All right, I have a question for you.....Are you ready for some Bible?

Actually, what I want to offer you this morning is a Bible Trivia question. And it’s really not a very complicated question at all, so let me lay it on you. For $1,000 in the category of "The Bible," name the twelve disciples.

There’s Simon and Andrew, they were brothers. James and John, the sons of Zebedee, also brothers. Incidentally, James and John had a nickname, Boanerges, which means "Sons of Thunder." Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, Matthew (except in Mark he’s called Levi). James the son of Alphaeus, who is also called James-the-Less, how’s that for a nickname. Thaddaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot. That’s twelve, right?

Well, let me tell you a few things about the twelve disciples. The first is that it seems that the number of disciples was more significant than who they actually were. Here’s what I mean.....Paul knows that there were twelve of them, because he mentions "the Twelve" in I Corinthians. John also knew there were twelve of them, because though he doesn’t mention all twelve of their names, he does mention "the Twelve." Luke, who also wrote Acts, tells the story of how the eleven disciples left after Judas Iscariot commits suicide, choose Matthias to fill out the twelve. The requirement, Luke writes in Acts, is that it had to be a person who had traveled with them the whole time from Jesus’ baptism by John to Jesus’ ascension, and that there were several candidates before Matthias was chosen by lot. The point being that there had to be twelve. Now, there had to be twelve because there had been twelve tribes of Israel, and the bringing together of the disciples symbolized the bringing together of Israel.

At the same time, there’s not complete agreement on who the twelve actually were. John, for instance, includes someone named Nathaniel as part of the twelve. And Luke, who doesn’t mention Thaddeus, includes a second Judas. All of which points to the fact that the early church either couldn’t remember who the twelve disciples were--good news for those of us today who can’t--or that they simply didn’t care that much. Regardless, it means that the number was more important than the identities of who filled out the number.

The other thing about the Twelve is that we don’t know a whole lot about them. Sure, we know a lot about Peter. He says a lot and does a lot in the gospels and in Acts. And we know some about John, and a little about his brother, James. A few places in the gospel according to John, Thomas asks a few questions, and of course he’s forever known as being the doubter. And Judas, of course, we know about as the betrayer. But other than that, the disciples don’t say or do very much. We don’t know a whole lot about them. We’ve made up stories to fill out their lives, and traditions developed. But historically, according to the gospels, most of them are wall-flowers, silent as the night. Here are the disciples who never say a thing in the four gospels, who aren’t even mentioned as doing anything worth mentioning--we hear nothing from, or about, Thaddeus, Bartholomew, Simon the Zealot, and James-the-Less. Philip says a couple lines in the Gospel According to John, and Matthew, the tradition tells us, wrote the gospel bearing his name. And then there is Andrew.

Andrew is one of the first to be called. All the gospels agree on that. He’s Simon’s brother. He made a living being a fisherman. But mostly he’s in the shadow of Peter. We don’t know for sure, but my bet is that he was the younger brother. Being a younger brother myself, incidentally with Andrew as my middle name, I know how easy it is to fall under a big brother’s shadow. Tradition has it that he went to a place called Scythia. Tradition also has it that he went to Scotland, of which he is the patron saint. And according to the story, he was crucified on an X-shaped cross, hence the St. Andrew’s cross. But all that is story and tradition. All we know is that he was a fisherman, Simon Peter’s brother, and one of the first to be called. Because in all ninety pages of the gospels, he only says one sentence by himself, and it’s this one we hear today. He spends time with Jesus who John the Baptist points toward, and at the end of the day, at four in the afternoon, with the sun settling into the hills, he goes to his brother and says, "We have seen the Messiah." And then he brings him to Jesus.

Now, I don’t know what would have happened had he gone for a walk in the hills that afternoon instead of going back to his brother. I don’t know what would have happened had he stopped by his best friend’s house on the way home and had a cold one. I don’t know what would have happened had he been as silent with his brother as he is in the rest of the gospels, had his brother asked him "what happened today, Andrew," and he replied "Nothing." But he didn’t do those things. He went to Simon Peter, said his words, and brings his brother. Peter is brought in. Rough and foolish and impetuous Simon, who eventually becomes the Peter, the Rock; who eventually becomes one of the great leaders of the early church; who eventually is the human being who breaks down the division between Jew and Gentile when he visits and baptizes the centurion Cornelius; who eventually writes his letters; who eventually, from the perspective of our tradition, becomes the first bishop of Rome; and who eventually, like his brother, is put to death for his faith.

You see, Andrew is no giant. We don’t know much about him. He’s kind of an everyday disciple. If you want to write about him, you have to work hard to fill three paragraphs. His moments of glory are so small that you wouldn’t even call them moments of glory. But what he is, and it changes the church forever, is a "bringer." The one thing he does is bring one person to Jesus. Just one. He’s a bringer of just one, and it isn’t even a stranger. It’s his brother.

There are people in life who are up front kinds of people. They are big people, expansive people, people with a commanding presence. They carry great weight and authority. They get headlines, and they stand before crowds. They are comfortable in the public realm. Sometimes they are called great. These people are important. They galvanize public opinion, they understand the common will and give it expression, they are at the head of movements and people. They have names that we all know.

But not everyone is like that, not everyone should be like that, and not everyone can be like that. The life lived by the twelve was difficult enough. Just take a look at the gospel according to Mark to see how hard they had to work to get it straight who Jesus was. And their life would have been immeasurably more difficult had they all been Peters, and had there not been some Andrews. Not everyone lives life on the front page. Not everyone likes a public life, not everyone feels comfortable in front of a large group, not everyone wants the kind of life about which books are written. In fact, that’s most of us. Most of us are background people, at work and at home and at school, we make our way with little fanfare or adulation. We do our jobs, and we love our kids, and we participate in the life of the community. We are, in essence, Andrews. People write novelizations of the lives of Peter and Paul and Mary. They don’t do that about Andrew.

Well I’m here to tell you that being an Andrew is a wonderful thing. It is more than a wonderful thing, it is a crucial thing. It is an essential thing. It is a heroic thing.

Today is our annual meeting, and I invite you to stay after the worship service to be part of the meeting. You’re going to hear about a lot of different things. New vestry committee members, and an update on the building, and the progress toward a second worship service and other things that are part of the next steps work, and an operating budget for 1999. The next two forums after that will deal more fully with other aspects of our next steps as a community, and you should have received in the mail this past week some information about some special gatherings during the first two weeks of February that we hope every adult at Christ Church will be part of. We’ll be having our first ever Shrove Tuesday Pancake supper on February 16, to which everyone is invited, and we begin a new chapter in our life on February 21 with two worship services. If one were to accuse this congregation of being self-satisfied and sitting still, there would be no evidence for conviction.

But I just want to remind all of us of our origins, because our future is tied up in our past. We’re not here to play church, and I can’t imagine why anyone would come here to do that since we’re here in this auditorium. And we’re not here to build a building. The creation of a permanent home is the creation of a valuable tool for ministry. It’s intent is to help us be ministers.

We’re here, God created us, because there is at least one person who needs to be saved. There is at least one person who needs to feel God’s love in the pit of their soul where there are no places left to hide. There is at least one person who needs to have someone say to her or him, "We have seen the Messiah. We have seen the one, we have found the one, we know the one, you are waiting for. Your wait is over, and your God is nearer than a whisper, nearer than a kiss." Really, in our area, there are about 20,000 people who need that. But we don’t start with 20,000. We start with just one. Because there is one for whom it will mean the difference between life and death, love and fear, hurt and wholeness.

And I don’t know who that one is. But maybe you do.

At our first worship service some sixty-four months ago I said that if one person says yes to God because Christ Church was born, our existence would be justified. And on the day of our sixth and final annual meeting of the 1900's, that is still true. And my hunch is that in the sixty-four months of our existence, at least one person has said yes. But what I know for sure is that there is at least one more person out there who needs to, for the sake of their own soul.

If you are new here, we don’t want you to do a thing here until you are ready to do something. Sit back and worship, and enjoy being with this community. We have always maintained that it is okay to receive for as long as someone needs to receive.

But if you have been around a while, I invite you to think about who that one person is for you. I invite you to imagine being Andrew, and consider who your Simon Peter is. Martin Luther King Jr was a big leader, but he wouldn’t have been had there not been a Rosa Parks who did nothing but sit down. And Peter was a big leader, but he wouldn’t have been had there not been a little brother who told him what happened that day. We all had only one first day of our life. We all take only one first step of a journey. And the beginning of something great and life changing and important as the whole world, may begin with that one person in your heart right now.

If this were our last day, and there was one more because one of us has been an Andrew, that would be okay. If the building burned down right now, and we had to start over, and there was one more because one of us has been an Andrew, that would be okay. Because we won’t be asked about the many, we’ll be asked about the one, for humanly the fate of the church has always rested more stoutly on the shoulders of the Andrews than it has on the shoulders of the Peters.

So we’re going to meet and talk about our future after the worship service, and after the next few worship services, and into the month of February. We make plans praying they are godly plans. We do all that stuff a church does.

But really, here’s the question: Who’s the one. For you, who’s the one?