The 17th Sunday after Pentecost-the Feast of St. Francis-transferred

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Jonesboro, Arkansas

The 17^th Sunday after Pentecost-St. Francis of Assisi transferred

October 5, 2025

Lord, make us instruments of your peace.  Where this is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy.  Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love.  For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.  Amen. 

       Today we are celebrating the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, and this prayer we just prayed is a prayer attributed to him found on page 833 in our Book of Common Prayer. (We’ll actually pray it together at the end of the service today after we’ve had communion.). I’ve prayed this prayer over and over again in my time here with you this week, and I love the way it starts:  “Lord, make us instruments of your peace.”  

       Our prayer goes on to tell us all the ways that God invites us to be instruments of God’s peace—sowers of love where there is hate, of pardon where there is injury; of union where there is discord, of faith where there is doubt, of hope where there is despair, of light where there is darkness, and of joy where there is sadness. 

       It seems a simple enough formula, but we all know it is so much harder to practice.  

       In light of this call to be instruments of God’s peace today, I want to tell you a story.

       Once upon a time, there was a man named Francis.  Francis was raised in a wealthy, privileged family, and he had everything he ever needed or even wanted.  But at some point, Francis was no longer content with the way he was living.  He was chafing under the plans his father had made for him about how he would live his life, and he was becoming increasingly more concerned with the needs of the poor, especially as juxtaposed against his own great wealth and privilege.   So, he fought with his father, until one day, Francis’s father dragged him publicly before the bishop, and Francis knew that the time had come.  He stripped himself completely naked, standing there before the bishop, his father, and all the gathered witnesses, and gave all of his clothes and his possessions back to his father.  It was a moment of true conversion. 

       Listen to what this past Tuesday’s meditation from the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr’s daily meditation says about this moment in the life of St. Francis:

       “As Francis stood there naked, completely vulnerable … he divested himself of much more than just his clothes and belongings. In effect, he relinquished family identity and reputation and the security of his economic status.  

For Francis, divesting himself from privilege was a gospel-inspired action, one that we are invited to consider today.”

Rohr continues, “Relinquishment as a call and a gift means giving up prestige and privilege, learning to listen and to accept criticism, and learning how to use our power differently and ultimately to share our power….

And he concludes:  “The way of relinquishment is the lifelong process of removing the obstacles to loving and just relationships with our neighbors on this earth and of moving toward more genuine community among all of God’s children and indeed among all of earth’s creatures and elements, the kind of sisterhood and brotherhood envisioned by Francis. As we help remove the obstacles to the liberation of others, we are simultaneously removing obstacles to our own liberation….”[i]

       We at St. Mark’s Jonesboro have much to learn from this one moment in the life of St. Francis this week.  Because in this moment of relinquishment, Francis does two things.  First, he makes himself completely vulnerable before God and everyone.  In my conversations with y’all this weekend, I have seen how you all find yourself in a place together where you struggle with being vulnerable, for a number of valid reasons.  Some of you feel betrayed; some of your feel powerless; some of you feel defensive, needing to protect something that is important and valuable to you; some of you are grieving a way of being the church that no longer exists.  And in your hurt and in your fear and in your protectiveness, you have hurt each other.  Every single one of you.  None of you is blameless.  You know how I know this?  Because we are, every single one of us, human.  All of us have fallen short of the glory of God.  You, understandably, struggle to be vulnerable, and yet it is what you so desperately need, and it is what God is calling you into all together in this way of following Jesus here.

       The second thing Francis does is that he makes a clean break with his old way of life—offering full relinquishment of his identity and all the power and privilege and wealth that came with it.   Listen again to this statement about Francis’s relinquishment: “Relinquishment as a call and a gift means giving up prestige and privilege, learning to listen and to accept criticism, and learning how to use our power differently and ultimately to share our power.”  Here at St. Mark’s you are being called by God to several forms of relinquishment.  

First, the Holy Spirit, who brings new energy and new life, is calling you to relinquish your own ideas of how things are supposed to be here.  And to begin seeking together the kind of community God is calling you to be, listening carefully for the Holy Spirit who is already at work in, among, and through you in this place.  Second, God our creator who knows each of us intimately and loves us fully is inviting you to relinquish your assumptions about each other.  None of us really knows what another’s thoughts, feelings, ideas, or motives are until we ask.  And we’ll really only begin to learn about each other when we are willing to show up and ask kind, curious questions that go below the surface of things.  Third, Jesus our incarnate healer, is inviting you to relinquish your woundedness and to begin to seek healing from him and from each other for all the ways that you have wounded each other.  He will not forsake you in this difficult work.  But in order to do it faithfully, it will require every single one of you to be vulnerable.    

It is so easy to pray the prayer attributed to St. Francis—“Lord, make us instruments of your peace”—and it is so hard to live it, to practice it, to try to embody it.  Being an instrument of God’s peace means doing our inner work—work that can take years or that can happen overnight in a flash of inspiration from the Holy Spirit.  But always, at its heart, being an instrument of God’s peace involves vulnerability and it involves relinquishment.

We are called to relinquish our old identities, our power, our wealth, our privilege.  We are called to relinquish our grievances—both the deeply legitimate and the petty.  We are called to relinquish our righteous anger and even our sense of righteousness all together.  We are called to relinquish our need to be right and our personal agendas for how we want things to be.  It’s the call of the Christian life, the way of discipleship, the way of Jesus who relinquished everything in his death on the cross.  

So how might you start?  Pray this prayer every day this week.  Or even just pray the first line: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.”  Then ask the Holy Spirit to show you where you are being invited to be vulnerable and what you are being invited to relinquish. Every day.  And let’s see what happens.  

God desires for you to do this work.  The Church needs for you to do this work.  And if you look deeply in your hearts, I believe you long to do this work, as well.  “Lord, make us instruments of your peace.”  Amen. 

---

[i] https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-invitation-to-relinquishment/

Reflections on Proper 21C-The 16th Sunday after Pentecost

16th Sunday after Pentecost- Proper 21C

"Between you and us a great chasm has been fixed..."

    In this parable of Jesus from Luke's gospel for this past Sunday, I can't help but notice this line above and the question it evokes in me.  It's passive voice in the translation--has been fixed--and I wonder who has fixed this great chasm?  Was it fixed by Lazarus, by his earthly actions?  Is it a natural part of the geography of the afterlife?

    What are the fixed chasms in our own lives, and who fixed them?  Are any chasms truly unbridgeable?  How might the fixed chasms in our own lives be bridged or breached?  

    As I've found myself doing intensive conflict work and mediation these last few weeks, I've been thinking about these great chasms between people and how they get fixed.  (We see this at work in our own country right now as well.)

    Are Abraham's words in the parable really true--that this great chasm has been fixed and can no longer be bridged or breached?

    In the midst of intense conflict, it can feel like there is no way forward, that we are standing at the edge of a great chasm over which there is no bridge.  And yet we know that even though this feels true, it is not.

    The Holy Spirit is, in her very essence, a bridge builder, a repairer of the breach, and she is always present, always working, creating, breathing new life, even when we cannot see or recognize her at work in our midst. 

    And I also know that there are tools that we can pick up, to help build bridges over chasms alongside the Holy Spirit, tools that can help us do the work of repairing the breach.

    These tools are characteristics or ways of being in the world and in relationship with others.  They include curiosity, vulnerability, a willingness to listen deeply--below the surface of things, assuming positive intent of others and playfulness.  (Although it's not reasonable to expect people who feel powerless to be able to employ playfulness.)

    I've heard our bishop say frequently that he wants us to work together in our congregations to create brave, safe, and sacred spaces.  It is these kind of authentic spaces that can help bridge the chasm that divides us.  

Reflections on the 15th Sunday after Pentecost-task versus relationship

The 15th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 20C

September 21, 2025

    Several years ago, I took a continuing education class in Emotional Intelligence in Group Development.  I didn’t know it when I enrolled, but it is one of those type of classes that throws you into situations that may create conflict so that it becomes a learning lab for the concepts the class is teaching.  

    For this particular class, we were divided into two small groups and were told that each group should plan a project that we would undertake over the course of the week.  To do the project, we should interview the people at the camp where we were staying about what we could do that would make things better for them, and then pick a project to carry out.  My group immediately got to work, and it became clear that we had different ideas about what projects would be suitable.  We had three men in the group and two women, and two of the men were emphatic that they wanted to do manual labor in the community garden that had slipped into decline as  our group project.  I expressed my unhappiness with this project idea, saying firmly why that project would not work for me.  (I often experience contact dermatitis when gardneing and didn’t want to spend the week dealing with an allergic reaction to some strange weed I was sure to come into contact with.). Two of the men proceeded to pursue that project, insisting that we all had to be on board with it.  The other woman in our group and one of the men tried to advocate for me, saying that I shouldn’t have to do anything that I wasn’t comfortable doing.  The garden champions finally agreed that the other woman and I could conduct interviews of the staff to try to identiy a secondary project for our group, which we did, and we learned that the camp had just received a new shipment of pillows and they needed us to raise funds for pillow covers to protect them.  

    So, my group proceeded in pursuing not one but two projects, but we were still experiencing a fair amount of tension as the garden project proponents insisted that all in our group needed to participate in the cleaning out in some small way.  And I drew a firm boundary that I would not do it.  

    Meanwhile, the other group spent all their time getting to know each other.  They spent the first couple of days sharing their stories and nurturing their relationships.  And they reached the half way point of the week without having even conducted their first interview to determine what project they would undertake.

    After one of our leaning sessions, the instructors gave each small group a challenge where we had to build something with tinker toys with some stringent stipulations and under a time deadline.  The other group worked together well to do this, but my group broke out in an argument, and the tension was palpable.  The other group began to be affected by the arguing and tension in my group, and everyone became stressed.  

    The learning from all this that I took away from the training is that in group development, we always have to balance two competing goals.  The first is the task that we as a group are called upon to complete, and the second is the relationships that we are called to tend in our group.  If we pursue the task whole-heartedly without tending to relationships, then often the task will suffer because we don’t have the relational foundation to carry out the task in a healthy way.  If we only focus on our relationships, then the tasks or the things we are called to do may never get completed.  

    Our gospel reading for today gives us a glimpse into this world of task and relationships.  The parable of the unjust manager shows us a person who has focused solely on the task of amassing wealth, but when he gets into trouble, he realizes that it is the relationships that will save him, so he gets to work trying to cultivate those.  Jesus concludes the parable with teachings on faithfulness, and I’ve been reflecting on these this week in the light of a statement that my former bishop Frank Logue often would reiterate to his clergy:  “what does faithfulness to God look like in this present moment?”  And I’ve been wondering this week what does it mean to be faithful to both our tasks as people of faith called to proclaim the gospel, and what does it mean to also be faithful to our relationships?  How do we balance these two competing claims on our faithfulness?  

    I think this is going to look different for each one of us in every different context we find ourselves in.  The key is continuing to ask the questions:  “what does faithfulness to God look like in this present moment?”  and “how am I being called in this moment to balance task and relationships?”  

The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 18C_St. Mark's Jonesboro, AR

The Rev Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Jonesboro, AR

13^th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 18C

September 7, 2025

        Good morning! My name is Melanie Lemburg, and I’m the new Canon to the Ordinary for the Diocese of Arkansas.  I just started this work on August 20^th, and I moved to Little Rock to serve on the bishop’s staff where I will, among other things, be working with congregations in transition.  (I’ll be back here this Wednesday with another member of the diocesan staff to meet with your search committee and vestry.)

        I’ve come to the diocese from Savannah, Georgia, where I’ve served for the last eight years as the rector of St. Thomas, Isle of Hope.  Before moving to Savannah, I served three different congregations in the Diocese of Mississippi, which is where I grew up-in a little town named Canton, just north of Jackson.

        My husband, David, is also a priest; we met at seminary at General Seminary in New York City;  he’s from Fayetteville, grew up at St. Paul’s and went to the U of A.  We have two children-a daughter who’s a senior at the University of the South at Sewanee and a son who’s a senior in high school, and we also have three dogs who are all rescues and who are each crazy in their own unique way.

        It all seems pretty straight-forward, doesn’t it?  All these roles and pieces of my identity the we can make a short list of:  daughter, sister, wife, priest, rector, mother, and now, canon.  And yet, as I’ve stepped into this new place in this new role, I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about identity.

        I believe (and have taught for many years) that at our very beginnings, God claims each of us as God’s beloved, and in and through our baptism, we say “yes” to our belovedness, promising to try to live our lives as God’s beloved.  This belovedness of God is the essence, the core of our identity, but it so easily gets lost or obscured in our daily life by other competing identities.

        In all of our readings for this morning, we see glimpses of this notion of identity, and there is an invitation in all of this that can help us grow more deeply as individuals who are God’s beloved as well as to grow more deeply in this place as God’s beloved community.

        In Jeremiah, we see the compelling metaphor of a potter at work with clay, and the prophet compares this potter and clay with God and God’s people who have gone astray.  There is an aspect of judgement in the reading, for the ways that God’s people have strayed from their belovedness and from living fully into what it means to be God’s people, the community of the beloved.

        And also, with the judgement, there is hope, because in the potter’s hands, the clay is malleable and can continue to be re-worked, to be transformed.  The potter doesn’t abandon the clay just because it’s true shape doesn’t initially take form.  He keeps working with it, molding and remolding, until it is the beautiful, fitting vessel that he envisioned.

        In the letter to Philemon, we see Paul writing to re-introduce Onesimus to Philemon.  Paul is inviting Philemon to see how Onesimus’s identity has shifted in his time away with Paul, and he is encouraging a new, transformed relationship between Onesimus (the enslaved person) and Philemon (who may be his current or former owner). 

        Then in the gospel, we see Jesus seemingly taking a hard stance against close familial relationships saying, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple…”  He goes on to talk about assessing and measuring, about counting the costs, and about taking up a cross as an aspect of following him or discipleship. And this passage's starting with the call to hate those who are closest to us, makes the whole thing feel completely unattainable.  And maybe that’s the point?

        But what if Jesus is really inviting us to examine these key aspects of our identity, and to perhaps hold these identities a bit more loosely?  

         This is something that I’ve been wrestling with recently and I had an epiphany yesterday about it, that I’ll share with you.  I play pickleball recreationally and have had very little technical training.  Yesterday, I had a 2-hour lesson with the pickleball pro at the Little Rock Athletic Club that I’ve just joined.  One of the first things he taught me in this lesson is to pay attention to how firmly I’m gripping the pickleball paddle as I hit the ball.  He said to imagine a grip meter between 1 and 10 with 10 being the tightest, (what he called “a death-grip”) and to ask myself what is the intensity of my grip in any given shot?  Well, the answer is usually a 10-full on death grip.  But he said that for most shots in pickleball, my grip should be a three.  A THREE!  I’m having to intentionally learn or relearn how to play pickleball with a much more relaxed grip.  The epiphany is that this is a metaphor for my life right now, because pickleball is not the only area in my life where I need to pay attention to how tightly I’m holding onto things.  I’ve been wrestling with this in my prayer life as well as in other areas, including holding identities more loosely. 

        So, what if in this gospel reading Jesus is inviting us to discern if any of these key identities that we cling to so tightly have become an impediment to our living out of our essential core identity as God’s beloved, or how we live out our call together to be God’s beloved community? It could be an invitation and a challenge to examine our priorities and our attachments and to evaluate how those may serve as impediments in our following of Jesus, in our discipleship. 

        And what I have rediscovered recently is that in times of transition, our identities become a little less fixed, a little more malleable and open to transformation.  Sometimes we choose these transitions and sometimes we don’t, but the opportunity for transformation is there regardless.  It’s not particularly comfortable, when our hardening clay edges soften, maybe weakening, maybe growing a little bit squishy, and yet it is in those seasons when we can be most transformed by the Holy Spirit like clay in the hands of a skilled, creative potter.

        Your invitation this week is to think about your own identity—what parts are you holding onto in a death grip, when you need to be holding them at grip level 3; what parts are you too attached to so that they are becoming rigid, prone to shatter or what parts have become impediments to your living out your call as God’s beloved?  Where are the parts of your identity that are softer, more malleable, where the Holy Spirit may be working, shaping, re-shaping, inviting transformation?

        And your invitation is also to think about this notion of identity as it pertains to this beloved community of St. Mark’s.  Where are the places where your identity may be too rigid, unflexible, prone to shatter, and where are the softer places that are more malleable, where you can join the work of the Holy Spirit in transforming this community more deeply into God’s beloved community?

 

       

The 11th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 16C-for St. John's Helena

St. John’s Episcopal Church, West Helena/Helena 

The 11th Sunday after Pentecost_Proper 16C 

     Good morning! What a delight it is for me to be with you here, in the ‘jewel of the Delta,’ on my first Sunday in the Diocese of Arkansas as Canon to the Ordinary! Your hospitality is legendary, and I have already enjoyed a good dose of it in my short time here with y’all, so thank you for that warm welcome! 

     It was the summer of 2022, and it had been a hard season in my ministry. My parish and I had navigated the global pandemic together, and as we were coming out of Covid, our beloved 40 year-old parish administrator died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism. And I kept going. What else was I going to do? But I was so very weary and heartbroken. I began to feel like Bilbo Baggins describes in the Tolkien book The Fellowship of the Ring: “…thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” 

     I spoke to our wardens and then to the vestry, and we determined that both I and our associate rector needed to go ahead and take some sabbatical time about a year earlier than planned, in different configurations. That summer of 2022, sabbatical or intentional sabbath saved me. Now, I recognize the privilege in being able to take a sabbatical, and the generous gift of time and resources that it represented from my parish; it was also a tangible offering of their care for me, which I deeply appreciated. 

     I didn’t have many plans for my sabbatical except to travel for three weeks in Europe with our family after our daughter’s high school graduation, and to be fully present for our son’s surgery and recovery from spinal fusion surgery for scoliosis. 

     And by sheer accident right before my sabbatical, I ran across a poet named Ross Gay who had just written a book of short essays titled The Book of Delights. Gay had decided on his birthday to daily for the next year about something that had delighted him; and so The Book of Delights is almost 365 brief essays that chronicle his delight over the course of a year—from one birthday to the next. In the preface, Gay writes about how he established some rules around this project: to try to write daily about delight, to write quickly and by hand. He writes, “The rules made it a discipline for me. A practice. Spend time thinking and writing about delight every day.” He continues, “It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study. A month or two into this project delights were calling to me: Write about me! Write about me! Because it is rude not to acknowledge your delights, I’d tell them that though they might not become essayettes, they were still important, and I was grateful to them. Which is to say, I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight. I also learned this year that my delight grows-much like love and joy-when I share it.” i 

     When I went on sabbatical, Ross Gay and his notion of delight became my companions. And what all of that taught me is that like many things, the practice of delight is a practice that is intrinsic to us as humans, and it is also a cultivated practice. Just think about it. Most children practice delight abundantly, naturally. But over the course of our growing up, delight can get crowded out of our lives by other concerns or our busy-ness. So, most of us as adults have to intentionally practice and cultivate delight. And in that season of my life, cultivating and practicing my delight was God’s gift of healing for me and my weary spirit and broken heart. Imagine my delight to discover in this Sunday’s propers that delight and sabbath keeping are interwoven in both the reading from Isaiah and even to some extent in the gospel reading from Luke. 

     In our reading from Isaiah, we find ourselves in the part of this lengthy book that scholars refer to as “Third Isaiah” which means that the people of Israel have been taken into captivity in Babylon; they have dwelled in Babylon, as foreigners and captives, for a couple of generations, and then they have been set free to return home to pick up the pieces of their lives. This part of the book that we hear today gives us glimpses of how the prophet and people are wrestling with coming home again and restoring some of the essential practices of their faith and their identity. Today’s passage reminds God’s people of the importance of the practice of justice, of taking care of the vulnerable among them, as a part of what it means to be in relationship with God and each other. And it is all connected with the keeping of the sabbath. Listen to a snippet of it again: “If you refrain from trampling the sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day; if you call the sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs; then you shall take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth; I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” 

     I love how Isaiah shows the connection between sabbath keeping as a way of taking delight in relationship with God and also in each other! This notion of delight is essential to the keeping of sabbath for God’s people because sabbath at its very creation becomes for God a way to delight in all that God has created, and as God’s people, we are invited into this dance that God dances between creation and sabbath and delight. 

     The gift of sabbath is also a gift of freedom as God restores the sabbath to the children of Israel once God frees them from slavery in Egypt. At the heart of the connection between sabbath and delight is compassion. We see this in both the Isaiah reading in the encouragement to God’s people to pay attention to the needs of others as well as the gospel reading: when Jesus sees a woman in need of healing, has compassion on her and proclaims that she has been set free, and then heals her. Jesus sees the woman in the synagogue because he is open and attentive to what is going on around him; it’s the invitation of Isaiah, of how to look at and be open to the world as a part of relationship with God that can offer us healing, rest, and restoration. 

     This summer, as I was in the midst of some intentional sabbath time between leaving my former church in Savannah and beginning my work here in the diocese with y’all, I came across a quote by the Irish priest and poet and theologian John O’Donohue that was another lens for me to look at these practices of delight and keeping sabbath in my own life. This is from his book titled Beauty: Invisible Embrace. He writes, “At the heart of things is a secret law of balance and when our approach is respectful, sensitive and worthy, gifts of healing, challenge and creativity open to us. A gracious approach is the key that unlocks the treasure of the encounter. The way we are present to each other is frequently superficial. In many areas of our lives the rich potential of friendship and love remains out of our reach because we push toward ‘connection.’ When we deaden our own depths, we cannot strike a resonance in those we meet or in the work we do.” He continues, “A reverence of approach awakens depth and enables us to be truly present where we are. When we approach with reverence great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty of all things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us.” He concludes, “The rushed heart and the arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace. Beauty is mysterious, a slow presence who waits for the ready, expectant heart.” ii 

     It’s all interconnected, isn’t it? Keeping sabbath, practicing delight, embracing a reverent approach to others and to ourselves, which helps us engage our compassion for others and for ourselves. So, this week, your invitation is to cultivate the practice of delight, of looking at the world and the people around you with reverence and compassion. Each day this week, I encourage you to be intentional in naming in your prayers, writing about, or even taking a picture of one thing that you find delight in, and you also might spend some time reflecting on how you encounter delight in this church and in this community. 

 i. Gay, Ross. The Book of Delights. Algonquin: 2019, pp xi-xii. 

 ii. O’Donohue, John. Beauty: Invisible Embrace. Shared on the John O’Donohue Facebook page on August 9, 2025.

The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 11C

The Very Rev. Melanie Dickson Lemburg The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 11C July 20, 2025 Beloved,i from the moment I first met you, I loved you, and you were so eager to love me, too. Beloved, it was miraculous! You were kind of depressed but “with so much potential,” ii and I was so deeply wounded. But we were All-graced by the Holy Spirit’s hope and you helped me discover how to love again. Beloved, it wasn’t perfect, because none of us is perfect. But it was Faithful— all the small and wondrous ways we cared for each other: Beloved hands outstretched to receive and give; kindly pressed on holy foreheads, holy shoulders. Beloved faces lifted shining, sorrowful, open at God’s altar. Beloved bodies crafting wooden boxes to cradle beloved friends into their final rest in the garden under the windows of their Home. As we Sang them into eternity. Beloved hands clasped in beginning, two lives joined and wrapped in vows and hope and the prayers and support of Beloved Community. Beloved children, claimed and marked in water and oil, raised by us all as God’s beloved. Beloved, we are all (understandably) grateful and grieving and worried and anxious about many things. May we always remember “there is need of only one thing”. May we Choose the Better Part: Beloved. That God is in each of you, in the midst of you, working in and among you more than you can ask or imagine. God will never forsake you. Beloved, be gentle to yourselves and to each other. Be alert and be silent so you may Listen to God who is in each of you and among you. Trust your leaders and if you do not understand, don’t assume. Ask. If you assume, (because I know you, and you probably will) assume the best, as you are each and all the dwelling place of God, God’s Beloved. Know that you have shaped me and my ministry in so many ways. I’m so grateful for the ways we’ve risked and tried, Created, and trusted and adapted. These are not just my capabilities, but Our capabilities. And they do not leave here with me. Beloved, is how you will always be known by God and by me, and no amount of time or distance will change that, My Beloved. i. This homily was inspired by Jan Richardson’s blessing Beginning with Beloved from her book The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief. p 99 ii. This is how then Canon Frank Logue described St. Thomas to me when he invited me to apply.

The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 9C

The Very Rev. Melanie Dickson Lemburg The 4th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 9C July 6, 2025 When faced with an upcoming journey, I have a tendency to overpack, especially if I wait and pack at the last minute. I’ve been thinking about this tendency of mine this week in the light of our gospel reading—when Jesus sends out 70 disciples to go out ahead of him and to proclaim his mission. He gives them specific instructions about what to take (not very much), where to stay (don’t move around from house to house), how to engage with the people where you stay (eat what they give you, offer your peace but if they don’t receive it, then move on to the next town). By our modern standards, these are some austere travel instructions, and it makes my little over-packer heart anxious just to think about it. But there’s much that we can learn from today’s gospel reading. Some of the highlights of this story include that Jesus sees abundance where others see scarcity (“the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few”). Vulnerability is implicit in discipleship (take nothing with you and eat whatever they give you). The faithfulness of the 70 leads to successes that have unexpected results (not only do they spread the good news but they discover that even the demons submit to them). And even though the 70 disciples receive great power from God, the greatest benefit of their faithfulness is that their relationship with God develops and deepens through their trust in God and not in their own power.i But this way of traveling, of being in the world requires a certain degree of risk. Here’s what another writer writes about this passage: “In commissioning seventy disciples, Jesus invites them-and us-into practices of risk. Risk traveling lightly. Risk rejection and welcome. Risk protest and proclaiming the good news of God’s kingdom, which is coming near to every circumstance. This passage nurtures our capacity for risking…” ii It’s interesting to think about my tendency to overpack, or to over plan in light of this. Perhaps it is my own attempt at ‘risk management.’ And it has led me to wonder how Jesus calls us, even now, to take risks in our life of faith, in our discipleship? What does it look like right now in our lives of faith, to heed Jesus’s call to not overpack, to take less than what we need, to be vulnerable and open to both hospitality and to rejection, to live into his call to boldly proclaim the good news of God’s healing and restoration? What are the ways that we are called to this kind of discipleship both in our upcoming journeys and in our everyday lives? Who are the companions that Jesus is sending us out with, so that we are not alone on the road? Where is God’s peace revealed in our lives, so that we may share it with others? I will confess that in these final weeks with you, I am trying to resist the temptation to overpack, over plan for you and for me for our separate futures. We are all being called to the risk of uncertainty, of not having the itinerary completely nailed down. The temptation is to try to stuff our suitcases full of everything we might need. But the call of Jesus is to be fully present in this moment, to risk trusting God and also trusting our companions on the way. And our gospel reading reminds us of all the ways God shows up with abundance even when we expect scarcity, of the ways God provides in the midst of our risk and uncertainty. So this week, I invite you to think about how Jesus is calling you to risk in your discipleship, in your living out your faith. I invite you to examine where you might be overpacking in your life or in your faith right now. Where is God calling you to risk both hospitality and rejection? In closing, I’ll share with you writer Kate Bowler’s Blessing for Uncertainty. “Blessed are you who live here. The space between simple categories and easy answers. You who wonder why this is your life, why you got this diagnosis, or why you still struggle with infertility, or why you haven't found your birth parents, or why you can't kick this addiction, or why your kids haven't come. Blessed are you who built a home on uneasy ground, who, despite your trying, your asking, your searches haven't found the satisfying feeling of discovery and blessed are you who never will. This is not an easy place to live outside of certainty, outside of knowing, outside of the truth. But blessed are you who realize that love and beauty and courage and meaning can still be found here amid the unease and frustration and sleepless nights. May you be surprised by your capacity for ambiguity, for the way it makes you a great listener and a good friend for you or someone who knows how to feel your way around in the dark and squint for the stars. I wish it were easier, dear one, I wish I could have the answers you seek, but for now, may you find comfort in the fact that you are not alone. Here in the gray, we are all learning to live in the uncertainty of the unknowing. So blessed are we who live here together.” iii i. This section came from a homily I preached on these lessons at St. Thomas on July 7, 2019. ii. Quote by Hierald E. Osorto in Everyday Connections: Reflections and Prayers for Year C. Heidi Haverkamp, ed. WJK: 2021, pp 366-367 iii. Shared on Kate Bowler’s Facebook page on June 26, 2021 https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1FD8KjPGmy/