An Attitude of Gratitude

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. 

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The Rev. Shearon Sykes Williams
Where is God in suffering?

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?

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The Rev. Paddy Cavanaugh

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.    

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The Rev. Shearon Sykes Williams
The Lightbulb Theology of Stewardship

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?

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The Rev. Paddy Cavanaugh
  “A capable wife who can find?”

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….” 

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The Rev. Shearon Sykes Williams
 Crumbs of Grace

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.  

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The Rev. Shearon Sykes Williams