Welcome!

Wow, this has been quite the last couple of weeks!  The aftermath of the presidential election has left some of our fellow Americans feeling completely elated and triumphant, and others altogether bereft and discouraged about our future as a nation.  And most people in Arlington and here at Saint George’s are in the latter group.  Roughly 80% of voters registered in Arlington voted for Vice-President Kamala Harris and roughly 20% voted for President-elect Trump.  But whomever we voted for, whether we voted with the majority of Americans overall or whether we voted with the majority of people in Arlington, we can all agree that this is the most consequential election of our lifetimes to date.  When people are having a hard time agreeing on much of anything right now, we can all generally agree about that, whichever political perspective we are speaking from, that this election signals a major shift in direction.  There will be a lot of changes and yet we do not know for sure what initiatives will come to fruition.  There is so much uncertainty right now and human beings do not deal very well with uncertainty.  So it is especially important for us to be reminded of how we are called to live as Christians during this time.   And our reading from Hebrews today has a lot of wisdom to offer us. 

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?