The encouragement of an obscure Saint.

On Wednesday morning, groggy with sleep and sinus infection, I stumbled into the chapel vesting room to prepare for the 7AM Eucharist. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a splotch of a red on the liturgical calendar. Red indicates the commemoration of a martyr, in this case St. Bartholomew, one of the twelve apostles. Bartholomew, tradition tells us was martyred by being flayed. He is portrayed in art with a knife in one hand and his own skin in the other.

Think about Bartholomew for a moment…Allow the great childhood Sunday school stories of Bartholomew fill you. Ponder all you know of Bartholomew from your personal Bible study…

Is your mind flooded with remembrances of this great saint? Are you overwhelmed with gratitude at the anecdotes of his faithfulness? Or does your mind, like mine, draw a TOTAL blank?

We drew a blank because a Biblegateway search reveals no information about anyone named Bartholomew in the Bible outside of his being listed among the twelve in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke). We know nothing about Bartholomew from scripture. But we do know the fruit of his life: Bartholomew, tradition tells us, was the evangelist of the Armenians – The one ethnic group in the middle east to have successfully resisted Islam and wave after wave of persecution from every direction.

Bartholomew may have lived anonymously and died tragically, without a word or deed of his life recorded. But 2000 years later the results of what he did and said are still bearing fruit. The Armenian people, the subject of genocides and persecution, are sustained by the faith learned from Bartholomew the obscure.

Life, for all of , includes the tragic and painful. You may toil in obscurity. But the fruit of a life given away in service to our Lord Jesus points others to him not ourselves anyway. The legacy of a Christian is not our words, but his…not our deeds but his on our behalf. The example of St. Bartholomew tells us that a life given away for the Master always bears fruit. And always, always, matters.

*Bartholomew may be the apostle identified as Nathanael in John 1. Nathanael is the apostle that when Philip went and found him to take him to Jesus said, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” When Nathanael went with him to Jesus,  Jesus said, “There is an Israelite in whom there is no guile.” Nathanael responded, “How do you know me?” When Jesus told him he saw him sitting under a tree miles away, Nathanael responded with an astounding statement of faith, “You are the son of God, the King of Israel.”