What Are You Looking For?

Sermon for Nov. 23, 2025 – feast of St. Andrew, transferred
Matthew 4:18-22

As we celebrate St. Andrew this morning, I want to tell you a story.  No surprise – it’s his story, which seems right for this day.  But I’m going to tell it to you backwards because, sometimes, the best way to know where we’re going is to know where we’ve begun.

So, let’s start where we find St. Andrew now.  Spiritually, that would be here, and in countless other congregations in the Episcopal Church and around the world.  You might wonder, what’s the Episcopalian connection to St. Andrew anyway?  On our Episcopal shield, you find the X-shaped cross of St. Andrew – why that instead of any other disciples’ symbol?  It’s because of our historical connection to Scotland, where Andrew is also the patron saint.  It was Scottish bishops who consecrated the first Episcopalian bishop for the new United States, Samuel Seabury (you’ll find his window up there, on the lectern side); and it was the Scottish Church’s prayer consecrating the bread and wine for Eucharist that we put in our first American Book of Common Prayer.

OK.  There’s our connection to Scotland.  So, what does Andrew have to do with Scotland?  It’s a good question, given that Andrew never went there while he was alive.  Instead, the story is that Andrew’s remains were lifted and taken there from Greece in the 300s by a monk named Regulus.  The monk had a vision telling him to take Andrew’s bones and sail to the ends of the earth, wherever the Holy Spirit and the prevailing winds took him.  It turned out Regulus’ ship ran aground at what’s now St. Andrews in Scotland, which was pretty much the end of the earth for 4^th-century Greek sailors.  There, the monk founded a cathedral and a center of Christian learning to help bring the Good News to the people of Scotland.

OK, Andrew’s bones were taken to Scotland from Greece.  So, how did a Galilean fisherman end up being buried in Greece?  Tradition says Andrew was martyred around the year 60 at Patras in western Greece, crucified on an X-shaped cross.  That’s what’s under Andrew’s arm in the stained-glass window over the altar, just to the left of Jesus.  Tradition says Andrew taught about Jesus in Greece after stops in Thrace, a region that straddles what’s now Bulgaria and Turkey.  In Byzantium, later Constantinople and now Istanbul, he’s said to have consecrated the first bishop for this place that became an important patriarchate of the Orthodox Church.

Of course, we don’t have hard evidence for any of that, and other countries’ traditions remember different stories about Andrew’s travels.  He’s honored as a patron saint in the nations of Georgia, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Malta, Romania, and, ironically, both Ukraine and Russia, one of the few things uniting those countries now.  But the dominant tradition is that he ended his life on that X-shaped cross in western Greece.

So, if that’s how Andrew answered the call to be Jesus’ witness “to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8), what do we know about Andrew as he traveled with Jesus himself?

Well, the last word we get about Andrew in the Gospels comes from John.  Just after Jesus rides into Jerusalem in triumph on Palm Sunday, with everyone shouting “Hosanna!” and proclaiming him king, a couple of non-Jewish strangers come up to the disciple Philip and say, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus” (12:21).  Philip takes these outsiders up the chain of command to Andrew, and Andrew makes the call that these two “Greeks” are worth Jesus’ time and attention (12:20).  For Jesus, it’s his sign that the time for his glorification has come – because not just the Jews of Jerusalem but also these representatives of other nations are seeing in Jesus the light of hope and healing.  I think it’s also an important sign for Andrew, maybe something he hadn’t seen before – that his call doesn’t stop with walking alongside Jesus there in Galilee and Judea.  He’ll find himself talking to lots of “Greeks” as he takes Jesus’ hope and healing on the road.

Earlier in the Gospel story, Andrew takes center stage in John’s version of feeding the 5,000.  When Jesus tells the disciples to give the crowd something to eat, Andrew is the one who finds the boy with the five loaves and two fish.  Of course, that doesn’t seem like much.  But – and I think this is important –Andrew isn’t ashamed to bring to Jesus precisely what God has given him.  He’s living in the hope that Jesus can take what we see as our meager gifts and use them to bless thousands.

But when did Andrew actually sign up for this gig as a disciple?  For most of Jesus’ followers, the Gospel writers don’t give us a specific story.  But for those who were part of Jesus’ inner circle, we get vignettes that draw on their past to reveal something special Jesus sees in each of them.

And the first of those is our Gospel reading today, where we overhear Jesus calling two sets of brothers – Andrew and Peter, as well as James and John.  All we’re told is that “they were fishermen”– in fact, that’s what they’re busy doing as Jesus walks by and rocks their world (Matthew 4:18).  Jesus sees Andrew and Peter “casting a net into the sea” (4:18) – which, as any fisherman knows, is fundamentally an act of faith.  Are the fish actually there?  Am I in the right spot?  Do I have the right equipment?  Who knows, right? You just cast out your net or cast out your line in the assurance that, eventually, your work and your faith will be rewarded.  It’s amazing, the faith of a fisherman.  Well, Andrew and Peter must have been blessed with that kind of persistent faith – and for Jesus, this moment seems like just the right time to cast the net himself.  He yells out to them, “Follow me, and I’ll make you fish for people” (4:19).  Somehow, that offer must have seemed much more rewarding than the kind of fishing they knew, because they left their nets “immediately” to follow him (4:20).

I’ve always been skeptical about this story.  I mean, what small-business owner closes up shop permanently to follow a wandering preacher?  In Matthew’s Gospel, this is the first time we meet Andrew, so we have no backstory to help make sense of his decision.  But if we look to another source, we find backstory that Matthew apparently doesn’t know.  It’s from John’s Gospel again, very early on.  In the story, Jesus hasn’t even said anything yet; all we know so far is that John the Baptist is pointing to Jesus as the Lamb of God, the one who’s come to take away the sin of the world.  Well, when two of John the Baptist’s followers hear this, they break off from John’s group to go check out the new guy.  One of these two is Andrew, making his first appearance in the Gospel story.  So, Andrew and his friend tag along after Jesus, which Jesus notices, being Jesus.  He turns around, looks them in the eye, and asks, “What are you looking for?” (John 1:38).

Let’s pause the story just a moment because this is one of my favorite verses in all of Scripture.  It’s Jesus, God in the flesh, just cutting to the heart of the matter and asking the question that starts every spiritual journey:  “What are you looking for?”  Talk about God meeting us where we are.  Jesus gives no order to follow religious rules.  He makes no demand for worship.  He doesn’t even expect service right off the bat.  Instead, Jesus’ first question to Andrew is God’s first question to you and me, too:  “What are you looking for?”  I think that might be the richest question we could take with us today, something to chew on long past Thursday’s turkey.

Anyway, back to the story.  Andrew and his friend respond saying, “Teacher, where are you staying” – probably just trying to come up with something to say rather than standing there, slack-jawed, when Jesus comes up and talks to them.  And Jesus replies with maybe the other best line in all of Scripture.  The God who starts out with life’s richest question then offers them life’s richest invitation:  “Come and see” (1:39).  And they do.  Andrew and his friend hang out with Jesus all day.  When the sun starts setting and the divine interview comes to an end, Andrew heads back home to find the person he loves most, his brother, Simon Peter – because, when your life truly starts opening up before you, you can’t keep it to yourself, right?  So, Andrew says to Peter, “We have found the Messiah,” and he brings Peter to meet Jesus … thereby starting a movement that will change the world.

I think Andrew’s origin story matters.  After all, none of the rest of his discipleship would have happened without Andrew’s willingness to engage Jesus’ rich question and invitation:  “What are you looking for?  Come and see.”  All the rest of Andrew’s faithful work begins there.

We are no different.  We may not have universities and golf courses named after us.  We may not die a martyr’s death and see ourselves in stained-glass windows.  We may not travel to the ends of the earth to share God’s love with others.  But our journey starts just where Andrew’s journey started – with Jesus asking us, “What are you looking for?”

Once the turkey dinner and the football games and the weekend’s shopping are behind us, we’ll begin a journey ourselves, a four-week journey starting next Sunday – the season of Advent.  Now, the Church would tell us that Advent is a time to prepare our hearts to receive Christ anew and to prepare for his coming at the end of the age, when he returns to set the world to rights.  Yes … and … maybe before all that, Advent is a time to hear God asking you, “What are you looking for?”  The answer’s probably not parties and presents and too many commitments.  The answer’s probably more along the lines of … healing, and purpose, and meaning, and peace.  Well then, Jesus says, “Come and see.”

There are many ways to do that.  I don’t pretend to have just the right answer for you, but you’ll find several possibilities to consider on the Advent page of our website – ways to breathe and connect with what you’re truly looking for.  It might happen in a book study.  It might happen in a class on grief during the holidays.  It might happen in the silence, chants, and candles of a Taizé service.  It might happen in a Saturday spent in retreat.  It might happen through giving of yourself to bless neighbors in Kansas City or kids in Haiti.  It might happen simply through lighting a candle, finding a prayerful podcast, and turning in a new direction.

However you do it, the point is to start a journey.  You don’t have to measure up to anyone else’s definition of what it means to follow Jesus.  Like Andrew, all you have to do is take Jesus up on the offer.  All you have to do is “come and see.”