Thhis sermon was preached recenttl by Rev Sue.
Looking back to my first year at high school, I can still remember the first scripture lesson. I can picture a page in the exercise book where we had drawn a whole shelf of books: the books of the Bible, gathered into collections, each in a different colour. One collection was the four Gospels.
Have you ever wondered why we are given four different accounts of the life of Jesus? It can be confusing when we compare them and find the stories told slightly differently. But the beauty is that we have four authors, each writing from their own perspective, each with their own emphasis. What they put in, what they leave out, and how they remember the words of Jesus all combine to give their version of the good news.
All four have their merits, but if I had to choose just one, I would keep Luke’s, and it’s his feast day we are celebrating today. I’d keep it because Luke, more than any of the others, notices people, especially the people everybody else overlooks.
Luke’s Gospel is really volume one of a two-book series. The same author wrote the Book of Acts, which carries the story on from the Ascension and tells how the church was born. Both books are addressed to the same person, Theophilus, a name that means “friend of God”. In all, Luke wrote over a quarter of the New Testament.
He is mentioned by name three times, each time in letters connected with St Paul. Paul calls him a fellow worker, and in Colossians “the beloved physician”, which is why he is the patron saint of doctors. And in our epistle today, written when Paul was a prisoner in Rome and many had deserted him, Paul writes simply, “Only Luke is with me.” Tradition says he came from Antioch, and he was most likely a gentile: someone who knew what it was to be an outsider looking in. Partway through Acts, the story suddenly changes from “they” to “we”. Luke was there, sharing Paul’s hair-raising journeys, shipwreck and all.
A good doctor learns to pay attention to the person in front of them. Not the illness, not the category, but this person, with this name and this story. And that is exactly how Luke writes his Gospel.
So let’s think about who gets noticed in Luke’s Gospel.
The poor get noticed. In Mary’s song, the Magnificat, God “has filled the hungry with good things”. Where Matthew has “Blessed are the poor in spirit”, Luke puts it plainly: “Blessed are you who are poor.” And only Luke tells the parable of the rich man who feasted every day while a poor man called Lazarus lay at his gate, longing for the scraps. Have you ever noticed that in that story the rich man has no name? The poor man does.
The women get noticed. Luke tells the Christmas story from Mary’s side. He names the women who travelled with Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna and many others, and tells us they supported the ministry out of their own resources. They weren’t on the edge of the story; they were helping to pay for it. Luke’s people come across as real people in their own right, not minor roles supporting the main plot.
And the outsiders get noticed. Only Luke gives us the good Samaritan, where the hero is the very man the listeners would least have expected. Only Luke gives us the prodigal son, and the father who runs down the road to meet him. And only Luke gives us Zacchaeus.
We remember him from Sunday school as the little man who climbed the tree. But Zacchaeus was the chief tax collector in Jericho, and he was rich: he collected taxes for the Romans and took his own cut on top. Nobody felt sorry for him.
When Jesus came through Jericho, Zacchaeus wanted to see him, but he was short and the crowd wouldn’t let him through. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree. Picture it: a wealthy, important man scrambling up a tree like a schoolboy.
When Jesus reached that spot, he stopped, looked up and said, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” He called him by name. The crowd grumbled that he had gone to be the guest of a sinner. But Zacchaeus promised to give half of what he owned to the poor, and to pay back four times over anyone he had cheated. And Jesus said, “Today salvation has come to this house.”
Notice the order. Jesus didn’t wait for Zacchaeus to change before he noticed him. He noticed him first, and that is what changed him.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus sends out seventy of his followers to heal the sick and to say, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.” Healing and proclaiming: the physician and the evangelist. Luke was an evangelist in both senses of the word. He wrote the Gospel, and he went out and told people the good news. That was his calling, and it is ours too.
So the question Luke puts to us is a simple one: who do we fail to notice?
Society is becoming more and more divided. On our own doorstep, our Jewish neighbours are living in fear of violence and hatred. They are part of the life of this place, and they need to know their neighbours stand with them. Anger is directed towards immigrants and asylum seekers, irrespective of why they are here or who they are. It is so easy to talk about people as a category and never see a face or learn a name. Luke won’t let us do that.
And although the cost of living hits all of us, looking at the world as a whole, we are very fortunate. We are not living in a war zone. We have enough to eat. We have a place we can call home. Many people have none of those, and some of them live closer to us than we might think.
Let me go back to that exercise book. Luke wrote two volumes, but the Book of Acts has no neat ending. It leaves Paul in Rome, still telling everyone who comes to him about the kingdom of God. The story isn’t finished. Volume three is still being written, and we are writing it, here, this week. Luke shows us how Jesus responded to people in need. He saw them. He stopped for them. He called them by name. So may God give us Luke’s eyes: to notice the people others overlook, to stop under the tree, and to call them by name. Amen.
