The Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany-Year C

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg The Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany-Year C February 23, 2025 Enemies is such a strong word. I’ve been thinking about this all week and wondering if it isn’t a bit archaic as well? Do we still really have enemies? What are other words that we might use in our modern context to capture what Jesus is getting at in the second out of three parts of his Sermon on the Plain in Luke’s gospel today: “Love your enemies and pray for those who curse you”? Adversary? How about nemesis? Those who irritate you or whom you disagree with? The Greek word translated as enemy here is literally hateful or the hated one. Enemies. It’s a bit strong. Maybe we could soften it somehow. Surely we’re enlightened enough, Christian enough, that we don’t have enemies? I’d gotten pretty far down this path this week until I was pulling out of my driveway headed to work and who did I see? My next door neighbor who is definitely my enemy!!! For those of you who haven’t been here long, there’s a whole history there; it’s a history of lawn fungus and dog drama. So, there I was thinking enemies was an archaic term in today’s gospel when I came face to face with mine. (Denial ain’t just a River in Egypt, Melanie!) Ok, so we have enemies. And usually an enemy is someone who has harmed us in some way; enemyship often involves some sort of betrayal of power or relationship. In last week’s gospel, we had the first part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain, where Jesus is enumerating those who are blessed (which can also be translated as a sort of “atta boy”) and those who are woe-begone (which can be translated as a sort of “shame on you!”). And we pick up today right where we left off last week with Jesus teaching us about what it means to live a faithful life, to be merciful, even toward our enemies. And unfortunately, Jesus is unambiguous: “I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.” And then he says it again: “love your enemies.” And he goes one to talk about the importance of giving over receiving and of forgiving. But how do we go about forgiving someone who has hurt us who we just do not want to forgive? (I am, of course, asking for a friend!) Our Old Testament reading for this week gives us an interesting glimpse into forgiveness of one’s enemies. Today we have the happy ending in the Joseph saga from Genesis, and it’s interesting to me in this context because Joseph has suffered a massive betrayal at the hands of his brothers which leads to his enslavement and imprisonment in the foreign land of Egypt, and then, through God’s involvement, in an exciting twist, Joseph becomes the hero of the Egyptian people, helping safe-guard them from a debilitating famine through his faithful and accurate interpretation of Pharoah’s dreams. In our reading for today, we see how Joseph, who has been betrayed by members of his own family, forgives them and seeks to be reconciled with them, even though he has been horribly wronged by them. And isn’t that also the case with enemies? When I was on my pursuit of a different term for enemy, I ran across a definition someone had submitted to Urban Dictionary for enemy that gets to this: an enemy is “1. A former friend or acquaintance whose company is no longer considered to be beneficial to a relationship; 2. One who is deemed or deems him/herself to be of more use to another as an adversary as opposed to an ally.” We’ve even made up a word for this: we call them a frenemy. The people who are closest to us have the greatest power to wound or betray us. Or perhaps we have different expectations of what love should look like, and those unvoiced or unmet expectations lead to resentments, which can be toxic to us and to our relationships. Joseph’s is an interesting case study on how family systems work. Because most families do follow predictable patterns of behavior, but when one member of the family changes their behavior, it can impact the entire family and its dynamic. It could have been so easy for Joseph to reveal himself to his brothers and to enact his vengeance upon them and their families by just refusing to help them and sending them back home to Canna where they would all eventually starve. But something in Joseph has changed over the years, and his hubris and pride which he used to flaunt around his brothers has been worn away by the challenges he has faced. And so he ends the pattern of sibling retribution that has gone back generations in his family by forgiving his brothers, and inviting them to join him in Egypt to reap the benefits of his position of power there. So, what does that mean for us? How do we live into this call of Jesus and forgive our enemies? For me, I think that’s going to have to start with regular, daily prayer for my neighbor. And here’s what I’m going to try to do. (Someone else came up with this, and I’m going to borrow it.) “Choose an enemy to pray for this week. Write their name on a piece of paper and place it somewhere you will see it regularly. You might use this prayer: ‘May they have enough. May they love and be loved. May they know and be known by God.’” i (repeat it) In closing, I’ll leave you with someone else’s words about making this shift in thinking toward our enemies: “[Christian life] asks us to sacrifice our long-cherished sense of aggrievement toward our enemies, rendering them in the process not enemies at all, but fellow sinners forgiven by God.” ii So, I’ve added my enemy/neighbor to my private prayer list and am committing to pray for her for the week: “May she have enough. May she love and be loved. And may she know and be known by God.” I invite you to join me in this practice this week. i. Haverkamp, Heidi, ed. Everyday Connections: Reflections and Prayers for Year C. Westminster John Knox: 2021, p 124 ii. Ibid. p122 Quote by Robert F. Darden

The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany Year C

The Very Rev. Melanie Dickson Lemburg The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany-Year C February 9, 2025 It is pretty uncommon for Episcopal preachers to give our sermons titles. (It can be common in other denominations.) But this week, I couldn’t help thinking that if this sermon had a title, it would be “Sin and Awe.” Sin and awe are two states of being that I would not normally associate with each other, but they are two ribbons woven through almost all of our readings for this Sunday. So, what’s up with that? First, I think we need to start with some definitions. When I asked our Wednesday healing service crowd to define sin, we had even more definitions than we had people in the room. Sin is “separation from God; moving away from God instead of moving toward God; unrighteous behavior; disobeying the commandments; defiance; missing the mark…” The list was much, much longer. Our Book of Common Prayer actually has a really helpful section that gives us some definition around common phrases and words that helps bind us together, like the Prayer Book helps bind us together in our common prayer. If you look on page 848 in the BCP in the Catechism section, you’ll see lots of writing about sin, including this definition: “Sin is the seeking of our own will instead of the will of God, thus distorting our relationship with God, with other people, and with all creation.” Seems straightforward enough. But what about awe? Our group described awe as standing at Pike’s Peak and looking out and down and being overwhelmed by majesty. I think we find awe in the brushing up against something so much larger than ourselves. Unfortunately, our BCP doesn’t have a handy definition of awe for us, but in her book Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience, sociologist Brene Brown defines awe for us. She writes about how we often use awe and wonder interchangeably, but there is an important difference. “ ‘Wonder inspires the wish to understand; awe inspires the wish to let it shine, to acknowledge and unite.’ When feeling awe, we tend to simply stand back and observe, ‘to provide a stage for the phenomenon to shine…Researches have found that awe ‘leads people to cooperate, share resources, and sacrifice for others’ and causes them to ‘fully appreciate the value of others and see themselves more accurately, evoking humility.’ Some researchers even believe that ‘awe-inducing events may be one of the fastest and most powerful methods of personal change and growth.’” i Interesting. So, in one way they are complete opposites. Sin divides and separates. Awe connects and humbles. Our readings for today give us two solid examples of this juxtaposition (and the Corinthians reading actually hints at it pretty strongly as Paul points back to his own story and conversion experience on the road to Damascus). We see in both Isaiah’s call story and the call story for Jesus’s disciples in Luke this encounter with the divine which provokes awe for both Isaiah and the newly-minted disciples juxtaposed with an acute awareness of their sinfulness. And I can’t help but wonder if this overwhelming sense of connectedness to the infinite doesn’t highlight for them all the ways that they are separated or divided from God and from others? The passage from Isaiah is interesting, too, because it isn’t just an indictment of individual sin. The call from God through Isaiah in the first third of that book is all about the ways that God’s people Israel are failing as a people. Isaiah isn’t calling for just a repentance from individual sin; he is holding up a mirror to an entire society and pointing out the ways that they are not living up God’s expectations of how God’s people should treat each other and especially the most vulnerable among them. Back before Christmas, I saved a meme that I found floating around social media that I’ve been contemplating since then. It’s a quote from someone named Mark Charles (who I know absolutely nothing about), and it is this: “Western Christianity preaches a hyper individualistic salvation so it doesn’t have to repent from its systemic sin.” (Ouch!) But this systemic sin is, in fact, what Isaiah is calling the people to repent from, even when he acknowledges that there seems to be a certain inevitability to their destruction because they have allowed themselves as a society to become too separated, too divided from how God encourages and calls them to live as God’s people. Last week, in one of the daily meditations from the Center for Action and Contemplation, they shared excerpts from Franciscan priest Richard Rohr’s new book titled The Tears of Things. Rohr reflects that we often think of a prophet as someone who is angry and raving at the people of Israel for their many sins or predicting future doom, but there is often a larger pattern to the prophets (and Isaiah falls into this larger pattern as well). First the prophets “rage against sin as if they were above or better than it-then they move into solidarity with it.” Rohr continues, “Please understand that sin is not as much malice as woundedness. Sin is suffering. Sin is sadness. Many of us have learned this truth from studying addictions, where it’s become more clear that sin deserves pity, not judgement.” He concludes, “Sin is also the personal experience of the tragic absurdity of reality. It leads us to compassion. We must have compassion for the self, for how incapable we are of love, of mercy, or forgiveness. Our love is not infinite like God’s love. It’s measured-and usually measured out according to deservedness. But that’s not how YHWH treats ancient Israel, which was always unfaithful to the covenant. God is forever faithful.” The meditation ends by showing how the prophets move from standing above sin to being in solidarity with human suffering, and we, too, can be transformed by that evolution, just like the prophets. ii And awe is one of the tools that God uses to transform us. Awe is God’s unexpected gift for us. It’s not something that we can generate, but it is something we can look out for, and when we encounter it, we can lean into it allowing it to transform us through humility and re-connection. Your invitation this week is to try to think about sin differently, to see it as something to be pitied, in yourself and others, as opposed to something to be judged; to look for the ways that our systemic sin harms the most vulnerable among us. And you are also invited to try to create space for awe in your days and in your interactions, and in those moments in your life when God’s glory is revealed, to pay attention. i. Brown, Brene. Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience. Random House, 2021, pp58-59 ii. https://cac.org/daily-meditations/a-misunderstood-image/

The Third Sunday after the Epiphany-Year C

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg The Third Sunday after the Epiphany-Year C January 26, 2025 You might have noticed that I’ve done something a little different with our readings today. Our gospel passage assigned for today was actually the first half of the reading—Jesus’s first sermon back in his hometown of Nazareth at the beginning of his earthly ministry just after his baptism. Normally, next Sunday, we’d have the second part of the reading which we heard today, which is Jesus’s extrapolation of his sermon and how his hometown friends and family received it. But instead, next Sunday, we will have the Feast of the Presentation—when Jesus as a baby is presented in the temple, which is a major feast of the church that when it falls on a Sunday, we commemorate it. So we weren’t going to get to hear about the fall-out from Jesus’s sermon at all this year. So, we have a double gospel reading today, and I just went ahead a cut the other readings to accommodate that change. This past week, I got to hear the Rev Dr. Bertice Berry, who is a deacon serving at Christ Church, preach at the MLK eucharist at St. Matthew’s. Bertice preached about Jesus’s sermon on the plain and how it was a “leveling” which included the golden rule. She spoke eloquently about all the ways that we “other” each other, drawing lines between we who are in and those who are out, and how those lines can constantly shift. I’ve been thinking about this concept of “othering” this week as I’ve watched the news swirling around the Rt Rev Marianne Budde, the bishop of the diocese of Washington DC and her sermon at her cathedral earlier this week. I’ve watched as she has been heralded as a champion by many and also demonized by many who question both the validity of her ordination as a woman bishop and even her right to American citizenship. And I have become so very curious as to how a sermon about unity has become so deeply divisive. i. It’s an interesting juxtaposition that our gospel readings for today give us a glimpse into Jesus’ first sermon back in his hometown of Nazareth. It’s unclear if Jesus himself picks the scripture or if, like us, he preaches on what is assigned for that day’s reading. (Scholars suggest it could be either option.) Jesus’s reading threads together several different passages from the book of the prophet Isaiah saying, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." Then he sits down and says, (in what may be enviably the shortest sermon ever) "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." Jesus is proclaiming how his work flows out of his baptismal anointing as God’s beloved, and he shows through the words of the scriptures how his ministry will be one of restoration and reconciliation for the lost and the least. And his hometown folks are understandably proud. But Jesus doesn’t leave it at that. In the second part of the gospel, we see him give his hometown folks, who are feeling quite proud of their hometown hero, a bit of a jab which almost gets him thrown off the cliff. He reminds them that in the past, the prophets of God have shown up most frequently for those who are considered other—not the hometown folks but the foreigners and the enemies of Israel. When his hometown crowd is feeling proud because of their connection with him, Jesus immediately sides with the “other.” And they become angry and unsettled by what appears to be a shift in his allegiance. But here’s the thing. Jesus is reminding the crowd and us that in the Kingdom of God, there is no “other.” All are God’s children, and as God’s people, we are called to recognize our kinship with everyone. There is no “other” in the Kingdom of God, no matter how much we might want there to be. Think for a moment about who you might consider to be an “other” in this moment. And hear Jesus proclaiming that even that person is a beloved child of God, a part of Jesus’s mission of healing, reconciliation, and restoration for all. Noone is outside of that mission. Today, Jesus is reminding us of the inclusive embrace of God, and he is showing us how the Holy Spirit is so often willing to use “others” or “outsiders” to unfold new narratives for God’s people and all of creation. I wonder how God is inviting us here at St. Thomas to live more fully into this reality? I wonder how God will continue to be revealed here in our midst through people and places we might not expect? i. Here is the full text of Bishop Budde's sermon: https://dioet.org/blog/bishop-mariann-buddes-sermon-from-service-of-prayer-for-the-nation/?fbclid=IwY2xjawH_QUhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHTenL8nqXGeEqjenpn-_9uIv0zchDa214UPihxMy46zm5WX-ZYSGoZgi0g_aem_sq0l66p3u7-0iJkH_9qJhg

The First Sunday after the Epiphany-Year C

The Very Rev. Melanie D. Lemburg The First Sunday after the Epiphany-Year C January 12, 2025 I’m not someone who regularly watches the news. I get most of my updates from daily emails from NPR with the headlines, and that’s almost more than I can stand. But this week, I’ve been paying more attention than usual because of the wildfires in California. It started early in the week when a seminary classmate of mine who is now the bishop of Arizona and is from California shared the news about how the Diocese of Los Angeles had lost St. Mark's, Altadena, the rectories of St. Matthew's, Pacific Palisades, and many homes of church members to the fires. And I’ve watched the stories about how so many people are evacuating and still some choose to stay, wetting down their rooves to try to prevent losing their homes. It makes me wonder what people are thinking who choose to stay and face down a wildfire. It reminded me of the stories I heard along the MS Gulf Coast after I served there after Hurricane Katrina—about parishioners who live a block back from the water who would always stay and ride out the storms. They’d never had any problems before. But Katrina was different, pushing a wall of water so many miles inland. As the waters rose throughout the day, my parishioners moved from the ground floor to the second floor, and then finally from the second floor into their attic. As they watched the waters continue to rise from the tiny attic window, the wife called her best friend and told her, “The water’s still rising, and I don’t think we’re going to make it. Whatever you do, don’t let them play Amazing Grace at my funeral.” i Two of our readings for today give glimpses of God’s providence over the elements. Psalm 29 is a reminder of God’s creative power, how God speaks creation into being and how the Holy Spirit moves over the water at creation. It is a song of reassurance and thanksgiving from the voice of an individual that when they go through the fires and floods of life, God’s providence has been faithful and that God continues to give to God’s people strength and the blessing of peace. In the reading from Isaiah, we see the voice of God speaking to God’s people through the writer of Isaiah as the people have been taken into captivity in Babylon. Removed from their homes, their temple destroyed (and probably many of their homes, too), the people are captives in enemy territory for anywhere from 50 to 70 years. In this passage from Isaiah, God reassures God’s people that in the midst of this crisis, God has not abandoned them. God continues to be with them as they walk through fire, as they face floods and rivers. God promises that they will not be overwhelmed and that God finds them precious in God’s sight. In both of these passages, we see glimpses of chaos that God’s people are swept up in, and we receive assurance that God controls the uncontrollable. God promises that we, too, shall not be overwhelmed, and that God is enthroned over the metaphoric floods of our lives. It is a part of the human condition that we all will, at some point or another, face fires and floods in our lives. They may not be literal, but all of us face things that are beyond our control. Can you think back over your life and identify past floods that you have encountered, and how God showed up in those? What does the flood feel like in your life today? How might you envision God enthroned over that flood? How can God help you from feeling overwhelmed?ii It’s really easy to judge the people who are wetting their rooves to try to save their homes from the wildfires or the people who stayed during Katrina and ended up stranded in their attics facing possible drowning there. But when we think back about our own floods and fires in our lives, we can see how certain decisions we made put us in a similar place. No one willingly chooses to be stuck in their attic facing drowning in the midst of a flood. But so often, that’s exactly where our decisions and our choices put us. Perhaps it is because so often in the face of our floods and fires, we try to be like God; we try to exert our control over forces that are just too big for us, and this is part of how we get overwhelmed. So, maybe you’re thinking, “well, that’s just great, Melanie. But what’s the alternative? Are we just supposed to lie down and die in the face of the diagnosis or the family member who is trapped and looking to us for help? The job loss, the broken relationship, or the death of those close to us? What, then, should we do? We know we are supposed to trust God, but what does that actually look like?” And to that I say, I hear you! Every day, my faith journey is an exercise in questioning what areas are mine to influence and control and what is best left to God. I promise you, I haven’t figured it out yet. But here’s something that has helped me this week. Retired Bishop Stephen Charleston posts daily on social media, and here’s what he posted this past Wednesday that spoke to me: “We live in a time of extremes. Extreme weather, extreme events, extreme anxiety. These are forces that we cannot control. Therefore, control is not what we seek. We concentrate instead on keeping our balance. We adapt. We adjust. We remain flexible, riding over the impact as best we can, staying close to one another, being alert for chances to help. When reality turns hard, we become like water.”iii What does that mean—in the face of floods and fires and forces we cannot control--to become like water? Water is fluid; it can be both gentle and powerful. It can cool and refresh, and it can also reorder and reshape. What does it mean to become like water in the face of whatever flood or fire you may find yourself in? My parishioners who were trapped in their attic during Katrina made it out. They faced the complete destruction of their home and the world around them, but they survived. And they rebuilt their home. Three years after their brush with death, we blessed their newly rebuilt home, during Epiphany-tide, the season of light. “We live in a time of extremes. Extreme weather, extreme events, extreme anxiety. These are forces that we cannot control. Therefore, control is not what we seek. We concentrate instead on keeping our balance. We adapt. We adjust. We remain flexible, riding over the impact as best we can, staying close to one another, being alert for chances to help. When reality turns hard, we become like water.”

i. This is the story of Maria Watson and Julius Ward who were parishioners of mine at St. Peter’s by-the-Sea in Gulfport, MS. Maria called her friend, Joy Jennings, who was also a parishioner. ii. This idea is from Khalia J. Williams as share din Everyday Connections… iii. January 9, 2025 https://www.facebook.com/bishopstevencharleston