Somewhere in Saint Luke...

I begin this Ascension Sunday with a brief story from an historian… John Meacham… He has crossed my path in the past few years.  You may have heard of him.  He is a presidential historian, a TV news commentator and also a faithful Episcopalian.  He wrote a devotional book on the seven last words of Christ that I read a few Lents ago.

This is a true story from that book:

A good friend and Episcopal Priest, tells a story about the great classical scholar Richmond Latimore, a poet and noted translator of Greek, including the New Testament.  A professor at Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia. Lattimore regularly attended my friend’s church with his wife. He never came to the altar rail for Holy Communion however, and my friend thought, rightly, that Lattimore was a skeptic. And yet, late in life, Lattimore agreed to be baptized.

“Dr Lattimore,” the Priest asked, "I thought you had reservations about the Christian faith and the church.”  “I did.” Lattimore replied.  “But you don’t any longer?” “No, not any longer.”  “Please then, may I ask you, when did they go away?  “Somewhere in Saint Luke.”

“Somewhere in Saint Luke…” Saint Luke the Evangelist was also a bit of an historian. He is the author of the book of Acts, the source of our First Lesson today.

Tradition also tells us that Luke was a doctor; most of the healing miracles of Jesus are in Luke’s gospel… He sees healing as a key element in the Lordship of Jesus Christ.  A little murkier tradition suggests that Luke was also a painter, in fact the painter of a portrait of Mary, the mother of our Lord… Some suggest, that painting hangs  on the wall of Santa Maria Maggiore; Where the late Pope Francis used to go to pray, and where he chose to be buried.

For me, Luke, as the historian, the doctor, the artist, are all in the shadows… he is an Evangelist!  The only one of the four who probably never met Jesus. But he talked with

Mary and with Peter, and other eyewitnesses to the truth of the power of the gospel stories… he wrote for a man named Theophilus, a real Greek name in his day, and still in our day, the Greek name that could be appended to each of us… “Theophilus.” It means ‘lover of God.’

I studied Greek for two years in college. The New Testament was originally written in Greek. I took Greek 1 as a freshman. Dr. Vera Lachman was the teacher. There were thirty five students the first day in that beginners class… the next day there were 11 of us. The seniors and juniors all dropped out because Dr. Lachman had a reputation… I was an ill-informed freshman. I stayed in the class.  By the third week I was lost, and feeling very alone.  I had done Spanish in High School, and it had no “cases“ like ”dative” to worry about.  By the middle of the semester, I had stopped going to class, and instead studied Greek on my own, in the Student Union Building.

I remember that after the final exam I thought to myself… “I knew a third, I guessed at a third and I left a third blank.”  I got an F in Greek. The Seniors and Juniors had known; Dr. Lachman was not the best teacher for first semester Greek.

But I stayed with it, and began again the next semester with a different teacher.  Got a C, then another C and another. It was hard for me.  However, the final semester of my two years of Ancient Greek was taught by the very same Dr. Vera Lachman, that gave me my well-deserved F, in Introductory Greek.  We read Homer's Odyssey. In Greek. I loved it.   I got an A.  After the class I bought an English translation done by a man named Richmond Lattimore… and a few years later as a young Pastor I got a copy of Lattimore’s translation of the four Gospels. I still have it. So, I smiled when I read Meacham's story for the first time.

The story of Jesus Christ is in Luke's Gospel. He surrounds us with the story of our Lord. And, “somewhere in Saint Luke” as Lattimore says, is the place we find ourselves today.

Our Ascension text today is the very end of Luke’s Gospel… the resurrected Christ has met his disciples, and he reassures them as he departs, that the Spirit will come…  He just doesn’t say when…

I think that today, we may be just as confused as the disciples were; witnesses in faith, watching him vanish, feeling alone… Perhaps these days, in our own Ascension moments, we may even find ourselves feeling alone and fearfully closing our eyes… at things around us in our nation, or in our lives, things that seem so wrong or so out of control. We don’t know what to do, how to feel, or what history will make of this… or of us.

In our best moments, we can look within ourselves… and notice ourselves… today, like the Apostles, here church, blessing God. Giving God the glory. Good for us…

But some of us may still feel a little short on joy or hope, and the Holy Spirit, some days, may even seem to us to be … delayed…

Ever felt like that? Maybe after a disappointment, or a doctor’s appointment… or upon hearing that a friend's illness is worsening… or you get what feels like some sort of an F, that you know you deserved, in some important part of your life…  And you feel alone.  Ever felt alone?

The hymn we sang today at the beginning offered that image, “Orphans.” The line is “not as orphans are we left in sorrow now… faith believes, nor questions how…” ”Faith believes…”

Can you do that? Believe? Of course you can.  You first came to faith months or years before today… How many Advents, Christmas’, Lents, Easters? How many stories of healings; how many parables, sermons, hymns; how many prayers? One day, something touched you. Quietly. Inside. But perhaps it just seems hard to find that feeling today…

Yes, many of us have had days exactly like that…  I know I have… The Church has written about it for centuries. He has left us… and the Spirit has not come to us… perhaps we do not feel Christ’s presence… or perhaps it’s just hard to feel held by the power of anything good… in the midst of our weakness, pain, or sorrow, doubt, or fear…

Ever felt like that? Lattimore did. And yet:

“Somewhere in Saint Luke”, said Richmond Lattimore to his Pastor… somewhere in your life you remembered, you began to sense it close to you, and your faith began to grow again… you began again to hope, to believe, to trust…

And now we have come here again, together, even as the image of light, the image of the presence of the risen Christ, the Paschal Candle, has been extinguished, and we are symbolically again, alone…

Saint Luke records what the Risen Christ said: “You are witnesses to these things ” … not just then, but in real time; now, and somehow not yet, even in the midst of our doubt, or fear, or some mysterious inner disquiet… and in exactly the same present moment, we know, we believe, we trust, we even remember.

How can we be witnesses… to ourselves and to one another, so that a bit of our darkness is dispelled?  Not just somewhere in

Saint Luke, but anywhere. Here. Perhaps this very day, as you come forward to celebrate the Sacrament of the Altar..

Christ does not preach from the past.  Lattimore understood that. God’s word is holy and present… in my life and in yours; giving us, even in our darkness, small bright promises of grace, forgiveness, hope and the promise of his eternal kingdom.

Seek him where he may be found… come to the altar. Follow the person in front of you… We are witnesses… to one another; We, you. You are not alone.

To God be the glory!! Amen.

Pastor William Carter | June 1, 2025 | Ascension of Our Lord