St. George the Great Martyr, The Saint we need today

In the podcast on WorkingPreacher about this week’s readings, Matt Skinner describes Jesus’ response in Luke 15:1-10 to the legalists questioning why he was partying with those wrong folks as Jesus saying “Because it's fun. Because it's joyful. Because it's about these restored relationships, these restored connections and new understanding and new society being formed.” He goes on to say that “it's not like God needs one more repentance to fulfill God's own personal needs or something like that. It's that God encounters great joy in seeing the human family flourishing.” And in this Season of Creation, we might also say that God encounters great joy in seeing the whole of creation flourishing.

But as we look around this world, we know that God’s creation is not flourishing. It is struggling, and much of the human family is far from flourishing. And increasingly much of that poverty and violence is caused by climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss. We are being invited to change how we live so that creation might thrive, and we can join in God’s great joy.

Today we celebrate St. George the Great Martyr, patron saint of Georgia, Ethiopia, Lithuania, Palestine, Portugal, Germany, Greece, and England. He is respected today by Christians, Druze, as well as some Muslims as a martyr of monotheistic faith. Some time ago I read a Muslim saying applied to him that the righteous act is to confront the tyrant. Tradition tells us he died confronting the anti-Christian tyranny of the emperor Diocletian. His courage led to some of those witnessing his faith to convert, and to be martyred themselves. Tradition tells us that among them was the emperor’s wife, Alexandra of Rome.

Today we are invited to think about the “tyrannies” that are preventing people and this world from flourishing. And in our service we will take time to give thanks for the ways God has called us to engage with our community and to confront some of those tyrannies so that we might join God’s great joy.



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