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. 

---

[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.