The Sunday after All Saints' Day-St. Paul's Batesville, AR

The Sunday after All Saints’ Day—St. Paul’s Episcopal Church Batesville, AR

November 2, 2025

 

       Good morning!  I’m Melanie Lemburg, the new canon to the ordinary for the diocese, and I’m delighted to be here with y’all on this All Saints’ Sunday!  I’ve already enjoyed your excellent hospitality, and I’ve really enjoyed working with your wardens, Sarah and Steve, since I arrived in the diocese.

       The Feast of All Saints is one of our seven major feast days in the life of the church.  It’s designated as a day that is especially good for baptisms (which is why we’ll renew our baptismal covenant together today), and it is such an important day that even though it happens on November 1^st, we are allowed to move it so it can be observed on the following Sunday.  

       The Celtic Christians had an understanding of All Saints and the days surrounding it as being a thin place, a threshold between what has come before and what will be.  They saw it as a time in the year when the veil between death and life feels thinner than it otherwise might feel.  

       And that’s helpful to lift up today and to mark, because we are no strangers to these thin spaces, these liminal spaces, these thresholds in our lives.  

       Not too long ago, I read the book How to Walk into a Room by Emily Freeman, and she uses the image of how our lives are like different rooms in a house, how we spend different seasons of life in different rooms, and sometimes we are forced out of a particular room, and sometimes we choose to walk out of our own accord.  There are even liminal, in-between times when we find ourselves hanging out in the hallway of our life, in between rooms.  All Saints’ and its surrounding three days (All Hallow’s Eve through All Soul’s Day, which is today) are a sort of liturgical hallway for us, connected deeply with the changing of the seasons.

       None of us is a stranger to this hanging out in the hallway.  These liminal spaces are a part of our human condition.  The shift from babyhood to toddler-hood, from childhood to adolescence and adolescence to adulthood.  There are transitions between being engaged and getting married, from leaving one job and starting another.  The transition from this life into the next is another liminal space in which we will all dwell eventually, and often accompany loved ones through.  

Some of us find comfort in these hallways, these transitions.  These liminal spaces can give us a break, a time-out for a reset, or even be a place of safety, a refuge where we build a nest of blankets and hunker down when the tornado sirens are going off. For others, the hallway is a place of risk, where we relinquish any sense of control over our goals or our destiny, a place of waiting and watching, and of discomfort. For many of us, these hallways are the portal between life before and life after—life before the diagnosis, the loss of our spouse, the job loss, a new relationship, a new job, or the birth of a child and the life after this transition that we sometimes choose and sometimes don’t. 

       These liminal spaces, these hallways, are opportunities for reflection on our life and our call, and they are spaces where God invites us to be open to uncertainty, the unknown, to mystery.  

       You find yourselves all together in one of these hallways, these liminal spaces, these in-between, already, not yet types of thin spaces, here at St. Paul’s. And it is not an easy or comfortable place to be, here in the hallway with your nest of blankets waiting for the tornado siren to stop going off.  

       So, what type of encouragement might this day that lifts up liminal spaces have to offer you in your liminal season?  

       In the reading from Ephesians for today, we have what is known as a “hinge section;” it is its own sort of threshold that comes between the opening salutation of the letter and the prayer that follows.  In the hinge section, the writer emphasizes the inheritance that the listeners have already received from God, reminding them of what God has already bestowed upon them.  And then there is the prayer.  Listen to it again:  “I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.”  

The writer is praying for his readers to have the eyes of their hearts enlightened, the knowledge of the hope to which God has called them, the riches of the inheritance of the saints (a gathering across time and space of those followers of Jesus past, present, and future), and the gift of God’s power to those who believe.  

       On this All Saints’ day, in what ways might you draw upon the inheritance of hope from all the saints who have lived and worshiped here at St. Paul’s in your rich history of over 150 years?  What are the ways God is inviting you to dig deeper into your hope together in the present?  How might your annual commitment campaign be an opportunity for you as individuals and for you as the collection of the saints to live more deeply into this hope to which God is calling you?  

       As people of faith, hope is our best companion and a gift from the Holy Spirit in these threshold, liminal, in-between thin places, these hallway seasons of our lives.  This week, I invite you to look for signs of hope in your life and in this community.  Reflect on the lives of the saints who have come before you, who have found hope in the face of incredibly trying times, and because of that hope, they were able to faithfully persist in living out the gospel.  I invite you to pray for the hope that is God’s good gift and a part of our inheritance as God’s people.  

       I’ll conclude with a blessing from the writer and theologian Kate Bowler.  (This was shared on her Facebook page a few months ago.). 

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.”[i]

 

       

 

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[i] Shared on Kate Bowler’s Facebook page on June 26, 2021  https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1FD8KjPGmy/.  

 

20th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 25C_baptismal letter for St. Mark’s Crossett

The Rev. Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Crossett, AR

The 20^th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 25C

October 26, 2025

 

A letter to Issac Cole Morman upon the occasion of his baptism.

Dear Issac,

       Today is an exciting day for you and for the Church!  It’s your baptism day, a day when you will stand before God and this congregation and make vows about how you will live your life, and we will make vows to support you in that. This is the next step in your life of faith, the next step on a journey that actually began at your birth.

       Because you see, Isaac, when you were born, you were already known and named and claimed by God as God’s beloved, just like all of us.  God creates us because God wants to be in relationship with us.  God cherishes us and claims us as God’s beloved at our creation.  

       In your baptism today, you are saying yes to being God’s beloved; to living life as God’s beloved.  It’s a beautiful life, a life full of meaning and purpose, to live your life as God’s beloved, and it is also not easy.  That’s why we live this life of the beloved here in community.  We need each other as companions on this way, and our tradition gives us a pathway to live out this life of the beloved in our baptismal covenant.  

       You will be making these promises for the first time officially today, but it will not be the last time.  Over the course of your life of faith, you and the rest of us who are God’s beloved will recommit ourselves again and again, to this path, this way of life. 

       Our gospel passage for today gives us one of Jesus’s parables that shows us a small glimpse into why we need these words of our baptismal covenant.  In a world where we are all so quick to judge and to be certain of our own righteousness, our baptismal covenant can hold up a mirror before us, a mirror both of how we are called to live as God’s beloved and also in all the ways that we fall short of doing this. 

       I once heard the line, years ago, “I am no better and no worse than anyone else;” and to me, this is what is at the heart of our baptismal covenant.  “All of us fall short of the glory of God,” is how the apostle Paul puts it.    But that’s not where we are left in this, always falling short of living into our life as the beloved.  It’s why you will answer today, not just “I will”. But “I will with God’s help.”  Because none of us can be truly faithful in this without God’s help and the support of each other.  

       And the gift of our baptismal covenant is that it gives us perspective.  We don’t need to so self-abasing as the tax collector, because we know we are created as God’s beloved, and we also shouldn’t be contemptuous and judgmental like the Pharisee because when seen in the honest light of our baptismal vows, each one of us can understand where our shortcomings are.  

       Reading this gospel parable alongside our baptismal vows today gives us the opportunity to truly reflect on our lives and to examine where are the places we have veered too much toward self-righteousness these days?  It doesn’t take much to get caught up in  and swept away by our culture’s knee-jerk reaction toward blaming others while protecting our own self-righteousness. We might also ask ourselves who we enjoy looking down on, even as our baptismal covenant holds up the mirror for us in the call to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves.  We might also examine the ways that we have made ourselves too small, where we have not lived into the full potential of our belovedness.  What does true humility in right relationship with God and others, within the framework of our baptismal covenant really look like in each of our lives in the midst of our current reality?  

       It’s no easy task, this living out life as God’s beloved.  There will be times when we need you, Isaac, to remind us of our belovedness, and there will be times when we can help you remember.  It’s the beautiful gift of Christian community, this reciprocity of remembering,  and we are all so glad that you are now on this journey with us!

Your sister in Christ, 

Melanie+

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. 

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[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/

The Third Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 8C

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg Third Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 8C June 29, 2025 A letter to Lillian Alice Johnston upon the occasion of her baptism. Dear Lily, Today we are celebrating your baptism here at St. Thomas. Today your parents and godparents are making promises on your behalf about how you will live your life, and we, the gathered congregation, are making promises to support you and them in your life of faith. In baptism, we are acknowledging that God has already claimed you as God’s beloved. We are all saying “yes” to that belovedness for you, even as you are reminding us of our own belovedness as well. There’s a saying in the church that “baptism is becoming who you already are.” You are already God’s beloved, and today, you are becoming God’s beloved as you and those who speak for you say “yes” to your belovedness. In fact, our whole lives of faith are a growing deeper in this becoming who we already are. It’s what the church refers to as discipleship. Jesus models for us the way of growing deeper into true belonging as God’s beloved, of becoming who we already are. He teaches that that becoming is marked by dying to ourselves and our own selfish desires; in living lives of empathy and compassion and forgiveness of and service to others. The ways that we become who we already are as God’s beloved are encoded in our baptismal covenant. Our becoming is nourished in prayer, scripture, and sacrament; it is rooted in seeking and serving Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves, asking for and offering forgiveness, repenting and returning to God when we fall away, striving for justice and peace and respecting the dignity of every human being. But as we see in our gospel lesson for today, this call to discipleship, the call to continued becoming is not an easy path. Sometimes it calls us to forsake things that are good in and of themselves; and sometimes we find that if we cling too tightly to these good things they get in the way of our becoming or our growing in our belovedness. Our hearts can make idols of even the best things in our lives, so that they come between us and God. And our hearts can also cling too much to the wounds and slights and shadows of the past, holding us hostage for living fully in this present moment. That’s part of what our becoming is; it is being fully present to God and those in our midst in each present moment. It’s challenging, uncomfortable work, and so we need each other. It’s why we gather here week after week together, so we can support one another in our becoming. Today is the beginning of that journey for you, sweet Lily. Today you begin your becoming. There will be so many more moments before you when you will be challenged to become more than you already are, to grow deeper in God’s love for you. These moments of becoming can be deeply unsettling and uncomfortable. They are filled with both hope and terror, as we leave behind what is old and don’t yet exactly know what is to come. i It is what the apostle Paul refers to when he says that anyone who is in Christ is a “new creation.” It’s what Jesus is getting at in our gospel reading when he calls the people on the road to follow him in discipleship and then rebukes them for wanting to turn back; even though what they are turning back for is worthy, it divides their hearts and holds them back from following him into their becoming a new creation. Lily, today is the first moment of many becomings for you. There will be so many more than you can ever count. Any time you stand in the crossroads of such seemingly ordinary things as choosing kindness or forgiveness over retribution or setting aside your own selfish desires to create space and welcome for another. And of course, there will be bigger moments of becoming as well, times when you stand on a precipice and are called to jump into the unknown; sometimes it will be your choice to jump, and sometimes it won’t. But the truth that undergirds all of this, for you and us, is that you have been, are, and always will be God’s beloved: marked as Christ’s own forever. No matter what happens in your life, you will never be alone. God will not forsake you, God’s own beloved. We promise to help you remember this, sweet Lily, and we hope you will do the same for us. May you continue to become what you already are! Your sister in Christ, Melanie+ i. A friend of mine recently quoted a line from her favorite Jane Austin book Persuasion in reference to these moments of becoming, saying, “I am half agony, half hope.”

The Second Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 7C

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg 2nd Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 7C June 22, 2025 “Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul? * and why are you so disquieted within me?” In our two psalms assigned for today, we read this verse three different times. “Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul? * and why are you so disquieted within me?” It could easily be the refrain for our modern times. “Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul? * and why are you so disquieted within me?” There is so much noise in our lives and in our world. And our souls just seem to soak it up. Even in our hyper-connected society, we find ourselves lonely, our souls burdened and disquieted, cut off from God, our source of life and light and oppressed/overloaded with so much noise. And you know what’s crazy? We choose this noise all the time! The 24 hour news cycle. The text-threads. The endless doom scrolling on social media. The to-do lists. And don’t even get me started on the leaf-blowers! (Oh, how I hate the leaf blowers!) Take a minute and think about how you often choose noise in your life? Think about how you have done it just this week? Just last night, as we were going to bed, we heard the news that the US had dropped bombs on Iran, and instead of saying a prayer for all those affected and going on to bed, what do you think I did? I picked up my phone and started reading as much news about it as I could. Also, I can’t help but notice that we do it here, too. Just about every week, we fill up the silence before worship with talking. Why do we do this? Why do we choose the very things that are making us disquieted and restless? And even more importantly, how do we stop it? How do we stop choosing for our souls to be disquieted? Let’s look at our Old Testament reading for today to gain some insight into all of this. Our portion from First Kings picks up right in the middle of things with the prophet Elijah. Now, Elijah has gotten himself sideways with the king and queen of his day, Ahab and Jezebel, who were quite corrupt. God has used Elijah as God’s mouthpiece to tell Ahab and Jezebel to return to following Yahweh, but they have upped the ante, worshipping the false god Baal and killing off the prophets of Yahweh. So Elijah puts on a show where he goes against the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. He prophesies how God will end the drought, and Elijah calls down God’s fire from heaven (while doing some epic taunting of Baal’s prophets), to demonstrate the sovereignty of Yahweh over all other gods. And then, Elijah encourages the gathered witnesses to round up all the prophets of Baal, and Elijah kills them all. That’s when our story for today picks up. After his tremendous victory, Elijah goes on the run as Queen Jezebel threatens to kill him. We see God sending an angel to Elijah to tend to him in the wilderness. The angel provides him with food and encouragement to rest and to continue. Elijah runs all the way to a cave at Mount Horeb (where God had given the 10 commandments to Moses), and at this point, Elijah is feeling persecuted and quite self-righteous. When God asks him what he’s doing there, he replies (quite full of himself), “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away." God, tells Elijah to stand out on the mountainside and God will pass by. And then, comes the noise of several cataclysmic events: wind, earthquake, fire. But Elijah knows that God is not in those. It is when Elijah hears the sound of sheer silence that he knows that God is approaching, so he goes out of the cave, and he encounters God in the silence. And in the silence, God speaks to Elijah and reveals what Elijah is to do next. Where Elijah feels like he is the only one left who is faithful to God, God reminds Elijah that there is a whole community of people who remain faithful, and there is still work for Elijah to do among them. God tells Elijah to anoint two new kings, and to anoint his prophetic successor, and God reminds Elijah that there are 7,000 people who are still faithful to God. So Elijah leaves that encounter with God in the silence with renewed mission and purpose. He finds courage in knowing that he is not alone after having received God’s care for him in the form of food and rest. And he becomes renewed by a sense of a new call-- that he is called to be an important part of the community of those who remain faithful to God, and he leaves Mount Horeb and gets back to work. So, what does this all have to teach us about our own disquieted souls and how to stop choosing the noise in our lives but instead making space for God to speak in the silence? The Episcopal priest and spiritual director Margaret Guenther writes about this encounter between God and Elijah in her book My Soul in Silence Waits. Here is what she writes: “The voice of God was not in the powerful, potentially devastating phenomena, but in the silence. I try to imagine the clarity and expansiveness of that silence. Looking within myself, I am baffled and chagrined by my simultaneous yearning and resistance. I am drawn to the intimacy of that prayerful silence, and at the same time I am genius at avoiding it. The silence of God… is living, active, and filled with the Holy Spirit….The silence of God demands our surrender. It demands that we shut up and listen, abandoning our defenses and taking off our masks. [She continues,] Elijah, standing outside the cave on Mt Horeb, must have felt helplessly open, as vulnerable and exposed as a mortal can be. He must have wondered if the wind and the fire would destroy him, if the earthquake would swallow him up. When we let ourselves wait upon God in God’s silence, we too become receptive and open. We rid ourselves of non-essentials… [She concludes] To wait for God in silence demands that we pay attention. It demands our awareness of subtlety and smallness. In the silence we become mindful of what might otherwise be dismissed or ignored.”i Where in your life is God inviting you to surrender, to be vulnerable, to be open to how God speaks to you in the silence? How are you being called to choose the silence of God over the noise of your life or the world? Where is God inviting you to lean into uncertainty, to relationship, to trust in God? Consider ending each day of this coming week in intentional silence. You might consider using the Psalmist’s refrain as a mantra: “Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul? * and why are you so disquieted within me?” i. Guenther, Margaret. My Soul in Silence Waits: Meditation on Psalm 62. Cowley: 2000, pp 37-39

Easter 7C

The Very Rev. Melanie Dickson Lemburg The 7th Sunday of Easter-Year C June 1, 2025 Liturgically, we find ourselves in a strange, in between time today. Today is the 7th Sunday after Easter-The Sunday after the Ascension-where we find ourselves dwelling in a liturgical “already-not yet.” Jesus has already ascended to be with God, (we commemorated the feast of the ascension this past Thursday), and the gift of the Holy Spirit has not yet been given to his disciples. (That will happen for us next week on the Feast of Pentecost.) So, we’re in a sort of spiritual in-between or liminal sort of place. It’s no wonder that the collect for today seems to plead: “Do not leave us comfortless!” This week at the healing service, we talked about liminal spaces, and about how or where we have found comfort in those in between times and places and seasons. I shared that I had recently read the book How to Walk into a Room by Emily Freeman, and she uses the image of how our lives are like different rooms in a house, how we spend different seasons of life in different rooms, and sometimes we are forced out of a particular room, and sometimes we choose to walk out of our own accord. There are even liminal, in-between times when we find ourselves hanging out in the hallway of our life, in between rooms. That’s where we find ourselves today; in the liturgical hallway between Jesus’s ascension and the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. None of us is a stranger to this hanging out in the hallway. These liminal spaces are a part of our human condition. The shift from babyhood to toddler-hood, from childhood to adolescence and adolescence to adulthood. There are transitions between being engaged and getting married, from leaving one job and starting another. The transition from this life into the next is another liminal space which we will all dwell in eventually, and often accompany loved ones through. Some of us find comfort in these hallways, these transitions. These liminal spaces can give us a break, a time-out for a reset, or even be a place of safety, a refuge where we build a nest of blankets and hunker down when the tornado sirens are going off. For others, the hallway is a place of risk, where we relinquish any sense of control over our goals or our destiny, a place of waiting and watching, and of discomfort. For many of us, these hallways are the portal between life before and life after—life before the diagnosis, the loss of our spouse, the job loss, a new relationship, a new job, or the birth of a child and the life after this transition that we sometimes choose and sometimes don’t. These liminal spaces, these hallways, are opportunities for reflection on our life and our call, and they are spaces where God invites us to be open to uncertainty, the unknown, to mystery. Can you take a moment to think about when you have experienced one of these liminal spaces or stood in the hallway of your life? Was it a place of discomfort or comfort for you? What did you learn about yourself, about your life, your relationship with God? Where or how did you find comfort in the liminal space, in the hallway of your life? How did courage take shape in your life the last time you were hanging out in the hallway? The Irish priest, theologian, and poet John O’Donohue writes about these liminal spaces, these hallways that he calls thresholds in his book To Bless the Space Between Us. Here is what he writes, “ At any time you can ask yourself: At which threshold am I now standing? At this time in my life, what am I leaving? Where am I about to enter? What is preventing me from crossing my next threshold? What gift would enable me to do it? A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms and atmospheres. Indeed, it is a lovely testimony to the fullness and integrity of an experience or a stage of life that it intensifies toward the end into a real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up. At this threshold a great complexity of emotions comes alive: confusion, fear, excitement, sadness, hope. This is one of the reasons such vital crossings were always clothed in ritual. It is wise in your own life to be able to recognize and acknowledge the key thresholds; to take your time; to feel all the varieties of presence that accrue there; to listen inward with complete attention until you hear the inner voice calling you forward. The time has come to cross.” i In our gospel reading for today, we get a glimpse of Jesus’s farewell discourse to his disciples from John’s gospel, where he is trying to impart to them the truths he wants to leave with them. He invites them to stay grounded in God’s love and to stay connected with each other, even as things are about to change dramatically. In her reflection on the feast of the Asension, the pastor, poet, and artist Jan Richardson had this to say about how Jesus takes leave us his disciples and how he encourages them to dwell in the liminal space for a time. She writes, “Before he is gone from the physical presence of his beloved followers and friends—precisely while he is leaving them, in fact—Jesus offers them a blessing. It’s this moment that really knocks me out. Jesus is not trying to put a silver lining on his leaving. He is not giving them a blessing as a consolation prize for having come through these wild years with him, only to see him leave—though consolation is surely part of his intent. Instead, with the blessing that he gives them in the very moment of his leaving, Jesus is acknowledging that the substance of grief is also the substance of love. They are made of the same stuff, and if we can be present to this—if we can stay with both the grief and the love that lives at the heart of it, the love will become more and more clear, and more clarifying, and it will, in time, show us the way to go.” In conclusion, I’ll offer you Richardson’s blessing that accompanies her reflection. It is titled STAY I know how your mind rushes ahead, trying to fathom what could follow this. What will you do, where will you go, how will you live? You will want to outrun the grief. You will want to keep turning toward the horizon, watching for what was lost to come back, to return to you and never leave again. For now, hear me when I say all you need to do is to still yourself, is to turn toward one another, is to stay. Wait and see what comes to fill the gaping hole in your chest. Wait with your hands open to receive what could never come except to what is empty and hollow. You cannot know it now, cannot even imagine what lies ahead, but I tell you the day is coming when breath will fill your lungs as it never has before, and with your own ears you will hear words coming to you new and startling. You will dream dreams and you will see the world ablaze with blessing. Wait for it. Still yourself. Stay. ii i. O’Donohue, John. To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings. Doubleday: New York, 2008, p48-49. ii. Jan Richardson from The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief

Easter 5C

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg The Fifth Sunday of Easter-Year C May 18, 2025 How many times in our lives have we said, “I just can’t wait to be home!” We say it when we are away on trips of various sizes. We say it when we have a stay in the hospital. We say it sometimes even mid-way through a long day at work. Even in the midst of adventures, this longing for home may steal upon us. I’ve talked to a number of different people this week about what makes a place home for them. Home seems to indicate a place of familiarity, of comfort, of peace, of refuge. It’s a place where we feel like we belong in our truest selves, and it is often a safe place where we can mourn. Many folks associate home with family and friends, and for some, home encompasses a multitude of generations who figure out how to get along in ways that sometimes stretch us. I wonder what makes a place home for you? When you say “I just can’t wait to be home!” for what are you longing or looking for? In our reading from Revelation for today, we’ve got the very end of the book of Revelation. Now, we’ve had readings from Revelation for the last four Sundays and surprisingly, none of our preachers have chosen to engage them, myself included!. So, here’s a bit of context on Revelation from the scholar Diana Butler Bass. She writes, “We often forget that the Revelation of John is exactly what it claims: a revelation, a vision. It isn’t predictive, it isn’t fortune telling, and it certainly isn’t writing the future. Above all, it isn’t literal. Like all visions, it reveals truth of things through symbols, poetry, visual and auditory suggestions, and dream sequences. The writer wasn’t a soothsayer. The author was certainly intuitive. And by the text’s own admission, the writer was a contemplative visionary. This person heard voices, paid attention to dreams, and prayed through images. And then, whoever this was wrote down what had been seen. Sort of like an ancient dream journal. A record of visionary experiences…” She continues, “Revelation was written many years after Jesus’ execution. Most scholars, even conservative ones, think it was composed some six or seven decades later. The popular predictive interpretation of the end times isn’t accepted by serious academics, even if it is the familiar view held by casual Bible readers and fundamentalist Christians. [Instead] modern interpreters have emphasized that Revelation was a message of comfort to a persecuted church. Some suggest that it emerged in the midst of internal Christian conflict, others think it was a warning aimed at Christians who had become collaborators with the Roman Empire. She concludes, “Catholic biblical scholar Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza insisted that Revelation be read ‘from the margins’ and is best understood as a kind of Christian version of the Jewish story of the Exodus. As such, the book stands in the tradition of scriptural liberation, reveals the struggle of early believers with Rome, and proposes a hoped for future of justice for all.” i Our reading for today gives us a glimpse into this vision, this dream for God’s church in the midst of conflict or persecution or collaboration with Empire. In the vision, God is making God’s home among mortals, and it is clear that in that home, we all belong together with God. And the main thing that this passage shows us that God does in making God’s home among mortals is to offer comfort for those who mourn, to take away all sadness and suffering. And in that home together with us, God makes all things new. It’s a compelling image of God, if we really think about it; That God chooses to not only make God’s home with us but also, that one of the ways that God makes home is by comforting those who mourn and by even removing the sources of that grief or mourning. Perhaps that is why this passage is one of the suggested passages for our Burial liturgy—to remind us of this image, this promise of God. And I can’t help wonder what this means for us as the Church? If we the church are the body of Christ, God’s way of making home among mortals, how are we called to further this work of God? How are we called to create a space of home or belonging for others, both inside our walls and outside? How are we called to care for those who mourn, both inside our walls and outside? How are we called to make things new in partnership with God? Because it’s not enough to create a space where we and others feel comfortable. There’s an aspect of home that nourishes us, cares for us, even as we get called outward to make our way in the world. Poet David Whyte captures this tension beautifully in a portion of his poem WHAT I MUST TELL MYSELF. I’ll share it with you in closing, and invite you to consider this week, how we are called to make home for others. WHAT I MUST TELL MYSELF I know this house so well, and this horizon, and this world I have made. from my thoughts. I know this quiet and the particular treasures and terrors of my own silence but I do not know the world to which I am going. I have only this breath and this presence for my wings and they carry me in my body whatever I do from one hushed moment to another. I know my innocence and I know my unknowing but for all my successes I go through life like a blind child who cannot see, arms outstretched trying to put together a world. And the world seems to work on my behalf catching me in its arms when I go too far. I don’t know what I could have done to have earned such faith. Watching the geese go south I find that even in silence and even in stillness and even in my home alone without a thought or a movement I am forever part of a great migration that will take me to another place. And though all the things I love may pass away and all the great family of things and people I have made around me will see me go, I feel they will always live in me like a great gathering ready to reach a greater home. When one thing dies all things die together, and must learn to live again in a different way, when one thing is missing everything is missing, and must be found again in a new whole and everything wants to be complete, everything wants to go home and the geese traveling south are like the shadow of my breath flying into darkness on great heart-beats to an unknown land where I belong. This morning they have found me, full of faith, like a blind child, nestled in their feathers, following the great coast to a home I cannot see. ii i. From Diana Butler Bass’s Substack page The Cottage. Sunday Musings for Easter 4C-The prophetic shepherd. https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/sunday-musings-a22?utm_source=substack&publication_id=47400&post_id=162973184&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&utm_campaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&r=l4l89&triedRedirect=true ii.From WHAT I MUST TELL MYSELF In The House of Belonging © David Whyte and Many Rivers Press. Share on David Whyte’s Facebook page on May 7, 2020.