By Reverend Laurie DeMott

Who could this composer be who not only transcends style but time itself? The CD collection trumpeted by this clever ad is featuring music attributed to the composer "Anonymous."

"No artist sketched his features," the ad reminds us, "no poet sang her praises, yet 'Anonymous' is the single most prolific composer in history."

Anonymous has written more music than any single musician, penned more proverbs than any single sage, and left behind more good deeds than any single saint.

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, someone scribbled across one of the broken pieces: "Many small people who in many small places do many small things can alter the face of the world."

I've been preaching a series on the disciples of Jesus, looking at what their lives and experiences can teach us, and I've explored the lessons of Peter, and James and John, and Matthew, and even the famous women around Jesus -- Mary and Martha, and Mary Magdalene -- but today I want to focus on those disciples who are really only a step away from being Anonymous. These are the disciples who make the list of the twelve apostles in at least one of the gospels but none make it into the lists of all four. These are the men about whom we know literally nothing except for their name, and even that is sometimes in doubt. These are the men that the Bible is talking about when it says things like "and then Peter and Andrew and some of the other disciples went with Jesus." They are the "etc" of the apostles, the "and those other guys".

Let's take a closer look at these etceteras.

Simon the Zealot is mentioned by three of the gospels in their lists of twelve and then never heard from again. The fact that "Zealot" is attached to his name might suggest that we could at least assume he was a firebrand, except that only Luke calls him a Zealot. Matthew and Mark call him Simon the Cananaean, and if he was part of some political activist movement, he apparently never did anything memorable enough to be recorded.

And then there's Bartholomew, who was so forgettable that it's possible we don't even really know his first name. Bar means 'son of' so the gospel writers might have been saying, "And then there was Tholomew's son -- oh what was that boy's name? Well, anyway, one of the sons of Tholomew was among the 12."

The early Catholic church tried to correct this oversight on the part of the gospel writers: they matched up Bartholomew, who appears in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, with the apostle Nathaniel, who is mentioned only in the gospel of John, to create one disciple that the church called Nathaniel bar (son of) Tholomew. This gave poor anonymous Tholomew's boy a first name but there's no real evidence for this dubious, though compassionate, scholarship.

One of my favorite of the almost anonymous disciples is Judas, the son of James, or as the gospel of John calls him, "the Judas who is not Judas Iscariot." That's kind of like introducing Chuck Shultz as "The Charles who is not Charles Manson." Well, I guess it's good to know at least that you're not talking to a deranged psychopath but most people would want a little broader resume when they are introduced. Once again, Catholic tradition tried to fill in the gap by saying that this other Judas, the son of James, in Luke and John, must be the same man as Thaddaeus mentioned only by Matthew and Mark because, they said rather unconvincingly, Thaddaeus could have just been a nickname.

And finally, the last of the etcetera disciples is James the son of Alphaeus, dubbed by the church as "James the lesser." If Judas, son of James, is known mostly for not being the Judas who betrayed Jesus, James son of Alphaeus is known mostly for not being the most important James. An ego-deflating title if there ever was one.

So we have Bartholomew who may or may not have also been named Nathaniel, and Thaddaeus who may or may not have been the same guy as Judas, (the Judas who is remembered for not betraying Jesus) and James, whose most stunning biographical fact was that he shared a name with a much greater man.

Now, if you are confused by all of this, let me assure you, I have actually spared you many of the convolutions of tradition which try to tie all of these men into association with every stray name dropped in the Bible so that, for example, Thaddaeus is seen as not only possibly Judas, the son of James, but Judas, the son of James, is determined to be the Jude who wrote the epistle, who must be not only the son of James but also the brother of another James who is referred as the brother of Jesus, but in a fraternal sense not a biological one, who probably the same guy as the James who ran the Council of Jerusalem. Whew! It's like trying to sort out the Snyders of Alfred.

What the later church didn't want to admit is that we simply don't know much about these men. They were for all intents and purposes anonymous disciples. The gospel writers remember them as being instrumental to Christ's ministry, but they can't exactly remember how or why or what they looked like or even for sure what they were named. We know that Jesus chose twelve apostles to carry on his ministry after him: some of those twelve went on to do famous deeds which were recorded, discussed, and celebrated for generations to come, while others quietly did their work in the small corners of their world, unheralded and unrecorded, with the only certain thing the gospel writers could remember about them was that when they were called by Christ, they answered the call.

"Many small people who in many small places do many small things can alter the face of the world."

I'm sorry to tell you but you and I are probably not going to be among the Peters, or the Johns, or the Mary's whose devotion and deeds will be recited for generations to come. The odds are that most of us will not be revolutionizing society in grand and glorious ways. When we have finished living the most compassionate lives we can live, there will still be hunger. There will still be poverty. There will still be environmental decay, and disease, and too much suffering in the world.

The measure of your faith cannot be whether you are able to eradicate hunger in your lifetime; the measure of your faith is whether you are able to lessen it just a little because you gave everything you had in service to Christ.

The measure of your faith cannot be whether you are able to eradicate poverty in your lifetime; the measure of your faith is whether you lessen it even a little because you gave everything you had in service to Christ.

The measure of your faith cannot be whether you are able to eliminate the loneliness in the hearts of every man and woman; the measure of your faith is whether one person is a little less lonely because you reached out a caring hand while the rest of the world turned away. Their loneliness was eased because you gave everything you have in service to Christ and your neigbor.

"Many small people who in many small places do many small things can alter the face of the world."

A pastor on a mission trip to Kenya attended worship in a small village church. Sitting near him was a woman with two small children, and the pastor could tell by the family's clothes and their thin bodies that they had little money and every day was a struggle for them. When the time for the offering came, the pastor thought of that woman and placed a little extra money into the basket before passing it along.

And then when the basket reached the woman, she set it down on the floor beside her, carefully removed her ragged sandals from her feet, and then reverently, humbly, she stepped into the basket. A hush fell over the congregation as she stood praying quietly, and after a few moments, she stepped back out, put her sandals back on her feet, and passed the basket to the next.

She did not have much but she was determined to give everything she had in service to Christ, and her dedication changed the hearts of an entire congregation. And her testimony is changing hearts still, carried from that pastor to his colleagues, and from those colleagues into pulpits and on to people like you. As we struggle to give ourselves in service, we will remember an anonymous woman who placed her entire life into the offering plate in a poor church in Kenya.

We are all the anonymous apostles. We are the Thaddaeuses, Bartholomews, Simons, the other Judases, and the lesser James'. Some day your face will be only a dim memory and your name will be forgotten but when you give your entire life to Christ, the service you do will alter the face of the world and I guarantee you, it will live on forever.