The Rev Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg
St. Mark’s
Episcopal Church, Jonesboro, AR
13th
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 20th,
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?
