Luke 07
Dean Gay Hall
Seabury-Western
October 18, 2007
Whether or not you believe that there was a real Luke who made his living as a medical doctor, the Christian tradition has always seen it as important to affirm that one of the four evangelists had his principal vocational identity as a physician. Today’s collect thanks God for the way Luke’s Gospel sets forth “the love and healing power” of Jesus. Whatever else we may think of Christianity, it is clear from even a cursory reading of the New Testament that Jesus’s earliest followers understood him primarily as a healer.
For you and me, as post-Enlightenment rational 21st century people, healing means essentially being cured of disease. But in Jesus’s world, healing meant that and a lot more. It wasn’t only that the blind received their sight and the lame could walk. Healing signified that and the liberation from the stigmatization that illness often entailed. In the world of Jesus, to be healed from an illness meant being restored to one’s self, one’s role in the community, one’s mission in life. As one philosopher puts it, to be ill is to be disvalued in “being and in social function.” [Crossan, The Birth of Christianity¸ p. 293] When Jesus cured a leper, restored sight to the blind, unstopped a deaf mute’s ears and tongue, he restored them to the fullness of both their personal and social identities.
So one thing we do as a community when we celebrate St. Luke’s day is, traditionally, to give thanks to all those people in our world who, like Luke, devote themselves to the healing of people from disease in all its various forms. And another thing we do, when we gather on this day, is to listen to what Luke—the most radical of the four Gospel writers—wants to say to us about the content of what that healing actually looks like.
Here, again, is what Jesus says to us in the fourth chapter of Luke’s Gospel. Returning to his home town of Nazareth, Jesus stands up to read the scriptures in the synagogue and reads this passage from the prophet Isaiah [Isaiah 61]:
“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.”—Luke 4.18-19
And then, never shy about his own vocational identity in the working out of God’s plan of salvation, Jesus concludes by announcing, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."
As we think about St. Luke and his day, both the occasion and the Gospel reading equate God’s ministry of healing with a particular kind of liberating activity. In Jesus’s life and ministry, healing is about bringing good news to the poor and release to the captives. It helps the blind recover their sight, sets the oppressed free, and proclaims “the year of the Lord’s favor”—what used to be translated as the “acceptable year of the Lord”, the year of release into freedom after a six year period of slavery. So Jesus’s ministry is about restoring identity, setting free, establishing justice. In his very presence, this promised work is now present and real. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
So the question naturally presents itself: “What does all this have to do with the life and work of a theological seminary?” As a community of faith and learning serving the church and the world, when we think together as students and faculty and trustees and staff, what does it mean to be agents of healing in the way that Jesus and Luke might use the word? How do we understand our ministries in the light of this radical liberation which Jesus embodies?
Just before he died in a car accident earlier this year, Jim Kelsey (former bishop of Northern Michigan) came to Seabury for a meeting on ministry development, and he and I got into a side conversation about our shared concerns about CPE—Clinical Pastoral Education. Most dioceses and seminaries, including this one, require ordination track students to do this 12-week summer program usually located in a teaching hospital. Jim and I found ourselves in agreement about both the strengths and weaknesses of CPE. For all its benefits, CPE raises some crucial theological issues. For Jim those issues had to do with inculcation into a kind of clerical identity which increasingly runs counter to our emerging sense of the ministerial identity conferred on all of us in Baptism. For me they concerned the rather narrow clinical understanding which construes “pastoral ministry” as essentially one-on-one counseling. I suggested that seminarians would develop a lot more pastoral, relational, and leadership skills by doing the 10-day IAF training in community organizing capped by an intensive weekend of initiative games at a church camp. If we are ordaining people to lead faith communities in groups, then community organizing skills seem more important than the one-to-one sensitivities which are the proper equipment of all baptized people. And I can tell you from experience, you learn a lot more about a person observing them in a ropes course than you do from reading a verbatim.
So no matter how you feel about one-to-one pastoral care, I believe that Luke and Jesus are at least pointing us in the direction of seeing, as a seminary, that for theologically trained men and women the ministry of healing has as much to do with personal and social liberation than it does with what we have traditionally called “pastoral care”. Letting the oppressed go free and restoring sight to the blind go hand in hand.
And that leads me to a second observation. Given the oppressive social forces which grip our nation, our culture, and our world, a commitment to be ministers of healing in the tradition of Jesus and Luke entails a commitment to standing with and for those who are most at risk in our society: children, the poor, those who are hated or marginalized because of their racial, social, religious, gender, or sexual identity. And yes, the sick, the mourners, the lost. The Beatitudes is not just a collection of sayings about people God cares about. It is a program for action for those of us who do ministry in God’s name.
It would be lovely if we lived in a place and in a time where and when seminary could be a removal from these realities, so that those called to ministry could “get themselves together” before they took on the cares of the world. But we live neither in that place nor at that time. You and I inhabit a world deeply in need of healing in the way Jesus and Luke talk about it—liberation, redemption, transformation--and the role of a school like this must be primarily as a faith community itself which takes on and responds to the pains and fears and losses of the world and its most vulnerable citizens. We can avoid neither the civic nor ecclesiastical controversies of our day. We must let them in and expose them to the liberating blessing of God’s healing light.
To the extent that we can do that we will be, as Jesus was and is, healers. And if we are persistent and faithful and loving in living out that ministry of healing, it just may be that one day this scripture will be fulfilled in our hearing, too. Amen.