Welcome!

Today is All Saints Sunday, the day in the church year when we focus on what it means to be knit together in the communion of saints.  We are reminded today that we live our lives in the here and now mindful of all the faithful people who have gone before us.  Those people are still with us as our heavenly cheerleaders, encouraging us and helping us onward.  Today I am mindful of faithful Saint Georgians who have died.   I remember seeing them at church every Sunday and hearing what was going on in their lives.  I can still see where they sat, and recall the ministries they served in.  I remember visiting them and sharing communion when they weren’t able to be in church anymore.  I really miss them but take comfort in knowing that they are with us still.  I am also aware of family members, my grandparents, my father, my mother-in-law, my brother-in-law.  You may be mindful of people in your own life who have died.  Even if it has been a while, their memory is still alive, and not only that, they are very much alive in a spiritual sense.  Every Sunday in the Eucharistic Prayer we praise God with the angels, archangels and all the company of heaven.  They are  the company of heaven , all those who we love but see no longer, and that is a comforting and empowering thought.   

While reading Mark, I sometimes wonder if sight is overrated. Generally we regard sight as the most valuable of the senses. Some 2,400 years ago, the philosopher Aristotle ranked the five senses in hierarchical order, and praised sight as the most noble of them all. No doubt he was influenced by his teacher, Plato, who wrote that sight was the foundation of all knowledge in a work called Timaeus, which some biblical scholars associate with our Bartimaeus, the blind beggar in today’s Gospel lesson, whose name literally means ‘Son of Timaeus.’ This is possibly an ironic head nod to the wisdom of an unsighted man overturning the wisdom of a man praising sight.

This past Friday, the sports world was shocked to hear the announcement that UVA basketball coach Tony Bennett was retiring.  Bennett is one of the “winningest” coaches of all time.  He has had a stunningly successful career.  He is also widely regarded as a person of deep integrity.  He said that he could longer continue because he did not believe in the direction that college sports were going and feared for the well-being of his athletes within a system that was becoming more and more like professional sports.  Coach Bennett said that he knew it was time to acknowledge that he was not equipped to take the program forward in this new environment, describing himself as a square peg in a round hole. 

Last Sunday Reverend Shearon preached an excellent sermon on the faithful Christian response to suffering, and today I’d like to continue that thread by exploring the question of what, then, is God’s response to suffering?

How can we profess that God is good in the face of all the human suffering we witness every day?  Wars rage around the world, people die from starvation, and hurricanes wipe out whole communities.  The list goes on and on.  Some suffering that we experience in life is the result of our own actions.  And that requires us to take responsibility, asking for God’s forgiveness and the forgiveness of those we have hurt and asking God to help us live differently going forward.  But so much suffering in this life just happens to us.  It has nothing to do with anything we have done and is totally undeserved.  That is the central dilemma that he Book of Job explores.