St. Luke
October 18

Sermon Preached by the Rt. Rev’d Gordon P. Scruton, Bishop of Western Massachusetts

to begin the Centennial Celebration of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

Readings are from the Book of Common Prayer 1892

2 Timothy 4:5-15

Psalm 147

Luke 10:1-12

Happy birthday, St Luke’s!  God has brought you a long way since 1909.  Considering your age, you don’t look like a decrepit congregation relegated to the diminishments of 100 years.  You look like a congregation vitally alive and seeking to live the mission God has given you to fulfill in this generation.

Christ guided you through the first Great Depression and is guiding you now in the midst of a 2^nd Great Depression.  God guided you through two world wars, including the experience of your first rector, Frederick Danker, serving in the first World War.  After those two world wars, Christ inspired you to join with other congregations in the diocese in working for peace, recovery and reconciliation by developing companion relationships with German Lutheran congregations.

The Holy Spirit inspired your first members as they walked to church from the neighborhood, inspired another generation of members as the took the trolley to church and now as they drive cars to worship in this building.  Clergy and lay leaders have come and gone over the past one hundred years, but God the Holy Trinity has remained at the center of worship and at the guiding center of the daily lives of the people who have worshiped and served in this community.

As we worship today, with the words and format they would have used in 1909, let us be aware that we sit here in the company of all the souls who have worshipped here in past generations.  They are praying for you now, begging Christ to help you recognize and follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit as you live God’s mission in this generation.

At your birth you were named, St Luke’s.  Names shape identity.  Luke, your patron saint, continually seeks to guide your life and ministry as a congregation.  How appropriate that the Gospel for today comes from St. Luke’s gospel and outlines one of the clearest visions in the New Testament of what it means to live as a Christian community.  Today’s gospel is not one to hear today and put on a shelf.  This is a core passage of Scripture from Luke that can anchor and shape your direction as followers of Jesus in your daily life and as a Christian community in the Worcester area.

Luke says that Jesus appointed seventy people and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go.  This commissioning is very significant for you.  St Luke’s is not just a nice little religious club.  You are not a non-profit organized to do religious things together. Christ appointed each of you and all of you together…to go into your daily lives, your homes, your neighborhoods, your work places, to stores and schools in the area to prepare the way for Christ’s coming.

Luke is an Evangelist and each member of this congregation is sent by Christ to be an evangelist to live and share the good news of Christ in your daily lives.  In our culture evangelists have often gotten a bad name as manipulative, controlling, arrogant, self-centered hucksters.  That is not the picture Luke paints in this gospel.

Evangelists are sent out by God to develop relationships with people with an attitude of humility and with great vulnerability.  They are like lambs amid wolves…doesn’t it feel that way many days?  They take nothing with them to defend themselves or to manipulate others.  When they go, the first thing they do is to offer peace to the people they meet.

Do the people you meet experience you as a person who brings peace to them and to the situations you encounter every day?

Of course, we can’t bring peace to others unless we have learned to center our lives in the peace of Christ.  What spiritual practices help you to center your life at the beginning of each day in the peace of Christ?  When you find yourself in stressful situations during the day, what spiritual practices help you reconnect with the peace of Christ?  Do you end each day, allowing the peace of Christ to heal your wounds and stresses from the day, giving thanks for God’s blessing and presence with you in the day that is past?

To be a person who constantly radiates “the peace of God which passes understanding” requires intentional daily discipline.  Becoming a community of peace to this neighborhood and this city requires time and energy to keep listening to God’s guidance as a parish community, letting God show you how to be instruments of peace personally and corporately.

Jesus sent his followers to develop such close relationships with the people they meet that they are invited into the homes of their new acquaintances to eat meals.  This was common practice in the Middle East.  We contemporary Americans are so busy and mobile that friends and neighbors seldom eat in each other’s homes.

Jesus calls us to build the quality of trust and relationship that enables us to get invited to our neighbors’ homes.  Notice, we are dependent on their hospitality.  That’s the humility to which Jesus calls us.  We are not the generous one who offer hospitality.  Jesus calls us to be the humble ones willing to be dependent on the hospitality of others.  How might God be inviting you to have that kind of relationships with people in your neighborhood or place of work?

Then the assignment Jesus gives us gets even more challenging.  Jesus says, when you visit in their home, cure the sick who are there and say, “The Kingdom of God has come near to you.”

What an assignment…go heal the sick!  Of course, none of us have that kind of power.  I remember a surgeon telling me that he couldn’t heal anyone.  All he could do was cleanse the wounds and stitch them together.  Only God could do the healing.  That is true for all of us.  Christ invites us to develop relationships with people who are hurting and in need.  We cannot heal them ourselves, but we can invite the Spirit of Jesus to flow into their places of need.  We can pray with them and for them.  We can walk with them as Jesus reaches out to help them in their needs.

How might Jesus be calling you to bring healing to people you will meet this week?  How might the Spirit be inviting this congregation to be an instrument through which God’s healing power flows into the needs of this neighborhood, city and world?

Jesus called St Luke to be an evangelist and a physician.  And Jesus calls you to share God’s Good News and to be channels of God’s healing grace.  Jesus is clear that these ministries will not be easy.  You will be rejected at times.  You will be vulnerable, like lambs among wolves.  But you don’t quit when things get challenging.  You simply let go of situations and people who are not receptive and move forward to the next opportunity Jesus gives you to offer peace and healing.  It’s not about us.  It’s all about God’s kingdom coming, about God’s will being fulfilled.

As you begin this centennial year as a congregation, Jesus and Luke are urgently reminding you of your core mission, the primary reason God brought this community of faith into being.  God is inviting you to a renewed vision and commitment to living the “Jesus way” in this generation.

It was not easy for the founders to establish this congregation in 1909.  It will not be easy for you to discern and follow Christ’s fresh call to a mission of relationships, offering peace and healing, sharing the good news that the Kingdom of God is very near and active.

Jesus and Luke and those who have gone before you in this congregation are praying for you and urging you on.  How will you respond to their urging and prayers?

I invite you to close your eyes and in a moment of silence, listen for what Jesus might be saying to you personally and to this congregation through today’s Gospel.

O Lord, make us instruments of your peace.  Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair hope, where there is darkness, light, where there is sadness, joy.  O Divine Master, grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love.  For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.  (A prayer attributed to St. Francis, BCP p. 833)