St Luke the evangelist

I wonder how many of us have visited a doctor this week? This month? In the last year? As a family, we were very glad to be able to sign up with a new doctor’s surgery when we moved to Stafford, and were very grateful to receive medical advice when the children were poorly the other week. Doctors have a very important place in our everyday lives. They can help identify what is wrong with us and help us when we are sick. Even if you've never been ill, it is still good to know that there is a doctor there, just in case.

Today the Church remembers the apostle Luke, who was himself a doctor and has become the patron saint of doctors, physicians, and surgeons. He was also a writer and is attributed as the author of the gospel of Luke and often known as Luke-Acts. Luke's story about Jesus contains many examples of how Jesus healed the sick. Luke seems particularly interested in how Jesus helped those who some doctors might have given up on and for whom nobody else really cared: the disadvantaged, minority groups, outcasts and those that society considered unclean. Of the four gospels, it’s Luke who emphasizes God's love for women and as such women play a more prominent role in Luke than in the other three gospels.

Luke came from the ancient city of Antioch, Syria, he was a well-educated Greek-speaking Roman citizen, who came to faith in Christ and joined the church in Antioch. There he met the apostle Paul and went sailing with him from Troas around 50 A.D. He was clearly ardent and faithful in the cause of Christ, writing down historical events and explaining his faith.  And we should rightly give thanks today for Luke, for his faith and his writings which help us to draw closer to Christ. So, this morning, on St Luke’s day, we have a passage from Luke’s gospel, which in many ways epitomises Luke’s purposes for writing down the events he saw and heard about Jesus, and I invite you to come and ponder with me the passage we read together. Over the next few minutes, we’ll turn the passage over and turn it over again, to try to hear what God may be prompting us to hear.

In Luke 10:1-9. Jesus sends out seventy (or according to some manuscripts seventy two) helpers, to go out with a message to the people of Galilee. There are clear echoes here of Moses and the Israelites in Numbers 11.16, 25. Where Moses chooses seventy elders of Israel, to help him lead God’s grumbling and rebellious people from Egypt on to the Promised Land. The sending out of seventy followers of Jesus is unique to Luke’s gospel. (You’ll find a few parallel verses in Matthew’s gospel) but only Luke tells us of the seventy being sent out, it follows the sending out of the disciples in Luke 9.1-6. And both stories are perhaps intended to help us make the connection with the story of Moses, who sent out assistants to lead the Israelites to the Promised Land. Here Jesus sends out seventy to help lead people into the new Exodus, of life in Christ.

In the Gospel, Luke presents two aspects of Jesus' personality. The first is a Jesus who is the accepting, merciful Saviour, the one who has tremendous patience, especially  with the “slow to catch on” disciples, Jesus the one who will accept all into his great banquet, no matter how cast out they are by their community, the one who stops and listens, as people’s concerns are brought to him. Jesus is Saviour of all, Jews and Gentiles. The second aspect of Jesus, Luke presents for us, is quite different: Earlier this year, I received a distressed phone call from my mother. The tone and tension in her voice jolted me into listening carefully. My step-farther had had a severe heart attack and was in the process of being airlifted to hospital, would I come? Well, thanks to God for the speed of the helicopter taking him to Coventry hospital and the excellent medical care he received in the coronary care unit, my step-father is safe. But the urgency and pressingness I heard in my mother’s voice, echoes something we often hear here in Luke’s gospel and in our reading today in Jesus words. Luke shows us another side of Jesus, a Jesus who has an urgency, a pressingness about his task, a focus and an intensity, which jolts us to sit up and listen.  The sending out of the seventy is driven by urgency of Jesus’ mission to share the news of the kingdom. “The harvest is plentiful but the labourers are few; ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest. Go on your way”, says Jesus. The gathering in of God’s kingdom is a task shared with God’s people.

The seventy are given quite specific instructions as they go out. Jesus tells them three things they are not to do: They are not to take anything with them (no a purse, a bag or sandals) implying they should in faith rely on others for hospitality. They are to greet no one on route to Samaria; for it was dangerous territory and they needed to take care. The task was urgent; they needed to get on with it!  Not to hang about en route. And thirdly, they are not to move about from house to house – not to gad about from one to another. But to be focussed and purposeful in their visits. Then there’s a positive instruction: When they go into someone’s house they are to offer peace to those who are willing to receive it: they are to demonstrate this by eating with those who welcome them and by curing the sick. Then the seventy are told by Jesus to say to that “the kingdom of God has come near to you”.  

Now most of Jesus’ contempories were not looking for peace at all. At least, not peace with their traditional enemies, the Samaritans or with their oppressors the Romans. No, they were hoping for a messiah who would be more of a War Lord, who’d deal with their enemies, who’d overthrow the much hated Roman rule and set them free by force - not by peace. So Jesus’ call for the kingdom of God to come was going in the opposite direction to their thinking. Jesus rejection of violence came from his knowing and loving God as a generous God, who is full of grace, astonishingly powerful, one who brings healing, peace, reconciliation and love. God’s life-giving power; flowing through Jesus to heal. This was the new kingdom Jesus sent the seventy out to proclaim. 

Well, I’ve been pondering and praying this week about what I, what we might hear from this passage, as a town centre Christian community, as God’s people here in centre of Stafford on St Luke’s day. I have been reminded that Jesus asks each of us to take God’s message of love, to those outside our Christian family, saying in peace, “the Kingdom of God has come near to you”. I’m wondering where and to whom God may be asking me and us to go out to, as God’s labourers.

Some of us had something of an experience of being sent out, going into the high street shops, and delivering invitations to join in the Christmas Tree Festival, to be held here at St Mary’s at the beginning of December. This resulted in a number of encouraging and enquiring conversations. Then there was Graham’s invitation in the Staffordshire Post, inviting people in Stafford to come on the second Thursday of the month to a service of Healing and Reconciliation. A good number came, some from outside the church. It was a privilege to be amongst those who came, to share in God’s healing presence together. A similar invitation has been made this afternoon, for people to come together to pray for Stafford General Hospital. Can I invite you to pray too? , as we are encouraged to do by Luke “to ask the Lord of the harvest”, for those who will gather here this afternoon for God’s Kingdom to come near, deep into the heart of the people and issues surrounding the hospital. And many of us have had opportunities over the last few weeks to show “the Kingdom of God has come near to you” by expressions of love, sent in the boxes that have gone out to Eastern Europe and in gifts to support the work amongst HIV and Aids orphans in Tanzania. But, I find personally, once again, a further challenge in this passage. We are jolted out of the safety of thinking we can stay put in our comfort zones. The reason is there, in the first few verses of our reading. The seventy were sent out, ahead of Jesus in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. Jesus wasn’t planning to stay put with his friends the disciples, or even with the many who gathered around him to hear him teach. No. Jesus was planning to go out – to complete the work his father had called him to do.

As a church family, we are thinking through how and where we can go out amongst the people of Stafford to share that “the Kingdom of God has come near to them”. In particular, we’ve been reflecting about those who are presently underrepresented in church; children and young people, people in their twenties, thirties and forties. This might feel very challenging; it might mean offering something alternative, considering doing church a bit differently, offering additional styles, time and place of worship. But these ideas should excite us as God’s labourers in the harvest, as they might enable us to share with others that “the Kingdom of God has come near”. Perhaps, each of us might like to pray for and look out for opportunities to share God’s Kingdom with others; whether at the school gate, in the classroom, over coffee with friends and family, at work, at home, in our social gatherings and in the unexpected conversations we might have over this coming week.

Finally, there’s both a challenge and a warning in the passage. A word of peace was then and is now a blessing to those who receive it; but a judgement to those who reject it. Rejecting God’s peace is to turn our backs on God. The result for the people of Galilee, who the seventy went out too, would mean throwing themselves into the hands of pagan power. This explains why Luke presents Jesus as ardent and pressing, in sending out the seventy; he is not offering them an alternative religion, a different way of doing things. Jesus was offering God’s last chance for the Israelites to turn away from a path of ruin and disobedience and to turn back to accept God’s way of peace, God’s new creation in Christ. To accept God’s kingdom – his sovereign and saving rule, which longs to enfold all people and the whole world with love and new creation. And this is the saving message of love Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem to demonstrate, on the cross, by giving of himself.

So as we come this morning to celebrate the Eucharist as God’s children, our hearts can rightly be glad of Luke’s account of a Christ who gave of himself to reconcile us to God. For the new creation made possible in Christ and for the continuing reconciling power of Christ in the world and here in the centre of Stafford. And as we come to receive, let’s be open to asking God, to use us as his labourers, willing to join in the work Christ has begun, to pray and to be sent out in humility and with love, to those on the outside of the Christian family. Amen.