Homily for the Feast of St. Luke (observed), Evensong, 10/19/2025
Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Detroit (detroitcathedral.org)

This morning we observed yesterday’s feast of St. Luke, and we continue that observance this evening. St. Luke’s day has long been important in this cathedral—which is why we can move it to a Sunday—because of the medical institutions that practically surround us and with whom we work and are in community. St. Luke is the patron saint of physicians. And so we focus on healing today, for example in the litany we will pray in a few minutes. What healing do you need? (I have a list. You probably do too.)

Biblically, healing is about wholeness—not just on the individual level, but in community. We often see this in stories of healing: We’re often specifically told that the person is not only relieved of physical suffering, but they are returned to their place in their community. Like Peter’s mother-in-law, who gets up from her fever and starts serving her guests. Or the Gerasene demoniac, whose healing involved putting him in his right mind—and, what I’m sure must have been painfully difficult and awkward, restoring him to fellowship with his neighbors.

But complicating matters further, the Bible sometimes seems to conflate forgiveness and healing. Again, in Gospel stories, for example: Someone comes to Jesus for healing, and he tells them their sins are forgiven, which they never asked him for. Perhaps this is somewhat in answer to the human temptation to assume other people who suffer somehow deserve it. But just as important, we’re reminded that we need to be healed from sin and sinfulness. And I would argue, also from the guilt we tend to cling to, possibly because if we’re guilty, then we were the primary actor in our story. But we’re not. [sotto voce:] Jesus is.

One of my medical conditions, bipolar disorder, is a great example of how we can conflate illness and sin. Mental illness affects behavior. But it’s a disease of the brain, which is an organ like the heart or liver. I’ve read estimates that one in five people with bipolar disorder will die from it, and yet we stigmatize those tragic deaths because they look like the results of choices and behavior. Can you imagine if we did the same with heart patients who died from heart attacks? Our brains are amazing. But they’re also prone to disease, as well as the effects of aging. Our fragility reminds us how vulnerable and dependent we are, on our communities and on God.

Like all of living things in creation, we humans arrived on the scene as the product of evolutionary processes driven not by ideals but by adaptations to pressures and dangers in our ancestors’ environments. As biologist Forrest Valkai (who has a YouTube channel I enjoy) puts it, evolution isn’t survival of the fittest; it’s “reproduction of the okayest.” That leaves a lot of room for stuff going wrong—diseases of old age being a prime example. That history also introduced behaviors we now, as moral agents, consider to be wrong. Homo sapiens sapiens was never innocent, and never without wounds and scars. And the truth is that it’s hard sometimes to parse what is sin, what is sickness, what’s just the human condition more generally, which is so much bigger than the sum of its parts. Our actions often lead to effects we have no way to anticipate, much less control. We’re creatures of habit, of instinct, of self-preservation, and, as our patron, St. Paul complained so long ago, we do precisely the wrong things we don’t want to do and don’t do the good things we mean to do.

But now, the good news. Christian tradition reads our Isaiah passage for tonight in light of Jesus. It’s his feet we see on the mountain. The Eternal Word of God chose to become one of us, a member of homo sapiens, caught up in the messiness of human history and the tragedy of suffering and death. In his two-part Gospel (Luke-Acts), St. Luke understands the incarnation of Christ as entirely world-changing, imbuing creation with God’s creative Holy Spirit through Jesus and through the communities of his followers with whom he shared that Spirit.

And Jesus is the resurrected one in the passage from Acts who shows himself to his disciples and invites them to join him in bearing the good news out into the world.

Luke doesn’t mention it, but elsewhere in the New Testament, we’re told the risen Christ, whose body has been healed from death no less,  remains scarred from his execution by Rome. But his resurrection has transformed those scars and the bitter memory of his death into a victory over death that yields to life abundant. It’s his presence that heals; our wholeness is in him, regardless of any visible or invisible health issues, whatever quirks or failings we continue to struggle with.

So let’s bring our wounded selves to Jesus. Whether or not the healing we desire takes the form we would like, we have been promised that we will be like him if we follow.

Here he comes, bearing scars and good news. And we, who also bear scars, now also get to be bearers the Holy Spirit and of good news.

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I close with the Ignatian prayer, Anima Christi:

Soul of Christ, sanctify me.
Body of Christ, save me.
Blood of Christ, inebriate me.
Water from the side of Christ, wash me.
Passion of Christ, strengthen me.
O Good Jesus, hear me.
Within your wounds hide me.
Permit me not to be separated from you.
From the wicked foe, defend me.
At the hour of my death, call me
and bid me come to you
That with your saints I may praise you
For ever and ever. Amen.

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_{Note: I’m not a regular homilist. Prior to this, I’d only ever delivered two impromptu “homilies,” both in noonday services of ante-Communion (which would’ve been noonday Mass had the priests shown up) during my time as a verger at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco (2005-2014).}

_{The Venerable Rev. Tim Spannus, Archdeacon of the Diocese of Michigan, invited me to give the homily this feast of St. Luke…with two days’ notice, but that was okay. But this isn’t something I regularly do.}