The Rev. Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg
All Saints’ Day-Year A
Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Lake Village, AR
November 1, 2026
Good morning! My name is Melanie Lemburg, and I serve as the Canon to the Ordinary for the Diocese of Arkansas. When I’m out and about in the diocese, I’m often asked the question, “What exactly is a Canon to the Ordinary?” To which I reply, “Well, the ordinary is our bishop, and as his canon, I serve as his chief advisor, chief of staff, and I support his ministry in a variety of different ways, specifically around the structure and governance of the diocese, by overseeing the ordination process, and I also accompany congregations in and through conflict. As part of my role, I get to make visits to congregations all around the diocese, and I’m delighted to be here with y’all in that context and to help out this Sunday while Laurie is out. It’s one of my favorite parts of my job—getting to be a “loose canon” out and about in the diocese.
Last week, I was visiting St. John’s in Harrison, up in the northern part of the state, and it was magical to watch the trees change colors more and more as I drove further north from Little Rock. When I arrived at the church, I marveled to more than one person about the row of 3 maple trees that were half-aflame with red lined up right in front of the church. And someone finally said, “Oh, that’s nothing. If you really want to see some pretty trees, drive over the Maplewood Cemetery and walk around there. Well, I must confess that it had never really occurred to me to go sight-seeing in a cemetery, so I didn’t make the detour on the way out of town, but when I got home, I was still curious. So, I googled Maplewood Cemetery, and it came up as the #2 destination in Harrison! (Only beat out for the number #1 spot by the Buffalo National River Park!)
It reminded me of a line from another preacher’s sermon: “this is the time of year that we like to hang out in cemeteries.” We just had Halloween last night—the eve of All Hallow’s day, which is actually today—what we call All Saints’ Day—which is one of 7 major feasts in our calendar—days which are especially appropriate for baptisms or for renewing our baptismal vows. (You can find this on page 15 in your BCP.) I’ve noticed an increase in recent years in Halloween decorations in yards that feature tombstones to mimic cemeteries or giant skeletons who sometimes wear different outfits. And we don’t bat an eye at these trappings of cemeteries that pervade our normal, everyday lives this time of year.
So why is it that at this time of year, we spend more time in cemeteries than in other times of the year (both literally and figuratively)? In the calendar, we mark the turning of the seasons, and with this seasonal change, our ancestors in the faith believed that the veil between this world and the next got a little bit thinner over these three days. There’s a bit of the blurring of the lines between past, present, and future, in this thin space of All Saints’ Day, and we are invited to contemplate the people who have been saints in our own lives and in the life of our church, even while we ponder how we are called to continue to live our own lives faithfully, according to the call of our baptismal covenant. And we are even invited to contemplate those saints who will come after us, keeping the faith and the faithfulness of our congregations long after we have returned to the dust.
All of this is encapsulated in one of our beloved hymns for this day, found in our hymnal on page 293: “I sing a song of the saints of God..."
[Do y’all know this song? “I sing a song of the saints of God,
patient and brave and true,
who toiled and fought and lived and died
for the Lord they loved and knew.
And one was a doctor, and one was a queen,
and one was a shepherdess on the green;
they were all of them saints of God, and I mean,
God helping, to be one too.”
And here’s the part that really speaks to me today:
2 They loved their Lord so dear, so dear,
and His love made them strong,
and they followed the right for Jesus’ sake,
the whole of their good lives long.” ]
It’s no accident that our gospel reading for today is Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes—the teaching by Jesus from Matthew that is known as the Sermon on the Mount, one of Jesus’s key teachings. One of my friends who is also a preacher once said of this gospel reading: “the Beatitudes are the path of our becoming.” “The Beatitudes are the path of our becoming.” According to the hymn, the saints embraced their becoming by loving their Lord so dear, finding strength in God’s love, and then “following the right for Jesus’ sake….”
Here’s what another preacher has written this connection between the saints, the Beatitudes, and the call we live out in our own baptismal covenant: “What makes someone a saint? Following the right? And what is right? The Beatitudes reveal Jesus’ commitment that the ‘first shall be last, and the last shall be first.’ The wounded and heartbroken are the blessed. The poor and the peacemakers are blessed. When asked what makes a saint, the writer Barbara Brown Taylor once answered by paraphrasing the Beatitudes: ‘Extravagance. Excessive love. Flagrant mercy, radical affection, exorbitant charity, immoderate faith, intemperate hope, inordinate love…”[i]
Today, I’m going to invite us to do a couple of different things in our service to mark this day. Instead of the Nicene Creed, we’re going to renew our baptismal covenant, because in this also is found the roadmap for our becoming, and it’s good to be reminded of and recommitted to those promises on All Saints’ day. And the second thing I’m going to invite us to do is to hold space in the prayers of the people to name the faithful departed of our lives, to remember ourselves, and to bring to mind the future saints who will carry on our work in this place long after we are gone. I’ll invite us to ask the Holy Spirit to inspire our work today, so that we may become the saints and faithful departed upon whose shoulders those who come after us will stand.
And as a part of marking this day, as you are thinking about your own becoming and how the beatitudes and the baptismal covenant inform that, think also of the becoming God is inviting you into as a congregation, a goodly fellowship of saints. What are the ways that God is calling you all together toward extravagance, excessive love, flagrant mercy, radical affection, exorbitant charity, immoderate faith, intemperate hope, inordinate love?
When we talked last week, Laurie told me just a little bit of all that y’all have endured here and your remarkable resilience. You have much to teach the rest of us (and this community) about how God’s love has made you strong and how to follow the right for Jesus’s sake. I can’t wait to see how the Holy Spirit inspires you to be the saints in this place in the next season!
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