The Gift of St. Luke

Sermon 435 St. Martin’s 189 (Keeping the Kalender) 10/19/26

Today we celebrate St. Luke, a physician and evangelist—and a little bit of an overachiever, if you ask me. He was not only smart enough to care for people’s health and well-being, but he also went on (with the Holy Spirit’s guidance) to write one of the four gospels; and as many New Testament scholars will say, Luke is the William Shakespeare of gospel writers.

No one exceeds Luke’s use of the Greek language when telling the story of Jesus.

Luke was a Gentile, and he wrote with the outsider in mind. Though it seems he never met Jesus in the flesh, he was captured by the radical Good News that God had broken into the world to set all people free from sin and death.

Luke pays close attention to the least, the lost, and the typically forgotten throughout his gospel account. Early on, we read about the elderly, childless couple Elizabeth and Zechariah, and the miracle God was bringing about in their son John.

Luke also spends a good amount of time early in his gospel on Mary, a teenager from the middle of nowhere. He records her song, which recalls God’s uplifting nature for those the world has forgotten, herself included.

She says, “God has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant” and “He has lifted up the lowly, and filled the hungry with good things.”

Luke is the only one who records this, and countless stories of Jesus interacting with the most surprising cast of characters. In total, Luke gives us six miracles and 18 parables that are unique to his gospel. Without it, something important would be missing from the overall story of Jesus and God’s plan of salvation.

Photo by LUCIANO BESERRA on Unsplash

And I think part of what makes Luke’s narrative so unique is that he is a doctor. As a physician, Luke cared for the body, but as an evangelist, he also cared for the soul. 

And this is an important fact in the Judeo-Christian worldview. We are not disembodied spirits just waiting to break free from these physical bonds. No, God created us —soul and body —and he calls his creation good—very good, in fact.

The Greco-Roman world that Luke was accustomed to may have preferred this idea of spirits yearning to break free from the weak flesh, but Luke’s emphasis on Jesus’ Incarnation—this idea of God being enfleshed—is a reminder to all of us that humanity has been honored because God came as one of us. God stooped down to become one of us. What a privilege.

Maybe this is why Luke spends so much time with Jesus’ birth narrative—just to remind us that God was weak and helpless in the form of a baby, in the same way that we are faced with our own human frailty and weakness.

Luke makes sure we know that Jesus cares about people’s well-being through the many healings throughout his gospel. But Luke is interested not only in physical healing, but also in what each healing does to the entire family and community.

A sickness may entail estrangement from family and others in a village. Leprosy is a good example. Each time Jesus heals someone, it not only restores that person's health and sense of wholeness, but also brings them back into fellowship with others.

Luke knows, like any good physician, that we are not just individuals, isolated and alone—health includes belonging to one another and a sense of purpose within a community.

One small miracle from Jesus can restore all of this for a person. God cares for our whole being.

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In our own lives, some of us have experienced miraculous healing; others have gone through the long journey of consultations, surgeries, physical training—which the Church would say is God working through the gifts of these people and this process. And praise God for that.

For others of us, though, we have prayed for healing for ourselves or someone we love, and it has not come. No matter how many specialists we’ve seen or how many prayers we have prayed, it can feel like they all go unanswered. When there is suffering involved, our prayers can become more questions of “why is this happening” rather than “when will this go away?”

These are big and important questions, and it’s important to remember that Jesus did not heal every person he met. His mission was larger than just healing sick people. When he did a miracle, it was a sign of the life to come. The kingdom of God was breaking in, but it had not come in its fullness.

Even now we long for God’s kingdom to come in its fullness.

As the great preacher Sam Lloyd once said, “There can always be healing; there can’t always be a cure.”

In this life, on this side of eternity, we must reckon with the fact that the cure may not come in time, but God always offers us healing.

That is why Luke not only tells us the healing stories of Jesus, but also the climactic moment of his gospel: Jesus is raised on that cross, stricken and struck down.

The same book that began with baby Jesus in a manger, visited by angels and shepherds, also tells of his brutal death. The Son of God’s body would experience the same frailty and weakness that our bodies have—and not even he bypassed the finality of death.

Luke not only cares about the body, but in the crucifixion, he was telling us just how much God loved our soul.

The good news of Jesus’ resurrection three days later enlivened his followers' hearts, and they were sent out to the ends of the earth. Their hearts were set on fire for the Lord, and what he had done. And even Luke, this Gentile, was overcome by the flames of divine love.

Luke not only wrote about Jesus, but then added part two, Acts of the Apostles, that gave a detailed account of how that message spread throughout the empire.

From the earliest days, the Christian communities we read about in Acts cared for people’s physical needs: the sick, the widow, and the orphan. They tended to the body just as much as they tended to the soul.

There are countless stories of Christians caring for the least, the lost, and forgotten in communities around the world and throughout time. This conviction rests on Luke’s gospel.

Tonight, as we gather in worship around this table, we are reminded that God always offers healing, even when there isn’t a cure.

Healing includes the body and soul, and we know that God, through his infinite goodness and mercy, has offered healing that goes from this life and into the next. Thanks be to God.