One of the treasures of Rome is a painting of Mary, the Mother of our Lord, which resides in the Borghese chapel of the Church of St. Mary Major and is attributed to St. Luke. It is a painting reputed to have healing powers, possibly because St. Luke was a physician as well as a painter; at any rate, on occasions like the cholera epidemic in 1837, it was carried through the streets of Rome to the Church of the Gesu, where it was placed so that the people might venerate it and be spared the dread disease. No one bothers to dispute its authenticity, simply because it is ancient and is a fitting work of art for the magnificent church that is named for the Virgin Mary.

Luke, according to Scripture, was a physician and a companion of Paul as well as, tradition tells us, an artist and one of the seventy commissioned by the Lord for the first evangelism effort of the church. But it is chiefly as an artist with words - a consummate story teller - that we remember him on the traditional date of his death, October 18. He may have healed people and ministered to them as a physician, and he may have painted portraits of Jesus, Mary, and even of himself. We’ll never know the complete truth about these traditions. What we do know is that he wrote two books that spell out the wonderful story of Jesus Christ and the beginnings of the church that bears his name. He told an extraordinary story - the gospel of our Lord and he did it so marvelously that his feast day is worthy of celebration by every person who has read or heard his version of the tale about the Christ.

Luke’s Self-Portrait

Among the old and ancient paintings of the city of Rome is one that is supposed to be a self-portrait of Luke, but he paints a better picture of himself at the beginning of his Gospel. What he writes to Theophilus, the lover of God, has been set down out of deep concern for a human being who has heard about Jesus but doesn’t have knowledge of the whole story. Luke was a person who cared about the welfare of people; he desired that Theophilus - and others, as well - should enjoy spiritual as well as physical health through knowledge of the Word. And he was equally concerned about the truth of what happened in the life and brief ministry of our Lord. Accordingly, he set out to publish Jesus’ story.

That same concern for the welfare of people has caused numerous people who have heard that story to speak out today when the lives of all people - perhaps all life on earth - are threatened by the arms race and the Bomb. Two years ago, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Amarillo, Texas, the Most Reverend L. T. Mattheissen, preached a sermon, "I Didn’t Know the Gun Was Loaded," in Riverside Church, New York City. He, too, paints a self-portrait, a before-and-after picture of unconcern about nuclear war and how it changed to deep concern so that he began to speak about the munitions makers and especially about Pantex, the corporation that assembles all nuclear weapons in the United States just outside the city of Amarillo. He said, "I really paid little attention when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. I was grateful only that the war would soon be over and that my brother could come home. I did not realize at the time what the guns over Hiroshima and Nagaski were loaded with." He could say with the Catholic chaplain on Tinian Island and the Catholic pilot who flew the plane from there to bomb Nagasaki, and who knew that thousands of other civilians were being firebombed and napalmed in Tokyo, Dresden, Hamburg, Coventry, and Vietnam: "I knew that civilians were being destroyed. Yet, to the men who were doing it, I never preached a single sermon against killing civilians. On Judgment Day," said that Catholic chaplain, Father Zabelka, "I think I am going to need to seek more mercy than justice in this matter."

At last Bishop Mattheissen became aware of the threat that the Bomb posed to the bodies and souls of people, and with deep concern, a radical change took place in him. "What of me?" he asks. "For thirty-three years I lived and continue to live at the very portals of Pantex, and for those thirty-three years I have said nothing either as a priest or as Bishop - until a Catholic employee (of Pantex) and his wife came to me with troubled consciences. They had begun to think that what he was doing at the plant was wrong." Suddenly, he became aware of the danger that nuclear war poses for life on the earth, and he began to speak out and to tell people the whole story of the Bomb, as he now understands it, for their knowledge and welfare - perhaps, for their survival. Luke was addressing the same sort of situation - belief based on partial information which could threaten one’s faith and even destroy it - when he began to write his first book for Theophilus. He wanted him to know the source of life, the gospel, and to believe in Christ and live the life that knows no end. He was concerned about Theophilus - and others, of course - and was totally committed to the business of telling the whole and true story of Jesus Christ.

The Story Luke Tells

The Gospel of St. Luke is indeed a beautiful story. He alone recorded for posterity the fascinating details of what we now call "the Christmas story" - Jesus’ conception, birth, the only story from his boyhood - and he makes the people involved in the drama real and memorable. He collected and included the fantastic parables of Jesus that constituted the bulk of his

teaching and preaching ministry for those short three years. Luke spells out the details of how Jesus trained his disciples to carry on his ministry after he would be gone. And he graphically pictures Christ as one who loves people, has compassion on the sick, the poor, the hungry, and uses his power to help and heal the ailing persons who came or were brought to him. It is indeed a beautiful story that Luke wrote for Theophilus - and for all of us.

The end of his Gospel reveals his concern that anyone who should read the story might understand that it is not just another lovely tale but a true story about Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and his mission here upon the earth. He spells out, so that all readers should understand, the heart of that story - Jesus’ suffering, his death, his resurrection, ascension, and the promise that the Holy Spirit would be sent to them to confirm their faith and give them power to witness in his name. Luke made certain that the pivotal part of the story could not be missed or misunderstood by allowing the risen Christ to speak for himself and high-light the heart of his own story.

On January 30th of this year, I met a little boy - Joshua is his name - and wished him a happy birthday on his third birthday. That was an event which should not have occurred. You see, Joshua drowned on October 20th, 1982. His mother told me the story after the worship service in a church where I was a guest preacher. It seems that he and his brother decided to go swimming that day in October; that the water temperature was almost fifty degrees did not phase them - they took off their clothes and entered the lake. Joshua sank, and there were no signs of life when he was pulled from the water; his heart was not beating. He was dead. Medics and physicians at the hospital worked on him for over two hours before his heart began to beat again. Then there was hope; but it was hope mixed with fear; brain damage was almost a certainty if he survived. People prayed for him; a parade of pastors, priests, and ministers, whom the mother had never met, paused in his room and prayed. A chain of prayer stretched across the Twin Cities, the state and country, and literally around the world. And Joshua lived. "It’s a miracle," his mother told me. "Joshua is almost back to normal now for his age, and the doctors are confident that he will shortly have totally recovered his mental and physical abilities." Just then a little boy wearing an ice hockey helmet, with the remnants of a black eye, ran up to the woman and grabbed her around the knees. She picked him up and turned him toward me and said, "This is Joshua. He’s three years old today." I said, "Happy Birthday, Joshua," and then he squirmed out of his mother’s arms and disappeared as rapidly as he had appeared before us. He ran off to play with his friends.

It seems to me that as he remembers the story of his drowning and resuscitation - and the miracle of restored life that is his - Joshua should have little trouble understanding the gospel and the sacrament of baptism, too, for that matter. When the stories of his early years and growing up are told, it will be the story of the day he drowned and, through medical science and the grace of God, was given new life that will be the pivotal part of Joshua’s story. He died but was restored to life again; his life’s story should have ended on October 20th, but it didn’t, so there will be more to tell, as yet unwritten stories that make up in combination the whole story of Joshua. Luke did something like that when he focused attention upon the heart of Jesus’ story - his death and resurrection - at the very end of it, his ascension. He knew that there would be more to come, thus he had to write the account of the Holy Spirit at work in the early Christian church that we call The Acts of the Apostles. And that’s why we call Luke’s story The Gospel of St. Luke; he makes certain that Theophilus and the whole world would hear the good news about what God accomplished in reconciling people to himself through repentance and the forgiveness of sins in Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection.

Luke’s Untold Story

Luke’s feast day is celebrated as that of one of the four evangelists and also as a martyr’s day; the color for the day is red. It would be nice if there were some spectacular story to tell about his death and martyrdom. If there ever were such a story that might have made Luke into the sort of folk-hero that Peter and Paul, Lawrence and Sebastian were to the Roman Christian community, it has been lost. But it might make an intriguing tale, because what little tradition has survived to the present day has it that Luke died at eighty-four years of age. He must have been a feisty old man, a trouble maker who had to be eliminated even though he must have been close to a natural death. Why bother to make a martyr out of an eighty-four-year-old and stir up his friends and followers if he must be about to die from advanced age? That part of the tale is mysterious, but no one will ever know - unless new evidence is unearthed - what the full and true story ever is.

However it was that Luke died, we may be certain that he was faithful to Christ to the end of his life. Were it otherwise, the Christians would not have established a feast day for him and celebrated it as a martyr’s day for untold centuries; he might have made the calendar of the church as an evangelist, but not as a martyr and evangelist. He had demonstrated his readiness to give up his life for the Lord and the gospel by staying with Paul during his second imprisonment in Rome; Paul told Timothy, "Only Luke is with me." His life was not demanded on that occasion, and he went on to become an evangelist and, according to tradition, a missionary to Bithynia. But that is speculation; his faithfulness and commitment to Christ certainly were not, and these are the qualities of which - through grace - martyrs are made. However he died, it is rather obvious to me that he left this life to enter into another phase of life with Christ and did it triumphantly. I would like to think that he died at peace with God and humanity.

In his autobiography, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., tells about the death of his beloved Uncle Henry Sloane Coffin, who had been president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Dr. Coffin had been preaching at the funeral of a friend and had to cut short his sermon when he became ill. He was able to smile at friends after the service but he did not speak. Later, as he leaned heavily upon his nephew’s arm in his walk toward the car, "he chuckled softly as he quoted from St. John: ‘And when you are old another will lead you whither you will not go.’ In the car he stared straight ahead. His face was white; but when Aunt Dorothy got in behind the wheel, he said firmly, ‘Home, Dorothy.’ He knew he had had a heart attack and sensed he was going to die. But he wasn’t going to be taken to any hospital." He lived his last couple of days at home.

Coffin continues: "The day before he died he slept most of the time awakening only in the early evening to ask Aunt Dorothy what time it was. She kissed him and said, ‘Now the day is over.’ smiling, he replied, ‘Only this day.’ ... His very last words were to the new night nurse who came at midnight ... (While) trying to get oriented in the dark room, she had bumped a few objects. She thought Uncle Henry was unconscious. But suddenly she heard a voice from the pillow (quoting Hamlet and) saying, ‘Rest, perturbed spirit.’ " Shortly thereafter he went to that final rest - death. And Coffin adds: "During the days following his death, Uncle Henry remained such a presence in the house that when it was time to leave for the funeral no one really was surprised to hear Aunt Dorothy call, ‘Come on, Henry, time to go.’ His life had been so full that the service inevitably became one of gratitude more than grief. I have never known a man who found greater joy in believing; nor one more certain that our lives run from God, in God, to God again!" Could it have been anything like that with St. Luke? Whatever the circumstances of his death, I believe it is reasonable to assume that he died entrusting his life to the Lord - and, therefore, in peace. That’s the way his story should have ended and, perhaps, ours will, too, as we come to love the story - the gospel - that is Luke’s legacy to all of us and learn to live - and die - with the one the story is about, Jesus Christ, our Lord.