Namesake
Thumbnail image: “St. Luke” by Giorgio Vasari, National Gallery of Art
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
October 18, 2026—Feast of St. Luke
Sirach 38:1-4,6-10,12-14; Luke 4:14-21
The idea of celebrating The Feast of St. Luke, our patronal feast,
has been kicking around for a few years now.
I have to admit, it’s not a tradition I have much experience with,
despite how common it is in the Episcopal Church.
But the more we talked about it,
the more excited I got about the idea of taking the day
to honor the man who gave us his name.
St. Luke, after all, is the patron saint of physicians, of healers.
And I have long maintained that our core charism, our gift,
our way of showing Christ’s face to the world, is that of healing.
But there’s more to Luke than that.
Most significantly, of course, he wrote one of the four gospels.
And since each gospel writer has a slightly different lens,
it’s worth looking at what characterizes the gospel Luke wrote.
And you can see it, right from the beginning:
Luke emphasizes the power of Jesus to overturn oppression,
to upend everything that favors the rich and the powerful
and those at the center of things.
In the very first chapter,
Mary is brought the news that she will give birth to the messiah.
And in response, she sings the Magnificat,
one of the all-time great liberation songs:
“[The Lord] has shown the strength of his arm,
He has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich He has sent away empty” (Lk 1:51-53).
Luke’s gospel is anchored in this image
of God’s kingdom as something that reverses everything that keeps
some in wealth and some in poverty,
some in good health and some in crippling sickness,
some at the center of things, and others at the margins.
One has only to compare Matthew’s account of the sermon on the mount
to that of Luke to see it:
in Matthew, we hear Jesus say,
“Blessed are the poor in spirit …
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Mt 5:3f);
but in Luke, it is simply, “Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who hunger, for you shall be fed” (Lk 6:20b-21a).
Spiritual and practical needs are both important.
Individual and societal salvation are both important.
The Kingdom of Heaven beyond this world,
and the one that Jesus tells us is breaking through right here and now …
they are both important.
And none of those things is exclusive to any one gospel writer.
But it’s fair to say that Luke puts special emphasis
on the fleshly concerns, the lived experience, of THIS world.
He knows that God’s kingdom coming (on earth as it is in heaven)
will require an overturning of the ways of the world
that Isaiah described and Jesus proclaimed in today’s gospel:
the poor will be raised up,
the captives released,
the blind receive their sight,
and the oppressed go free!
And this, in every possible way, will bring about healing.
Not only for individuals, but for a community, for a nation, for the world.
It is no small thing, to carry a name.
To have been named for someone not only honors that person,
but it lays their legacy upon you.
Admittedly, this is not always an easy thing, or even a good thing.
We can bear the name of someone who was actually deeply flawed,
and have to reckon with what it means to live that down,
to shake it off,
even to repair the damage we have somehow been saddled with.
But at its best, it is a mantle laid upon us
that not only calls us to live up to the name,
but also bestows some of the power that person had, some of their charism.
Luke is remembered as a physician,
and his gospel paints a vivid picture
of the many ways in which salvation will bring healing.
One of the striking things about Jesus is what happened
when he faced someone or something said to be unclean.
In the world through which he moved, after all,
it was understood that if you touched an unclean thing or person,
it made you unclean.
And we need to set aside germ theory here,
because most of the time that’s not what this was about.
We might understand it better through a social analogy.
Because anyone who’s been in middle school can recognize this idea,
can remember just how contagious social stigma could be.
Which left the outcast even lonelier
because other kids didn’t dare risk being caught up in their rejection.
But Jesus? Jesus is the sweet nerdy kid who risks that fate,
to go and sit with them, so they won’t be so alone.
Jesus is the cool kid who goes and sits with them,
so that they are actually made cool by association.
Because with Jesus,
his holiness, his being, is the thing that’s catching.
When the woman with the flow of blood touches his robe (Luke 8:43-48);
when he draws near to the dead body of the widow’s son (Luke 7:11-17);
when he approaches the ten lepers in the wilderness:
he is not made sick or unclean; they are made well!
Jesus, especially in Luke,
goes where he isn’t supposed to go.
He moves towards people whom others fear or shun.
He goes out to the edges, to the borderlands, to the uncertain places,
and his very willingness to be there, begins the healing.
Healing that restores bodies,
healing that brings solace to the lonely and rejected,
healing that restores fractured community.
We carry the name of Jesus,
and we carry the name of Luke the physician.
Which means that healing is in our DNA,
the mantle is on our shoulders,
the gift (we have to believe) is in our blood.
We are called into the wounded places of the world.
We are called to the sick, to the lonely,
to those who have fallen through the cracks of society,
rejected by their community, perhaps even cast out of their churches.
We have a gift for healing.
of welcoming those people in, with a love that binds up wounds.
And the model we see in the gospel of Luke
invites us to move even closer to the edges,
to the fringes, to the cracks where we can help the light get in.
Which certainly means us going out there,
finding more and more ways to be present at the margins:
of society and of people’s lives,
as we do at Welcome Inn,
as we do at Oakridge Manor,
as we do in immigration courtrooms.
But it can also mean right here at church,
in ways we might push ourselves beyond the comfortable and familiar,
ways that would help us connect with someone different,
someone we don’t really understand,
going through or coming from
something outside our experience.
So that we might expand our healing embrace.
So that we might follow Jesus
in the way that inspired our patron saint
to pick up a pen and to write the good news.
May we carry the name with pride, my friends. Amen