Colossians 4:5-11, 14-18
St. Luke 10:16-21
Today is the
Feast Day of the Holy Apostle and Evangelist Luke, the patron saint of our
parish. Our small community is named in his honor and memory, and we ask
him to pray for us in virtually every service. In many ways, St. Luke is
an especially appropriate saint for our parish. He was a Gentile, a
physician, an iconographer, and one of the 70 Apostles sent out by the Lord to
proclaim the good news. (Our members include a physician, an iconographer, and
a bunch of Gentiles!) Author of both a gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, St.
Luke died a martyr’s death at the age of 84.
He was the only Gentile to write one of the gospels of the New Testament.
Like St. Matthew, he includes the family tree or genealogy of Jesus Christ.
St. Luke traces the Lord’s lineage all the way back to Adam, the first human
being who lived before the distinction between Jew and Gentile. Thus he
showed that Christ is the Savior of all, that He came to bring all peoples and
nations into the glory of His Kingdom. As a Gentile, St. Luke’s own
family tree did not place him in the house of Israel, and his gospel especially
emphasizes the mercy of Christ for those then thought of as strangers and outsiders
to God’s blessings.
The Lord rejoiced in today’s gospel reading that the Father hid His truth
from the wise and prudent, but revealed Himself to babes, to humble and simple
people with little standing in the eyes of the world. Gentiles, the
poor, the sick, and women got little respect in that time, but St. Luke presents
the ministry of our Lord in a way that makes clear that the blessings of the
Kingdom extend to all, and that the lowly and despised are often the ones most
ready to receive the good news of Christ, precisely due to their humility.
For example, it is from Luke’s gospel that we know of the Virgin Mary’s
obedient acceptance of the calling to become the Theotokos, the Mother of the
incarnate Son of God. She sings the Magnificat in response, praising Him for
regarding the low estate of His handmaiden; for henceforth all generations will
call her blessed. She sings of a God who has put down the mighty from
their thrones, and exalted the lowly, who has filled the hungry with good
things and sent the rich away empty. A simple, unknown virgin girl
miraculously became the living Temple of God; through her, the Savior came to
the world; and in purity of heart, she accepted a shocking pregnancy that put
her own life and reputation at risk.
The
physician Luke even tells us of a meeting between the pregnant Theotokos and
the pregnant St. Elizabeth in which St. John the Forerunner leaped in the womb
in the presence of the not-yet-born Jesus Christ. What an amazing detail that probably only a
physician would have recorded in that time and place.
It is also from St. Luke’s gospel that we learn of the astounding humility of
Jesus Christ’s birth in a barn. The Son of God used the feeding trough of
a farm animal as His crib. And the shepherds—poor, dirty, and generally
looked down upon-- were the first group notified of this event. They were blessed to be the first to know that
the Messiah had been born.
And when the Savior preached His first sermon in St. Luke’s gospel, He chose an
Old Testament text that showed His love for the outcasts, the suffering, and
those on the margins of society. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor…to heal the
brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and recovery of sight to
the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the
acceptable year of the Lord.“ Though the worshipers at the synagogue that
day had liked the beginning of Jesus Christ’s sermon, they hated the
ending. For the Lord reminded them that God sometimes worked through the
great Old Testament prophets Elijah and Elisha to help Gentiles instead of
Jews. When the people heard of God’s concern for the hated Gentiles, they
literally tried to kill Christ by throwing Him off a cliff. They wanted a Savior only for themselves on
their own terms, not this surprising kind of Messiah Who came to save even
their enemies.
Do you see the common theme of these examples? St. Luke demonstrated
clearly that the Lord does not operate accordingly to conventional human
standards of who is important, powerful, worthy, or holy. In contrast
with the ways of the world, our Savior taught that the last will often be first
in the Kingdom of Heaven and the first will be last. The “least of
these,” the babes, will often respond to Christ with a pure heart while those
who trust in themselves, their riches, their social status, their power, or
their respectability will often refuse Him.
As a small parish in a part of the world with very few Orthodox Christians, we
should be glad that St. Luke is our patron saint. Like those common
people in Luke’s gospel, our little community has no special prominence or
power. We are not wealthy or large or well-known. We all have
friends, neighbors, or family members who, until they met us, had never even heard
of the Orthodox Church. We certainly
cannot rely on a common ethnicity or any other human characteristic to hold us
together and build up our church. In some ways, we are probably the most
diverse congregation in Abilene; sociologically, our very existence probably makes
no sense. No, our very existence as a
parish is a sign of God’s abundant grace and mercy. We should all thank
the Lord for creating and sustaining this blessed community through which we
share in the life of Christ and have become members of one another in Him.
St. Luke also wrote of the original Christian community in similar ways in the
Acts of the Apostles. By the power of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost,
people of different nationalities who spoke different languages were united in
a common faith in Jesus Christ. They were persecuted by both Jews and
Romans; there were tensions in the church between different ethnic and cultural
groups; arguments raged over whether Gentiles had to be circumcised and obey
the Jewish law before becoming Christians. The early church as described
by St. Luke was not wealthy or large or well-known. To follow Jesus
Christ under those conditions was a difficult struggle that literally made many
saints and martyrs. In their weakness, the first Christians found God’s
strength. In their humility, they were lifted up by His power. In
their obedience, they became victors over their enemies by sharing in Christ’s
conquest over sin and death.
The Book of Acts has many of the same themes as the Gospel of Luke. St. Luke
describes the early Church as a rare place of reconciliation for Jew and
Gentile and a community in which financial resources were shared so that no one
was in need. The Church was born at Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit empowered
Christ’s followers to proclaim the good news such that people from all over
world could understand and call on the name of the Lord. As in those days, it remains the case that it
is often the babes, the least of these, the outsiders, those who know trouble
and pain all too well, who call upon Him with the purest of hearts.
On this feast day of St. Luke, our challenge is to remember that, by the power
of the Holy Spirit, we are that Church that began on Pentecost. And like
the first generation of Christians, we will find our salvation in the obscure place
in the world that God has given us. We have learned from St. Luke that
lowliness and humility are actually favorable characteristics in the Christian
life. And we grow in these Christ-like virtues by patiently serving one
another and our neighbors as Christ has served us. That is why—even
though we have not yet repaired our hall from the fire and have limited
resources-- we are sponsoring a reception this week in support of IOCC’s relief
work for refugees from Syria and Iraq, even as our members have given generously
over the years for several campaigns to help our suffering brothers and sisters
in the Middle East. It is why we assist our own members and others who are in
need and support Pregnancy Resources of Abilene. Even
as St. Luke described the Theotokos welcoming the unexpected birth of the
Savior, we want to help women today welcome their own children, regardless of
the difficulties that they face. As
Christ said, “In that you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you
have done it unto me.” That includes those
who leap in the womb today, as well as their mothers in the most challenging of
circumstances.
From a worldly perspective, all that we do in our parish is small scale and out
of the cultural mainstream. That is no
problem at all, of course, because St. Luke has shown us a Savior Who works
through weak and unlikely people to establish His Kingdom, which is surely not
of this world. As hard as it is to
believe, that is precisely what the Lord is doing through us in this place by the
prayers of the Holy Apostle and Evangelist Luke, our patron.
No comments:
Post a Comment