Saint Luke the Evangelist of Care

If you’re part of, or have followed, the goings on of the Episcopal Church under our current, but soon departing, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, you will have noticed a strong emphasis on evangelism.  This, of course, begs the question: what is evangelism?

I admit that as someone who has a history with fundamentalism, talk of evangelism can make me nervous. Through a variety of influences, I spent many years thinking evangelism meant worrying that people who didn’t believe like me were going to go to hell, which meant I needed to share the gospel with them so they would get saved and escape hellfire. Remembering the hours I spent trying to get people to pray the sinner’s prayer is a way of understanding evangelism that still feels hard to think about.

So when the Episcopal Church made evangelism our thing, I got nervous.  But through this effort, I saw new fruits of evangelism, new ways of understanding it, and new opportunities for growth in my own faith.

Today we observe the feast of Saint Luke, who is often called Saint Luke the Evangelist.  The Episcopal Church honors Saint Luke with the following prayer:

Almighty God, who inspired your servant Luke the physician to set forth in the Gospel the love and healing power of your Son: Graciously continue in your Church this love and power to heal, to the praise and glory of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Something simple but profound to me now is how Luke is both a physician and an evangelist and how this prayer–and Luke’s broader witness–speaks to evangelism not being a sinner’s prayer to escape hellfire, but an invitation into deep healing. To be a physician and evangelist is to look into body and soul, see how they are connected, and desire profound healing for whatever assails us in both body and soul.

So then, what if evangelism is receiving the call from God to seek profound healing, in body and soul, for all those we encounter? What if we tried to start noticing the many bids for healing around us and accepted as many as we can, knowing our acts of care are our acts of evangelism?

A consistent memory from my childhood is my mom rescuing animals. While some might become our pets, all of them were treated with dignity and care. A quick trip to K-Mart would, in my childlike mind, become a day-long affair because we would stop to help a turtle cross the road. We’d get halfway to the grocery store before changing course and heading to the vet with a wounded bird. My mom showed me, at a young and tender age, that these animals were worthy of care, worthy of the pause. She showed me it is always worth abandoning our plans to save a life.

One way we might not just be evangelists of care, but also teach children to be evangelists of care, is to nurture those opportunities. I know the way those experiences showed me a tenderness toward life that I still feel welling up inside me to this day, calling me to be an evangelist of care for others in both body and soul.  

Today, I hope there might be an invitation for you to be an evangelist of care–some ache in a creature standing before you–so that you can celebrate the feast day of Luke by feeling the tenderness of tending to something outside of yourself.

The collect for the Feast of Saint Luke is shared today with permission from the Episcopal Church.