Feast Of Saint Luke

It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Winston Churchill is widely believed to have said, “History is written by the victors.” There is a certain amount of truth in this–particularly in the chronicling of wars and political conflicts. But Professor Daniel Sims of the University of Northern British Columbia counters that history is written by the people who actually take the time to write it down. That’s what Saint Luke did for us–and does for us.

Luke is known to have written more than a quarter of the New Testament contributing to the canon of scripture both the Gospel that bears his name and the book called the Acts of the Apostles. And yet he is mentioned only three times in the Bible, all in the letters of his mentor, Saint Paul.

Luke and Paul spent a great deal of time together which is fitting because Luke was a doctor and Paul got beat up a lot. A match, as it were, made in Heaven.

It seems striking to me that these two men, Paul and Luke, who were not among the original twelve disciples, did not travel with Jesus during His earthly ministry, had such an experience with the risen Lord that they together wrote half of the New Testament and two thousand years later are speaking to you and me today.

There are, it seems to me, two kinds of spiritual experience: the sudden, miraculous, “mountaintop” kind; and the more gradual, educational, kind. We see a miraculous experience in the conversion of saint Paul on the damascus road, when Our Lord appeared to him in resurrected glory. But Luke, the man who writes about Paul’s experience in the Acts of the Apostles, acquired his own faith through study and research, and claimed to be nothing more than a historian. Here’s the prologue to his Gospel in contemporary English:

I have investigated all the reports in close detail, starting from the story’s beginning [and] I decided to write it all out for you, most honorable Theophilus, so you can know beyond the shadow of a doubt the reliability of what you were taught.

Luke was a physician, a scientist, and he approached his faith from a scientist’s perspective. Researching, investigating, and finally writing a prescription for the best medicine. Thank Heaven his writing is more legible than most written prescriptions–I think doctors’ notoriously poor penmanship is the reason most prescriptions are electronic these days.

Nowhere in Luke’s writings do we get the sense that he views himself as inferior to Paul because of his lack of a mountaintop experience. That’s one of the things we ought to take away from our study of Luke: that we don’t have to be struck blind like Saint Paul on the Damascus road. We don’t have to be struck dumb like Zacharias, whose mouth was shut by the angel who announced the impending birth of his son, John the Baptist. We can respect these miraculous occurrences when they happen to other people and rejoice with them and still know that’s not the only way to become a believer.

A lot of people long for these miraculous events and become disappointed when God doesn’t provide one. Some even fall away from the Church–doubting their own discipleship.

On the other hand there are some who have miraculous experiences and then quit the Church when they find they’re not sustainable. Many of us have been around people who had what they believed was a genuine supernatural religious experience. They couldn’t wait to tell everybody about it. They got a lot of attention at church. And then one day they just quit showing up.

A mountaintop experience, even if it’s legitimate, has to be followed up with more educational and less exciting pursuits: prayer, study, regular interaction with other believers. All of the things we know we ought to be doing as Christians.

That’s clearly what Paul did, and one of the most important things he taught his student saint Luke is that we can pass the message on without having a miraculous experience.

Luke addresses both his Gospel and Acts–which some scholars believe were originally combined in one book–to a believer he named Theophilus. This is a Greek work which means “beloved by God–” the one whom God loves. This was a common name in the Greek speaking world and also an honorary title for learned Romans and Jews of the era. And in that sense, he’s writing directly to you and me–the learned friends of God of our era.