The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 24A-St. Barnabas, Foreman

The Rev. Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg

Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 24A

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Foreman, AR

October 18, 2026

      Good morning!  It is a pleasure to be back with y’all here in Foreman!  I’m Melanie Lemburg, and I serve as the Canon to the Ordinary for the Diocese of Arkansas.  The ordinary is, of course, our bishop, and in my role, I serve as his chief of staff and key advisor and I also work to support the administration and governance of the diocese.  One of my joys in this work is getting to visit congregations all around the diocese and provide support for those congregations and their clergy.  

      The last time I was with y’all, back in the spring, we had a baptism, and I understand y’all are preparing for another baptism and some confirmations, which is really exciting!  So I’ve been thinking about that this week as a part of the conversation with y’all and the readings for today.

      We do a bible study/reflection on the readings when we have diocesan staff meeting, and this week, our bishop spoke about this gospel passage.  He noted that while the religious leaders are seeking to trap Jesus with a question about taxes, Jesus never actually talks about taxes.  Instead, he talks about belonging. And I would add, he also talks about giving.  So let’s look at that briefly this morning and talk a bit about that as well.  

      As we’ve been reading Matthew’s gospel, we see a growing conflict, week after week, between Jesus and the religious leaders.  He has called them out through some of his parables, and he has purged the Jerusalem temple, and they have determined that he cannot be allowed to continue in this vein.  So, they send their disciples and some Herodians, who they normally don’t get along with but who seem to be united with them in their efforts to neutralize Jesus, to try to trap Jesus with a question about paying taxes.  But when they ask Jesus the question, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?”  Jesus does two things.  Instead of talking about paying taxes, he changes the terminology to giving. And he also changes the conversation from what is lawful toward what is necessary, from what is required to the very essence of our belonging.

      Many years ago, in my early and mid-20’s before I went to seminary, I worked in an inner-city non-profit in Jackson, MS.  I learned as much from the people I served with and among there in those three years as I learned in my three years of seminary.  One day, I was having a conversation with one of the participants in the program that I ran, which was a morning enrichment program for senior citizens and adults with mental and psychiatric disabilities who lived in the local area personal care homes.  I was talking to a woman named Cheryl who we all knew was, as we say in Mississippi, “crazy as a Betsy bug.” I noticed that Cheryl was wearing a bright, shiny new butterfly necklace that I hadn’t seen her wear before, and so I complimented her on it and told her how lovely she looked in and how much I loved butterflies.  She looked at me for a moment and cocked her head to the side, and without saying a word, she pulled the chain over her head and offered it to me with a smile.  Well, I was absolutely horrified.  Here was this woman who had limited resources, offering me this thing of beauty in her life, and of course, I couldn’t possibly take it.  So, I resisted, but she kept wordlessly insisting, to the point that we were in a bit of an awkward standoff.  And then in a moment of intervention from the Holy Spirit, I had a realization.  She needed and wanted to be able to give this necklace to me, and I needed to be able to accept it.  So, I did.  And over 25 years later, it lives in a special place in my jewelry box. 

It's a reminder to me that every single one of us has need to be able to receive and also we have a need to be able to give in a way that is meaningful to us.  “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

      In our Rite One liturgy in the prayer book, there is a line that we used to say when we’d bring the offering up to the altar.  I’m wondering if any of you remember it?  It’s a quote from scripture—(1 Chronicles 29:14):  “All things come of thee, O Lord; and of thine own have we given thee.”  It gets to the heart of what Jesus is intimating here—that everything ultimately belongs to God.  We may try to create false divisions of what belongs to God and what belongs to us and what belongs to the government, but in reality—all things begin and end in God:  “All things come of thee, O Lord; and of thine own have we given thee.”  And this belonging extends to us as well.  It is the core truth of our baptism, that we belong to God, and in and through our belonging to God, we also belong to each other.  We acknowledge this at the end of the baptism when the priest makes the sign of the cross on the forehead of the newly baptized with chrism oil, which is oil that is specially reserved for baptisms that has been blessed by the bishop, so it symbolizes and signifies our interconnectedness.  And we say, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.”  It’s a reminder that you belong to Christ, and through Christ we all belong to each other.  (I was given this pottery plaque as an ordination gift many years ago, and through the years, it has hung right beside the door of my office, so I see it when I turn the light on to come in and when I turn if off to leave.  

      So what does all that mean for us here today?  We need to give (and to receive), and we belong to God and to each other.  We live this belonging out in the ways that we take care of each other in the church and as a way that we take care of people outside of the church as well, through our mission and ministries.  We live this belonging to each other out through our interconnectedness as a diocese; it’s why I’m here with you today—because we belong to God and to each other.  At the diocesan level we see it in and through a variety of ministries:  through Camp Mitchell and other youth programming that gathers Episcopal youth from all around the state.  We see this belonging in our small rural church initiative and the recent conference y’all attended.  We see it in the diocesan curacy program of which Aric is a part, and you’ll get to meet his mentor in that next week—the Rev. Chuck Chapman.  We see this belonging when one of us needs help or support and the other can give it and in the commitments that we make to each other.   

         Let us be mindful, then and give thanks for the ways that we all belong to God and so belong to each other and for the ways that we are all called at times to give and at times to receive.  

      

    

The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 23A-St. Michael's Little Rock

The Rev. Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg

The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 23A

St. Michael’s Episcopal Church Little Rock

October 11, 2026

       Good morning!  My name is Melanie Lemburg, and I serve as the Canon to the Ordinary for the Diocese.  I’m delighted to be making my first “official” visit with y’all today (although I have worshipped with y’all previously, sitting in the pew with my friend Caroline).  When I make these official visits, I’m often asked in the “holy handshake” line, what exactly is a Canon to the Ordinary?  Or what do you do?  So I’ve learned it’s good to just get that cleared up early on.  As Canon to the Ordinary, my main job is to support, assist, and advise the ordinary, our bishop, in his work, and I offer him support by overseeing work around ordinations, as well as in cultivating leadership in the diocese and helping administrate the governance of the diocese.

       In addition to my work for the Diocese, I also do a little bit of work for the broader Episcopal Church.  Three times a year, I join a team of three women, and we go to different locations in the Episcopal Church and teach lay and ordained leaders about conflict.  The class is called Managing Yourself During Conflict, and as a part of this class we teach that conflict is inevitable and can even be good, and we try to equip people with different skills for navigating conflict faithfully.  This past week, I was at Camp Allen in Navasota, Texas (about an hour from Houston) teaching one of these weeks.  Part of the work for this course is to invite the participants to share a current church conflict in which they have a part.  Each person shares their conflict with the group early in the week, and at the end of the week, we workshop their conflicts, and they present a plan for how they want to engage with the conflict when they return home, using some of the different tools that we’ve taught over the course of the week.  

       It is such a hard and holy week.  The conflicts are often so messy and deeply painful, and the participants are so brave, stepping out and sharing these vulnerable stories with a room full of mostly strangers.  It blows me away, every time we do it!

       Imagine my surprise, when I looked to the propers for this week to begin my conversation with the scriptures and you all only to find….more conflict!

       First, we have the reading from Philippians.  We see Paul writing from prison this letter of thanks to his favorite church. And in this letter, Paul is encouraging the Philippians to live in unity with each other, to be humble, and to live lives worthy of Christ, following Christ’s example by putting the good of others before themselves.  In our portion for today, we see Paul give a shout-out to two women leaders of the church—Euodia and Syntyche—who are apparently in conflict with one another. Now, we don’t know what the two women are fighting about when Paul writes the letter, but what we can be almost certain about-because conflict follows predictable patterns-is that people have probably started taking sides.  It’s a part of our human nature to self-select into two, binary groups, especially when things start heating up.  So I’d be willing to bet that the two women’s argument, whatever it is, has begun to create division in the wider community of the church at Philippi.  As a part of their reconciliation, Paul urges them all to employ the practices of gentleness, non-anxiousness, thanksgiving, and rejoicing.  

       Then we have today’s gospel passage.  Can I just say…this parable is awful!  I mean, what are we supposed to do with this?!  

I’ve read more scholars than usual this week, trying to make sense of this parable, and here’s the thing I think we need to remember.  The context of this parable in Matthew’s gospel is especially important in our engagement with it.  Matthew’s community to which he is writing is a primarily Jewish community, and scholars believe that Matthew’s gospel is written shortly after the complete destruction by the Romans of the Jerusalem temple, the beating heart of Jewish worship.  So, there is profound grief along with a deep tension in Matthew’s community of believers.  And we are at the point in Matthew’s gospel where the conflict between Jesus and the Jewish leaders is reaching a crescendo.  In last week’s reading, Jesus has just ridden triumphantly into Jerusalem (the story we hear every year for Palm Sunday); he’s cleared out the money changers and the sellers in the temple, overturing tables and driving them out, and then he starts teaching in the temple via parables.  First is last week’s parable about the tenants of the vineyard who kill the vineyard owner’s servants and eventually the son. And last week’s reading concludes by telling us that when the chief priests and Pharisees hear Jesus’s teaching, they determine to try to arrest him.  

       Then we have today’s parable about the horrible wedding banquet.  Our reading today tells us that today’s parable is a direct response from Matthew’s Jesus to the chief priests and Pharisees who are determining how to get rid of him.  

       So what we are seeing today is what another preacher has termed “a low point in an intense family feud.”  Here’s what that preacher writes about it: “I want to emphasize the word ‘family’ here because Matthew and his community are caught up in a struggle with their Israelite kin about how to be faithful to the God of Abraham and Sarah and, in particular, whether Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah Israel’s prophets had promised. This is not a Jewish-Christian dispute – though in the centuries that follow Christians will use this passage to further their anti-Semitism (which is one of the things that makes this passage dangerous) – but rather represents the pain of a community sundered from its family and trying to justify itself.”

       He writes about how this parable is also found in both Luke and the Gospel of Thomas, but this version in Matthew is dramatically different from those two other versions.  He continues, “On the whole, Matthew’s version is darker, more violent, and pushes even the typical parable’s tolerance for absurdity to the edge. Why? Because at this point in the family conflict, [Matthew] is willing to say that God not only rejects those cousins and kin of his that rejected Jesus but actually sent the Romans to destroy the Temple as punishment (a conclusion not uncommon to Matthew, but intensified in this parable). This is painful stuff… and we’d best not ignore it. Why? Because this parable has been used across the centuries – and still by some Christians today – to drive a wedge between Jews and Christians and even to justify Christian mistreatment of Jews.”[i]

       Both of these passages for this Sunday got me to thinking about what it might look like if some of our current conflicts were to be written down in parable form or memorialized for all time in a letter from Paul? Surely, we’ve become advanced enough in our Christian practice that we wouldn’t become embroiled in these sorts of family feuds?!  Right? 

       So there I was at Camp Allen and feeling pretty good about the progress our students were making in their conflicts over the course of the week, when it happened.  On Thursday, Camp Allen also became the site for an evangelical, non-denominational church somewhere nearby in Texas to host their annual Men’s retreat.  The brought over 200 men with at least 200 pickup trucks and two large trailers of sound equipment for their praise band, and they set up in the room right next door to us.  We were, thankfully, able to shift in our location due to the overwhelming sound from the drums and bass, but what we hadn’t been able to prepare for was the intensity of mealtimes.  There were 16 of us, and even though we had designated tables, we were completely surrounded by all these men.  (Now don’t get me wrong.  I like men.  I have a great dad, who lives one a farm and drives a pick-up truck, two younger brothers, a husband, who was actually born in Texas, and a son.  We all get along pretty well, mostly because they pretty much all do what I tell them to do!  I grew up in Mississippi and have served the church in Mississippi, Georgia, and Arkansas.  I am not generally uncomfortable interacting with Southern men). 

But 200+ men is a lot of men.  And while our group contained people of color and LGBTQ folks, these 200+ mostly white men were quite proud of their particular version of patriotism and Christianity, proclaiming it through a variety of t-shirts and baseball caps.  A number of t-shirts had pictures of guns, and not just guns, but assault rifles.  They were loud and intense, and they had so much facial hair.  At breakfast on the last day, when we sought refuge in a side dining hall (because they had fully taken over our reserved tables), several were in there sitting at separate tables by themselves and pouring over open bibles.  And we who had spent the week talking about how curiosity and humility were the tools to help unlock conflict, hunkered down in our group and we judged them.  We said things like, “Can you believe they don’t take their baseball caps off at the dinner table?!”  “Look at that cap:  it says, “Jesus and John Wayne!”  Or “check out the guy with the t-shirt with the red, white and blue AK-47!”  We judged their choice of clothing and their loudness, their worship music and even the fact that they were gathering for a men’s only retreat.  

       When I got home and was safely removed from all that testosterone, it occurred to me that this is the family feud of modern Christianity—evangelical Protestantism that creates space for the expression of Christian nationalism, and the rest of us.  And it helped me understand and empathize with Matthew’s community and this parable just a little bit better.  Because not once did I think it would be a good idea to talk to one of those men to try to find common ground, to try to be curious instead of judgmental.  There most likely wasn’t any threat to me, a middle-aged white woman, but I was profoundly afraid for and protective of our group members who were people of color or LGBTQ+.  And so I chose not to engage.  And maybe that was a missed opportunity? I’ll never know if just a little bit of courage and curiosity on my part might have brought just a little bit more understanding in this family feud we contemporary Christians find ourselves in the midst of.  

       So where does that leave all of us this week?  I wish I could tie this all up neatly for us, but the best I can do is to invite you to join me in the wrestling with what it means to be faithful to God in this unique moment.  In thinking about Paul’s letter, I can’t help but wonder how rejoicing might be an antidote to fear and the divisions or conflict caused by fear? What might that look like for me to try to practice that in the face of the current family feud of contemporary Christianity and especially as we approach the next election?   Where are the places in our lives or in our world where we are being called to employ the practices of gentleness, non-anxiousness, thanksgiving, and rejoicing?

       

       

       

 

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[i] From David Lose’s blog In the Meantime.  https://www.davidlose.net/2014/10/pentecost-18-a-preaching-an-ugly-parable/

  

The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 21A_St. Luke's North Little Rock

 The Rev. Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg

The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 21A

St. Luke’s North Little Rock

September 27, 2026

 

       Good morning!  I’m Melanie Lemburg, and I serve as the Canon to the Ordinary for the Diocese of Arkansas.  I’m delighted to be making my first visit here with y’all!  When I reached out to Carey a couple of months ago about coming, I could tell he put a lot of time and thought into when he wanted me to come.  He asked for my dates in September and October and when we narrowed down my availability, he asked for either today or October 25^th.  It was only a couple of weeks ago that I learned that these dates just happen to coincide with key dates for your Fall Annual Commitment Campaign that just so happens to kick off today.  So…. well, played, Sir!  

       But I actually do love preaching about stewardship! I’ve seen vestries and congregations transformed when we fully embrace a more robust understanding of stewardship (beyond the annual fall commitment campaign), and I’ve seen many miracles of God performed by the modern church sheerly through an understanding of generosity and abundance!

       So, let’s talk about stewardship.  In the early years of my priesthood, I learned this definition of stewardship:  “Stewardship is all that I do with all that I have after I say, ‘I believe.’”  (repeat that).  Or, if we’re talking about stewardship for a whole church or congregation or even a diocese we could say, “Stewardship is all that we do with all that we have after we say, ‘we believe.’”  I love this definition because it helps us remember that all that we have is already entrusted to our care and keeping and stewardship by God, and this act of stewardship is a key aspect of how we live out our discipleship faithfully, both as individuals and as communities.  

       When I was in seminary at General Seminary in the early 2000’s we were fortunate to have the late Terry Parsons, who was the Stewardship Officer for the Episcopal Church at the time, join us for a class.  Terry was a lay woman from Kentucky who had been raised Southern Baptist, and she had a wonderful sense of humor.  Those two things made her absolutely fearless in talking about the biblical tithe in ways I had never seen in my life spent in the Episcopal Church.  I can remember sitting in that class and hearing Terry say to us when asked about the Old Testament scriptures that instructed God’s people to give 10% back to God (what is known as the tithe).  She told us, “People ask me all the time why they should tithe, or give 10% of their income back to God through the church.  I always tell them, ‘Well, the Old Testament tells us to give 10% to God; and Jesus tells us to give up everything, so I don’t know about y’all, but I’ll take the 10%.”[i]  

                  In her work around the Church as stewardship officer,  Terry often spoke about steps around faithful stewardship.  Some of these included praying to God about what God is inviting or encouraging us to give; engaging the gospels to see what Jesus calls us to do; rebuking scarcity, and claiming and practicing abundance.[ii]

       It’s the rebuking scarcity and claiming or practicing abundance that I really want to focus on today.  Because it’s really easy to say that we as both individuals and a church want to rebuke scarcity and claim abundance, and we all know how difficult that can be as a spiritual practice and a way of life.  So, let’s look at this rebuking of scarcity and claiming abundance in light of the Old Testament reading for today.

       Today we find ourselves at the beginning of Chapter 17 in Exodus.  But let’s do a quick recap of the story of God’s people that we’ve heard over the last few weeks.  Exodus starts with God’s people living enslaved in Egypt, and God raises Moses up as a leader to help lead God’s people to freedom in the promised land. God sends a series of plagues on Egypt to convince Pharoah that he is better off letting God’s people go, and even though Pharoah lets them go, he changes his mind, and begins to pursue them with his entire army.  Moses and the people flee the might of the Egyptian army until they reach the impassable Red Sea.  God tells Moses to use his staff and God will, through Moses, part the water of the Red Sea, so the people can walk through the water on dry land.  When the Egyptian army pursues them, Moses and God release the waters, and the army is washed away, no longer able to pursue and threaten God’s people.  The people sing and rejoice at how God has saved them and freed them, and then, two and a half months after the parting of the Red Sea, they enter the wilderness.  (That’s where last week’s reading picked up.). Almost immediately upon entering the wilderness, the people start to complain against God and Moses:  where are we going to get water to drink?  Where are we going to get food to eat?  Remember how awesome it was in Egypt when we could eat our fill of bread?!  And meat!  Remember the meat!!!  Oh, that you would have just killed us there in Egypt rather than bringing us out here into the wilderness to starve with our children and our livestock!!  Leading up to today’s reading, we’ve already seen two miracles by God (through Moses) that have helped save the people and offer them God’s providence in the wilderness (the sweeting of the bitter water at Marah and the gift of manna in the wilderness- from last week).  

       And then we have today.  As God’s people move further into the wilderness, they are not able to find water sources, and they are understandably panicked.   Moses asks God for help, and God tells Moses to take the staff which he used at the Red Sea and at the Nile and to go before the people to strike the rock from whence God would make water flow.  And scripture tells us that Moses names the place Massah (from the Hebrew verb “test”) and Meribah (from the verb “find fault”).  

       I can’t help but wonder what it would have looked like if God’s people had rebuked scarcity in this moment?  Over and over again, the people have witnessed God’s miraculous, saving work in their lives and in the life of their community, but it is as if they have amnesia.  They do not remember how God has saved them and how God continues to save them.  Over and over, throughout scriptures, we hear this call to “remember.”  So perhaps a rebuking of scarcity and an claiming and practicing abundance could have started for them with this remembering. 

       But so often fear is an impediment to our remembering.  We know this, don’t we?  When we think about our own individual lives and the lives of our congregations, it is so easy to have this sort of amnesia that is caused by fear.  We see the numbers on the gas pump go higher and higher.  We see the costs on the grocery receipt jumping exponentially for fewer and fewer items.  We see the deficit between what people give and the cost of the ministries of the church growing wider.  It would be so easy for us to be like God’s people in the wilderness and to let our fear and a sense of scarcity take over.  We forget how God has provided for us over and over again and how God continues to provide for us.  Because, thankfully, we serve and follow a God of abundance, a God who easily makes the water to flow for God’s people in a place where this is not water.  God does not hesitate to give God’s people what they need, even when they are doubtful, fractious, complaining, and fearful. 

       And while it is right for us to trust in God’s abundance and God’s generosity, we are called, invited to do our part as well.  We have all already been given tremendous and abundant gifts by God, and we have been invited and encouraged to share those.  Embracing and practicing abundance while rebuking scarcity means that we are called to an honest, and prayerful inventory of our lives and our gifts—as individuals and as a congregation.  

       Years ago, I preached on stewardship in my congregation and asked people to focus on Jesus’s teaching, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”  For this practice, I encouraged everyone to look intentionally and prayerfully  at how they spend their money and what that says about where their hearts might be inclined.  One of my parishioners came up to me the next week and told me he was absolutely dismayed to discover that he paid more in his two country club/golf club memberships in a given month than he gave to the church, and that he was committed to changing that immediately.  He cancelled one of his memberships, and he added that money to his pledge to the church for the coming year.  It’s a wonderful example of how an individual chooses to rebuke scarcity and claim or practice abundance in their spending and giving practices.  

       So here are some questions for you to think about, as individuals and as a congregation, as you engage in this intentional fall practice here at St. Luke’s of rebuking scarcity and practicing abundance in your fall commitment campaign:  Plenty of Room at God’s table.  

       If stewardship is all that I do with all that I have, after I say I believe, then how am I being invited by God to rebuke scarcity and embrace abundance in my own life?  How are you being called to do that as a congregation here in this season?  What percentage of your income are you really offering to God through God’s church and where do your spending habits indicate where your heart truly lies?  How might you move closer to the spirit of the Biblical standard of 10% in giving, keeping in mind that it doesn’t have to happen all at once in one year, but it certainly could.  

       And what does it look like for you all to work together to rebuke scarcity and to claim or practice abundance here at St. Luke’s in the coming season?   

                  

 

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[i] This story was originally shared in my sermon at St. Peter’s by-the-Sea in Gulfport, MS  for the 15^th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 18C, September 5, 2010

[ii] https://www.vancouver.anglican.ca/news/kentucky-woman-shines-with-her-own-kind-of-light

 

The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 20A_Grace Siloam Springs

 The Rev. Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg

Grace Episcopal Church, Siloam Springs, AR

The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 20A

September 20, 2026

       Good morning!  My name is Melanie Lemburg and I serve as the Canon to the Ordinary for the Diocese.  I’m happy to be making my first visit here with y’all and am grateful that Stan asked me to provide supply coverage for y’all this morning while he’s in Iona.  We’ve had to make a bit of a change in our plans this morning, due to the water issues, so I won’t be able to give you a full overview of the transition process, but I will talk a little about that in the announcements during the service.   

“God gives us what God knows that we need, in God’s time.”  I was in my early 20’s when I first heard these words, working at Stewpot, an inner-city soup kitchen and non-profit in downtown Jackson, Mississippi.  I was just out of college; it was my first job, and I also happened to be discerning a call to priestly ministry.  Stewpot was on the frontlines there in inner-city Jackson and had been for many years.  We were the recipients of abundance and generosity, and we also stood alongside people daily trying to help keep them afloat and help them get the most basic of things needed to survive:  food, clothes, medication, blankets.  

“God gives us what God knows that we need, in God’s time.”  

On a weekly basis, we saw the truth of this revelation in ways that never ceased to surprise us.  

One of the ways this bore fruit was in our food pantry.  It was not uncommon that our shelves would be almost bear, and someone would show up with an 18-wheeler of donated food that we had no idea was coming.  Every year, we’d give away food parcels at Thanksgiving and Christmas.  We’d have people sign up ahead of time, so we knew how much food we needed, and every year, our food pantry coordinator, Nancy Dennis, would be wringing her hands for weeks, fretting that we didn’t have enough turkeys.  And every year, the turkeys would come, right when we needed them.  We started referring to it as “Nancy’s turkey dance.”  

“God gives us what God knows that we need, in God’s time.”  

Over twenty-five years have passed since my time at Stewpot, and yet it was that refrain that echoed for me in my life this week while being in conversation with two of our readings for the day.  First, the gospel.  It’s a challenging parable, especially coming on the heels of Jesus’s teachings from the last few weeks of our lectionary-- teachings around power dynamics, right relationships in the church, and how many times we are called to forgive.  This week, we see this story from Jesus comparing the Kingdom of Heaven to a landowner who goes out throughout the day to hire workers for his vineyard.  He hires as many workers as he can find throughout the day and in the end, he pays them all the same thing, with the ones who start at the end of the day getting the same payment as the ones who work the full day. We are invited to take up the juxtaposition of envy and generosity, and at least for me, it is all too easy to find myself relating in this parable to the all-day workers in the vineyard as opposed to the ones who come late to the work and still receive an all-day’s wage. 

But what if….we look at this parable through the lens of God’s faithfulness and providence, we look at our lives through the lens of God’s faithfulness and providence, how might that shift our relationship with God, with others, with the world around us?  

Another writer puts it this way: “This parable is essentially about the generosity of God.  It is not about equity or proper disbursement of wages but about a gracious and undeserved gift.  It is not about an economic exchange but, rather, about a bestowing of grace and mercy to all, no matter what time they have put in our how deserving or undeserving we may think them to be.  God’s generosity often violates our own sense of right and wrong, our sense of how things would be if we ran the world.  [She continues,] Are we unable to celebrate another’s good fortune because we have not celebrated our own?  How often am I ungrateful for God’s graciousness and mercy?  How often do I deny God’s love and forgiveness in my own life?”[i]

“God gives us what God knows that we need, in God’s time.”  

And if this week’s parable wasn’t enough, we also have the reading from Exodus where God gives God’s people the gift of manna in the wilderness at the very beginning of their wilderness journey.  “Where are we going to get food?”  the people fret, understandably.  And God says, ok, how about this?  “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day [you] shall go out and gather enough for that day.”  Let’s take a minute and think about this.  For fifteen chapters of the book of Exodus, God has worked to free God’s people from slavery in Egypt.  The first line of chapter 16 (which we didn’t get as a part of the reading today) tells us that the people are entering the wilderness “one the fifteenth day of the second month after they had departed from the land of Egypt.”  Two and a half months since God parted the Red Sea for God’s people to walk through on dry land and then swept Pharoh’s army away so that they could be free!  And already the challenges of the wilderness are taking their toll.

In his Commentary on the Five Books of Moses (Part II In the Wilderness) translator Everett Fox writes this about the section of Exodus for today’s passage: “The portrait of a people…undergoing transformation in a place outside of normal geographic/cultural boundaries is a well-known phenomenon in traditional stories.  Anthropologist Victor Turner speaks of the “liminal” experience, where the protagonist…is separated spiritually and geographically from his origins in order to be changed into something new…This is paralleled by the process of pilgrimage in the world of ritual, as can still be observed among many community of the world to this day.  The desert is the site of liminality par excellence:  it is a harsh place that contains none of the succoring elements of human civilization, yet at the same time it leads the wandered into truer communication with nature and the divine…It is a place of betwixt and between, which mirrors the experience’s psychological state.  In the case of Israel, later biblical sources speak of the wilderness period with striking force, either as an example of the people’s long-standing and deeply ingrained rebelliousness…or fondly, as a kind of honeymoon period between God and Israel.  In both cases what is evoked is only a stage on the way, and not the final goal.”[ii]

It's interesting because this moment in time, this gift of manna—God giving Israel what they need in the wilderness—becomes a touch point that future generations carry forward as a key part of their story, and a reminder of what lies at the foundation of their relationship with God. 

“God gives us what God knows that we need, in God’s time.”  

You find yourselves at an interesting point, here in your life together at Grace.  You are in a place of remarkable health and vitality, and you have flourished here together with gifted lay leadership and staff, alongside the steady, brilliant presence of your rector.  And, you can see the liminal season coming not too far down the road with Stan’s retirement at the end of this year.  I wonder what key understandings of your unique identity here coupled with the unique way you all live out God’s call to you as a community will be the touchpoints for you in your coming liminal season?  Or what are the key things about you and your relationship with God as it is lived in this place that can be the touchpoints for you as you prepare to enter the wilderness?  How has God already provided you with all that you need in God’s time, and how are you being called to be open to receive that generous gift from God in new ways? 

       “God gives us what God knows that we need, in God’s time.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Saying Goodbye—the beginning of the wilderness (for the announcements)

“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”[iii]

-Annie Dillard (writer who died this week at age 81)

  

       

 

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[i] Celghorn, Charlotte Dudley.  Pastoral Perspective in Feasting on the Word Year A Vol. 4 Ed. David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor. WJK: 2011, p 96. 

[ii] Fox, Everett.  The Five Books of Moses…A New Translation with Introductions, Commentary, and Notes.  Shocken Books, New York, 1995, pp341-342

[iii] Annie Dillard quote shared by The Englewood Book Review on Facebook on September 17, 2026

The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 18A-All Saints' Bentonville

 The Rev. Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg

The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 18A

All Saints’ Bentonville, AR

September 6, 2026

       Good morning!  My name is Melanie Lemburg and I serve as the Canon to the Ordinary for the Diocese of Arkansas.  I’m glad to be with you today for my first official visit on your first Sunday after Brandon’s leave-taking.  

       Part of the work that I’ve been doing for the diocese over the last year is accompanying congregations who are in the midst of clergy transitions, and I am finding that these seasons of transition bring both expected and unexpected challenges and also some expected and unexpected joys.  

       I’ve been in the midst of my own personal transition lately.  In the last month, my husband and I sold our home in Savannah, moved our oldest child into an apartment in Long Island, moved our youngest child to college at the University of Georgia for freshman year, bought a home in Little Rock and moved there with our two dogs and otherwise empty nest.

       People keep asking me, “Are you moved in?” or “Are you feeling settled?” and usually I offer some humorous, benign response like “Well, all of our stuff is technically inside the house!”  But I will confess to you the truth.  The answer is that we are nowhere near to being settled.

       There’s so much of our stuff that is still in boxes, so much of our stuff that doesn’t really have a place in our new house.  There’s so much of our stuff we still haven’t even found yet.  And there are things we are realizing that we need to discard for this new home, this new life.

       There’s a wonderful expansiveness that comes with this empty nest—a spaciousness in our marriage that we haven’t had in 22 years (which just happens to be the age of our oldest child!).  And there’s also some grief for me—about moving away from the home we lived in the longest and in leaving behind the season when we all mostly lived under one roof. 

       Our gospel reading for today hints at some of this—the challenge and gift of transitions.  But first, before I get into that, I would be remiss not to mention something about today’s gospel passage.  I teach a class for the Presiding Bishop’s office around the Episcopal Church.  It’s a class for clergy and lay leaders about conflict—how to navigate it better, how to avoid its pitfalls and dangers, how to put healthy practices in place that can make our communities more well and whole-hearted and vital.  This gospel reading from Matthew 18 is the chief cornerstone of that class.  Jesus gives his disciples and us a very clear roadmap about how to navigate interpersonal conflicts in the church faithfully.  (If you want to learn more about this, read John Paul Lederach’s book that’s titled:  Reconcile:  Conflict Transformation for Ordinary Christians.  He’s got a whole chapter on this passage from Matthew 18 including how this passage is often misinterpreted and misapplied.) 

       But here’s what’s been most captivating for me about this gospel passage this week, that I believe will speak to you also in your current season here. After Jesus gives explicit instructions on how to reconcile differences, (in this chapter of Matthew that begins with the disciples arguing over who is the greatest), Jesus says to them:  “Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” It’s interesting to me that he introduces here these notions of binding and loosing in the midst of a teaching around how to navigate conflict better.  

       Because really, if we think about it.  That’s what periods of transition are all about.  It is a restructuring of our binding and our loosing.  

       In this most recent move, it has been reemphasized to me that there are usually two different values represented in most couples.  There is the one that clings tightly to stuff (the one who binds) and there is the one who is eager to get rid of stuff (the “looser”), and that is representative of how many of us deal with transitions, as well.  We fall in one camp or the other.  Think about it for a minute.  Would you consider yourself to be a “binder” or a “looser”?  

And this doesn’t just have to be about “stuff”?  There are some of us, the binders, who hold onto things tightly—it is both our gift and our challenge.  We need the binders, who help keep us grounded in our identity and our purpose and our values.  And the challenge of our binders is that they can keep us stuck in the past—longing for the way things used to be.  

Then there are the loosers.  We are the ones who can let go of things fairly easily, who can move on to the promise of new and better things, and the challenge of the loosers is that we can get blown about by every fad and fancy, or sometimes, when the going gets really tough, we can too easily say, “Yeah… I’m outta here!” 

       It’s interesting to me today that Jesus is saying that there will be both binding and loosing in heaven.  There is space and need for both.  And we need each other to hold both of these in tension.

       This week, one of my friends from Savannah sent me an email to read.  (That’s our love language.  We give each other things to read!). It’s a Substack post by the Episcopal Bishop of Washington DC, Marianne Budde that is titled:  A Time to Be Brave.  In it, Budde writes about how the beginning of September reminds her of young children headed back to school, and even though it has been years since her children were school-aged, she can still reflect on all the feelings of the season:  “feelings of loss and relief, pride and worry, particularly when they were beginning at a new school, or crossing a threshold that at the time felt larger than life itself.”  She writes about how children are “the bravest among us” writing, “Time and again, they are thrust into new situations and must attempt to do things they’ve never done before, be taught by people they’ve just met, and take their place in a classroom, gym, or cafeteria where they don’t know if the students sitting next to them will be kind.”

       She continues, “Parents must also be brave, for they inhabit that in-between space after they kiss or fist bump their children goodbye and then watch them walk away. In a poem that captures this experience beautifully, Cecil Day-Lewis writes of the day his son played his first game of football.

¹I can see you walking away from me towards the school

With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free

Into a wilderness, the gait of one

Who finds no path where the path should be.

I have had worse partings, but none that so

Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly

Saying what God alone could perfectly show --

How selfhood begins with a walking away,

And love is proved in the letting go.

       She concludes, “Even without children at home, I still feel the poignancy and potential of this season. The need to be brave shows up for us in all sorts of ways.

I’ve been thinking about the courage it takes to hold contradictory realities at the same time: to love someone and let them go; to be grateful for new beginnings and sad for what must end; to acknowledge that some things in life are both good and hard. We might wake up to a morning full of possibilities while someone else is facing the hardest day of their lives, or vice versa. We can be right about one thing and dreadfully wrong about another.”[i]

       It’s binding and loosing, isn’t it?  Sometimes we are called to hold onto things; and sometimes we are called to let go.  And in different ways, both require a deep courage and a stepping out in faith.  

     In this new season, may you be brave.  May you be kind and gentle with yourselves and each other.  May you work together to loose what needs to be loosed and to bind what needs to be bound.  And may you trust the Holy Spirit who is at work in, among, and through you.  Amen. 

 

        

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[i] https://mariannbudde.substack.com/p/a-time-to-be-brave

 

The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 17A-Grace, Pine Bluff

 The Rev. Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg

The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 17A

Grace Church, Pine Bluff, AR

August 30, 2026

       Good morning!  I’m Melanie Lemburg, and I’m glad to be making my first visit here with you as Canon to the Ordinary for the Diocese of Arkansas.  As Canon to the Ordinary, my main job is to support and assist the bishop in his work, and I offer him support in work around ordinations, as well as in cultivating leadership in the diocese and helping administrate the governance of the diocese.  I also help in clergy transitions and helping vacant parishes find clergy support in a variety of ways.  

       I’ve officially become an Arkansan in the last month or so, as my husband David and I bought a house in Little Rock.  And we also have had another significant life transition.  In the last few weeks, we helped move our oldest daughter to an apartment on Long Island for grad school, and we helped move our youngest son to college at University of Georgia.  So, just in the last few weeks, we have entered that new and uncharted realm of empty-nesting!  

       I’ve realized these last few weeks, that this new life of being an empty-nester is deeply connected to and entangled with my identity and my calling or vocation as a wife and a mother, so it has raised questions for me like—“what does it look like for me to faithfully parent young adult children in this new season?” and “how is our marriage moving into a different season or changing shape, now that we have ample space to focus on only the two of us in our day to day functioning?” 

       It is not uncommon for questions of identity to be all bound up in questions of vocation—both in our everyday lives and in the spiritual life.  I’ve been reminded this week of writer Frederick Buechner’s famous quote about vocation when he writes on vocation: “It comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a [person] is called to by God.  

There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Super-ego, or Self-Interest.” 

He continues, “By and large a good rule for finding out is this. The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you've missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you're bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren't helping your patients much either.” 

He concludes, “Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.”[i]

        The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.  

       In our gospel reading for today, which is an immediate continuation of the story from last week, we see Jesus and Peter wrestling with questions of Jesus’s identity and vocation.  Last week, Jesus asks his disciples “who do people say that I am?”  and they answer: “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”

       Then he asks them, “who do you say that I am?”  And Peter answers: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

       Jesus affirms Peter’s response and gives Peter a new identity, a new calling—naming him petrus or the rock upon which Jesus will build his church.  But then we see today, things take a pretty quick turn.  Jesus is speaking about the suffering which he must undergo as a part of his vocation, and Peter takes him aside to try to talk him out of it.  Jesus then publicly rebukes Peter, calling him now Satan and saying, “You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

       There are two things that are happening here that I think are pertinent to us.  The first has to do with suffering.  Peter, understandably, doesn’t want to see his friend Jesus suffer or die.  And Jesus is inviting Peter and the other disciples into a different understanding of suffering.  He is inviting them to understand that there are certain ways of suffering that can lead to new life and resurrection.  Now, this is a hard pill for us to swallow.  It’s been helpful to me to think about this in terms of a question someone else posed this week: “What is the difference in your life between suffering that leads to new life and resurrection and suffering that destroys life?”  (repeat the question)

       The other thing that is happening here is that Jesus is clearly articulating his vocation, who God is calling him to be.  The disciples, who are given voice by Peter, are wrestling with this vocation of Jesus toward suffering, death, and new life, but I suspect they are also wrestling with the implications for their own identity and vocation as followers and friends of Jesus.  Let’s face it; none of us signs up to be on the losing team!

       So, what does all of that have to do with us today?  Earlier this week, I read the daily meditation from Franciscan priest Richard Rohr.  It was shared this past Wednesday, and it has been in conversation with me around these ideas of identity and vocation this latter part of the week.  

Rohr writes, “ The author Sue Monk Kidd reflects on her midlife discovery of the concept of the true self:  Over and over again God calls you and me … to the cultivation of what Meister Eckhart called the “true seed” within us. God calls us to tend what lies seeded in the soul, this kernel of our truest nature—the God-image or True Self….

He continues, “Throughout our lives we create patterns of living that obscure this identity. We heap on the darkness, constructing a variety of false selves. We become adept at playing games, wearing masks as if life were a masquerade party. This can go on for a long while. But eventually the music of the True Self seeks us out. Sooner or later (often in midlife), we’re summoned back to the garden. We’re called to soul-work….”

He writes about how “Monk Kidd compares soul work to the art of whittling:  The art of soulmaking is taking our lives in our hands and—with all the love and discernment we can muster—gently whittling away the parts that don’t resemble the True Self. In spiritual whittling, though, we don’t discard the shavings. Transformation happens not by rejecting these parts of ourselves but by gathering them up and integrating them. Through this process we reach a new wholeness.

He concludes, “Spiritual whittling is an encounter with Mystery, waiting, the silence of inner places—all those things most folks no longer have time for. I’ll be honest. As I began my own spiritual whittling, I often clung to my “block of wood” resistantly. After all, wasn’t I fine just as I was?…But there were also days when I felt drawn to try, when I yearned to discover how I was living falsely….”[ii]

I love this idea of spiritual whittling as part of the work around what it means to understand our vocation and identity as followers of Jesus.  What are the parts of the shavings of my life, my identity, my vocation, that I would prefer to discard but that really need to be reintegrated back in so that I can be more fully the person God is calling me to be?  And where does suffering fit into all this?  How does suffering become life-giving and producing new life and resurrection versus being destructive?  

I wonder if these questions resonate with you as well—as individuals and as a congregation?  How is God calling you—as individuals and as Grace Episcopal Church in Pine Bluff?  Where is the place where the world’s deep hunger and your deep gladness meet?  What might be the spiritual shavings that you’d prefer to discard but that need to be integrated back in?  

       

 

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[i] https://www.frederickbuechner.com/quote-of-the-day/2021/7/18/vocation

[ii] https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-true-seed-within/