Owing to the fact that his putative remains are kept in Amalfi Cathedral, it could be said that I’ve been to a wedding with the Apostle Andrew. I must confess I have my doubts.

And it might be that those sorts of things mean you have your doubts about the possibility of saints’ days featuring in a supposedly Reformed blog about the liturgical calendar. It’s certainly fair to say this is one area where the English Reformation ended up looking more like the Lutheran churches than the other Reformed churches. If that’s you, I understand why you might be sceptical and hope to devote a blog post or two to it at some point in ‘ordinary time’, when the absence of other seasonal things to write about mean I plan on doing some more general reflection on the calendar as a spirituality. For the time being, let me just assure you that in our house we don’t venerate, invoke, or pray to saints – Article XXII of the Church of England has some rather robust things to say about that.

St Andrew’s day doesn’t always fall in Advent. Since the start of Advent moves around depending on what day of the week Christmas is, St Andrew’s day ends up in just slightly more often than it doesn’t. So if I keep this going until the end of this liturgical year, you’ll actually get St Andrew’s day twice – once in Advent and once in ordinary time.

The collect for the day focuses on how Andrew ‘readily obeyed’ Christ’s call ‘and followed him without delay’. The accompanying reading, taken from Matthew 4, is the familiar story of the calling of the first disciples. In it, Andrew, along with Peter, James and John, leave behind their fishing nets to follow Jesus.

The first thing this brought to my mind was the similarity to Abraham. In one of the more widespread iterations of the Advent wreath tradition (more on which in a future post), Abraham is the figure remembered in the first candle. Like Abraham, Andrew and the other Apostles left people and father’s house behind (notice James and John leave Zebedee) to follow God’s call.

Relatively few of us are called to leave our jobs and become itinerant evangelists in the way Andrew was – though some of us are! But the collect doesn’t let us off the hook that easily. In it we acknowledge that we are all called in God’s holy word to ‘forthwith give up ourselves obediently to obey [God’s] holy commandments’. In Advent, this fits well with the accent on repentance established by the first collect.

But it also reminded me of a still more radical application of Advent hope. Paul teaches that one of the implications of the future return of Jesus is that all of us should hold on far more lightly to the things of this age:

‘From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.’

1 Cor 7:29b-31

This is, frankly, uncomfortably challenging. Not only should our hope of Christ’s return fuel repentance from sin, but it should also loosen our grip even on perfectly natural and legitimate activities in this present age. We may not literally leave behind families and businesses as Andrew did, but we are all called to lives where our Advent hope radically relativises their importance in our hearts and in our actions.

In terms of what we actually did this year, it was a fairly muted celebration at our house as I’m unwell. Obviously, the whole idea of patron saints rests on a theology of sainthood that I don’t believe in (see above) but we do sometimes let it inspire our menu choices for saints’ days. St Andrew is a patron saint, not only of Scotland, but of nations as diverse as Singapore (for which I have a special affection) and Barbados as well as, rather poignantly, both Russia and Ukraine.