Year C St. Bartholomew Luke 22:24-30

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High, abides under the shadow of the Almighty.

Or – as the modern song puts it:

You who dwell in the shelter of the Lord Who abide in His shadow for life . . .

What does it mean to abide under the shadow of the Almighty? To live in God’s shadow means that loving faith on our part will be met by faithful love on the part of God. We are called to be steadfast, trusting in God and loving Him completely.

So difficult can this be for us, God came down to earth and took human form. Mother Teresa often said that she had no imagination and because of this she prayed always to Jesus. A human being was someone she could envision, could love and trust without the strain of trying to imagine Almighty God.

And this is what the disciples had, the human Jesus, to follow, to learn from, to emulate, to trust, and to love. The connection was so powerful that, after His resurrection, they did not pause to do His will, but went out and spread the Good News, the Gospel.

However, before that time arrived, before Jesus death and resurrection, like all human beings, like us, they were prone to some petty arguments and disagreements.

A dispute arose among the disciples as to which one of them was to be regarded as the greatest.

So begins our Gospel for the Feast of St. Bartholomew. A group of men, following an itinerant rabbi, think there ought to be a proper hierarchy. In fact, today, many people accept the hierarchy that has developed in both the Roman Catholic Church and in many Protestant denominations. People crave a sense of worldly order. They want to know who is in charge, both to discern who has the authority, who gets the praise, and also where the buck stops if things go wrong. As it is now, so it was in ancient times. Thus, Jesus’ answer comes as a surprise.

The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you; rather the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves

This isn’t what people want to hear. No one wants to be told they should be “lower” in the social order. Everything we are taught insists we should “climb the ladder of success”. Jesus’ disciples obviously felt this way, only to be told that that was not the way Jesus intended it to be. It would have taken a great deal of steadfast love and trust to adhere to this teaching.

From what we know of the disciples they did remain steadfast, faithful to Jesus, spreading His Love through the then known world. We know many of their stories how they, as the hymn says, “toiled and fought and lived and died for the Lord they loved and knew”. But as you probably noticed this morning, despite the lessons being those appointed by the Church for this Feast Day, none of today’s readings mention St. Bartholomew by name.

All I knew of St. Bartholomew when I was young was based on the Apostles’ shields displayed around the top of the wall in our parish nave. Over the priest’s sacristy door was a shield with three knives on it – this turned out to be the shield of St. Bartholomew and the knives the instruments of his martyrdom.

Indeed, little is known of the saint. If you were to research him, you would discover that Bartholomew was probably not his proper name, but one that, in keeping with Jewish traditions of that period in history, indicated who his father was. Bartholomew means, literally, son of Tolmai (toll-my). This one small fact and the surety that he did exist is all we know with certainty about him.

Who was this person? Scholars think his name may have been Nathaniel. They base this on Phillip, another of the disciples of Jesus. In Matthew, Mark and Luke Philip and Bartholomew are always mentioned together – “Phillip and Bartholomew”. In John’s Gospel there is no mention of Bartholomew, but John puts Philip with Nathaniel. Well, that sounds like reasonable assumption, that Bartholomew and Nathaniel might be one and the same, but not all scholars agree that this is so. We will never know for certain.

Everything else we “know” of Bartholomew is based on legends and traditions. According to these, he traveled widely and converted many people in many nations. It is generally accepted he ended up in Armenia where, steadfast to the end, according to legend, he was skinned alive and beheaded. Those knives on his shield, all the Apostles have shields, represent the three flensing knives, used to flay the skin from his body,

St. Bartholomew is revered in Armenia, The Armenian Apostolic Church honours him as one of its two patron saints. He is celebrated in Great Britain, and throughout the Church the myths and legends that surround his ministry are widely accepted as, if not fact, certainly the next best thing. But who Bartholomew really is or was, is obscure. He is an Apostle, a great saint, and during his lifetime a servant to all for Jesus sake, and, we believe, he died a martyr’s death.

I sing a song of the saints of God, patient and brave and true, who toiled and fought and lived and died for the Lord they loved and knew.

This is a British children’s’ hymn with which many of us are familiar. It goes on to name the professions of the many, many people who are unrecognized saints of God, assuring us that they loved the Lord and did His will. They hymn concludes with the assurance that saints still live among us today, brightening the world with light and love, and concludes “For the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.”

This hymn tells us is that, like Saint Bartholomew, to be a saint doesn’t mean being well known. It doesn’t involve being written up in ancient scrolls or modern news reports. It doesn’t mean anyone will ever recognize us, or applaud us, for the work we do for Jesus. It does mean it might benefit us to take a closer look at each and every person we meet, even those folks we think we already know very well.

Many of us think of our mothers as sainted souls, but we also assume we know most of what there is to know about them. It wasn’t until I was twenty-one, just after my grandmother died, that my mother told me that she was adopted. I was in my forties and already an ordained priest when she revealed that she came from a Jewish family. And it was later still that my sister and I were told she starred in a silent film in the 1920s that raised money for Armenia, money that saved the lives of thousands of Armenian orphans. In recent years, but before her death, she was honoured by the Armenian Near East Foundation, receiving their highest award, their medal of honour.

All of us may well have similar stories, unexpected secrets discovered in the lives of people we thought we knew so well. But sometimes we really don’t know people the way we think we do. We have that terrifying tendency to categorize folks, to see social status, to judge. The beggar we shun, the powerful individual to whom we defer, what do we really know about them? The social order to which we cling causes us to struggle for “place”, never looking deeper, and it goes against Jesus command to be a servant to all.

We are called to treat every person we meet as Christ, to see Jesus in every individual, and when engaged in conversation, to listen. Someone meeting us, talking to us, ought to feel like they are the only person in the world at that moment, the center of our loving attention. As Jesus Himself told us in the parable, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

We don’t know much factually about St. Bartholomew. Just as we know little of him, the world may never know much about us, just as we really know so little about each other. But when our time comes, and we stand before the Throne, may God see in us the steadfast, loving person Jesus calls us to be. May it be said to us, as it was certainly said to Bartholomew, “Well done, good and faithful servant”.

Let us pray:

Lord Jesus, in the endless upheavals and distractions of this worldly life, three things we pray: to see thee more clearly, love thee more dearly, follow thee more nearly day by day. May we love and serve you in every way – in each and every person we meet. We ask this for Your love and mercy’s sake. Amen.