(Sermon preached by Bishop Terry Brown for St. Luke’s Day, October 22, 2017, at Church of the Ascension, Hamilton, Ontario. Texts: Sirach 38: 1-4, 6-10, 12-14; James 5: 13-16; and Luke 4: 14-21.)
All week I have been thinking about St. Luke. Last Sunday afternoon, we celebrated St. Luke’s Day at the Cathedral with the giving of the Order of Niagara, a sign of devoted Christian service, to parishioners from across the diocese, including our own Stan Bowers. On Wednesday morning, the proper St. Luke’s Day, we had a small celebration of St. Luke at the midweek Eucharist. Wednesday evening, the very small St. Luke’s parish on the North End was disestablished with a last patronal celebration and the building handed back to the diocese, still, we hope, with evangelism and healing in the plans. And this morning we mark St. Luke’s day with a service of anointing and healing. I encourage everyone to come forward who feels a need for healing. Laying on of hands and anointing with a prayer for healing is very biblical, as we heard in our second lesson.
Reflecting on all these events and the life and witness of St. Luke, two intersecting themes – storytelling and healing – come to mind, producing a single theme: being able to tell a good story with real people, but a story that illustrates and leads to healing and new life, whether in this life or the next. That is what St. Luke’s Gospel is about: a good story about real people in real circumstances and a story that leads onward from pain, sickness, intransigence, alienation and indifference, to healing, love, forgiveness, compassion, hope, and new life. And we are invited to let Luke’s story shape our own stories, so that they are equally compelling and helpful to those who hear them.
An argument can perhaps be made that Luke’s Gospel saved Christianity from turning into an abstruse and abstract mystery religion, overly influenced by the Greek gnostic and mystery religions that surrounded it. They certainly shaped John’s Gospel and Epistles and perhaps the book of Revelation, making them sometimes hard to follow. Luke stuck with parables and stories, what we might call “human interest stories” that portrayed Jesus as someone very down-to-earth and engaged with the ordinary life of the people, whether Jew, Samaritan or Gentile, making it clear that Jesus was about practical love and healing, not some abstract concept. We see this in Luke’s detailed narratives of Jesus’ birth, so many stories of healing, and favourite parables such as the Prodigal Son and Good Samaritan.
At some point in his life, Luke heard the story of Jesus and was immensely attracted to it. He had the skill and connections to write the story. In writing the story, he made it clear that it was about Jesus and his wonderful healing and loving power, that he was God’s revelation to the world. He told the story in such a way that we are invited into it – into acts of healing, forgiveness, acceptance, care and compassion. We are invited to take Jesus the Healer into our lives and become agents of healing ourselves.
We all have stories of our lives and of our experiences as Christians, or, perhaps, our journeys to Christ. We also often have stories of loss, pain and separation. We read novels and biographies or watch television or films because we like stories and are drawn to them. They may resonate with our own experiences or give us insights we lack. Luke is the prime storyteller and encourages us to tell our stories.
Yet Luke does not tell us much about his own story because he is so taken up in the story of Jesus. We can only assume that the story of Jesus has come to reflect his own experiences as he must have reflected upon his own life as he listened to and wrote down the stories of Jesus. As a doctor, he was a healer, and he must have been deeply drawn to the stories of Jesus the Healer.
Ever so often, I try to write a small memoir as I have had a certain amount of adventures in my life. Yet I have never much succeeded, except in small bits and pieces. We also tell each other our stories. Sometimes those stories are very interesting and sometimes, alas, they are boring.
If we take Luke as our model, perhaps we need to tell our stories in light of Jesus’s story – where, for example, we have experienced tremendous forgiveness (like the Prodigal Son) or where we have been an unlikely healer (like the Good Samaritan) or where we have loved and been loved with the love of Christ, or where we are still broken and need Jesus’ healing power. We may not want to broadcast our stories on the housetops (or we may) but we should all have a story that somehow merges the experiences of our lives – good and ill – into the story of Jesus: his humanity, his perfect love, his death, his resurrection.
These stories all move towards healing and new life, from pain and suffering, to healing and resurrection. So, if we are stuck in a personal story of grief or illness or separation, as Christians we are still part of a divine story that moves through deeper and deeper love, to death and to resurrection.
Thus, as Luke’s Gospel, makes it so clear, we are called to a process of being healed (even if our bodies are moving towards death) and to being healers. In Christ, there is the tradition of “the wounded healer”. Thus, the early church, as we heard in the Epistle of James today, practised the laying on of hands and anointing of the sick, as we shall do today. This early Jewish understanding of health was holistic: health of body, mind, and spirit, so that confession, forgiveness and reconciliation were part of it. Thus, it is not just some sort of appendage to Holy Communion but comes as part of preparation for it. The oil, blessed by the bishop, and the prayers of the whole community are part of the healing action, in addition to the laying on of hands. Taking part in such a service is a commitment to move to full health of body, mind and spirit.
Thus, we are also called to be healers to one another: by listening, by sharing stories of encouragement, by being present in times of sickness and pain, by not judging too quickly, by being confident, even in the face of pain and physical decline. St. Luke was a human being. He must have had times of sickness himself. As a doctor he saw much suffering and did all he could to work for healing. But it was Christ, the great Healer, who attracted him and brought together and made sense of all his efforts for good health. And so it is for us.
There will be times of sickness and decline, both in ourselves and loved ones; there will be times of great grief and sorrow; there will be times of anxiety and anticipated death. Yet, we are still invited to hitch our stories, so to speak, to Jesus’ story, particularly as narrated in Luke Gospel: that despite what our outer bodies look like and experience, we are still on a path to healing and still helping one another along that path. May the Great Healer bring health to us all, through us all. Amen.
(Sermon preached by Bishop Terry Brown at the Church of the Ascension, Hamilton, Ontario, on Harvest Thanksgiving, October 8, 2017. Texts: Deuteronomy 8: 7-18, Psalm 65, 2 Corinthians 9: 6-15, and Luke 17: 11-19.)
The beauty and promise of our first lesson from Deuteronomy 8, “For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates”, and so forth, needs some further reflection, especially if, on this Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, we plan to apply it to Canada as, I am sure, many generations of Canadian preachers have done.
In the original context, the Israelites are returning to their ancestral land after exile in Egypt. Others have occupied this land in their absence and they are given power over them. However, this gift comes with a warning, not to forget God: “Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you this day”. And later, “Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth’”. Of course, from time to time the returned exiles did forget God; chaos and God’s punishment ensued.
The suggestion of this reading for Canadian Thanksgiving inevitably seems to suggest that the settlement of Canada was a bit like the Israelites coming into the Promised Land since Canada does have the agricultural, mineral and aquatic bounty described in this passage, though too cold for olive and pomegranate trees. However, here we must be careful, lest we put forward a kind of Canadian Christian nationalist theology and forget history.
The settlement of Canada was a colonial enterprise, as with all the great settler nations: the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. In the Canadian case it was a search for a passage to Asia, a search for valuable furs and other wealth, the search for new agricultural land, development of new markets, a freer political and religious climate and, of course, souls to win for Christ. (One of my great-grandfathers fled conscription in the army of the German Kaiser to settle on a farm in Iowa; many of us have such family stories.)
But, of course, there were already First Nations peoples in North America (as there were aboriginal peoples in Australia and Maori in New Zealand) and the story of defeat and colonization and settler-governments was often not a happy one. At the time, the European expansion was understood as part of God’s divine plan – the so-called Doctrine of Discovery – but now we realize otherwise, especially as settler exploitation of the land and natural resources has been so destructive and unsustainable.
Thus, I believe any celebration of Canadian Thanksgiving is inevitably tinged with an element of penance and sorrow, aware that what we think was given to us was often taken from another who was here first. We need to be aware that the words of Deuteronomy 8 are also directed to Canada’s First Nations peoples, and encourage them to claim their proper rights and land. And, aware that we have been given the privilege of sharing the wealth of the land, we do well to stand with them in solidarity as they seek to enjoy the bounty of their land.
As Christians, this realization should not be too difficult for us. Christian teaching has never encouraged the accumulation of wealth in land or possessions. Indeed, as our second lesson, from 2 Corinthians, points out, we are about giving away – generosity – rather than selfish accumulation. What Paul is calling for is a generous heart: generosity towards those in need, generosity of spirit to all, being a cheerful giver, not giving under duress. He suggests that out of this generosity, more abundance will flow and we need not fear for the future.
Here there is another danger: the risk of seeing Christian giving as a kind of divine bank with a very high guaranteed rate of interest, what we sometimes call “the gospel of prosperity”. Televangelists use this interpretation to encourage people to give beyond their means, with miraculous stories of people becoming wealthy overnight after they have given to the church. The problem with the prosperity gospel is that it is self-interested giving, even selfish giving, focusing on the material wealth that is supposed to come back later. For genuine Christian giving, we do not know precisely what will be the result – perhaps it will be a call to a different lifestyle or a new ministry – but it will be the one God wants and the church will flourish. We give because we are thankful for creation, for our lives, for God’s love to us in Jesus Christ, for the blessings of the church – not because we hope to get a high return on our investment.
Today’s Gospel, the eloquent story of the healed Samaritan leper, a hated outcast, who returns to give thanks after he is healed, while other nine privileged ones do not, reminds us, again, that Christian life is all about thanksgiving. Privilege sometimes blinds us to God’s healing work in us and the need to give thanks. We can be sure that the healed Samaritan leper never forgot what happened to him and was an agent of love, generosity and healing for the rest of his life.
As we know, St. Luke liked human interest stories, so let us dwell a bit more personally on this story. It has always been one of my favourites: the marginal one returning to give thanks. More than once I have found myself literally going back to a person or place where I have felt divine intervention or protection in my life. So, for a moment, think of a person (the leper goes back to a person, Jesus), place or a situation where you have felt Christ’s love in your life and, even if you have not revisited the site, think of it, and say “thank you” to God. . . . Let each of us be like the leper who returned to give thanks in today’s Gospel.
We say “thank you” about God’s healing and love in the past not to be fixated on the past or backward looking but because thanksgiving about the past is the ground for our future. If strangers meet us and find us sour and bitter, lacking the joy of forgiveness and thanksgiving, we are not good representatives of the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ.
Putting all this together, we rejoice in the exultant praise of Psalm 65. Even though we and our ancestors have sometimes made of mess of things, even if we have sometimes been begrudging and not cheerful in our giving, even though we have sometimes not returned to give thanks like the faithful leper, we can join in praise of God; with the hope that that praise and thanksgiving will become a permanent part of our lives.
Finally, of course, we come together in the Eucharist or Great Thanksgiving, where we offer all our lives and thanks to God. We say sorry, we promise to do better, we receive God’s grace, and we are sent out as part of the new and thankful creation to do God’s healing work in the world. Thanks be to God!
