something beautiful about mom who comes and says can we get one of these two boys there and the Spaniards have claimed that son.
There’s that there’s something human about that like when we come to church it’s good to be reminded the faith has has flesh and bones these are real people and whether or not James made it you know.
At this point I don’t know that I care that much I just think there’s something really humanizing about his story in particular and.
You know maybe it’s somebody else’s bones that they have there but at least they’ve not been passing a skull around for thousands of years.
Not to be dark but yeah friends thanks for being here I believe next week is pastor appreciation so that will will preclude our visit and we will pick up again after next week.
It does so James is martyrdom is in acts I have my Bible with me I’ll get it for you yeah I’ll have that next time.
Yep will do thanks friends.