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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