[Sermon composed for the Sunday broadcast at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Phoenix AZ (https://www.stmarysphoenix.org/online) for Sunday, October, 2020, the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost and the Feast of St. Luke the Evangelist]
✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
One of my biggest pet peeves with the Liturgical Reform movement (hey, who doesn’t have one???) is that any holy day that isn’t one of the Big Ones like Easter, Christmas, the Presentation, the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Transfiguration, to name a few, gets shunted to a weekday. The official reason for this is to emphasize each Sunday as the day of the Resurrection, but the net effect is that saints’ days get shunted to the hinterland and falls off the radar of the Christian who only goes/tunes in to Church on Sunday.
The Puritans would have been delighted. The Anglican Divines not so much.
In the old days when the Resurrection message AND commemoration of the saint could occur together, on a day like today we would be celebrating the feast day of St. Luke the Physician, Evangelist, and friend of St. Paul the Apostle. I have got a soft spot for St. Luke. On St. Luke’s day in 1987 I was raised to the honour of subdeacon in the Anglican Diocese of Fredericton, so I consider St. Luke one of my patrons.
As is common with the saints of the first century, we don’t know a lot about St. Luke, and what we know is subject to debate (more I suspect from the innate need for scholars to push out publications to stay employed, but that’s another talk for another time). What is part of the common tradition is that St. Luke was a devout Gentile, a God-fearer, maybe with some Jewish ancestry, but from what we can see from the Gospel attributed to him and to the Acts of the Apostles he had access to a lot of the source materials floating around in the first century. From hints in the Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline Epistles St. Luke joined Paul later in his missionary journeys and was with him in Rome. Tradition holds that St. Luke was also a physician and an artist as well as an historian. Traditions among Eastern Christians from Greece to India claim that St. Luke, based on personal interviews with the Blessed Virgin herself, was first to write the icon of her with the infant Jesus, and in fact wrote several (point of trivia, icons are written, not painted). Several churches, including the Coptic Christians of Egypt and the Syriac Christian community of India claim to have icons of the Virgin and Child written by St. Luke.
While one may take that whole personal interview idea with some skepticism, it points to the fact that of all the accounts of the Incarnation St. Luke’s account is the most detailed among canonical sources. St. Mark’s account starts with Jesus already at the beginning of His ministry, St. John’s account dives into the finer points of philosophy, St. Matthew’s account focuses on key points of the Messianic prophecies, but St. Luke’s is the most personal and relational. In it we get pictures of the relationships between St. Joseph and the Blessed Virgin, the Blessed Virgin and her cousin Elizabeth (and by extension her husband Zachariah), the yet unborn Saviour and His Forerunner, the Holy Family, and still we get a picture of not just the humanity of Jesus but His otherness as well. St. Luke more than any of the other accounts depicts the tension and the harmony of the human and divine natures within the person of Jesus than any of the other Gospels.
The Gospel readings for the feast are all over the map, however. Currently in The Episcopal Church Lectionary it is St. Luke’s Gospel in chapter 4, verses 14-21, where Jesus reads a selection from Isaiah in his hometown. In the Anglican Church of Canada, the 1962 (official) lectionary pulls from chapter 24, verse 44 to the end of the Gospel, and it is about Jesus’ last address to the disciples before He ascends. In the Church of England’s 1662 Lectionary and the current Roman Catholic Lectionary it is from chapter 10, verses 1-7, the commissioning of the Seventy, whereas in the Orthodox Church it is from the same chapter but verses 16-21, where the Seventy report their successes back to Jesus. I would argue these older lectionaries are probably the better readings for the feast, and I will show you why.
Consider in chapter 10 verses 2 and 3: “And [Jesus] said unto them, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into the harvest. Go your way, behold I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves.” Next to this let me point out from the Orthodox reading verse 20: “Nevertheless do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you; but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” Jesus had sent these seventy disciples out into a minefield, full of disbelief, sickness, despair, and firmly in the thrall of the powers of darkness, but against any rational expectation these disciples met with a great deal of success. However, it wasn’t the spectacular successes that Jesus wanted these disciples to remember; with any success comes risk, risk of assigning too much importance to one’s self, risk of getting cocky and over-confident, risk of losing the big picture. That big picture, the Evangelist reminds us, is as Jesus told the Seventy, that their names are “written in heaven.”
Brothers and sisters, we too have joined ranks with the Seventy. When we were baptized, we took on their mission, to proclaim the Kingdom of God.
We hear a lot about that, don’t we? Proclaim the Kingdom of God, where we actually look out for each other, take no thought for their own well-being, trust in others to look out for us while we look out for them, remember to include the forgotten and those shunted aside, and love God with every fibre of our being, proclaiming the Good News of Jesus Christ to all who will listen, letting our light shine so brightly that people cannot help but ask what lit that lamp, loving the unlovable because God Himself loves them, and loving God because we cannot help but love whom He loves.
St. Luke, however, has this caution for us. Like the Seventy, we are sent out into hostile territory. Not everyone will listen to our words of hope. There will be those who ignore us or actively oppose us. The message of the Kingdom is dangerous to the self-interested, the message challenges every twisted value loved by the world. Despite this, we will have some good moments, but we need to keep in front of us that it’s not the victories, it’s not the defeats, but that our names are written in heaven, written in the Book of Life.
Now, many have a picture in their heads that there is an actual ledger in heaven where names are scribbled in or crossed out on a regular basis, and often the picture includes an Apostle or angel tasked with the job.
*thud thud thud*
Do you hear that sound? It is the collective sound of the Apostles and Evangelists banging their heads on their desks in frustration.
To be blunt: the Book of Life is an allegory. It is an allegory for the relationship between us and God restored by Christ’s redeeming us from Death and Sin. Because we are redeemed, because we are now back in relationship with God, we uphold what is important to God: loving Him and loving His children (ALL of them, not just the ones we like). That is what it means to be written in the Book of Life and what it means to proclaim the Kingdom of God. It is practical. A relationship with God means becoming His willing agents in a world that may not want us but definitely needs us and certainly needs Him. And that is possible only because Jesus effected that reconciliation. Jesus brought us to the Father. Jesus sent us out into the world. It is Jesus’ message that we bring, to love God with all one’s heart and soul and mind and strength, and to love our neighbours as ourselves.
If we hold that St. Luke is the first writer of the icons of the Blessed Virgin, keep in mind that he always showed her pointing to Our Lord. The Gospel that he wrote points to Our Lord. The history of the Apostles that he wrote points to Our Lord. When we look at Our Lord, we see our redemption and reconciliation, but moreover what that means. Through Him we find reconciliation with God and in that reconciliation we bring that message to all those around us. As St. Luke encourages us, let us rejoice that our names are written in the Book of Life, and now let us make that count for something.
✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Saviour, save us.
By Unknown author, Illumination from an Armenian Gospel of St. Luke - The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42696270