Feast of St Luke

 2 Timothy 4:5-13; Luke 4:14-21

Today we are celebrating the Feast of St Luke, the Patron saint of physicians, surgeons, artists, painters, butchers, bachelors, and notaries.  And I am excited this fell on a Sunday this year (although I found out this week we aren’t really supposed to be celebrating it) because One, as you know I am desperately trying to avoiding listening to people needlessly fighting with Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew.  Two, Luke is my personal favorite Gospel writer and in general I just really like him.  And three, Luke’s prominent themes of boundary crossing, radical welcome, service and social justice fit perfectly with our themes for this season.

So, St Luke the Evangelist who we celebrate today is one of the church’s earliest saints.  He is most remembered as the author of both the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, and he is probably the only biblical author in the whole Bible who was likely not Jewish.  Instead, as best we can tell, he was born and raised somewhere in modern Syria, primarily spoke Greek and lived and worked in very Hellenized Greek oriented world.  He also, like the apostle Paul, probably never met Jesus in the flesh.  Instead, he likely met Paul on one of his early missionary trips and quickly became a disciple.  He then started traveling with Paul on several of his major missionary journeys, some of which he chronicles in the Book of Acts.  Luke is also mentioned several times Paul’s other existing letters as a brother and fellow co-worker.  He was instrumental in helping Paul found and sustain churches throughout Syria, Turkey, Greece and even as far as Rome.  And as we heard in our 2^nd lesson today, Luke was among Paul’s most persistent disciples.  When almost everyone else has abandoned Paul during his final imprisonment in Rome, Luke remains at his side.  Giving us a mighty example of dedication and service.

One of the things that makes St Luke’s witness so unique was that he was a Greek, a converted gentile himself, writing to a gentile audience, so he was always looking for ways to bring outsiders and new people into the faith.  And Luke's unique perspective on Jesus can be seen especially clearly in the six miracles and eighteen parables that we find only in his Gospel and nowhere else.  Luke's is the gospel of the poor and of social justice. He is the one who tells the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man.   He is the one who uses "Blessed are the poor" instead of "Blessed are the poor in spirit" in the beatitudes.

Luke also has a special connection with the women in Jesus' life, especially Mary.  The Christmas story as we know it and much of the narrative of Jesus’s early life are known to us only through Luke.  The annunciation as well as Mary's visit to Elizabeth including Mary’s powerful response in the Magnificat where she proclaims that God "has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty" are from Luke’s memory as well as the Presentation, and the story of Jesus' youthful disappearance in Jerusalem.

Luke is also especially focused on forgiveness and God's mercy to sinners and inclusion of outsiders in exclusive stories like Prodigal Son being welcomed back by the overjoyed father. Or the story of the Good Samaritan being the exemplar of justice and service or Jesus praising and defending the once sinful woman who washes Jesus’s feet with her hair.

It is fitting therefore that our Gospel lesson today tells us what Luke remembers as the first words of Jesus’s public ministry, his first sermon if you will:  “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”  This good news to the poor, the captive and the outcast is never far from Luke’s mind.

He is also remembered as a physician and an exceptionally well-educated man.  And although we don’t have a lot of actual evidence for this, he is also said to have painted the first icon, one of Mary, hence how he became the patron saint of artists and painters.  In this way Luke, reminds us of the beauty and power of art, language & science to teach, lead and inspire devotion.

And so, St Luke like St Francis, still has much to say to us today even across the centuries.  For we live in a world today more like Luke’s than we may want to admit.  Christianity doesn’t have the dominance in our culture it once did.  We are now called like Luke once did to be the translators, the boundary crossers, the ones who carry the good news of Christ out into the wider world.  We can no longer be content only talking to those who already know the stories.

And we learn that how we welcome others matters.  There is a reason that Luke tells all these stories about unexpected and extravagant welcome  He knows what it means to be an outsider.  Nearly all of his peers were born Jewish, they were born into this way of life, but Luke had to learn as he went.  So he knows what it means to be welcomed, he knows how important those fragile first steps are.  And so whether born into the church or like Luke later called into it, we are all called to welcome the stranger with joy and to extend God’s gracious welcome beyond our walls.

And we also learn from Luke that dedication matters.  Luke’s life as a disciple certainly wasn’t easy, and was probably a lot harder than his previous life as a doctor.  He followed Paul through a lot of danger and harrowing adventures.  We learn that he sometimes got left behind, maybe willingly, maybe not, to fend for himself and lead communities like the church in Philippi.  And yet through it all, he stands beside Paul through riots, shipwrecks, late night escapes, and even imprisonment right up to the end of Paul’s life.  Legend even says that he too was martyred in 84AD not long after Peter and Paul.  Yet his dedication echoes through ages.  We know many of our favorite stories about Jesus, those many of us return to again and again because of Luke’s ministry.

 So as we walk through this season, may we all strive to follow the example of St Luke.  To find ways to serve and to welcome.  To break down barriers and stand against those who seek to oppress.  To be persistent in good times and bad.  To find beauty and wisdom in the world around us.  And always to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ to all who may hear.  Amen.