Spending Time with Luke

Ask me how to get from Central Church to the manse where I live, and I can tell you. I’ll have to think hard to remember the names of the streets, the landmarks along the way. The route is so familiar to me that I can follow it without really thinking, without really noticing much.

            And there’s much in our lives that is so familiar that we don’t really think much about it, that we don’t really notice much anymore—not just places and things, but people too. And often, ironically, it is the places, things, and people closest to us that we take the most for granted.

            Since Christmas, we have been spending time looking at the story of Jesus as it is told to us in the Gospel of Luke, and there are texts, unique to the Gospel of Luke, that are among the most familiar in the Bible—the Christmas story with the shepherd and angels and manger (Luke 2), parables like the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) and the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), characters like the widow of Nain (Luke 7:11-17) and Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10)—all of which are passages that I have or will focus on in Sunday morning worship this year. How can we get ourselves to pay attention to such familiar stories?

            Well, I think that the answer is easy to say, but hard to do. Namely, I think that we have to spend time, focusing on the nuances, considering deeply what’s behind the words we’re reading or the voice we’re hearing or the face we’re seeing—spending our time, not simply on our way to the next place, the next thing, the next person—but living our lives here, now, aware of how the present moment glitters with inestimable value.