ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

St. Luke the Evangelist, 18 October 2009
Sermon preached by Fr. Julian Browning at High Mass

Readings: Acts 16: 6-12a; 2 Timothy 4:5-17; ; Luke 10:1-9.

You are looking so much better. I didn't want to tell you at the time but for six months you looked terrible under that strip lighting. It was like gazing out into a very crowded outpatients. St Luke would notice the transformation today. Luke is the patron saint of doctors, and also of artists, clearly a man with a sensitive side. And what he was sensitive to, about 80 AD, was the change from what first generation Christians were like, to what the second generation Christian congregations were like. These second generation Gentile Christian congregations, probably quite well-to-do, were doing all right, but were becoming aware of a new hostility in the air - internal squabbles and external criticism. They'd lost that original spark of Resurrection life. More than that, they didn't know how to be missionaries any more. They were a bit stuck. They didn't know what to do next.

I hope that rings a few bells, because if it doesn't, then in our neck of the woods of Christendom, we really are in denial. Restoration is great, but renewal is something else. The man who wrote the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, and that's about a quarter of the New Testament, wrote his story for congregations in need of renewal. For example, and I'm not going to get bogged down in early Christian history - there's no time for that - one thing that was sapping morale back then was the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70AD. God hadn't kept his promise to God's elect; he'd allowed the Temple to be destroyed. So what reasons do Gentile Christians have to believe that God will be faithful to his promises? That sort of thing saps morale. So there's quite a bit in St Luke about God's promises, and how we can look at them in a new way. God's promises are not just to Israel, but include Gentiles, the unclean, the poor, Samaritans and other outcasts. And Luke shows how this New Look, the new interpretation of how God does things, is not a break with the past but is in fact in the finest tradition of Judaism. Jesus, and the communities which follow his way, stand in a noble tradition. What a simple lesson for any congregation. Revival does not mean chucking away the past and starting again. Revival means gaining strength from all that is best in our tradition, and giving those best things a new life in our time.

I mentioned hostility. Who are our worst enemies today? We are. We put systems in place to exclude other people. Luke knew that. When he writes in his Gospel about the Pharisees, those who object to Jesus's eating habits, talking to sinners, and so on, the ones he really has in mind are the Jewish Christians of his own time who made life very difficult by applying strict entrance requirements to those wishing to join the new Israel, the Church. It's worse today. Now there are exclusive churches, inclusive churches, churches within churches. It is as chaotic now as at the time of St Paul's journeys in the Acts of the Apostles, and there Luke takes us through the difficulties of Peter, Stephen, Paul, Barnabas and the rest of them, and he shows it what it cost them to be Christians. Luke is more of a people man, than an ideas man. That is what makes his gospel and the Acts so accessible. The meaning of our religion is in a story, not a rulebook. In the end, it's not up to us to lay down the rules and say who's in or who's out. We have our lives to lead, and in those lives we can show others what it is to be a Christian, and what it costs, because there is no such thing as cost-free Christianity. The entrance requirement is to lose your life to gain it, and who of us can say we've done that. So instead of entrance requirements, we have baptism, the sign of the new life to which all are called. A new life, a new creation, free from the culture of death.

What a story Luke tells. It's designed to renew faith. It is about a man called Jesus whose work is one of redemption, of release, of the overthrow of all that holds us in the clutches of powers that restrict that fullness of life which God wants us to have. St Luke's Jesus tells us of a merciful God who is reaching out to us in a way which is still creative. Things change. Fortunes are reversed. The religiously secure, the proud, are not as secure as they might think, because when we become self-satisfied, we are no longer open to the grace and outreach of God. The Jesus of St Luke's Gospel pushes us to open our minds and use our imagination. The imagination doesn't age. The imagination is what links us with the minds of those who have gone before us. The imagination as well as the Apostolic Succession connects us to the glorious tradition of which I spoke. Thanks to St Luke and the other evangelists, we can go back, our imagination linked to theirs, in the space of a moment, to the time when Jesus walked this earth. We could just join the crowd and listen to Jesus. That's what we're usually doing. But why don't we go for broke, and go back as St Luke would want us to do, take our life in our hands and walk towards the tomb in the garden, in the early dawn of the first day of the Resurrection, feel the freshness in the air, and know that things have changed, and we need no longer serve and fear a god of death, because we are now served by the God of life who wants us to share His deathless life. So, over time, we rediscover a loving God. A new perception of God will change our perception of ourselves and other people. Maybe spiritual renewal is similar to restoration. Things start to look different, re-made, revived. There's a change of perception. And for us that's a new way of being alive.