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/