St Luke
From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul
Sermon: Saint Luke. Cathedral, Sunday Evensong, 17.10.10.
The Revd David Tannock, Hospital Chaplain, Wellington Hospital.
The year is 1863. A mission station had been opened at Matamata. But local conflicts meant that the children from the school had to be evacuated to Tauranga. At night they made camp, but their camp fire attracted a raiding party from Rotorua. After some fighting the raiding party withdrew and it was discovered that a 12-year old girl had been killed on her sleeping mat. The girl’s name was Tarore. Her death created a desire for utu. But at her funeral next day in Matamata her father, Ngakuku, spoke against revenge. Tarore is commemorated in the Church Calendar on Tuesday.
Uita, the leader of the raiding party, found a recently-published copy of Saint Luke’s Gospel under Tarore’s body. Thinking it might be of value he took it with him. He couldn’t read, but some time later a slave named Ripahau read to the people from the Gospel and this led to the reconciliation of Uita and Ngakuku. Later that same Gospel, with Ngakuku’s name on it, found its way to Otaki where Tamihana, son of Te Rauparaha, and his cousin, Matene te Whiwhi, had learned to read. They took this book with them when they toured the South Island, preaching the Gospel of peace and reconciliation.
A story of transformation. Individual lives are changed. Social values are transformed. Out of the untidy and tragic mix of events comes social and moral transformation. Imagine the moral and spiritual power which brought about the end of so much bloodshed and revenge from the midst of such personal grief.
Now press the re-wind button and go back to the first century AD. A two-volume work is written. It consists of what we now know as the Gospel According to Saint Luke, the book which Tarore had with her on that fateful day in 1836, and the Acts of the Apostles. We commemorate Saint Luke tomorrow. We have been reading from Saint Luke’s Gospel each Sunday this year at the Eucharist.
In Luke’s Gospel we have the record of the life, death and resurrection of One who stood against the full might of the religious and political establishment. Rome could not defeat him and death could not hold him.
In the Book of Acts we see how the Church’s centre of gravity moved out from Jerusalem to the Gentile world and to its capital, Rome. The followers of that Man, crucified as a criminal by the Roman Empire, were to take over that empire itself.
It is a story of transformation. Individual lives are changed. Social values are transformed. It is a tumultuous and untidy story. The Holy Spirit sets the Agenda. Individuals respond within the demands of the moment to the work of the Spirit and the needs of those around them.
I am a hospital chaplain. I am here in this pulpit because tomorrow is Saint Luke’s Day and Saint Luke was a doctor. But the healing work of hospitals, doctors, nurses, allied health practitioners, the Church’s healing ministry, is not just a matter of clearing up the ailments which afflict individuals. Individual needs are important, but we are all part of a society. There is also a healing of society which is an integral part of the Gospel. Let’s look at just two aspects of that now.
The whole saga of Tarore, her Gospel, her father and her killer, reminds us of the central importance of reconciliation. But you don’t get reconciliation just by niceness. Not even by Anglican niceness. You start with courageous moral vision. By standing up for some things which are simply right. When the Archbishop of York, sans clerical collar, came to New Plymouth for the consecration of the Cathedral, he led a delegation to the local prison. There the former prisoner and judge spoke out against the conditions of that prison and the penal policy which produced the building and filled it.
After the recent earthquake in Christchurch, the Bishop of Christchurch made sure that the clergy, with their clerical collars, were out in the community assisting the work of reconstructing people’s lives. She also launched an appeal to raise $100,000 for the people of Haiti as a gift from the people of Christchurch, to help reconstruct lives lived in conditions very different from those of her own people. We live in a world of astonishing contrasts of wealth and poverty, of health and illness. It is a world in which we all belong to each other. Saint Luke’s Gospel reminds us constantly of the plight of the poor, the oppressed and the disadvantaged. Dives and Lazarus are still with us. Stand up! Speak! Challenge! And be imaginative!
And the second area in which healing may take place is belief. As we look at our society today, we may well feel that we are standing on Dover Beach with Matthew Arnold, the Victorian poet, who saw in the going-out of the tide such a potent symbol of the waning of the faith in his day. This brings us up against some hard questions. Are we a spent force? Are we yesterday’s men and women? Does the future, and a more accurate understanding of our antecedents, rest with the selfish gene and the choices of the market place?
Most of the people in the world believe in God. But contemporary Western society generally doesn’t. The modern Westerner is technologically proficient and materially wealthy. We find it more congenial to believe that we are in charge of our daily lives, our relationships, our morality and our mortality. If we can explain everything by what we find in the material world, then God is our own creation and we take his place. There is a good analysis of what happens next in Genesis, Chapter 3.
We must thank God for the appearance in our day of evangelical atheism. It may be annoying. It may be trite. Sometimes it is – not always. It may be uncomfortable. But it makes us think. It makes us really consider what we believe. Why we believe it. Where that belief will take us. How we will commend that belief to others. It reminds us of our tradition of intellectual engagement which goes back over the whole life of the Christian Church to Scripture itself – Teilhard de Chardan, S. Thomas Aquinas, S. Augustine, the Book of Job.
And there are the poets, the musicians, the playwrights and painters who join head and heart, mind and soul. Palestrina, who lifts the liturgical plod to the serene eternal; T.S. Eliot who reminds us that in certain places we there to kneel “where prayer has been valid”; Rembrant, who shows us the disciples looking at the Lord’s body with such power that we look with them.
The Christian intellectual and artistic tradition is vital. One of the sad things of the contemporary Church is the way we have diluted some of the rigour of our preaching, our teaching, our liturgical language and performance, the theological preparation of candidates for ordination. In NZ especially we have not encouraged our intellectuals in the Church, any more than in society. Our ideal bishop would sometimes seem to be No 8 Wire in a Mitre.
But look again at Saint Luke. He is not only the patron saint of doctors, but also of the painters of pictures. There is a tradition that he painted a portrait of our Lady. And he gives us that wonderful word-portrait of her as one “who kept all these things, pondering them in her heart” (2.19). We are not just called to change our mental furniture. We are called to allow all these things – the things we believe, the things we experience, the things we stand up for – to work in our hearts. To produce new people. To produce a new people. To become part of that new creation which has its origin and its goal in the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Archbishop Michael Ramsay once said that the whole point about evolution is not the physical process of the evolution of the amoeba to a human being; it is the process of the evolution of the amoeba to the saint.
So let us stand up for what is right. Let us think carefully about what is true. Let us ponder and pray that we will grow in this way. This is the way of healing.
