Fourth Sunday of Easter Year B

The Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg The Fourth Sunday of Easter Year B April 21, 2024 In 2023, the US Surgeon General issued a report titled Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The US Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. Since then, Dr. Vivek Murthy has been traveling the country working to help us as a society to deal with this epidemic. Research has shown that loneliness—when people feel isolated, invisible, insignificant—has profound negative consequences for individual health, increasing a person’s risk “for cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death.” Now when the Surgeon General issues an advisory, it acts to call “the American people’s attention to an urgent public health issue and provides recommendations for how it should be addressed. Advisories are reserved for significant public health challenges that require the nation’s immediate awareness and action.” This loneliness epidemic is something that I’ve been pondering for a while now, looking for ways for the Church to help meet this need and offer tools of social connection that- when we have been at our best-we have cultivated over centuries. I’ll talk more about this in a minute. This week, the fourth week of Easter, we see a shift in our readings. In the first three weeks of Easter, our gospel readings have given us stories of Jesus’s encounters with his disciples after his resurrection. Today, we begin to hear Jesus’s teachings on intimacy with God (which will be our focus for the next four weeks). In today’s reading, Jesus compares individuals’ relationship with God to the relationship between a sheep and a shepherd. And one of the marks of a true or a genuine shepherd, Jesus says, is that he knows his sheep and his sheep know him. There is an intimacy in relationship that is suggested here, in the knowing and being known by God, and it is this intimate knowing that causes Jesus to lay down his life for all sheep and thus transform the very fabric of creation. So, I want you to reflect for a moment about what it means to be known by someone. We had a lovely discussion about this with the Wednesday healing service community. We talked about how we can be known by others, what that means to us, and how that impacts loneliness. We talked about how being known is a gift, how when we are known we feel cherished and how when we know someone else, we are given the opportunity to cherish them. We talked about the importance of showing up with our whole selves, about how being real with one another makes us vulnerable, but that is how we are truly known. Many talked about how hard it is to ask for help when we need it, but how that is another way of being known, and many also talked about how when people reach out (in a time of need or otherwise) that makes us feel known and loved. One person shared how she has felt loneliness at times when she knew there was a need, but she didn’t know how to reach out. And we talked about how there is this mystery to human connectedness, how the Holy Spirit shows up in the midst of us when we are our truest selves and about how sometimes we have to set ourselves aside to be fully present to another. The more we practice showing up before God and each other with our whole, true selves, the more we experience this knowing and being known, which is, I believe, the antidote for loneliness. But it’s not easy. It’s risky and maybe goes against what we’ve been taught, that we need to go through life protecting ourselves, armor on, only letting those whom we trust see our truest selves. So, how do we practice this being real, this knowing and being known by God and by others? Jesus models for us how to know and be known in his relationship with God. It is a relationship that is marked by trust, by listening, by faithfulness, by the willingness to give up his very self for the greater purpose of divine love and reconciliation for all. So to know and be known, there has to be an awareness of who we are in relationship with God and others, a willingness to see others as they truly are, and also a willingness to give up parts of our own agendas to love them how they need to be loved, to meet them where they need to be met. Here's one small example. We have so many people in this church who have cultivated deep friendships over many years. You look forward to seeing each other at church to sit together and catch up and spend time together. We also have lots of new people who are being sent to us by the Holy Spirit, people who are in search of a faith community and the meaningful relationships that come with that. Those of us who have been here a while need to be attentive to the opportunity to know and be known by those who are joining us; and we need to step out of our comfort zones and even step out of ourselves to meet them. I invite you to think about these ideas this week: how have you seen or experienced the loneliness epidemic in your life or community? What does it mean to you to be known? What’s interesting to me about the Surgeon General’s advisory and his work touring the country in talking about our loneliness epidemic is that we already have basic tools to help combat loneliness and strengthen relationships and communities. In our Wednesday conversation, I was amazed at how we were able to identify these key practices just in how we talked about times when we felt known. In the podcast titled Everything Happens with Kate Bowler in an episode titled Made to Belong , Dr. Murthy explains the 5 for 5 challenge that he has created to combat the loneliness epidemic in our country, and he talks about how, if we all begin doing this work of connecting, we can change the social fabric of our communities and our nation. His challenge is that each person take 5 actions over the next 5 days that will help you connect with someone else. There are 3 different ways you can connect. 1. By expressing your gratitude for someone. Tell them. Write them. Call them. Text them. What they mean to you or how you have been changed by them for the better. 2. By extending support to someone. Reach out to let someone know you’re thinking about them. Offer a stranger a simple kindness when the opportunity presents itself. 3. By asking for help. It is astoundingly simple! And each of us can be responsible for doing this work, for making a difference in our communities, for making peoples’ lives just a little less lonely. Five days. Five actions. 1. Express your gratitude for someone. 2. Extend support to someone. 3. Ask for help from someone. Will you try it? https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf https://katebowler.com/podcasts/made-to-belong/#transcript

The Second Sunday of Easter Year B

The Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg The Second Sunday of Easter Year B April 7, 2024 A letter to Charlotte Grace Strickland upon the occasion of her baptism. Dear Lottie, Today is the second Sunday of Easter, the day we are celebrating your baptism into the resurrected body of Christ and your inclusion in its membership through this particular faith community here at St. Thomas. Today also happens to be the day, every year, that we hear one of the main stories from scripture about our patron saint, Thomas. Now, throughout the years, Thomas has gotten a bad rap. He is often known as “Doubting Thomas” because he is not present when the resurrected Christ first appeared to his disciples, and so he asks for some proof, the same proof that the others have already received. But in a world that likes to draw stark polarizations (like between doubt and faith), I like to think of Thomas a little differently. Because we all know that between the black and white extremes of doubt and faith, there is a whole lot of gray area where most of us live most of our lives. So what might Thomas have to teach us on this your baptism day? First, I suggest that instead of doubting Thomas, we think of him as “Courageous Thomas.” Because while all of the rest of Jesus’s disciples were huddled together in a locked room that day of his resurrection out of fear, Thomas wasn’t there with them. I can’t help but wonder where he was; what he was doing? Was he trying to get more news about what the women had reported and the other disciples had witnessed—that Jesus was no longer dead in the tomb but had risen? Whatever it was he was doing, it is clear that he is braver than all the rest of them who are huddled together in fear in a locked room. And when he does return to the room and the group and he hears their miraculous and mysterious report that they have seen the risen Christ, Thomas is courageous enough to ask for what he needs in order to believe. Second, we might also consider calling Thomas “Good Question Thomas.” In the few stories we have in scripture about Thomas, he is usually asking good questions. In a few chapters before our passage for today, Jesus is predicting his death and offering comfort to his disciples, telling them he will go ahead of them to prepare a place for them and they will know the place where he is going; Thomas responds, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Thomas reminds us that in the life of faith, asking good questions is an important part of our growth. Our baptism liturgy is built out of good questions, sweet Lottie. Questions that your parents and godparents answer on your behalf today. Questions that you will eventually answer for yourself when you are older. There are questions for us, your faith community, too. So, today, in the spirit of Thomas, we might reflect on some questions raised for us in your baptism. Like what does it mean that you are to be marked as Christ’s own forever? What does that mean for you and for your life? What does that mean for each one of us who has be so marked as well? How are your parents and your godparents and all the rest of us being called to help you grow into your own faith in our midst? What does that look like? How are we being called to model our lives for you so that you learn what it means to be courageous and questioning and faithful? What does that mean for each of us to do that for each other? How will you teach us about what it means to be marked as Christ’s own forever as you learn and grown here among us? What does it mean to ask good questions in our life of faith? Are they questions that open, unlock? Are they questions that instruct in the asking? Are they questions that connect or even soften hearts divided and defended? Are they questions born of curiosity and not cross-examination? What does it mean to ask good questions, like Thomas, in our life of faith? So sweet Lottie, on this your baptism day and all the days that will follow, may you be like Thomas—courageous and willing to ask for what you need in your life of faith. May you be willing and able to ask good questions that will help you and those around you grown in the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ who has marked you as his own forever. Your sister in Christ, Melanie+ What does it mean to ask good questions, like Thomas, in our life of faith? Where are you called to be courageous? What good questions are you being called to ask of your faith or of this community in the coming days?

The Day of Resurrection-Easter Day Year B

The Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg The Day of Resurrection: Easter Sunday Year B March 31, 2024 This year as a part of my Lenten observance, I’ve been reading the book A Different Kind of Fast: Feeding our True Hunger by Christine Valters Paintner. In this book, the author invites us to get in touch with our true hunger that we so often try to feed or placate with other practices, practices that draw us away from the heart of God and from our own truest hearts. She has written a Lenten retreat to encourage us to consider fasting from these practices and in the space opened by that fast, embracing more life-giving practices over the different weeks of Lent. As a part of this Lenten practice, I’ve been invited into a different fast each week for the past 6 weeks—fasting from multi-tasking, from anxiety, from speed and rushing, from always trying to hold it together, and from list-making. It has been a challenge, this gentle invitation to examine and re-shape my own inner landscape and spiritual life. But it’s the final fast that I really want to delve into here today, on Easter Sunday. The final fast has been to fast from certainty. Paintner writes, “Fast from certainty and attempting to control the outcome of things so that you might grow in trust in the great mystery of life.” i Her invitation is to embrace the beauty of the unknown and be nourished by new possibilities we would have never dreamed. When I’m faced with uncertainty, my temptation is to try to force something to happen to bring about certainty through results. This is not always helpful. Others can become paralyzed or frozen in the face of uncertainty—a sort of spiritual stuckness. In fasting from certainty, there’s an invitation to befriend the opposite of certainty, which isn’t necessarily uncertainty but is, instead, mystery or even that delicious word precarity. The writer and theologian Kate Bowler in a talk titled “There’s no escaping precarity,” says that precarity suggests something that is given but can be taken away at any time. It helps to describe the contingency of uncertainty. Bowler says that Dorothy Day described precarity as the ability to live inside uncertainty without always trying to imagine it’s the thing you’re going to get over. [Bowler posits that] It’s the question we’re always trying to answer. How do we live beautifully inside things we cannot change? As Christians, it’s our job to learn to live inside precarity as people of hope. People who live in the not-yet-ness of the Kingdom of God.” There’s no better gospel reading to invite us into mystery, into precarity, than the story of Jesus’s resurrection from Mark’s gospel that we just heard today. Where other gospel accounts give us visions of the Risen Christ (who is mistaken for the gardener), a race between two of the disciples to see the empty tomb, or an angel in dazzling white sitting on top of the stone that had covered the entrance to the tomb, Mark gives us a mysterious young man dressed in white as messenger to tell the women not to be afraid, that Jesus is no longer dead and has been risen, and to tell the disciples that he has gone before them back home to Galilee, where they also need to go in order to see him. And then what happens in Mark’s gospel? The women flee in fear, and Mark tells us that they tell no one because they are afraid. And we can’t really blame them, can we? as we have done this ourselves in the face of unfathomable mystery, in the face of unyielding, unrelenting precarity. But it’s interesting because this is how the gospel of Mark originally ended—with a big gaping mystery, teetering on the knife edge of precarity and no further evidence of Jesus’s resurrection. So what might this ending, this story, have to teach us about living with mystery or about the precarity of our own lives? The word mystery offers us a sense that something is continuing to unfold that will eventually be revealed. Henri-Frederic Amiel writes, “Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for an unknown God.” ii Mystery invites us to stay open to possibilities, to potential. It invites us into a humility that comes with not knowing, and it invites us to loosen our attachments around how we think about God and also how we think our lives are supposed to turn out. “Often we meet this mystery in the place of our own unfulfilled longings. Howard Thurman writes about the patience of unanswered prayer: ‘Slowly it may dawn upon the spirit that there is a special ministry of unfulfillment. It may be that the persistent hunger is an Angel of Light, carrying out a particular assignment in life.’ It’s an important reminder that the spiritual life isn’t always about happiness or comfort. Instead, it often calls us to stand in uncomfortable places and to meet and embrace God in the unexpected places in our lives.” iii We know that the story from Mark’s gospel didn’t really end there-with the women fleeing in terror and not telling anyone the good news of Jesus’s resurrection. If it had, none of us would be here together right now. It’s an important reminder for us that there is a gift in the unexpectedness of mystery and if we are always rushing toward certainty, or like me, trying to force it, then we miss out on the revelation of God’s presence. God also has a way of helping things unfold for us so much better than we could have ever even planned or imagined. Your questions to ponder today on this Easter Sunday are: Where are you currently craving certainty and how are you being called to embrace precarity, to lean into the mystery that is slowly unfolding in and around you? Can you remember a time in your life when what unfolded was even better than what you had planned or imagined? As you ponder the gifts of mystery and examine your need for certainty, what hunger in yourself do you uncover? In closing, I’ll offer us all Christine Walters Paintner’s blessing that she uses to close the chapter on fasting from certainty. God of Holy Darkness, be with us in our desire to know, in the ache to be certain, in the longing for assurance. Sit with us in the long quiet nights, hold us in our winter seasons. Wrap us in the grace of mystery, finding comfort in this mantle of unknowing as we rest our thoughts. Remind us of how everything emerges from the black fertile womb space of new beginnings, from the rich soil where seeds are planted. Sustain us in the times when not knowing is painful, fearful, anguished. Abide with us in the space of sacred Mystery, bring comfort, whisper words of love to us in the silence. iv i.Paintner, Christine Valters. A Different Kind of Fast: Feeding our True Hungers in Lent. Broadleaf: Minneapolis, 2024, pp 29-31 in kindle edition. ii.Ibid pp198-199 iii.Ibid. p 201 iv.Ibid. pp 217-218

The Great Vigil of Easter

The Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg The Great Vigil of Easter Year B March 30, 2024 This is the night… This is the night when we remember the power of a single flame of fire leading the way in the darkness. This is the night when we follow that flame into the darkness of a tomb. This is the night when we huddle together in the warm embrace of candlelight and see the shadows of our ancestors gathered around us- a multitude of lights who participate with us in the sacred story. This is the night when we remember how God has acted and continues to act in love to save all of God’s good creation. This is the night when we weep with God over the ways we oppress and enslave and are oppressed and enslaved, how it sweeps away humanity in the swell of a huge tide and how we are all the lesser for it. This is the night when we watch in awe and terror as God takes what once was dead and gives it breath and new life. This is the night when we remember each of us has been claimed as God’s beloved, marked as Christ’s own forever, and we affirm that call and claim on how we live our lives. This is the night when the light returns, joy is resurrected, death is conquered and all creation is restored. This is the night When love finally prevails.

Palm Sunday Year B

The Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg Palm Sunday-Year B March 24, 2024 On the very first Palm Sunday, there were two processions that entered Jerusalem that day. One was the one that we just read about—Jesus of Nazareth’s arrival in Jerusalem, where he knew he was headed to die. His procession entered from the East and was greeted by Jewish peasants lining the road, cheering for him, and the processions was accompanied by coats and branches of palm. The second procession entering in from the West was Pilate’s procession. Pilate, the Roman governor of that entire region was entering the city ahead of the Passover because often with Passover, the story of the liberation of the Jewish people, there would be trouble in Jerusalem, the heart of Judaism. Pilate entered Jerusalem at the head of an imperial unit of cavalry and soldiers and was accompanied by all the pomp, weaponry, and symbolism of the empire used to enforce its dominance over the occupied people. “Jesus’s procession proclaimed the kingdom of God; Pilate’s proclaimed the power of empire. The two processions embody the central conflict of the week that led to Jesus’s crucifixion.” (Borg/Crossan. The Last Week) Through the first quarter of this year, I’ve been learning about Christian Nationalism. Christian Nationalism is “a cultural framework that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life.” This “framework of thinking… demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian.” i. Our Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, has spoken out against Christian Nationalism, and one of the practical responses that he offers to Christian Nationalism is that as Christians, we must recenter ourselves on the teachings, example and spirit of Jesus of Nazareth. Curry talks about how whenever in history Christianity has gone astray, we have seen that Jesus of Nazareth (and his life and his foundational teachings and his example) gets moved aside in favor of this overarching “Christ figure” and Christianity itself becomes placed above and beyond following Jesus. Christianity becomes the be all and end all, and the teachings, example, and life of Jesus get lost. Curry suggests that we as Christians must recenter ourselves in love as a part of this process and that instead of focusing on any kind of cultural Jesus, we need to focus on what he calls “the Jesus of the book:” Jesus as depicted in the New Testament of the bible. Palm Sunday is a weird sort of day in the life of the church. It starts with a parade—shouts of hosanna and the waving of palms—and it ends in Jesus’ death. It marks the beginning of Holy Week, the week when we walk in the final footsteps of Jesus leading into and through his last supper with his disciples, his crucifixion, and his resurrection. There is no better time in the life of the church to try to reconnect with the life, example, and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, “the Jesus of the book,” than in the coming days. If we show up with open hearts, we can allow all the extra layers that we ourselves (and possibly our culture) have added onto Jesus to be stripped away as we experience alongside him his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the deep sadness and poignancy of his final meal with his friends as he struggles to tell them goodbye and to impart to them all the things they need before he leaves them. We experience his betrayal, his wrestling with God in the garden as he summons the courage to bear what he must bear. We walk alongside him and watch his unjust trial, and his horrible execution and death by suffocation on the cross. And we watch how he navigates it all as a fully-feeling human. There’s no better framework to engage with Jesus of Nazareth than the way these stories shine through in our ancient and vibrant liturgies—our Triduum services. This week, I’ve been reflecting on a poem I’ve recently encountered by Sheri Hostetler who is a Mennonite poet. (Y’all know I love the Mennonites!). I think it offers a lovely invitation to us all as we begin this journey into Holy Week together. Instructions by Sheri Hostetler Give up the world; give up self; finally, give up God. Find god in rhododendrons and rocks, passers-by, your cat. Pare your beliefs, your absolutes. Make it simple; make it clean. No carry-on luggage allowed. Examine all you have with a loving and critical eye, then throw away some more. Repeat. Repeat. Keep this and only this: what your heart beats loudly for what feels heavy and full in your gut. There will only be one or two things you will keep, and they will fit lightly in your pocket.ii How are you being called to get reacquainted with “the Jesus of the book”--the life, example, and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth--as we approach the holiest time of our Christian year? How is your Lenten observance culminating to strip away non-essentials and draw you closer to God? i.Definitions from Responding to Christian Nationalism Curriculum produced by Christians Against Christian Nationalism: https://www.christiansagainstchristiannationalism.org/ ii.Poem: "Instructions" by Sheri Hostetler, from the anthology A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry © Reprinted with permission of the author. From the Writer’s Almanac: https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2005%252F10%252F07.html

4th Sunday in Lent Year B

The Rev. Melanie Dickson Lemburg The 4th Sunday in Lent-Year B March 10, 2024 Two of our readings for today are full of both dichotomies and paradoxes that invite us to wrestle with our lives and our faith in different ways than we might normally engage. In the Old Testament reading, we see the Children of Israel wandering in the wilderness and they are, once again, complaining. But their complaints are paradoxical: “why have you brought us out here in the wilderness? There’s no food out here!” And in the next breath: “we detest this miserable food that you keep giving us!” They make a critical error in complaining against God (up until this point, they’ve just complained against Moses), so God sends venomous snakes into their camp which bite the people and the people begin to die. They plead to Moses and God to save them, and God instructs Moses to make a bronze serpent and put it up on pole, and when the people look upon it, then they will live (and be healed?). The very thing that has wounded them has become the source of their salvation. In John’s gospel, we are plopped down in the middle of a scene that deserves some context. It’s the middle of the night, and a leader in the Jewish synagogue named Nicodemus has come to visit Jesus under the cover of darkness. Nicodemus is curious about Jesus and he has some questions for him, and the two get into a discussion. In their conversation, Jesus talks about being born anew or being born from above (which is a paradox), and Nicodemus leans into the dichotomy of how can you be born anew when you are already born and living? Jesus goes on to talk about darkness and light, intimating that light is preferred over darkness. (And yet, we note that Nicodemus only feels like he can come to Jesus under cover of darkness, so without darkness, their conversation probably wouldn’t be happening.) And then Jesus likens his coming death on the cross to when Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness—a story that Nicodemus would have been very familiar with. So what are we supposed to do with all this? How does it even make any sense to us or how can it be relevant for our lives and our faith? For most of us, it is our nature to try to make sense of the world by creating dichotomies, and we live in a world that encourages this: right versus wrong; good versus evil; light versus darkness: healthy versus sick; well versus wounded. (Dare I say it in this election year? Republican versus Democrat) When really so much of our lives and especially our growth is found in the in-between places, or in the gray areas. These in-between/gray areas are often places of wisdom, nuance, and understanding. Just think about all the things that can grow and thrive in the dark: seeds, roots, babies in the womb, intimacy. Think about the ways that modern medicine must often wound people further as a part of their healing: surgery, chemotherapy. Think about what it means to be empathic—how we can lean into the sorrows of another, sharing those burdens, and it can help someone be healed. In a world where we are encouraged to dichotomize and polarize, Jesus raises up the image of the bronze serpent on a pole and he points out how rather than polarizing, it becomes a reconciling, both/and experience—the serpent is both the distributor of a lethal snake bite and an instrument of healing. Jesus cross—a symbol of humiliation and torture and an instrument of death—becomes the tree of life upon which hangs the salvation of the world. Your questions for this week: think about a time in your life when you were both right and wrong at the same time? (Or when you needed both darkness and light? Or when something that wounded you also helped heal you?) What did that teach you about living in an in-between space? What occurrence in your life or in your faith now is inviting you to stop seeing it as a dichotomy and is inviting you into living in the gifts that can be found in the gray areas, in the both/and?

The Second Sunday in Lent-Year B

The Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg 2nd Sunday in Lent-Year B February 25, 2024 Last fall, I was driving down Highway 17 in South Carolina, and I saw a figure approaching in the distance along the shoulder of the road. I watched as it approached, and my eyes began to discern what I was seeing. It was youngish man, probably in his twenties; he was dressed casually, but nicely—in blue jeans and a ball cap. And he was carrying something slung over his shoulder. As we grew closer still, I discovered that he was holding a wooden cross, with one of the arms draped casually over the front of his shoulder, and as he approached, I noticed that the cross seemed to somehow be bumping merrily along behind him. Still trying to make sense of what I was seeing, I glanced over as I passed him to discover that the wooden cross that he was so intentionally carrying while walking down the shoulder of Highway 17 was attached to a wheel. (Hunh!) Our gospel reading for today from Mark’s gospel gives us Jesus’s first out of three predictions of his death and suffering. This is happening in the center of Mark’s gospel and is immediately followed by the Transfiguration (which we read two Sundays ago), and we talked about how the disciples in that moment are invited to go from being spectators to being witnesses. But today’s reading sets the tone for the rest of Mark’s gospel, which focuses on the question “What does it mean to be a faithful disciple of Jesus?” and continues to show, over and over again, how Jesus’s disciples fail to understand what Jesus’s mission and ministry is all about. In our reading for today, Jesus predicts his suffering and death on the cross; Peter, who has just had a beautiful shining moment when he actually gets it right and has named Jesus as the Messiah, takes Jesus aside and rebukes him, and Jesus, in turn rebukes Peter, telling him that he is trying to distract him from his mission. Then he calls together his disciples and the crowd who is following along with them and says, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” Now, before I really delve into this passage, let me take a minute to identify some of the pitfalls. (Another writer suggests that this passage is rife with possibility to be problematic, likening its treatment to how one picks up a snake. There are lots of ways a person can pick up a snake and it can go horribly wrong, but really only one right way.) So let me say very clearly that I do not believe that Jesus (or God, or the Holy Spirit) wants us to suffer or willingly inflicts suffering on us. We also have to be mindful of all the ways that this particular passage has been used to oppress people—specifically women and people of color— whom the system has been stacked against and this passage is quoted to basically tell them to suck it up and deal with their suffering as a way of following Jesus. So what is Jesus actually saying? What is happening here? Listen to what Contemplative writer Joyce Rupp writes about Jesus’ difficult teaching for followers to “take up their cross and follow him”: “What did the crowd following Jesus think when he made that tough statement? Did they wonder what carrying the cross meant? Did they have second thoughts about accompanying him? Jesus wanted his followers to know that the journey they would make involved knowing and enlivening the teachings he advocated. In other words, Jesus was cautioning them, ‘If you decide to give yourselves to what truly counts in this life, it will cost you. You will feel these teachings to be burdensome at times, like the weight of a cross.’ She continues, “We can’t just sit on the roadside of life and call ourselves followers of Jesus. We are to do more than esteem him for his generous love and dedicated service. We do not hear Jesus grumbling about the challenges and demands of this way of life. We do not see him ‘talking a good talk’ but doing nothing about it. He describes his vision and then encourages others to join him in moving those teachings into action.” i “If you decide to give yourself to what counts in this life, it will cost you.” We know this, right? Suffering is, strangely enough, an essential part of humanity, of loving engagement—with others and with life itself. And yet, so often we want to have our cake and eat it, too. We want to be followers of Jesus, but we want to be comfortable. We want to be good people, with meaningful relationships, but we don’t want to suffer. We want to be able to witness to Jesus by walking down Highway 17 carrying a big wooden cross, but we don’t want to strain our muscles, or for it to rub too much on our shoulder, so we slap a wheel on the bottom of it, and voila! No more suffering! How many times do I try to slap a wheel on the cross that Jesus has invited me to carry as a part of what it means for me to grow deeper in my discipleship? What do I lose when I do that? What is lost in my community of faith when I do that? Your invitation this week is to think about one recent way that you may have tried to slap a wheel on the cross that Jesus has invited you to carry as a part of your discipleship. Or here’s how another writer puts it: “How have you actively avoided suffering, rejection, or unpleasantness this week? [Maybe it is as simple as not telling someone the truth?] Was there a cost to you, to loved ones, or to your community in doing so? How might facing suffering directly, even just naming what is happening…open you to greater fullness this week?” ii And just for fun, here’s a poem I wrote about my encounter on Hwy 17. Wooden Cross on a Wheel Melanie Dickson Lemburg I saw his silhouette in the distance on the shoulder of 17 and I could not make sense of it. Eventually emerged a man in his prime blue-jeaned and ball-capped with a wooden cross slung over his shoulder bouncing merrily along behind him. As I passed I discovered the wooden cross was on a wheel. Why carry when you can roll? Is such work pleasing to God? Well, it certainly makes a statement. (Even Jesus had a little help carrying his cross.) Carrying crosses is cumbersome bulky and bumping with no place to rest it unless there’s a convenient corner handy to prop. Jesus never said to take up his cross. I am to take up my own cross embracing suffering and that which slowly kills me and in the awkward struggle God reveals salvation. i.Quoted in Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations From the Center for Action and Contemplation for Thursday, February 22, 2024. Original citation is Joyce Rupp. Jesus, Guide of My Life: Reflections for the Lenten Journey. Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 2023, 20–21. ii. These questions come from Everyday Connections: Reflections and Practices for Year B edited by Heidi Haverkamp. WJK: Louisville, KY, 2023, p312.

Ash Wednesday

The Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg Ash Wednesday 2024 (7 and 11:30am) February 14, 2024 It’s always a little weird when Ash Wednesday falls on Valentine’s Day. It’s like the secular world and the church world collide in a way that seems starkly incongruous. But this year, I decided to lean into the connection to see where it would take me. And where it took me was, unsurprisingly, to consideration of the heart. Every year on Ash Wednesday, we recite or sing Psalm 51 either during the imposition of ashes or just after, and in that Psalm we ask God to “Create in me, a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” It has been an interesting exercise this year for me to think about this day, Ash Wednesday, and all of Lent in light of this request I am making of God. What does it mean for my heart to be created clean? What does it look like for God to renew a right spirit within me? There’s a camp song that our daughter learned when she was little that is set to this verse from Psalm 51. She went through a phase where she wanted my husband to sing it to her every night before bedtime. It goes Create in me, a clean heart O, God, that I might be renewed. Create in me, a clean heart O, God, that I might be renewed. So fill me. Heal me. And bring me back to you. Create in me, a clean heart O, God, that I might be renewed. What are the ways that you need God to create a clean heart in you during this Lenten season? What does it look like for God to renew a right spirit within you? (Or even to renew you?) Create in me, a clean heart O, God, that I might be renewed. What are you longing to change? What is the deepest desire of your heart that needs tending to? Create in me, a clean heart O, God, that I might be renewed. Lent is a season in which we fast from practices that break our hearts or break the hearts of others, fasting from practices that distract us and draw us away from the heart of God. So fill me. Heal me. And bring me back to you. And when we create space in our fasting then we can embrace practices that are more life-giving, practices that can restore our hearts with God’s help and gracious presence. Create in me, a clean heart O, God, that I might be renewed. This requires truth telling and radical self-honesty, which is part of the work that we begin this day. And this work can be supported by Lenten practices or disciplines. I’ve started reading a new book as a part of my Lenten practice that looks at fasting and embracing in a new light. The book is titled A Different Kind of Fast: Feeding our True Hunger by Christine Valters Paintner. And in this book, the author invites us to get in touch with our true hunger that we so often try to feed or placate with heart-breaking practices, practices that draw us away from the heart of God and from our own truest hearts. She has written a Lenten retreat to encourage us to consider fasting from these practices and in the space opened by that fast, embracing more life-giving practices over the different weeks of Lent. Listen to her invitation: 1. “Fast from multi-tasking and the destructive energy of inattentiveness… Embrace the practice of beholding each thing, person, moment, as you respond to that hunger for presence.” 2. “Fast from anxiety and endless torrent of thoughts that rise up in your mind, thoughts that paralyze you with fear of the future. [Embrace] the radical trust at the heart of things and listen to the hunger for contentment in the moment.” 3. Fast from “speed and rushing through your life.” Embrace “the grace shimmering right here in… holy pause[s].” 4. “Fast from being strong and always trying to hold it together, and instead embrace the profound grace that comes through your vulnerability and tenderness…exploring [your] hunger for the ability to reveal [y]our wounded places and have them seen and loved by another.” 5. “Fast from endless list-making and too many deadlines and enter into the quiet as you listen for what is ripening and unfolding, what is ready to be born.” 6. “Fast from certainty and attempting to control the outcome of things so that you might grow in trust in the great mystery of life.” Embrace the beauty of the unknown and be nourished by new possibilities we would have never dreamed. i It's certainly a different kind of fast than we usually take up, isn’t it? But just maybe, on this Ash Wednesday that is also Valentine’s Day, we need to give some attention in the coming season to all the ways that we break our own hearts, and how God is longing to restore and renew them for us. Create in me, a clean heart O, God, that I might be renewed. Create in me, a clean heart O, God, that I might be renewed. So fill me. Heal me. And bring me back to you. Create in me, a clean heart O, God, that I might be renewed. i. Paintner, Christine Valters. A Different Kind of Fast: Feeding our True Hungers in Lent. Broadleaf: Minneapolis, 2024, pp 29-31 in kindle edition.

Last Sunday after Epiphany Year B

The Rev Melanie D. Lemburg Last Sunday after the Epiphany-Year B February 11, 2024 I have a new song that I’m quasi-obsessed with. It’s my new hype song; I listen to it when I’m driving in the car often on repeat because it makes me happy. It wasn’t a song I had planned to preach on until I woke up with it going through my head on Monday morning. The song is titled Shambala and it’s performed by Three Dog Night. Do y’all know this song? It was released in 1973 and the song is about the mythical kingdom of Shambala which is referred to in Tibetan Buddhism, and it is speculated that the song to this mythical place is actually about the spiritual path or journey. It starts: “Wash away my troubles Wash away my pain With the rain in Shambala Wash away my sorrow Wash away my shame With the rain in Shambala Ah ooh yeah Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah Ah ooh yeah Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah” The narrator goes on to sing about the people he encounters on the road to Shambala—people who are helpful, kind, lucky, and so kind-on the road to Shambala- and then launches into the rousing chorus: “How does your light shine In the halls of Shambala? How does your light shine In the halls of Shambala?” Today is the last Sunday after the Epiphany, the season in the church when we most focus on light—the light shining in the darkness, the ways that God is manifest in this world in the person of Jesus, the ways that God continues to be manifest in this world through the power of the Holy Spirit shining in our lives, weaving people and experiences together. So this question of how does your light shine is an especially appropriate one for us as we close out this season. But I think we can be a bit more specific in looking at how our light shines considering two of our readings for today—the Old Testament and the gospel. In the Old Testament, we see two of the greatest prophets of Israel-Elijah and Elisha; Elijah has served as a mentor to Elisha and Elijah is preparing to complete his time on earth and be taken up to heaven. There’s this strange group of spectator prophets who seem to be trailing after them wanting to see what will happen and kind of heckling Elisha, who just keeps telling them to essentially “shut up!” And in the gospel reading for today-the story of Jesus’s Transfiguration—we have Jesus’s closest disciples on top of the mountain with him when he becomes transfigured, and a voice from heaven proclaims: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Another writer says of this gospel account: “The disciples witness the deeds of Jesus, but fail to grasp the core of his character and mission. This is all the more striking, considering that the divine voice, heard in the transfiguration account, commands them to listen to Jesus (9:7). Narratively speaking this imperative suggests more than practices of passive listening. Here, the voice demands that the very disposition of Jesus’s closest followers evolve from spectators to witnesses.” We see this differentiation between witnesses and spectators at work in the Old Testament story as well. The spectators are the gaggle of prophets who are following along to see what’s going to happen to Elijah. But it is Elisha who insists on accompanying Elijah to the very end, and who receives a double portion of Elijah’s spirit as he is able to watch Elijah being taken up to heaven on chariots of fire with horses of fire in a whirlwind. And it is, thus, Elisha who becomes the witness and the next great prophet of Israel. So, what do you think is the difference between a spectator and a witness? Our Wednesday congregation weighed in on this question this week: for them a spectator indicates a certain amount of distance between the watcher and the event. But a witness implies connection, an experiential piece that changes the watcher making them become a part of the ongoing story; someone observed that witness is both a noun and a verb; and being a witness can sometimes mean standing up for what you believe is true or what truly happened. Think about how the disciples change from spectators to witnesses between the transfiguration and after Jesus’s resurrection (well into the Acts of the Apostles). Do you think the transformation from spectator to witness is a sudden development or more of a slow growth in the life of faith? How are you being called in your own life to grow from spectator or passive listener to witness to the manifestation of God through the Holy Spirit in your life or in the world around you? Or to quote my friends Three Dog Night: “How does your light shine in the halls of Shambala?” i. https://genius.com/Three-dog-night-shambala-lyrics ii. Smith, Shively T.J. As represented in Everyday Connections: Reflections and Practices for Year B. Ed Heidi Haverkamp. WJK: Louisville, 2023.

4th Sunday after Epiphany Year B

The Rev. Melanie Dickson Lemburg The 4th Sunday after the Epiphany-Year B January 28, 2024 A few weeks ago, I was at Honey Creek (our diocesan camp and conference center) for a meeting; it was dinnertime, and I was a little late joining the group. I fixed my plate at the buffet and was walking across the dining room to a table when I WENT DOWN! Thankfully, I suffered no real injury beyond the significant bruises to my rear end (which I landed on) and of course, my pride. As two kind friends rushed over to help scoop me and my spilled plate up off the floor and try to restore me to rights, I bewilderedly looked at the foot that had betrayed me to discover off the side the instrument of my literal downfall: a single, rogue, green bean that had been dropped onto the dining room floor by someone who had come before me. (You’ll be relieved to note that I checked my initial impulse to hold a full inquiry and was able to let the matter go.) The apostle Paul writes about this in our passage from 1st Corinthians today. Paul is writing to the young church in Corinth which is a church in conflict. We only get glimpses of what’s going on there in Paul’s admonitions to them on how to get along together as one should in Christian community. In today’s passage, we see Paul reflecting on the relationship between individual freedom and responsibility to others for a community’s overall health instigated by the question of whether or not it is ok for Christians to eat meat that has been offered to idols.i Paul says, sure, it’s ok to do this, but he offers one of the strongest admonitions in the New Testament (in the Greek word blepete)- a word of strong warning, or caution that is translated “take care.” Sure, it’s ok, he says, “but take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block” to someone else. You could also say, “Pay attention that you don’t drop a green bean off your plate and cause someone else to fall.” (Ok, so maybe I’m not as over it as I say.) It’s actually pretty intense, if you think about it. Our lives are made up of webs and webs of connections—with family, friends, acquaintances, fellow church members, strangers. How many times a day do we inadvertently do something (or not do something) that becomes a stumbling block for someone else? Probably so much more than we ever realize. In fact, I bet I’ve left a scattered trail of green beans throughout my life for people to slip on! And while Paul says, yes, technically I do have the individual liberty to leave my green beans wherever I want, as a follower of Jesus, I should take care, take care of other people, take care that my action or inaction doesn’t cause anyone else to stumble or fall. So what do we, as Christians, do about this? How then should we live? First, we have to pay attention to when we drop green beans. We can’t just go through life oblivious to how our action or inaction may cause damage to others. We have to pay attention to what aspects of our personalities, what aspects of our behaviors can become stumbling blocks (and have become stumbling blocks) for the people around us in any given web of relationships. For me, this means bringing more thoughtfulness to ordinary encounters, and it also means paying attention to the ways I have tripped people up in the past; asking for forgiveness; and trying to change my behavior. One of my gifts is that I can see potential—in people, in situations—and one of the challenges of that is that I can be relentless and demanding in pursuit of the achievement of that potential, to the detriment of relationships. A friend of mine shared that her stumbling block is her certitude—that she believes that she is always right and it brings with it a certain degree of inflexibility to other peoples’ ideas. Our Wednesday healing service congregation shared a couple of their stumbling blocks, too. One said that her perfectionism can be an impediment to her most important relationships, and another said that her time frame for things doesn’t always line up with others’ expectations, and this can be responsible for dropped green beans lying around. Once we recognize that we all inadvertently drop green beans from time to time, and are therefore in need of forgiveness, then it reminds us that others who drop green beans that trip us up are worthy of our forgiveness, too. I wonder what in your actions or inactions have you seen to be the cause of other people’s stumbling? What do you need to pay attention to in order to better take care of the people around you? The other challenge in this passage today for us is that it isn’t just about individual behavior; it’s also about communal behavior. How are we, as a church, dropping green beans for other people to slip on and not even noticing? What are the areas that we need to pay attention to that can be or already have become stumbling blocks for people in our midst or others seeking God in this community? One of the gifts of this place is long-established relationships, ties of kinship, and long-held friendships. One of the stumbling blocks in that is we often don’t pay attention to the stranger in our midst, the people outside our circle who are seeking belonging in this community, because we are so busy talking with our friends. How might we open up pathways of belonging in some of those old, cherished, long-standing relationships and create new space for others? I think it’s going to take all of us being intentional about this and maybe even putting some new practices in place. Your invitation this week is to think about all this on both individual and communal levels. How might your behavior (or lack thereof) become a stumbling block to others you encounter? Or what have you experienced around this in the past that you need to pay attention to? How are you being called to “take care” that you don’t cause someone else to fall? And how are we being called to pay attention to this as a church and to continue to be transformed as a community of faith? i. Feasting on the Word. Exegetical Perspective; WJK: p 303

2nd Sunday after Epiphany Year B

The Rev. Melanie Lemburg The 2nd Sunday after the Epiphany-Year B January 14, 2024 Last weekend, I gathered at Honey Creek with the Diocese of Georgia’s Commission on Ministry, which is a committee required by The Episcopal Church canons whose purpose is to advise the Bishop of each diocese in matters pertaining to ministry. Last weekend, we were meeting with people who were discerning a call to ordained ministry—both the priesthood and the diaconate. I told my colleagues when we gathered that I love doing this sort of work for the same reason that I love doing pre-marital counseling: they both help me remember my first love. It is enlivening for me to work with a group of other faithful lay and clergy to try to listen to how the Holy Spirit is acting in lives of individuals and in the greater church. Our work is essentially trying to listen for God’s call among us. So I’ve been especially struck this week in our readings by the story of Eli and Samuel. Eli is an interesting character to me. He’s a priest, but it’s not clear if he is an especially good or effective priest. In fact, throughout Eli’s story in the first part of 1 Samuel, he gets more things wrong than he does right. The book opens with an exchange between Hannah, Samuel’s mother, and Eli when she comes to pray at Shiloh where Eli is in service. She is distraught and in her prayers, she begs God for a son, praying with her lips moving but no words coming out. In watching her, Eli determines that she must be drunk, so he confronts her and chastises her. When she stands up to him, he offers her God’s blessing, and not long afterward, she has Samuel, who she dedicates to the service of God. We also learn that Eli’s sons, who are also priests, are scoundrels. They send their servants to take the best meat from what has been sacrifice to God, and thus they hold God (and the people worshipping God) in contempt. Eli gets a warning that his sons are invoking the wrath of God with their behavior, but he seems unwilling or unable to curtail their behavior. After our reading for today, as events in the life of Israel unfold, Israel goes to war with the Philistines. The Philistines kill a great number of Israelites, including both of Eli’s sons, and they steal the Ark of Covenant which holds the stone tablets containing the 10 Commandments and is Israel’s most prized relic at this time. When Eli receives the news that both his sons have been killed and the ark has been stolen, he falls over and breaks his neck and dies. But our story for today, gives us a glimpse of a single shining moment in Eli’s ministry. Samuel is young--tradition tells us probably around 12--and while he has spent his entire life in the service of the Lord, he doesn’t know the Lord. The Lord calls to Samuel, and he thinks it’s Eli, so he goes to see what the old man wants from him. Eli sends him back to bed with both a patience and a gentleness that he did not exhibit with Samuel’s mother Hannah. After three different times of this, Eli finally realizes what is going on, and he teaches Samuel how to respond to the Lord saying, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” Samuel does as Eli instructs, and the Lord tells Samuel that God is about to punish Eli for the sins of his sons. In the morning, Eli presses Samuel to share what God has revealed to him, and he receives the news courageously with a fair amount of equanimity, not offering any anger toward Samuel as messenger. And here’s a spoiler alert: Samuel goes on to become a great prophet in the history of Israel, an important figure in the establishment of the monarchy, featuring in both King Saul and King David’s stories. But even Samuel has to learn how to hear God’s call in his life, and it was the fallible priest Eli who taught him. Well, that’s all great, Melanie, but what does that have to do with me or with us, today? The reason why we do the work of discernment for ordained life as a committee in the diocese is because much of the time, we need community to understand who we truly are, who God is calling us to be. Eli’s story is heartening to me because it shows that we as individuals don’t have to be good or effective in order to help people learn a little bit more about who God has created them to be, and this is the call of what it means to be together in community. We are called to hold up a mirror for each other at times when we see the giftedness of the other, or when we can discern how God may be acting in that person’s life. It’s a task that requires humility, gentleness, a willingness to listen, and great courage to risk ourselves in this endeavor. But each of us is called to do this work for each other, both inside the church and beyond. You know, I’m not sure if I would be a priest, if my mother hadn’t named something that I was already wrestling with inside, giving me a sort of blessing to begin seriously considering it. And this is not a task that is limited to ordained vocations. So this is especially important work that we can offer to the younger people among us. But we have to take the time to listen, to be curious, and to be compassionate about the things that they are passionate about. To do this truly effectively, we have to be open to perspectives different than our own, and we have to be able to reimagine the contours of our own youth alongside the benefits of wisdom and age. This is also work that we are called to both as individuals and also as a whole church. Your invitation this week is to think of a time when someone noticed something in you and named it for you in a way that helped you understand yourself different? This week, be open to looking and listening to ways God might be inviting you to share something that you see (in kindness, gentleness, humility, and courage) about someone you encounter.