The Feast of St. Andrew_St. Andrew's Mountain Home

 The Feast of St. Andrew-transferred

St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Mountain Home, AR

November 30, 2025

         Good morning!  I’m Melanie Lemburg, the new canon to the ordinary for the diocese, and I’m delighted to be here with you to celebrate your patronal feast day—the Feast of St. Andrew!  

      I’ve come here straight from our family Thanksgiving gathering at our family farm in Northeast Mississippi.  My parents and one brother have houses on the farm, and we were joined by my second brother and his family along with my husband and two kids.  And for one chaotic week, we all lived together again, all on top of each other (like puppies!).  Siblings sharing rooms, some even with their parents; all of us sharing bathrooms with a granddaughter’s boyfriend thrown into the mix. It has been an interesting week, being in such close quarters to those who are the nearest and dearest to my heart, and it has been both a gift and challenge to once again live so near to each other when we have been accustomed to being spread out around the country.     

      We have a number of factors coming together for us today:  it’s the first Sunday of Advent, and here, today, we also celebrate the life and ministry of Andrew the apostle and lift up how his witness inspires your witness here in this community. 

      And our readings for St. Andrew’s feast day have theme that winds through them like a ribbon that can speak to us today in this place, in this moment. 

      In the collect of the day, we ask God: “give us, who are called by your Holy Word, grace to follow [Jesus] without delay and to bring those near to us into his gracious presence…” In the Old Testament reading, we hear Moses saying to the people:  “Surely the commandment…is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away…No, the word is very near to you.”  In the epistle reading, we hear Paul writing to the Romans, “the word is very near to you.”  And in the gospel reading, we see Jesus walking near the brothers—Simon and Andrew- and he calls them to follow him, and immediately, they leave their nets and follow him.  

      In other stories of Andrew in the gospels, we see that Andrew has a particular gift of seeing what is nearby, and then bringing that person or resource to Jesus. He does this in the story of his call to follow Jesus in John’s gospel.  In that gospel, it is Andrew who encounters Jesus first, and then he goes and finds his brother Peter, saying to him, “We have found the Messiah,” and he brings Peter back to meet Jesus.  It is Andrew who brings the boy with five loaves and two fish to Jesus, and it is also Andrew who brings two Greeks to Jesus so that even the Gentiles might be taught by Jesus.  

      Andrew has a knack for noticing what and who are near him, and then, through his gentle encouragement, bringing them into Jesus’s presence.  

      And into this mix, we add the season of Advent, which is a slow uncovering, a gradual revealing of God with us, of the Word who is already near us, as we light our candles in the darkness.  

      And I can’t help but wonder what does this mean, that the word is already near to us?  How is that Word already being revealed in our midst?  In our families?  In this community?  In the chaos of our common life as a nation?  Where have you, like Andrew, noticed that the Word is already so very near to you?  What does it mean for us to try to seek the Word that is already near?  

      I have just started reading a new book as a part of my Advent observance this year.  The book is titled Give Me A Word: The Promise of an Ancient Practice to Guide Your Year by Christine Valters Paintner, who is the online abbess at Abbey of the Arts, a virtual global monastery that offers resources to people to help nurture contemplative practice and creative expression.  In this book Paintner picks up the ancient monastic practice of identifying a word or phrase for reflection and spiritual nourishment for a season.  The seekers would often say to the desert mothers and fathers, “Give me a word.”  And this phrase is often repeated throughout the parables of the early church.  Paintner describes this word saying, “The word being sought was not a theological explanation or counseling.  It was part of a relationship that had developed with the assumption that this word, when received by the disciple, would be life-giving.  It was meant for this person in this moment and season in their lives.”  She continues, “When we receive a word, often it is confirmed through synchronicities that continue to appear to us or a sense of felt rightness.  I sometimes describe this process of listening as looking for shimmers.  Shimmering is a way to describe when something in the world is calling to you, beckoning you, sometimes even urging you to pay closer attention.  Sometimes what shimmers is challenging, but we know that wrestling with it will yield something bigger in our lives.  Sometimes what shimmers invokes wonder and awe.  We notice a felt response in our bodies and spirits that asks us to attune more deeply to what is being revealed.”[i]

      Advent is an appropriate season to be on the lookout for these shimmers, both in our individual lives as well as in our corporate life.  What in your individual life is invoking a sense of wonder or awe from the world near you?  Where are you as an individual being challenged?  

      And as you as a congregation allow yourselves to be inspired by Andrew, I wonder what shimmers near you all from the world nearby that beckon to your attention?  Who is near to you in this community who could be brought to Jesus by your kind and thoughtful witness?  

      Let us pray. Almighty God, who didst give such grace to thine apostle Andrew that he readily obeyed the call of thy Son Jesus Christ, and brought his brother with him: Give unto us, who are called by thy Word, grace to follow him without delay, and to bring those near to us into his gracious presence; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

 

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[i] Paintner, Christine Valters. Give Me A Word: The Promise of an Ancient Practice to Guide Your Year. Broadleaf Books:  Minneapolis, 2025, pp xi-xii.

The 23rd Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 28C-All Saints' Russellville

The Rev Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg

All Saints’ Russellville

The 23^rd Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 28C

November 16, 2025

      Good morning!  I’m Melanie Lemburg, the new Canon to the Ordinary for the Diocese of Arkansas!  I’m delighted to be here with y’all this morning, and I’ve already appreciated the time I’ve gotten to spend working with your vestry and leadership, including Mercedes, as a part of this transition you are now in with her completion of her time here with y’all and your beginning wonderings of what is next for you as a community of faith.  

      I am here today both as a support for your services this morning, and also as an outward and visible sign that you are not in this alone.  The bishop will be walking along side you, much through my presence in support of you and your leadership as you all begin to discern together what’s next.  (Hopefully, he conveyed this to you also when he was with you last week!). I don’t think I need to name for you that transitions can be times of both trepidation and excitement, of anxiety and of hope for what’s next.  If you hear nothing else from me today, I hope that you will hear that you are not alone in this transition, and you have nothing to fear.

      This past week, I’ve been in Indiana facilitating a training for a group of clergy and lay leaders from around the Episcopal Church.  This training has been about conflict in the church and how to navigate it by managing our own individual anxiety and responses. As a part of this training, I share some of my own story about how I was forced out of my third parish as a result of a high level conflict.  It’s not an easy story to retell, and yet I do it every time we offer this training.  Through this story, I detail not only what happened, but also my own part in the conflict (because no matter how much we might want to believe it, none of us is every pure hero or pure villain, pure victim or pure oppressor.  We’re all always a complicated mix of both.  It’s the message that’s at the heart of the gospel).  And what I have found  is that in sharing my story of this utter failure in my ministry and how it has become the impetus for me to learn more about how conflict unfolds and can be managed by our own behaviors and interventions, it actually gives other people who are embroiled in conflict hope.  They find hope that healing can happen, even though it is often in the most of unexpected ways.  And that is the gift of the Holy Spirit’s continued presence in the Church and in the world.  

      Three of our readings for today give us hints of this hope, even through the bleakest of situations.  In the Old Testament reading, we see the prophet Malachi offering words of judgement on the present age, suggesting that God is going to purify what is impure through a righteous fire; but even in the midst of that, the faithful will find healing.  This is partnered with a psalm that invites God’s faithful to sing a new song:  a song to God’s victory and righteousness, and how we are invited to be participants in God’s equity.  

      Then we have the gospel reading from Luke where Jesus is teaching in the temple, promising his disciples and listeners that hard times are on the way, but he offers them the assurance of his presence and that they will have what they need to face these anxious times together.  The community that Luke is writing to has already experienced these occurrences, the destruction of the temple by the Romans, along with the dramatic divisions that the Roman occupation has wrought upon their homeland and their most intimate relationships. Our passage for today is one that is chock-full of anxiety and yet under the surface is the assurance that Jesus is with us and continues to provide what we need to persist.  Our gospel passage for today shows us how hope (and its practice) is the opposite of anxiety and can even be its antidote.   

Retired Episcopal Bishop and Native American elder Steven Charleston writes about how and where we find hope:  “What gives someone a positive outlook on life?  We might list things like faith, wisdom and love, but ironically one of the major sources of hope for many of us is our own brokenness.  It is not the absence of hurt in our lives, but just the opposite that gives us strength.  We have been through many struggles.  We have known loss, grief and fear.  We have experienced disappointment, betrayal, and confusion.  And because we have lived through these challenges, because we have come through to the other side, we believe in the power of the Spirit to bring us healing, reconciliation and renewal.  Hope is not a wish, but a lesson learned.”[i]  

      We find ourselves in world where it is so easy to become enslaved by the forces of anxiety that are currently running rampant through our public life and discourse:  the 24 hour news cycle; the entrenched divisions; the natural disasters and the seemingly, never-ending wars and conflicts.  And yet, each of us has the power to reengage with the lessons hope has taught us in difficult times and to become more deeply grounded in how we practice hope as the antidote to anxiety and fear.  

      This week, I invite you to contemplate what anxiety you are falling prey to these days?  Can you name that before God now and in the days to come and ask God for peace?    How is God inviting you to practice hope in your life and in the life of this community? What lessons can you recall from difficult times that can help you practice hope?

      In closing, I’ll share with you another quote from Bishop Charleston.  This is in the first chapter of his book Ladder to the Light:  An Indigenous Elder’s Meditations on Hope and Courage.   He writes, “Made for freedom.  We are not made for resignation.  Passive acceptance is not the code written into our spirit.  If that were true, as a species, we would have vanished long ago.  Instead, for millennia, we have shaken off the temptation to simply accept reality and the demand that we bend the knee, and we have stood up to struggle against the odds, to change the situation, and to find an answer and a healing.  Those deep drives are the energy we call hope.  Those active forces are what determine our future.  We are not made for resignation, but for freedom.”[ii]  

 

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[i] Posted on his Facebook page August 7, 2018

[ii] Charleston, Steven. Ladder to the Light:  An Indigenous Elder’s Meditations on Hope and Courage. Broadleaf books: Minneapolis, 2021, Kindle location 224 or 1711.  

The Sunday after All Saints' Day-St. Paul's Batesville, AR

The Sunday after All Saints’ Day—St. Paul’s Episcopal Church Batesville, AR

November 2, 2025

 

       Good morning!  I’m Melanie Lemburg, the new canon to the ordinary for the diocese, and I’m delighted to be here with y’all on this All Saints’ Sunday!  I’ve already enjoyed your excellent hospitality, and I’ve really enjoyed working with your wardens, Sarah and Steve, since I arrived in the diocese.

       The Feast of All Saints is one of our seven major feast days in the life of the church.  It’s designated as a day that is especially good for baptisms (which is why we’ll renew our baptismal covenant together today), and it is such an important day that even though it happens on November 1^st, we are allowed to move it so it can be observed on the following Sunday.  

       The Celtic Christians had an understanding of All Saints and the days surrounding it as being a thin place, a threshold between what has come before and what will be.  They saw it as a time in the year when the veil between death and life feels thinner than it otherwise might feel.  

       And that’s helpful to lift up today and to mark, because we are no strangers to these thin spaces, these liminal spaces, these thresholds in our lives.  

       Not too long ago, I read the book How to Walk into a Room by Emily Freeman, and she uses the image of how our lives are like different rooms in a house, how we spend different seasons of life in different rooms, and sometimes we are forced out of a particular room, and sometimes we choose to walk out of our own accord.  There are even liminal, in-between times when we find ourselves hanging out in the hallway of our life, in between rooms.  All Saints’ and its surrounding three days (All Hallow’s Eve through All Soul’s Day, which is today) are a sort of liturgical hallway for us, connected deeply with the changing of the seasons.

       None of us is a stranger to this hanging out in the hallway.  These liminal spaces are a part of our human condition.  The shift from babyhood to toddler-hood, from childhood to adolescence and adolescence to adulthood.  There are transitions between being engaged and getting married, from leaving one job and starting another.  The transition from this life into the next is another liminal space in which we will all dwell eventually, and often accompany loved ones through.  

Some of us find comfort in these hallways, these transitions.  These liminal spaces can give us a break, a time-out for a reset, or even be a place of safety, a refuge where we build a nest of blankets and hunker down when the tornado sirens are going off. For others, the hallway is a place of risk, where we relinquish any sense of control over our goals or our destiny, a place of waiting and watching, and of discomfort. For many of us, these hallways are the portal between life before and life after—life before the diagnosis, the loss of our spouse, the job loss, a new relationship, a new job, or the birth of a child and the life after this transition that we sometimes choose and sometimes don’t. 

       These liminal spaces, these hallways, are opportunities for reflection on our life and our call, and they are spaces where God invites us to be open to uncertainty, the unknown, to mystery.  

       You find yourselves all together in one of these hallways, these liminal spaces, these in-between, already, not yet types of thin spaces, here at St. Paul’s. And it is not an easy or comfortable place to be, here in the hallway with your nest of blankets waiting for the tornado siren to stop going off.  

       So, what type of encouragement might this day that lifts up liminal spaces have to offer you in your liminal season?  

       In the reading from Ephesians for today, we have what is known as a “hinge section;” it is its own sort of threshold that comes between the opening salutation of the letter and the prayer that follows.  In the hinge section, the writer emphasizes the inheritance that the listeners have already received from God, reminding them of what God has already bestowed upon them.  And then there is the prayer.  Listen to it again:  “I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.”  

The writer is praying for his readers to have the eyes of their hearts enlightened, the knowledge of the hope to which God has called them, the riches of the inheritance of the saints (a gathering across time and space of those followers of Jesus past, present, and future), and the gift of God’s power to those who believe.  

       On this All Saints’ day, in what ways might you draw upon the inheritance of hope from all the saints who have lived and worshiped here at St. Paul’s in your rich history of over 150 years?  What are the ways God is inviting you to dig deeper into your hope together in the present?  How might your annual commitment campaign be an opportunity for you as individuals and for you as the collection of the saints to live more deeply into this hope to which God is calling you?  

       As people of faith, hope is our best companion and a gift from the Holy Spirit in these threshold, liminal, in-between thin places, these hallway seasons of our lives.  This week, I invite you to look for signs of hope in your life and in this community.  Reflect on the lives of the saints who have come before you, who have found hope in the face of incredibly trying times, and because of that hope, they were able to faithfully persist in living out the gospel.  I invite you to pray for the hope that is God’s good gift and a part of our inheritance as God’s people.  

       I’ll conclude with a blessing from the writer and theologian Kate Bowler.  (This was shared on her Facebook page a few months ago.). 

Blessing for Uncertainty.

“Blessed are you who live here. The space between simple categories and easy answers. You who wonder why this is your life, why you got this diagnosis, or why you still struggle with infertility, or why you haven't found your birth parents, or why you can't kick this addiction, or why your kids haven't come.

Blessed are you who built a home on uneasy ground, who, despite your trying, your asking, your searches haven't found the satisfying feeling of discovery and blessed are you who never will. This is not an easy place to live outside of certainty, outside of knowing, outside of the truth.

But blessed are you who realize that love and beauty and courage and meaning can still be found here amid the unease and frustration and sleepless nights.

May you be surprised by your capacity for ambiguity, for the way it makes you a great listener and a good friend for you or someone who knows how to feel your way around in the dark and squint for the stars. I wish it were easier, dear one, I wish I could have the answers you seek, but for now, may you find comfort in the fact that you are not alone. Here in the gray, we are all learning to live in the uncertainty of the unknowing.

So blessed are we who live here together.”[i]

 

       

 

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[i] Shared on Kate Bowler’s Facebook page on June 26, 2021  https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1FD8KjPGmy/.