Saturday, October 24, 2026

The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 25A-St. John's Harrison

 The Rev. Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg

Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 25A

St. John’s Episcopal Church, Harrison, AR


October 25, 2026

      Good morning!  I am delighted to be here with y’all this morning, for my first official Sunday visit to St. John’s!  I have appreciated your wonderful hospitality and warm welcome! [One of the things I’m often asked when I visit congregations is “what exactly IS a Canon to the Ordinary?”  To which I reply, “Well, the ordinary is our bishop, and as the canon to the ordinary, I serve as the bishop’s chief of staff and chief advisor with a specific focus on the areas of governance, structure, the ordination process and the curacy program.  I also have extensive training in conflict mediation and actually teach clergy and lay leaders around The Episcopal Church tools to help them navigate conflict more faithfully, so it’s not uncommon for me to walk with clergy and congregations in the diocese in that way as well.]

      I have to confess that I was surprised by some news in the religio-political world this week. The Public Religion Research Institute released their 17thannual American Values Survey, which is a major poll on the issues, attitudes, religious views, and trends impacting American voters.  In that study, they noted that there is a widening “empathy gap” among people, and the empathy gap appears to be growing between adherents of the two main political parties and also between mainline Protestants and white evangelicals.  (Please, note that this is a gross oversimplification of the survey, so if you want to check it out for yourself, I have a blog where I’ll post the sermon with the link that I can send to Greg+.)[i]

      So apparently, in the midst of a particularly divided season in the life of our country, we even disagree about empathy.  Now, let me just pause and name something here.  Y’all don’t know me, and I don’t really know you, and the last thing I want to do is to create any division here when y’all are thriving, nor do I want to create a situation where y’all are going to be lined up at your priest-in-charge’s office door complaining about how political my sermon is after I leave here.  (I do want to be invited back here in the future!). So here’s how I want to go about this.  Before I go any further, I want to name the reality that most congregations in the Diocese of Arkansas are what I would consider “purple” congregations—meaning they have people in the pews who vote for both the red party and the blue party (thus making them purple), and I suspect y’all are no different.  So I want to hold all that mindfully and carefully.  And I also want to name that no study can fully capture the nuances of what is in every individual’s heart or conscience.  What I’m curious about is empathy and what we think we mean by that, and also about how today’s readings might speak to that as well as how empathy can be a practice to help us find ways to be reconciled.  Does that seem like something we can all get behind?  

      So…empathy.  Years ago, I watched a little cartoon by the sociologist Brene Brown that described the difference between sympathy and empathy.  It has a little fox sitting down in a dark hole and the sympathetic responses are from other animals calling down solutions from up above while the fox sits alone in the deep, dark pit.  Empathy, Brown describes, is when a wise bear drops down a ladder, climbs down, and sits with the fox in the hole, asking her questions to understand what was going on with her.  According to Brown, “Empathy fuels connection.” Brown cites another researcher who has identified four key aspects of empathy: “perspective taking, staying out of judgement, recognizing emotion in other people and communicating that.”   Let me say those again.  The four key aspects of empathy are “perspective taking, staying out of judgement, recognizing emotion in other people and communicating that.” Brown concludes the video by saying, “Empathy is a choice, and it’s a vulnerable choice, because in order to connect with you, I have to connect with something within myself that knows that feeling.” [ii]  

It’s interesting because a couple of the tools that we teach people in our conflict training is the importance of being curious, and asking good, curious questions, over being judgmental, and we also teach about how just one person’s attempt at being empathic in difficult conversations or conflicted situations can help move toward reconciliation.  (On the flip side, judgement and blame and conditions that lead to humiliation are the nuclear bombs for difficult conversations or conflict situations.). 

      So in light of all that, let’s shift our focus now to the gospel reading for this week.  The lectionary’s treatment of Matthew’s gospel has given us several weeks of building conflict and intensity between Jesus and the religious leaders.  Just in the last couple of chapters of Matthew, we’ve seen Jesus ride triumphantly into Jerusalem, clean out the moneychangers from the temple, teach more and more pointed parables critiquing the religious leaders from within the temple, and engage in verbal sparring with them as they seek to entrap him.  The conflict is approaching it’s crescendo in Jesus’s arrest, and today, we have another series of questions and responses between Jesus and the religious leaders.  Today’s reading also contains some of the heart of Jesus’ teaching, what has been lifted up as “the golden rule.” In response to the question, “what is the greatest commandment?”  he responds, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”  

      So, the question I am pondering in light of Jesus’s teaching is this:  Can we truly love God and love our neighbor if we do not or cannot practice empathy? Or another way to put this is “is empathy essential for love?”  Can you think of a time when you were able to truly love someone when you didn’t empathize with them in some way?  

      I was inspired by a news story this week about a retired physician who served on the Navajo reservation and has just been awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant for his works of public art around the reservation—large photographic murals.  The article states that the MacArthur foundation named Dr. Chip Thomas as one of its 2026 Fellows for “transforming overlooked and neglected spaces into powerful public works grounded in community experiences and history.”[iii] And what I found to be so powerful about the story and especially the photos of Thomas’ art is that those murals are bridges (or ladders) into empathy.  (We are invited to see empathically, this community who Thomas so clearly knows and loves.). It was incredibly inspiring to me to see how one person’s practice of empathy can make a difference on a much wider scale. 

      But it can be really intimidating to think about starting with empathy on such a large scale.  Which is why I want to encourage us to consider what theologian Kate Bowler terms “appropriate smallness.”  These are small acts of empathy and faithfulness in our everyday lives that make an immediate difference, in appropriately small ways in the world around us.  This can be as simple as asking questions of ourselves and others that encourage curiosity over judgement, connection over contempt.  

      Greg tells me that y’all are some of the kindest people he’s ever encountered in the Church, so I suspect y’all are not strangers to empathy.  And so, here are some things I invite you to join me in thinking about this week.   Is empathy necessary to fulfill Jesus’s commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves?  If so, how are we being called to practice empathy toward those we most disagree with?  What might that look like both on an individual scale and on a communal scale?  What is one appropriately small place where you can start practicing empathy as a way to work toward reconciliation?  And what is the call of St. John’s in this moment?  How might your practice of empathy encourage and embolden and even change this community?  

      I’ll conclude with Kate Bowler’s 

A blessing for our small loves

Blessed are you who care so much
that everything has started to feel enormous.

Every headline, urgent.
Every disagreement, personal.
Every problem, somehow yours to carry alone.

Bless you with the humility
to wonder if you might not see the whole picture.

With curiosity strong enough
to outlast contempt.

With courage to remember we belong to one another.

And may we all remember that faithfulness has always had a smaller address:
the person in front of you,
the work that is yours to do,
the neighbor you are still learning to love. (Bless us all on that one.). [iv]

Amen. 

 

      

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Saturday, October 17, 2026

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.  

      

    

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Sunday, October 11, 2026

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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