The Third Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 6A-St. Mary's El Dorado

 The Rev. Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg

The Third Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 6A

St. Mary’s El Dorado

June 14, 2026

 

       Good morning!  It is a delight to be with y’all on this third Sunday after Pentecost!  I’ve spent a good amount time with your wardens and your vestry, and let me tell you, y’all have got some excellent wardens--they are dedicated and hard-working and they love y’all and this congregation so much!  And y’all have got some really smart, faithful, and committed vestry people.  I have really appreciated working with all of them! You all are in steady hands.   

This past week, I loaded up my car and left my home and my family in Savannah to return to Little Rock, and as I pulled out of my driveway, I realized I didn’t know when I would be back or when I would see my family again.  Now let me be clear.  This sounds much more dramatic than it actually is. You see, we are in the process of trying to buy a house in Little Rock and sell the house in Savannah, and we may be about to get an offer on the Savannah house and we’re waiting to hear more on our offer in Little Rock.  So we do have a plan a and a plan b and a plan c of when we’ll next be together as a family, but it’s all still very fluid right now.

As a result, this week has felt coated in a residue of uncertainty for me. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t really appreciate uncertainty.  Oh, I try. Because I know that uncertainty is a part of life and being able to hold uncertainty is a key part of our spiritual development.  But I don’t like it.  

So this week, my spiritual practice has been to try to pay attention to the ways that I resist uncertainty.  I wonder how you feel about this?  Are you generally comfortable with uncertainty or do you have predictable ways that you try to manage or deal with uncertainty in your life?  Do you freeze in the face of uncertainty or withdraw?  Are you of the “don’t just stand there, do something!” in the face of uncertainty school?  This would look like getting busier and busier, both with things that matter and things that don’t.  Do you try to ignore the uncertainty and pretend everything is normal?  How do you normally engage with uncertainty in your life?  You’ve probably already guessed this about me, but I like to create multiple plans and then attempt to grab the uncertain area by the throat and wrestle it into one of my plans.  (Spoiler alert:  this often does not work well for me.) 

So this week, I’ve been trying to have my plans formulated but to also create space for the uncertainty in my life to dwell alongside me.  And it’s uncomfortable, which tells me that this is probably an area I need to continue to grow in.

The gospel reading and the Old Testament readings have been helpful companions for me this week in my discomfort with uncertainty.  In the story from Exodus, we see the Children of Israel are three months into their wandering in the wilderness.  They are just three months out from their miraculous escape from Egypt and Pharoah’s army, when they walked on the dry land between the parted waters of the Red Sea where God, through Moses, led them to safety.  They have tried to drink bitter water, which God (through Moses) has made sweet for them; they have been hungry and been taught how to gather the manna that God provides for them to eat.  They’ve even been attacked by the Amalekites and saved (again by God and Moses).  But the wandering and the uncertainty is starting to wear on them, and they are feeling the full impact of that way of life.  So God gives the people through Moses a word of encouragement in the form of a covenant:  “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.”  

In these words, God is promising the people that just as God has taken care of them and has not let anything happen to them, God will continue to offer them God’s presence and God’s protection.  They are and continue to be treasured by God.  And because of this special relationship, the people have a responsibility to God also.  They are called by God to obedience to God and to keeping the covenant.   And in this call, this invitation, God is giving God’s people the tools to navigate the next 39 years and 9 months of wandering in the wilderness of uncertainty:  Trust God.  Obey God.  Be faithful to God. 

The gospel reading for today from Matthew shows how Jesus sends the disciples out to proclaim that the Kingdom of Heaven has come near.  This sending out is a result of Jesus’ compassion; he sees that the people are “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd,” so he sends out his disciples as missionaries of good news, telling them to “go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.”  And then, Jesus gives the disciples further instruction on how to do this, and it is a master class in uncertainty, in vulnerability.  He tells them:  

“Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff... Whatever town or village you enter, find out who in it is worthy, and stay there until you leave… If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town.” 

He tells them, you’re going to be handed over to the authorities, and when you are, prepare no defense, “for what you are to say will be given to you at that time; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.”

Jesus is sending his disciples out with a call to wander in order to proclaim the good news.  He sends them out without a clear destination (that’s the definition of wandering) and his instructions make it clear that the call to wandering, the call to discipleship, involves a great deal of both vulnerability and uncertainty.  In fact, the call to wandering is, at its heart, a call to uncertainty. 

And again, he offers them the assurance that in the midst of their wandering and their uncertainty, they don’t have to worry because the Holy Spirit is with them, working in and through and around them.  The other key piece to Jesus’s call to the disciples to wander off into vulnerability and uncertainty is that there is a purpose to this uncertainty.  It is to spread the good news of the Kingdom of God and to offer healing and reconciliation in Jesus’s name to those who need it most as inspired by the Holy Spirit.  

So what does this mean for us?  That the call to discipleship, the call to following Jesus is a call to both vulnerability and uncertainty?  Just as I find myself in a season of uncertainty in my life, you at St. Mary’s may also be wandering around a bit in the wilderness of “what’s next?”.  Maybe this season is an important reminder for all of us that we cannot plan or control how or when the Holy Spirit shows up?  (And thank goodness for that because it is often so different/greater/better than our best laid plans!). 

God’s invitation to wander, to uncertainty is God’s invitation to us to trust God, to give our lives over to an unreasonable, unplannable and unplanned hope.  And then to see what sort of space opens up in our lives (of faith) when we live into God’s call to wander, to be uncertain, to be vulnerable, to be faithful, and to trust God—all for the sake of God’s purpose which is the spreading of the good news.  

Your invitation this week is to pay attention to how you encounter uncertainty in your life or in this church?  Pay attention to what is your general disposition toward uncertainty?  How is God calling you to wander, to step into uncertainty for the sake of the good news?  

I can’t wait to see how God’s Holy Spirit shows up and surprises us in our work here together!  May God give us all the power to trust God, to obey God, and to be faithful to God in this coming season.  

The First Sunday in Lent-St. Alban's Stuttgart & St. Peter's Tollville

The Rev Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg

St. Peter’s and St. Alban’s, Tollville and Stuttgart

The First Sunday in Lent Year A

February 22, 2027

 

       About 7 years ago, my parents bought a farm in Northeast Mississippi.  Now, this might not seem like big news to y’all, here in the Arkansas Delta, but I have to admit that I thought they were crazy.  They were in their late 60’s at the time, so they had an eye toward doing this in retirement.  My dad is a lobbyist, and my mom is a retired teacher who also worked as a county court administrator.  They had always liked to garden, and they had this dream of owning a farm so they could grow their own food in the form of organic vegetables.  Together, with my youngest brother and his wife and newborn twin girls, they all embarked on the adventure of our family farm, learning all that they could about farming from YouTube videos.  

       About a year after they started their adventure, I asked my brother what had been most surprising to him about the whole endeavor.  He told me that farming had been for him a lesson in how little of life a person can actually control.  It was humbling, really, to recognize how much of farming was out of his control and that he couldn’t work his way or think his way out of hardships like drought or weeds or burst pipes in the barn.  

       My dad has shared his favorite quote about farming that’s not original to him.  (I suspect y’all have heard this before.) “God made farming hard, and then God invented weather.”  

       I’ve been thinking about all of this in light of our readings for this First Sunday in Lent, especially the Old Testament reading and the gospel.  In Genesis, we see Adam and Eve at work farming, tending the garden of Eden.  God gives them so much freedom and only one stipulation:  whatever you do, don’t eat of the fruit of one particular tree—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Anything else is fair game.  So what do they do?  They eat of that one tree.  And I can’t help but wonder why?  Was it because it was the one thing in the garden that was outside their control?  

       We see the counter to this potential need for control in how Jesus interacts with the devil in his temptations in the wilderness.  If you look closely, each one of the three temptations offered by the devil are temptations to control, to try to assert one’s will over trusting God’s care and providence.  And Jesus refuses to do that.  It is utterly astounding to me how he resists those temptations to try to exert control.  And each time he resists, he reiterates the call to trust only in God.

       When he says, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”  He is saying: “I trust God.”

       When he says, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ He is saying, “I trust God.”

       When he says, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him,’  he is saying, “I trust God.” 

And we see this supreme trust in God in the way he lives his life as well.  It is at the heart of his journey to the cross, which we will follow over the course of these forty days.  It is a slow, steady relinquishing of control, even to the point of giving himself up for death at the hands of his enemies.  

       So, what might all this have to teach us today?  Maybe y’all have already learned the lessons you need about control and trusting in God, but for me, it is a lesson I need to learn and re-learn just about every Lent.  

       A few years ago, I read the book A Different Kind of Fast:  Feeding our True Hungers in Lent by Christine Valters Paintner.  The book is essentially a Lenten retreat where the author invites the reader to take on a different type of fast during Lent and then using the space created by the fast to embrace more life-giving practices.  Each week, she offers a different practice, and for the sixth week she encourages the reader to “Fast from certainty and attempting to control the outcome of things so that you might grow in trust in the great mystery of life.”  Embrace the beauty of the unknown and be nourished by new possibilities we would have never dreamed.”[i]

       I’ve been thinking about that invitation a lot this week as I’ve been contemplating the ways that I most frequently act like Adam and Eve and contemplating the invitation to act more like Jesus in this area of control and putting my trust in God.  

       And something else that I’m reading currently has helped me in this contemplation.  It’s from the book titled the centuries wrap round us: a thousand ponderings on beauty, bridging, and being in an age of fear, fragmentation, and fragility by John Paul Lederach who is well known as a Mennonite and a successful peacebuilder/conflict mediator.  Lederach writes, “From Hannah Arendt I understood the greatest of all human paradoxes.  We have the capacity to remember but no power to change the past.  We have the capacity to imagine, but no power to control the future.  To embrace the paradox of powerlessness, to hold its extraordinary tension, humility remains the constant guidepost.”

He continues with his definition of humility writing, “Humility (n): The courage to hold your truth lightly enough that the light of another, even one you fear, can unexpectedly illuminate your path; also known as living with a tender tenacity.”[ii]

Let me read that one more time:  “Humility is the courage to hold your truth lightly enough that the light of another, even one you fear, can unexpectedly illuminate your path; also known as living with a tender tenacity.”  

Which goes back to farming, doesn’t it?  I can’t think of a better image of tender tenacity than little green shoots started from seeds and just beginning to spout up from the dirt.  And even the earth itself can teach us about this spiritual practice of humility.  The Latin word humus, which means earth, ground, or soil, is the root word for both human and humility.  

We are not strangers to dirt and dust in these early days of Lent; just the other day, we heard the haunting call to“remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

In light of all this, here are some questions I invite you to join me in considering this week.  Where in your life do you need to try to fast from seeking to control?  How might God be inviting you to practice humility—holding your own truth lightly enough that the light of another can also illumine your path?  Where in your life are you being invited to trust God, to trust others, to abandon all sense of control and to lean into uncertainty? Where is God offering you the nourishment of new possibilities?

In closing, I’ll share with you a blessing by the Methodist minister, artist, and poet Jan Richardson.  It’s titled:

Blessing the Dust

All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners

or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial—

did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?

This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.

This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning.

This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are

but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made
and the stars that blaze
in our bones
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.[iii]

     

---

[i] Paintner, Christine Valters.  A Different Kind of Fast: Feeding our True Hungers in Lent. Broadleaf: Minneapolis, 2024, pp 29-31 in kindle edition.

[ii] Lederach, John Paul.  the centuries wrap round us: a thousand ponderings on beauty, bridging, and being in an age of fear, fragmentation, and fragility.  Outskirts Press:  2026, pp 15-16 in Kindle edition. 

[iii] Richardson, Jan.  from Circle of Grace:  A Book of Blessings for the Seasons. https://paintedprayerbook.com/2026/02/17/ash-wednesday-to-ask-where-love-will-lead-us

The Last Sunday after the Epiphany Year A-St. Barnabas, Foreman

 The Rev Canon Melanie Lemburg

St. Barnabas-Foreman, AR

The Last Sunday after the Epiphany-Year A

February 15, 2026

 

A letter to Kendyl Jo Ellis upon the occasion of her baptism. 

 

Dear Kendyl,

 

       Today is an exciting day in your life and in the life of the Church!  Today is the day when you will be baptized, and in and through your baptism, you will become an official member of the body of Christ, an official member of this church.  Today is also a day that has profound implications on how you will be raised and how you hopefully choose to live the rest of your life. 

       In your baptism, your family and godparents are acknowledging a deep truth about who you are.  They are recognizing that at your very creation, God knew you, loved you into being, and claimed you as God’s beloved.  

       There is nothing that you can ever do, sweet Kendyl, to change that.  You are and always will be God’s beloved.  And today, your family and godparents are saying “yes” to God; they are accepting your status as God’s beloved, your very belovedness, on your behalf.  

       You might be wondering (in that sweet little head of yours), “What does it mean to be God’s beloved?  Your belovedness has echoes and meaning in Jesus’s own life.  We see Jesus being claimed as God’s beloved in his own baptism (which we read about way back in January).  When he rises up out of the water after his baptism by John, Matthew tells us “a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”  And we are reminded of this encounter in our gospel reading again today.  Jesus and a few of his closest disciples have gone up the mountain to pray together, when he becomes transfigured, changed and charged in a dazzling light.  They see the figures of Moses and Elijah with him, a bright cloud comes and overshadows them all, and a voice speaks from the cloud saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!”  Jesus reassures his disciples, tells them not to be afraid and not to tell anyone, and then he heads down the mountain where he begins preparing to face his death in Jerusalem.  

       It is in both Jesus’s life and in his death that we find what it means to be God’s beloved, what it looks like to live life as God’s beloved.  Jesus’s life is shaped by prayer and worship, both in solitude and in community; in the reading and study of scripture; in proclaiming the good news, that the Kingdom of God has come near, and doing his part to offer healing and reconciliation as his work in God’s kingdom.  He spends time with all different sorts of people, and especially with the people who were the most sick, the most lost, the most forgotten, the most marginalized.  And he is not afraid to speak truth to power.  Jesus gives up his life in death, in a pure act of self-giving love; and in his death, he proves that God’s love is stronger than absolutely anything, even death.  In his death, he opens for us the way for resurrection and new life.  And this is what you are being baptized into this day as well.  It is an essential part of what it means to be God’s beloved.  

       Sweet Kendyl, as your family says yes to your belovedness, they are promising to teach you about this way of Jesus and to help you learn how to live your life in similar fashion.  

       It is demanding work, living this life as God’s beloved.   Which is why you have all of us.  Each one of us is promising to support you as you live your life as God’s beloved, and you will support us as well.  We need each other to do this.  Because there will be times when your belovedness overcomes you like a blinding light, and sometimes, your belovedness will shimmer softly, just under the surface.  And sometimes you will need our help in holding up a mirror before you so you can see it.  We promise we will help you remember your belovedness; just as you will help us remember ours.

       Because, sweet Kendyl, every single person God has ever created is also God’s beloved.   No matter what.  That is also the truth of our baptism.  Today, we all will also reaffirm the promises that we will live our lives in a way that reflects our understanding of every person’s belovedness as well.  This means loving our neighbors as ourselves;  it means seeking and serving Christ in all persons.  It means respecting the dignity of every human being, and striving for justice and peace among all people.  

       Every single day of our lives, we are faced with choices about how we will treat people, how we will recognize and honor each person we encounter as God’s beloved.  Sometimes this choice shows up as a clear invitation between right and wrong, and sometimes it shows up in the quiet, daily persistence of being faithful.  Each one of us is called to live our lives in a way that reflects the truth of both our own belovedness as well as the belovedness of others, all together in the heart of God.

       May you never forget that you are God’s beloved, and may you live your life with joy and hope resting in the knowledge of your belovedness.

 

Your sister in Christ,

Melanie+