"Only Luke is With Me" A Sermon on Luke 4: 14-21 (Preached at St. Barts, NYC on October 18, 2021)

The best doctors are intuitive, with an empathy that enables them to understand how their patients feel—emotionally, as well as physically. This empathy often extends to friends, family, and strangers. My wife’s father was a doctor, in a small town, rural North Carolina, and her experiences as a doctor’s daughter played a major role in forming her identity. If I’m unwell, Catherine will swoop in, organize a plan to get me well, and make sure that I’m getting the best treatment possible. When I had surgery in 2020, and then again in 2021, she made sure that I was cared for by her, the surgeon, and all and sundry. My wife is the best patient advocate I could ever have. Of course, her mother, Mabel, was also in the medical profession. She attended the Baptist Hospital School of Nursing in Winston-Salem, NC and received a BSN and later a MPH from UNC Chapel Hill. After a long career, she retired in 1998 as Director of Psychiatric Services at Gaston Memorial Hospital in Gastonia. In the 1970s, she had been one of the founders of the Albemarle Mental Health Center in Elizabeth City, an example of her life-long commitment to the care and dignity of psychiatric patients. Her father, Dr. Stephen Pugh, died before I met her, and so I only know him through family stories. He made house calls, sometimes taking his fees in vegetables rather than charging his poorer, often African-American patients money that they didn’t have. In the 1960s, they inculcated a thoroughgoing opposition to racism in their daughters, and were fierce opponents of Jim Crow. They were carers, first and foremost. I mention them, because we are in the middle of a crisis that has had an outsize impact on our beloved physicians, and nurses, and other carers. According to the foremost British medical journal The Lancet, The pandemic has placed substantial demands on already overstretched, understaffed, and under-resourced health systems. COVID-19 has tested doctors and health-care workers to the limits of their professional competence and taken a considerable toll on their health and wellbeing. Core principles of medical professionalism—ie, primacy of patient welfare, patient autonomy, and social justice—have been challenged during the pandemic. Many doctors worldwide have had to change the way they work, having to prioritise patient care and make difficult decisions based on insufficient resources, including withholding and withdrawing potentially life-saving treatments [1] The effect on nurses was in some ways even graver. According to a 2021 study, RNs, primary front-line workers in the COVID-19 pandemic, encounter not only the stresses and risk of a serious and potentially fatal health condition, but also the increased risk of a mental health impact. The pandemic has subjected RNs, and other front-line healthcare workers, to situations of unparalleled stress, as routine roles and responsibilities are disrupted and there is a necessity to work outside of their normal routine. [2] Coping with this changed work environment, one that is now a site for exposure to life threatening infection, presents a challenge the health care work force may be ill-prepared to address. This daunting task is complicated further by concerns not only about personal risk but also worry about infecting family members and others in their social network. These situational factors increase the risk for psychological morbidity and burnout. But here’s the shocking fact in the study: Applications to nursing programs have gone up, in this time of peril, stress, and uncertainty. More people are looking to learn how to help than were before the pandemic. Empathy. The great gift of loving one’s fellow human beings—and by love, I don’t mean an emotion, but rather a promise. A promise to care for and support the fundamental well-being of the other, and to strive for their health and welfare. That love, that empathy, have not been crushed by the politicization of the virus, of masks, or quack remedies that would be funny if they weren’t so potentially deadly. Nor has it been crushed by the risk of infection, the strains on the medical system, or sheer fatigue and burnout. Doctors, nurses, and other carers are still striving to ameliorate the suffering of humanity, bringing comfort and healing where they can. St. Luke’s empathy is strong, so strong that his Gospel is the one in which so many of our most dearly loved stories come from. Luke’s compassion, his interest in people whatever their social status, makes his Gospel warmer and more relationship-based than the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, or John. Of the two Gospels that describe Jesus’s birth, Matthew’s gives us an account of the Magi, the famous three kings of orient visiting the newly born-Christ, finding him in a house, and giving him treasures. Luke tells us of Mary and Joseph being turned away from the Inn, surrounding the baby Jesus with lambs and protective shepherds. He also gives us the story of the blind old man Simeon, whose long wait for the Messiah ends when Jesus is brought to the Temple for circumcision, and the joy of Anna the Prophetess when she sees in the baby Jesus the hope of all who long for redemption. It is Luke who tells us of Jesus at 12 years old staying behind in the Temple and debating the teachers of the Law while his frenzied parents look for him. Luke also who gives us the story of Martha who serves while Mary listens to Jesus, and when Martha complains Jesus tells her that Mary has chosen the better part and will not lose it. It is a rebuke, but a gentle one, implicitly inviting Martha to stretch her heart and join with her sister in receiving the better part too. Throughout Luke’s writing, the love, compassion, and joy of God, is demonstrated in the life and ministry Jesus again and again. As Bernard Shaw, that agnostic admirer of Jesus, admits “It is Luke's Jesus who has won our hearts.” In the closing to his letter to the Colossians, Paul sends greetings from “Luke, the beloved physician.” (Col, 4:14). Despite writing in his Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles one quarter of the Old Testament, Luke normally keeps to the background other than his use of the word “we” in describing the companionship he provided his difficult patient. It’s fair to say that St. Paul was not exactly an easy person to impress or, for that matter to sustain a relationship with; his battles against Peter show his combative streak, and his falling out with Barnabas—the very first of the Apostles to accept Paul’s conversion from a bitter foe of the nascent Church and to accept him in the Church in Jerusalem. Their split resulted from Paul’s anger that Barnabas wanted to have his cousin, Mark (or “John,” or even “John Mark”) who had left them during their first missionary journey, accompany them on their journey to Cyprus. When Barnabas refused to cast aside Mark, Luke writes that “the contention was so sharp between them that they departed asunder” (Acts 15:36-40). Asunder is a heavy word, suggesting a significant degree of alienation. Luke sets the facts out without judgment. Notably, though, in Colossians, there is also a friendly reference to Barnabas and—yes, to John Mark, his sister’s son. This letter was written during Paul’s imprisonment, probably in 62 AD, and reflects the events of Acts Chapter 27-28. But then, in today’s Epistle—2 Timothy 4:5-13, which was read at the 11:00 sermon, we find Paul feeling that “the time for my departure has come” and asks Timothy to come to him soon—because Demas, Crescans, and Titus have all left him. He writes simply, “Only Luke is with me.” And, in his loneliness, he asks Timothy to bring Mark with him. I like to think (and I’m not alone in this ) that near the very end of Paul’s story, the empathy and love that were so characteristic of St. Luke both as a physician and as a writer wore away the old warrior’s grudge and caused him to renew his ties with Barnabas and to long for the presence of his former friend John Mark. The best doctors and nurses can never stop hoping for a happy ending. That’s why they never give up. And, in that sense, we are all called to be physicians and nurses of the heart. [1]. Christine Kovner, et al., “The psychosocial impact on frontline nurses of caring for patients with COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic in New York City,” Nursing outlook, vol. 69, Issue 5, pp 744-754 (Sept. 1, 2021).