Fr. Sean’s Sermon for the Feast of St. Luke

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith

It is hard to believe that we had our first Sunday here at Greencroft on July 26th, Trinity 8. Now we are celebrating the feast of St. Luke on Trinity XX—today marks twelve weeks, three months for the project! We are a third of the way through! I would like to say that time has flown by and in no time we will be back again in our own church, but to me, it has felt like a long time! And looking ahead we have some big hurdles. It is exciting , but it is not simple and easy. I miss our building, I miss incense, and I miss our regular times of fellowship such as coffee hour and Agape. A feeling of distance can arise when our normal way of interaction and our normal routines have been changed. I feel it, and having talked to many of you, I know others share this feeling. 

We are blessed, of course, that this wilderness wandering and feeling of displacement is because we are working together towards a good with support and resources. Our building was not destroyed by natural disaster nor are we forcefully separated. We chose this and now walk through it together--perhaps our own feelings of loss and change can help join us with those across the world who face such feelings without any other options. And it can help us realize that this is not how a parish should live consistently! 

What we are experiencing, briefly and just in part, but really experiencing, is the lack of fullness, the lack of perfection in the life of our parish. We are baptized into the Body of Christ, the Church universal, but that baptism has to happen in a specific place and at a specific time, highlighting the fact that our faith is lived out not just spiritually but materially, enfleshed, bounded by time and our own bodies. The universal church is experienced in an embodied parish–a particular place with particular people. And so when there is a dissonance in the ‘lived experience’ of the parish, then that dissonance will be felt. I bring this up because it is a profoundly human experience and one that helps us understand our life in Christ. 

We talk a lot about a short phrase: grace perfects nature. And again, that phrase has been on my mind all week as I have been contemplating the life and work of Saint Luke, our renovation, and the life of the parish. It is easy to reduce this phrase to a moral sense: that the grace of God makes us perfect so that we will not sin. Perhaps that is the easiest way for us to enter this imaginative exercise. I can see how I could avoid sin and I can also imagine what it would be like to have a strong will to choose not to sin.

But the phrase "grace perfects nature" means so much more than that. Perfection means being brought to completion--so through the grace of God, our human nature accomplishes everything God had designed it to be. Instead of the grace of God permanently altering our nature or overriding it or destroying it, the infusion of divine life (grace) lifts our nature to its highest form. 

Given the power of God Almighty and the overwhelming intensity of his holiness, this does not seem possible. In Exodus, God tells Moses, "You cannot see My face, for no one can see Me and live." And when God did descend on Mt Sinai, the people stayed away. But Moses did ascend into the presence of God and stayed 40 days in his midst. What is amazing is that when he descended the mountain, his whole body was transformed, shining in the light of God's glory to the point that he had to veil himself. This is an image for us to imagine--however hard it may be--all the different aspects of this phrase: grace perfects nature. 

If God's grace will surely aid us to avoid sin, think of how all of our desires, our passions, our reason, our intellect, our personality can fully mature and blossom in unique ways. What is almost too hard to imagine is that our humanity is not some uniform blob, but each and every one of us will be perfected in a different way. In the resurrection, we will be more ourselves than ever before, the grace of God manifesting in a multitude of different expressions.

As we consider this theological doctrine--grace prefects nature--we also realize the astounding fact that God delights in the particular. I do not lose my identity the more I am perfected by God's grace--rather, I become more myself as I gradually love God more and more. "For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it."

Paul's consistent image for us to consider is the body of Christ. We all are baptized into Jesus Christ and are joined by that sacrament to his divinity. But we do not vanish or become absorbed into him. Rather, each one of us becomes a member of the body. We are a particular part of that whole. The universal (and by that I mean the whole, the abstract idea) does not diminish or erase the particular. By the grace of God and his great love for humanity, his salvation perfects every particular person in the Body of Christ. God works with us as humans, in time, with our particular persons, particular bodies, in particular places, just as he became man in a particular place and at a particular time in a particular body.

And the biblical witness we have of his incarnation and life and work was recorded in a distinctly human way: four separate witnesses to the life of Christ in the New Testament, each Gospel a unique representation of the author. . .

We know very little of Saint Luke, but he wrote a large portion of the New Testament. Here are the details that we have put together: Though Luke never openly states that he is a Gentile, both tradition and scholarly consensus agree that he was a gentile. First, Paul mentions in Col 4 which Jewish disciples were with him and then he separately mentions Luke. Second, his name is a traditional Greek name, not Jewish. And third, his language in the Gospel and Acts is very high Greek, cultured and stylized after Greek works of his day. And so we believe he was a gentile. What I would love to hear is his own conversion story, but Luke does not share! While some say that Luke was the second disciple with Cleopas on the road to Emmaus when the resurrected Lord met them, we just don't know. What we do know is that this Gentile man completely devoted his life to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and was an important supporter of the Apostle Paul.

Acts 1-15 is written in the third person, but after Paul has Timothy join him in Lystra, the narrative changes. So, it could be that Luke converted much later from Paul's preaching. Acts 16 continues: "And as (Paul and his crew) went through the cities, they delivered them the decrees for to keep, that were ordained of the apostles and elders which were at Jerusalem. And so were the churches established in the faith, and increased in number daily." This is important, because the decrees mentioned here had to do with Gentile converts who believed in Jesus, which was decided at the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. And so, the next bit in Acts 16 has Luke joining the team when they travel north to Macedonia. Luke writes: Then Paul has a vision of a "man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, Come over into Macedonia, and help us. And after he had seen the vision, immediately we endeavoured to go into Macedonia, assuredly gathering that the Lord had called us for to preach the gospel unto them." [Act 16:4-10 KJV] From this point on, Luke joins Paul for most of his journeys, staying with him to the very end in Rome, as Paul related in the Epistle this morning: "For Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world, and is departed unto Thessalonica; Crescens to Galatia, Titus unto Dalmatia. Only Luke is with me." 

Paul is the one, actually, he gives us another detail to help us understand Luke when he says in Col. 4 that Luke was a physician. Now, in the ancient world, a physician was not as esteemed as we assume today, but still physicians did have to acquire a wide-ranging education that included biology, herbal medicine, surgery, and nutrition. And so we assume.

As an aside, there is a tradition that Luke was also the first iconographer, and that his first icon depicted Mary hold the Christ child on her lap, tenderly reaching out and pointing to her divine son. There is no early evidence of this, but it is definitely probable that a physician in the ancient world would be very familiar with the mixing of paints and minerals, and could be the first iconographer. 

During Luke's time with Paul, we also know that Luke took the opportunity to interview as many people as possible about Jesus' life and ministry. It seems not just likely but requisite that Luke interviewed the Blessed Virgin Mary during his travels and this was highly probably as Luke could have visited Ephesus. And Luke mentions twice the memory of Mary. In Luke 2, he writes that Mary pondered these things in her heart. And in Luke 24, he is the only Evangelist who lists the names of the women who went to the tomb and after he recounts the angel at the tomb, he writes, "And they remembered his words..." Why I mention this is because Luke's Gospel is often referred to as the Marian Gospel. It is in Luke and no other where we find the details of the Annunciation, the Magnificat, Elizabeth's visit, Zechariah's Benedictus, and the details of the presentation at the temple. 

Each Gospel is unique, and these details help us understand Luke's emphases and perspective. He cared deeply for the poor and outcast, and how Jesus as the Great Physician has come to heal 

On this feast day of Saint Luke, I want you to remember how God Almighty desires each and every one of us to grow in Him so that we can fully live. As we live more and more in his grace, we become more and more ourselves, perfected into the image and likeness of his son Jesus Christ. We do not, though, lose ourselves, but we exhibit the infinite beauty of God in all of our peculiar particularity. But this also means that God desires to work in every particular aspect of your life. He demands that every thought, every desire, every will and reason, be given to his grace.