Last week, in our reading from the Gospel of John, we heard John the Baptist herald Jesus as the messiah, the Lamb of God. And then briefly, we heard that gospel’s version of the calling of Andrew and his brother Simon Peter as disciples. This week, we are back in the Gospel of Matthew, where we will spend most of the coming year, and we hear Matthew’s version of the calling of these two apostles, along with James and John, the sons of Zebedee.
But I want to talk to you first about another disciple of Christ. Not one of the Twelve, but rather a later disciple, a disciple that’s a bit more like you and me. This past Thursday was January 20th and on January 20th in the calendar of the church, we commemorate the life and witness of one of the more obscure saints. January 20th is the feast day of Fabian, a bishop of Rome and eventual martyr who died for the faith in the year 250.
When the calendar of the church calls us to commemorate one of the saints, here at Christ & Saint Stephen’s that’s exactly what we do. On Thursdays, we read morning and evening prayer in the chapel and on this past Thursday when we did so, we honored Fabian, by reading a bit about him and praying the collect appointed for Fabian’s feast day. There’s not a whole lot of material out there about Fabian. But we do know Fabian existed. His tomb still exists at Rome and you can still read on the tombstone the words ‘Fabian… bishop… martyr…’ to this day.
A few other facts are known of Fabian and our main resource for those is a book put out by the Episcopal Church called Lesser Feasts and Fasts which contains the collects written for feast days and the readings to be used at a Eucharist celebrating the individual saints, martyrs and others we regard as exemplars of the faith.
If not much is really known about a saint, then Lesser Feasts and Fasts will give an account of the traditional beliefs and pious legends associated with the saint. We have another resource for these lesser commemorations -- which doesn’t quite sound right, does it? Are these saints and martyrs lesser than others? Well, the author of this other resource seems to have a problem with that ‘lesser’ designation. He is the Rev. Sam Portaro, a campus minister, writer and theologian and in the way of these sorts of things in the world today, my Facebook friend as well. Father Portaro calls his book Brightest and Best: A Companion to the Lesser Feasts and Fasts. Brightest and Best is a collection of reflections and homilies on the lives of these supposedly lesser women and men.
On a given weekday in the Christ & Saint Stephen’s Chapel here to my right, we might begin the day with the short reading about the life of someone like Fabian from Lesser Feasts and Fasts just before Morning Prayer, and in the evening, we’ll precede Evening Prayer with Father Portaro’s parallel reading from Brightest and Best. And in the case of Fabian this past Thursday, Lesser Feasts and Fasts and Brightest and Best give you almost everything that can be known about this third century martyr.
If you Google Fabian, you’ll get sent to that repository of all knowledge great and small and sometimes erroneous called Wikipedia, where the default page that comes up is actually about another Fabian, Fabian Anthony Forte, who was, like the good bishop, known only as by his first name. This Fabian was a teenage heartthrob from the late 50s and early 60s. St. Fabian plays a poor second fiddle in the Wikipedia world to Fabian the heartthrob.
But it seems worth noting about this other Fabian that he was from a good Italian Catholic family in Philadelphia who knew how to hand out a proper Christian name! Pope Benedict was railing last week about the dereliction parents have fallen into of late in regard to making sure that their babies are baptized with proper Christian names, the names of saints and martyrs, great and small. Not a sin that can be laid at the door of Josephine and Dominic Forte of South Philly.
Not to disappear completely down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, which I’m prone to do, I’m afraid, no more so than when writing a sermon, but I’ll just note that Fabian himself has a son, a noted screenwriter, and Fabian’s son’s first name? Christian! Now that’s a proper Christian name that any pope could love!
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Though the facts may be thin on the ground, what we hope to know about saints is the miraculous wonders they were able to work and the piety of their lives and the holy sacrifices they made. St. Francis reformed the monasteries and led a life of poverty and piety. He could commune with the animals and was visited with the holy, rather gruesome and no doubt painful, stigmata. Now those are the things you want to know about a saint.
What we know of Fabian is as I’ve said, not much. No where is it recorded that he was much of a heartthrob to the swooning teenage girls of Ancient Rome. He was known for that most inspiring of holy attributes: his administrative abilities. Fabian is famous for organizing Rome into sections that could then fall under the care of this or that deacon or ecclesiastical secretary. Fabian kind of invented the parish and the system of parochial administration that is still very much a part of most church organization. Now, that’s a feat to inspire the generations, isn’t it?
He was also a bit famous for his building program. Again, who doesn’t love a saint who carries out
successful capital improvements? Fabian renovated and improved parts of the catacombs in Rome preserving the burial places of Christian martyrs and saints from times earlier even than his own. And like many of the early saints and the disciples themselves, Fabian was martyred for the faith. The emperor Decius, in what was probably the first empire-wide persecution of the church, killed Fabian along with many other Christians. Fabian was one of the first to be martyred in Decius’s persecution, and his courage in facing his death was said to be an inspiration. When the hearts of his fellow martyrs throbbed with fear, they thought of Fabian and were given courage to face their fate.
He was, then, a good and faithful disciple -- if a somewhat obscure to us today. There’s not much you can say about Fabian, but you can say that he was a good worker, got things done, very organized, dealt well with contractors and builders, no doubt. You can say that he was good at dying too, he was inspiring in accepting the martyr’s lot.
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Obscurity was not the fate for those very first disciples of Christ, some of whom we read about in our gospel today. There aren’t many churches named St. Fabian’s, but there are boatloads of St. Andrews’s and St. James’s and St. John’s, and there are some rather famous St. Peter’s. And that’s due, of course, to the gospels which have recorded some of the exploits and histories of Andrew and Simon Peter, James and John. And particularly, what is actually the second volume of Luke’s Gospel, the Acts of the Apostles. We can know quite a bit relatively speaking about the very first disciples of Christ from the record that remains in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Acts.
But I think it’s worth peeling away some of the fame and regard that we very rightly have for the Twelve Apostles, to see just how obscure a lot they were in the beginning -- before being called to be the Twelve Apostles. Andrew, Simon Peter, James and John in today’s gospel, are fishermen. Now there’s nothing wrong with being a fishermen. Being a fisherman is a noble profession, even heroic at times, or so we might say if the writers of the scriptures had more of a reality TV approach, and left behind something like what the Discovery Channel would call Deadliest Catch: Galilee Edition.
But really, Jesus? Fishermen? I mean, most fishermen tell a good tale, we know. So, ok, maybe if you’re going to want to spread the gospel, folks who tell a good story are a good lot to recruit. Ok, I can see that.
But if you read today’s gospel as if you’re hearing it for the first time, and if you try to free your mind of all the accrued reverence that we hold for the Twelve Apostles, you can get a bit of the sense of the randomness of the calling of Andrew, Simon Peter, James and John. You can get a sense of the obscurity in which these Galilean fishermen lived and worked prior to this guy Jesus coming along. The reference in the gospel to Isaiah which we also read today connotes this sense of obscurity and insignificance that permeates this gospel scene. “Don’t worry, Zebulon and Naphtali, and Galilee of the Gentiles. There’s not much for you to do there but sit around in darkness and the shadow of death, but someday, maybe, you’ll get to see something cool, something worth remembering and talking about might happen in your parts someday… maybe.”
In the parallel section of John’s gospel, one of the Twelve Apostles himself says it best. Just after our gospel selection from last week, John’s gospel tells us of the calling of a couple of other disciples. John tells us in chapter 1, beginning at verse 46, that Jesus ‘finds’ Philip, that’s how John puts it, kind of random, he sort just chances upon Philip and recruits him. Philip, we learn, is from Andrew and Simon Peter’s hometown, so it’s likely that he knows some of the crew that’s being gathered up. And then Philip reaches out to his buddy Nathaniel, one of the truly obscure disciples about whom very little is known. Except for this bit in John’s gospel when Philip says to Nathaniel, “We’ve found him! The one that Moses and the prophets predicted! He’s this guy Jesus from Nazareth!” And Nathaniel says, “Really… Jesus of Nazareth… Can anything good ever come out of Nazareth?”
For Nathaniel, is just too weird, too random. Some nobody from a literal backwater, populated with fishermen. Not a hotspot, not a chosen destination. No vacation brochures in the ancient world touted world-wind trips to Zebulon, Naphtali and Galilee for wild nights of sitting in darkness and the shadow of death -- with those heartthrobs, the men of Deadliest Catch: Galilee Edition.
So random, so obscure, so seemingly insignificant these people and where they come from. But friends, you and I are here this morning, due to the hard work, the faithfulness, the miraculous depths that lay within these few fishermen. The story of Jesus and his life and preaching and his sacrifice on the cross could have easily died out, or could have become known only in the obscurest of histories of the ancient world. There are such histories and they include accounts of a few Jesus wannabes -- miracle workers and would-be messiahs who gained a following and who were eliminated by the powers that be to keep the peace. But there was something about this one, this Jesus of, of all places, Nazareth that transcended his own obscurity. There was something about him that lit a fire in the hearts and minds of those who encountered him, turning fishermen into apostles.
And let us give those fishermen their due, because no matter how obscure and insignificant they once were, no matter how cowardly they proved to be when the going got tough -- Fabian can rightly thumb his nose at the Twelve Apostles on that account, because Fabian went bravely to his martyr’s death, and eleven of the Twelve Apostles, upon Jesus’ death, when fearing for their own lives, cut and run. But no matter how obscurely they began, or how cowardly they proved to be on the day of decision, these apostles and their witness and work is what has brought us us here today.
They were nobodies but yet they were called, and they heard and heeded that call, and within themselves they found the means to bring Christ to a hostile world. They weren’t without their faults, but still, they told the story with such passion and conviction, that it has come down to us today and continues to inspire us, to change lives, to make our hearts throb even now.
I wonder if they will say the same about us someday. “Oh, she was just an actress. You know, he was a lawyer, a teacher… I think she did something in finance… I’m not sure where he was from; some Podunk town… But I remember how he lived his life, I remember how inspired she was by her faith -- it made her inspiring, really! Oh, he had his faults certainly. He could be kind of dog at times. But I knew he had found something that meant a great deal to him, and it sent me searching for that something too.” Will they say such things about us someday? I hope so.
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You know, there’s something else about Fabian that makes him memorable. Much like the disciples, much like you and me, Fabian was truly an obscure person when he was chosen bishop of Rome. He wasn’t even a clergy person, or for that matter a Roman. Fabian was, of all things, a tourist, a visitor to Rome, when the open-air assembly that would choose the next bishop of Rome gathered. Of course, there was noise and commotion and onlookers gathered, among them Fabian. And then in the hubbub, a dove flew overhead and lighted upon Fabian. All those gathered took this to be a sign from God, and like it or not, Fabian was elected bishop of Rome by acclamation. Now, that, my friends, is truly being plucked from obscurity, plucked quite literally by a dove.
Remember that dove, think about Fabian the next time you start to consider what you might offer to God, what role you might play in the mission of the church, in the work God calls each of us to do. You might think you’re not ‘apostle material’, but then that could be said of those Galilean fishermen. You might think that where your from or what you do isn’t going to inspire anyone. Well, time and time again, that hasn’t proven to be the case. Look at Fabian. Granted, he’s not the most famous of saints, but he did inspire others, those who had a very tough road to follow, the road to martyrdom. And his administrative and property management skills were a gift to the church, their impact is felt to this day. There was nothing to predict what Fabian would accomplish for God, who he would inspire; as with the Twelve Apostles, who could have guessed what a few fishermen might inspire, what a legacy they would leave.
Fabian’s example should always remind us that God chooses us for myriad reasons, for work that only he can see that we are capable of. As Father Portaro puts it in his Brightest and Best, God
“sometimes gives to the church its richest gifts and its most valued leaders on no stronger recommendation than the whimsy of a dove.” ~ Amen+
© The Rev. Mark R. Collins
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