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.
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