The Feast Day of St. Luke the Physician
The Rev. Sara Warfield
Scripture: Luke 4:14-21
Today we celebrate the Feast Day of our namesake, St. Luke. The story of St. Luke says that he was a companion to the Apostle Paul, and they traveled together spreading the good news of Christ. And, of course, he wrote the Gospel of Luke and also the Acts of the Apostles, which is basically Part 2 of his gospel.
I’m kind of fascinated by Luke because he was, as our parish’s name tells us, a physician. The word “physician” derives from the Latin word meaning “natural science.” Meaning, things having to do with the stuff of biology, the material world. The stuff we can see, hear, touch. For the physician, that means bodies, and more particularly human bodies. And physicians tend to deal even more particularly with things that have gone wrong with the body. Illness, injury, pain.
The word physician became synonymous with the word healer. The job of physicians, or doctors, is to heal. Now I don’t know the full story of the man we know as Luke. No one really does. But I’m assuming that, before he encountered the story of Jesus, he spent his time traveling around his village or region, visiting people who were suffering various ailments and figuring out how to heal them. I can’t know for sure, but I imagine that’s what a doctor did in those times.
But what fascinates me is that this man who dedicated his life to healing physical illness and injury encountered the story of Jesus and ended up writing a full account of Jesus’ life and what came after his death and resurrection. It doesn’t seem like the typical path for a doctor. Maybe writing about what procedures or medications work to alleviate pain or address wound care, but not a biography of Jesus and the early Church—well, a hagiography actually. You can look that up.
What made him drop his medical practice and start traveling with Paul? What inspired him to set down his balms and bandages and instead pick up a pen and write a pretty substantial account of Jesus, one that we still read and look to for guidance and inspiration 2,000 years later?
Well, I think his writing, and particularly the part we hear today, gives us a clue.
When Jesus came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
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.
Then Jesus said to the people: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
I don’t think Luke was abandoning his call as a healer at all. I think he recognized another powerful kind of medicine, another compelling way of healing. And that was Jesus. But not just Jesus and who he was and his own miraculous healing power, but what Jesus taught.
Healing means bringing good news to the poor.
Healing means releasing prisoners.
Healing means opening people’s eyes, maybe physically, but also spiritually.
Healing means freeing those who are oppressed.
Luke, our physician, is pushing the definition of healing beyond the physical, beyond even the mental or emotional, though those are important, too. He’s pushing the definition beyond the individual. Healing ALSO means giving all people what they need to survive and thrive, it means giving all people people the freedom they deserve as God’s creation to live, move, and have their being, it means giving people the opportunity to expand the way they see the themselves and the world, it means centering and prioritizing those we have forced to the margins.
To Luke, healing means to do justice. Not for one particular group of people, but for all people. But Jesus prioritizes justice for the poor and oppressed because they’re most in need of it.
Now justice is kind of a sharp word. And necessarily so, I think. Justice is a knife in many ways. Cutting bonds, slicing through the most tangled systems and customs to get to the heart of the matter. And the heart of the matter is always love. The philosopher and theologian Cornel West once said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.”
The softer side of justice, I think, is belonging. I would say belonging is what love looks like in community. And belonging is the most powerful healer when it is grounded in love rather than exclusion. Just like justice is most powerful when it is grounded in love rather than vengeance.
When Jesus says he has come to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed, I think he means he has come to cut off the ways they are separated from their neighbors and the abundance of the world, to bring people into belonging.
I think that’s what Dr. Luke saw in Jesus: a man who healed not only physically and mentally and emotionally, but also through the power of belonging. Of seeing the value in every person he encountered—Jew or Gentile, man or woman, poor or rich, disciple or soldier—and telling them that they have a place at the table, that they have something essential to offer the world, and that by virtue of being created in God’s image, they deserve to thrive.
Dr. Luke. Judy Bevilacqua was the first person I heard say that. Dr. Luke’s is what she and Jack often call this place. Because they see the Body of Christ in this community. They see healing through faith in Jesus and his teachings the same way Luke did.
And all I want for anyone is to find healing. From their chronic pain or anxiety. From whatever heartbreak or rejection they’re drowning in. From their despair about the state of the world and their ability to affect it.
And I think healing starts when someone says, it’s okay, you can come just as you are. You can come with your special cushion so that your pain is tolerable as you worship. You can come to receive communion angry that people in the world are being slaughtered. You can call and say “I just can’t make it to that ministry team meeting today because I can’t get out of bed.” Yeah, that’s a way of coming as you are, too. You can come and sit in the back sobbing and tell people to leave you alone if you need space.
You can come knowing that so long as you treat others with safety and respect, you don’t need to change to belong.
But I do think you will be changed if you stick around this parish long enough, and you—who you are and how you are—will change this community. That’s what belonging is. Opening ourselves to being changed by the love of others.
That’s what healing is. A cut changing into a scab into a scar that never quite disappears. Taking medicine to change how serotonin moves through your brain so that you can get out of bed for that ministry team meeting. Doing physical therapy so that you can change how you move your body so that it stays strong and stable.
All these changes make it so that you can belong in this world more fully. And all these changes take time. But they start with someone saying, come as you are, and we’ll see what healing happens.
That’s what Jesus did, especially in the gospel according to Luke, who was so deeply inspired that he wrote, more than any other gospel-writer, about the healing power of belonging. And that’s what brings us here, every Sunday, to Dr. Luke’s.
Amen.
Comments