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)

  

       

 

---

[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. 

 

        

---

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