The Rev Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg
All Saints’ Russellville
The 23rd 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]
[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.
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