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?