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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