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.    

The dean of Virginia Seminary has a habit of opening his sermons with a joke, and he even wrote a book about Episcopal humor, which I’d highly recommend, so I thought I’d take a proverbial page out of his book today.

How many Episcopalians does it take to change a lightbulb?

When I was in seminary, I had a professor who always said that when you are trying to decide which reading to preach on to “find the passage that begs a lot of questions and preach on that.”  And our reading from Proverbs today certainly does that.  “A capable wife who can find?... She is far more precious than jewels.  She girds herself with strength, and makes her arms strong…She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue….” 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus has just had a dust-up with the Pharisees, the religious authorities who were always challenging his teachings.  Jesus has just called them hypocrites and chastised them for failing to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” as the law of Moses demands. Then Jesus leaves the predominately Jewish region where he has been preaching and teaching and heads to a mostly Gentile, or non-Jewish area.  He wants to keep a low profile, according to Mark, but the news of his healing ministry has preceded him, and a Gentile woman approaches him and throws herself at his feet.  She is desperate because her little girl has an “unclean spirit”.  This could have been a physical illness, a mental health issue or something else.  We just know that the little girl was seriously unwell in some way and that her mother is beside herself with worry.  She has heard that this wandering preacher heals people.  

Hello, my friends!  It is so good to see all of you!  I am very happy to be back with you after my sabbatical.  My time away was wonderful, refreshing in so many ways.  We had time for travel, time with family and friends, time in creation, and time at home.  I came back on Tuesday and wow, what a lot of great happenings to get caught up on!  The top hits of the summer seemed to have been the preaching series, the youth service trip and the choir residency in Gloucester.   So much life, so much joy, so much for which to give thanks. 

’d like to tell you a story today. It was written in 1897 and the title of the story is The Happy Hypocrite: A Fairy Tale for Tired Men, which I think is a hilarious title. The story goes like this. There was a man named George Hell (which is also very funny) and George was a selfish man of many appetites. He was a gambler, a flirt, and he loved nothing more than a raucous all-night party. Then one day he met an incredible woman named Jenny and became enraptured with her. Now Jenny was everything that George was not. She was selfless and kind, generous and humble, and she loved God far more than any worldly delight. Hopelessly smitten by her goodness, the scoundrel George confessed his love and asked for Jenny’s hand in marriage, but Jenny playfully replied that she would only marry a man with the face of a saint.