The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost- The Rev Melanie Lemburg

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg 6th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 8B June 30, 2024 This week, I came across a quote about hope that I want to share: “Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense…Hope is not optimism….Hope is a discipline and… we have to practice it every single day.” i I started thinking about how I talk about hope. How many times a day do I say, “I hope…” “I hope you are well.” “I hope it goes easier than you expect.” “I hope…” We’re talking about well-wishes when we talk about hope that way, a sort of love made manifest in words. But that’s not what this quote implies about hope. Hope isn’t a feeling; it’s a discipline, a practice. What on earth does that mean and how might we practice hope as a daily discipline? Our gospel reading gives us two pictures of hope in the same story. Jairus, the leader of the synagogue, is seeking healing from Jesus for his young daughter. He throws himself at Jesus’ feet, tells him his daughter is near death and begs Jesus to come heal her. It’s definitely got the feel of a last-ditch effort from a desperate father. They set out, and on the way, a woman who has been bleeding for 12 years approaches Jesus and says to herself, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” And miraculously, she is healed in that moment. It seems at first that she’s going to get into trouble or get called out by Jesus when he seeks to know who touched him, but instead, Jesus commends her and her faith and sends her on her way. Then they get word that Jairus’s daughter has died, that Jesus has come too late, and the unnamed woman becomes a lesson in hope to the faithful synagogue leader Jairus. Because rather than giving up hope for his dead daughter, Jairus continues on with Jesus to his house where the parents and Jesus and his disciples go in to see the girl, and they all witness Jesus raising her from the dead. Both the unnamed woman and Jairus practice hope by pursuing a path that they believe will make lives better. So, what can these two different characters in the gospel story today teach us about practicing a daily discipline of hope? Each of them, in their own way, is willing to take a risk, acting in the belief that the world could be better and centering their faith in that better outcome in the person of Jesus. They also are at the end of their own limits; they have no delusions that they can affect the change they want through their own devices. So they seek out Jesus who they believe can bring about the healing they are looking for. In her book Atlas of the Heart, the sociologist Brene Brown writes about hope saying, “Hope is made up of…. ‘a trilogy of goals, pathways, and agency.” We need all three of these aspects in order for hope to be fulfilled. She also writes that “hope is a function of struggle-we develop hope not during the easy times but during adversity and discomfort.” (She continues by writing about how hope is a learned behavior. That children often have to learn the habit of hope from their parents and how they need boundaries characterized by love, consistency and support to cultivate hope along with the space to experience and grapple with adversity in their own lives. When they are given the opportunity to struggle, they learn how to believe in themselves and their abilities.) ii Hope is a choice that must be coupled with action in order to truly be hope and not just wishes. This week, after we discussed hope in our Wednesday healing service, one of the congregation sent me two different links talking about how she was seeing conversation around hope everywhere after our discussion. One of the links was to an Instagram story by a woman whose username is anniebjones05. Here’s what she writes: “In April, I planted a bunch of wildflower seeds in my front yard. My parents came over, and we raked and weeded, dug holes and fertilized. I fretted and tended and watered, until two days later, when a torrential rainstorm came and swept all the seeds away. I watched the dirt and fertilizer flow into my front yard turning everything into puddles of mud. I waited and waited to see if anything survived. Nothing did.” She continues, “In May, my parents came over and we tried again. We planted flowers in my front beds and tried seeds again in the back. I tried to not care if anything grew. I was afraid to hope. I am always a little afraid to hope. A few weeks ago, I started to see green sprouts peeking up along our back fence. Maybe the sunflowers we’d tried on a whim? A zinnia? Two? In April, I cared so much. By May, the rainstorm had taken my seeds and my care right along with it. Now it is June, and there are flowers. Plural! Zinnias. Sunflowers, I think, to come. They bloomed, disregarding my level of care and despair. They bloomed, ignoring my exhaustion, unconcerned with my cynicism. They did not need my hope. She concludes, “This is a true story. A literal one. Of course, it’s a metaphor, too.” It's interesting to me how in this story she uses the word “hope” to describe her wishes for her flower garden, but really what was hope in this story is her action to get out there with her parents and plant again after the first failure. I also appreciate the aspect of loving detachment that she introduces around hope, a sort of sense of working toward making things better with healthy detachment toward the outcome. Today, we had a baptism at the 8:00 service. Her name is Sophie. So that’s why, in just a few moments, we will renew our baptismal covenant as a part of this service. But I think it’s also an important reminder to us in this ongoing conversation about hope. It’s a reminder that in our baptism, we are invited to practice this hope by loving action on behalf of not just ourselves but also our neighbors. Notice how in the last five invitations of baptism, the first two are practices that help us nourish our own hope: continuing in the apostles teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers, and resisting evil and whenever we fall into sin, repenting and returning to the Lord. But the last three are about how we turn outward and practice hope in the world around us: proclaiming by word and example the Good News of God in Christ, seeking and serving Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves, and striving for justice and peace among all people, and respecting the dignity of every human being. Our baptism calls us to practice hope through loving action for ourselves and for others. A year ago, I shared a post from Bishop Steven Charleston that came up in my memories this week. I was grateful for the timing of this reminder from past Melanie. Here’s what he wrote, “I have a little broom called hope. I use it to sweep out the corners of my life where the dust of my past has settled and the shadows of my heart cling like cobwebs. It does a good job. I sweep fear and worry out the door, leaving only sunshine where the dark spaces once pretended to rule. I have a little broom called hope: please feel free to borrow it whenever you like." iii Your invitation this week is to seek to daily practice the discipline of hope in your life. Do one thing every day this week that could bring positive change to another person’s life or the world around you. i. Original quote by Mirame Kaba as listed in Everyday Connections: Year B. Ed Heidi Haverkamp. WJK, Louisville, 2023, p 638. ii. Brown, Brene. Atlas of the Heart. Random House, New York: 2021, p100. iii. Posted on Bishop Charleston’s Facebook page on June 27, 2023

6th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 8B 8 am baptismal letter

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg The 6th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 8B June 30, 2024 A letter to Sophie Winslow Smith upon the occasion of her baptism. Dear Sophie, Today is a big day in your young life. Today is the day of your baptism, a day when we gather to accept on your behalf that God has loved you and known you since before you were born, that God has claimed you as God’s beloved. Your parents and godparents are saying “yes” to your belovedness on your behalf, and they are making promises about how they will raise you to help you nurture your belovedness and to teach you how to see the face of God’s beloved in every person you will encounter in your life. And we your church are making promises that we will also support you in this work of growing into your belovedness, even as you will teach us more about our belovedness as well. Our gospel reading for today gives us a glimpse of the hope that can be found in following Jesus. I read a quote this week about hope that I want to share with you: “Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense…Hope is not optimism….Hope is a discipline and… we have to practice it every single day.” We see in our story from Mark 5:21-43 that both the unnamed woman and the desperate father Jairus have hope that leads them to action, either for themselves or someone they love. They don’t just sit there and wish for things to get better, they take a step forward in their faith, acting to approach Jesus and ask for (or in the woman’s case, take) what they need. True hope is not just a practice, a discipline. It also involves action. Today, sweet Sophie, your parents and godparents will make promises on your behalf of how you will live your life, and they make promises to raise you in this life of discipleship to Jesus. And we will all renew our own baptismal covenant alongside them. As we do this, we remember that in our baptism, we are invited to practice this hope by loving action on behalf of not just ourselves but also our neighbors. Notice how in the last five invitations of baptism, the first two are practices that help us nourish our own hope: continuing in the apostles teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers, and resisting evil and whenever we fall into sin, repenting and returning to the Lord. But the last three are about how we turn outward and practice hope in the world around us: proclaiming by word and example the Good News of God in Christ, seeking and serving Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves, and striving for justice and peace among all people, and respecting the dignity of every human being. Our baptism calls us to practice hope through loving action for ourselves and for others. That practice of hope will look different for you in different seasons of your life, sweet Sophie, but it is our job as your family and your faith community to help you discover what that looks like, what it means for you to practice hope. In closing, I’ll leave you with a reflection written by Bishop Stephen Charleston about hope. He writes, “I have a little broom called hope. I use it to sweep out the corners of my life where the dust of my past has settled and the shadows of my heart cling like cobwebs. It does a good job. I sweep fear and worry out the door, leaving only sunshine where the dark spaces once pretended to rule. I have a little broom called hope: please feel free to borrow it whenever you like.” Your sister in Christ, Melanie+

The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 4B

4th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 6B June 16, 2024 Samuel is stuck. And God knows it. He hadn’t even wanted Israel to have a king, but the people clamored for one. God tried to convince them, through Samuel, that it would be bad; that things wouldn’t turn out like they wanted or hoped. But the people insisted, so God said, “OK, but remember when it turns out badly that I told you so,” and God gives them the king they want in the person of Saul. And things with Saul are ok-for a while. Saul and Samuel work together to force the other tribes out of their territory. Until one day, Saul disobeys God, and God decides to be done with Saul and to find a new king for God’s people. Samuel hadn’t even wanted a king, but now he’s invested in Saul, so when Saul turns away from God, and God turns away from Saul, Samuel grieves. He mourns what they had; he mourns what could have been. And Samuel is stuck. But then God says to Samuel, Sam, you are stuck. “How long will you grieve over Saul? I have rejected him from being king over Israel.” It’s time to get up, dust yourself off, because I have a job for you. Fill up your horn with oil and set out on a journey because you’re going to anoint a new king for me. God is hopeful that this new king will be the answer. Spoiler alert: It’s David, and he is and he isn’t. But I appreciate how God doesn’t give up on Israel or the kingship because Saul was a disappointment. And maybe Samuel is inspired by God’s hope, too, because Samuel shakes off his grief and his stuckness, and he does what God asks, anointing David as the new king. Samuel has grieved for what was lost, but in order to move forward into God’s future, he must let go of the past, of the failures, of the disappointments, and maybe even of the comfort of the “devil you know…” so that he can move forward into the future and the task that God has set for him. As humans, we, too, get stuck. Things change around us, and we can be reluctant to even recognize the change, let alone embrace it. Or sometimes, change is thrust upon us in a way that we cannot deny, and we can get mired down in our grief or our apathy or our hopelessness. We know it is important to mourn what is lost or changed, but how do we know when it’s time to move on? To look toward the future so we can be ready to embrace something new? And why is it so hard for us to let go? To change? (I have a friend who likes to regularly rearrange all her furniture in her house, and I never understand it. Seriously, why?) One of our Wednesday congregation described that moment of getting unstuck, of letting go of the past and looking toward the future like being on a trapeze, when you’ve let go of the bar you’ve been hanging onto, but the one you’re jumping toward hasn’t quite yet arrived. So you find yourself suspended in mid-air for a moment-between what has been and what is yet to come. And several others reflected on the freedom that they finally found in letting go of the old and learning to trust again. Often in order to really let go of the old and move forward, we have to forgive—forgive one who hurt us, forgive circumstances for not turning out how we wanted, forgive ourselves for our own mistakes or bad judgement. I wonder if we can ever be ready for change if we haven’t forgiven? What’s most helpful to me about this interaction between Samuel and God is that it’s a reminder to me that most of the time, we need God’s help to get unstuck. Getting unstuck isn’t a pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps kind of activity. Our gospel parable is a helpful reminder of this. No matter what the farmer may do to prepare the field and sow the seed, it is God who gives the growth. The farmer is God’s partner, but at some point, the farmer recognizes there are things beyond his control. And so it is with us. This stuckness isn’t limited to individuals. Families can get stuck; churches get stuck and even the big C church gets stuck from time to time. I watched a webinar last week titled The Role of the Diocese in a Changing Church that was a panel interview of several Episcopal bishops who are trying to lay the ground work in their partnership with God to get the church in their dioceses unstuck and moving into the future. One bishop pointed out that the structures of our church were built to accommodate the baby boom in the early 20thcentury. Our church has been in decline for at least the last decade, probably longer, but still we cling to these structures, whether they are buildings or administrative structures, that were built to support the church in a very different time. You can see that here in that we have an entire building devoted to a way of offering Christian education this is no longer relevant to us or our culture. And so we’ve tried to lay the groundwork of offering more creative ways of using that space to do the work of God. You can see it in all the ways that we are trying to figure out how to engage the community around us, and in the ways that we are wrestling with how to create new pathways of belonging for the new people who are joining us. We are in that gawky, awkward phase similar to adolescence, where we haven’t yet grown into the new creation that God is calling us to be and that the Holy Spirit is creating among and through us. God has not and will not abandon us. Perhaps God is saying to us, how long will you mourn the loss of what is past? I have a new task for you. Go do this new thing to which I am calling you. And it feels like we are mid-swing on the trapeze, floating in the air between what has come and what will be. Our own diocese has just begun a strategic planning process which you’ll hear more about in the coming months. It is my hope that this is our attempt in the Diocese of Georgia to begin to do the work we need to do as partners of God, so that when the Holy Spirit shows up with our new task, we are ready to follow. Can you think of a time when you had to let go of something old to be able to embrace something new? What might God be inviting you to let go of now in order to embrace something new? In closing, I’ll offer a prayer from Bishop Steven Charleston that may speak to us as we open ourselves to becoming unstuck. Let us pray. “Spirit, watch over us, please. We are feeling a little anxious, a little uncertain, as if something was hanging over us, something beyond our control. Give us your confidence, Spirit, let us feel your presence among us, for when you are by our side, fear cannot be found. Amen.

2nd Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 4B

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg 2nd Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 4B June 2, 2024 There’s a story by the Irish priest John O’Donohue in his book Anam Cara that goes like this: “There is a lovely story of a man exploring Africa. He was in a desperate hurry on a journey through the jungle. He had three or four Africans helping him carry his equipment. They raced onward for about three days. At the end of the third day, the Africans sat down and would not move. He urged them to get up, telling them of the pressure he was under to reach his destination before a certain date. They refused to move. He could not understand this; after much persuasion, they still refused to move. Finally, he got one of them to admit the reason. The native said, ‘We have moved too quickly to reach here; now we need to wait to give our spirits a chance to catch up with us.’” i Do you know this feeling of traveling faster than your soul can go? We are a culture that glorifies the art of busy-ness. We fill every spare moment of our day with doing, for ourselves, for others. We rush and hustle and produce and buy and text and scroll. But have you ever stopped and wondered why we do this? Why do I do this? Why do you do this? I suspect that it is because we have been taught that our value lies only in our productivity and because being busy means we don’t have time or energy to face certain truths about ourselves, our families, the world we live in. Busy-ness is a highly effective avoidance tactic. We are so programmed to go, go, go, and it becomes harder and harder to stop. Although, every once in a while, gradually increasing as we age, life does make us stop. But then what do we do? When we finally stop, we have to become reacquainted with ourselves, who have become strangers. Our faith has an antidote to this. It’s called Sabbath. Sabbath is from the Hebrew word shabbat which means “rest,” or literally “to cease,” and it is a concept woven throughout the Old Testament: as a gift from God at creation and as a practice we can employ to imitate God, as a reminder of what it means to be free for the formerly-enslaved Hebrew people being led out of Egypt. Keeping sabbath is so important that it is one of the 10 commandments. In our gospel reading for today, Jesus is disputing the meaning of sabbath with the religious leaders of his day, and he says, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath…” As another writer puts it, “Jesus presses his opponents — and disciples like us! — to look deeper. The animating objective of the sabbath, Jesus contends, the reason God established and commanded it in the first place, is for the sake of vibrant, healthy life in beloved community.” ii In an unexpected way, keeping sabbath is similar to the difference between speaking and listening. I suspect we all have had experiences in relationships where everyone is speaking and noone is listening. (In fact, I think this is an accurate characterization of our country’s current political climate.) This happens in our relationship with God as well. Many of us spend our time in prayer speaking—interceding for others, petitioning for ourselves and our world, giving thanks or offering confession. But prayers of listening to God are different. We see this in our Old Testament lesson for today, where the old prophet Eli teaches the young student Samuel how to offer to God a listening prayer when God keeps calling Samuel, and Samuel doesn’t understand what is happening. Eli says to Samuel: “Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’” Listening is about creating space for relationship. And listening prayer often yields greater space and depth and unexpected creativity and generativity. Keeping sabbath is similar in that it helps create space for us to listen to our lives, to our souls, to our significant relationships. So how do we keep sabbath? What are some ways that we can stop and listen to our lives, to come home to ourselves? I recently came across 10 Core Principles for keeping sabbath that are found on a website called Sabbath Manifesto which is a “creative project designed to slow down lives in an increasingly hectic world.” Much like the biblical concept of sabbath, they encourage people to take one day a week to practice keeping sabbath, and they invite people to interpret and implement 10 core principles that support this work of keeping sabbath. They are: 1. Avoid technology. 2. Connect with loved ones. 3. Nurture your health. 4. Get outside. 5. Avoid commerce. 6. Light candles. 7. Drink wine. 8. Eat bread. 9. Find silence. 10. Give back. iii Your challenge for this week is to pay attention to your normal rhythms of life and find a way to keep sabbath, to stop for a set period of time. Practice keeping sabbath by interpreting and applying one of the 10 principles to your own life. Then talk to someone about how that affected how you kept sabbath. In closing, I’ll share with you a blessing written by John O’Donahue that captures the heart of how sabbath rest can heal us. (You might want to close your eyes as you listen.) A Blessing for One Who is Exhausted When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic, Time takes on the strain until it breaks; Then all the unattended stress falls in On the mind like an endless, increasing weight. The light in the mind becomes dim. Things you could take in your stride before Now become laborsome events of will. Weariness invades your spirit. Gravity begins falling inside you, Dragging down every bone. The tide you never valued has gone out. And you are marooned on unsure ground. Something within you has closed down; And you cannot push yourself back to life. You have been forced to enter empty time. The desire that drove you has relinquished. There is nothing else to do now but rest And patiently learn to receive the self You have forsaken in the race of days. At first your thinking will darken And sadness take over like listless weather. The flow of unwept tears will frighten you. You have traveled too fast over false ground; Now your soul has come to take you back. Take refuge in your senses, open up To all the small miracles you rushed through. Become inclined to watch the way of rain When it falls slow and free. Imitate the habit of twilight, Taking time to open the well of color That fostered the brightness of day. Draw alongside the silence of stone Until its calmness can claim you. Be excessively gentle with yourself. Stay clear of those vexed in spirit. Learn to linger around someone of ease Who feels they have all the time in the world. Gradually, you will return to yourself, Having learned a new respect for your heart And the joy that dwells far within slow time. iv i. O’Donohue, John. Anam Cara: A book of Celtic Wisdom. Cliff Street: 1997, 151. ii. SALT's Lectionary Commentary, Revised Common Lectionary, Proper 4, Year B, Proper 4B (saltproject.org) iii. Sabbath Manifesto iv. O’Donohue, John. To Bless the Space Between Us.

The Day of Pentecost-Year B

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg The Feast of Pentecost-Year B May 19, 2024 When my youngest brother was in preschool, he and his class went on a field trip to the Diocesan camp for a picnic. (It was a short drive from our hometown.) When he came home that evening, all he could talk about was one event out of the long day: when his classmate Noble Mosby had been attacked by a wild goose. I can still see my young brother telling this horror story with his big, round eyes, and how the most chilling part of the tale wasn’t when poor Noble got attacked, but it was when the teacher went to pick Noble up, and the goose went with him because it refused to let go. I’ve been thinking about this story a lot this week; I’ll explain more about that in a moment. Today is a major feast in the life of the church: the Feast Day of Pentecost. (The British refer to it as Whitsunday, so that’s a nod to our Church of England heritage that we include it as part of the name.) Pentecost was originally celebrated as the Jewish Festival of Weeks, also known as Shavuot (pronounced “sha-voo-OAT,”) that occurred 50 days after Passover and represented a sort of homecoming, for Jewish people to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. This is why there are “devout Jews from every nation” present in our Acts reading for today. We see the origins of the Christian celebration of Pentecost captured in that same Acts reading today. It’s 50 days after Easter Day, the Day of Resurrection. The disciples are once again all gathered together, and the Holy Spirit descends upon them with the sound “like the rush of a violent wind.” Acts tells us that “divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them”. And that “all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” It’s why fire and wind are often associated with the Holy Spirit and why we wear our flame colors today. Throughout the years, other images have been associated with the Holy Spirit. The dove, which descends upon Jesus in his baptism with the gift of the Spirit, is one image often associated with the Holy Spirit. In the gospel reading for today, the word that is translated as Advocate is a Greek word “paraclete” which doesn’t have a direct translation, so along with advocate, it can be translated as helper, comforter, or even counselor. The closest literal translation is “one called alongside.” (Paraclete is only found in John’s gospel and once in the first letter of John.) We see this image of Holy Spirit as comforter lifted up throughout this portion of John as Jesus continues to reassure his disciples that he will not leave them as orphans, and it is lifted up in our collect for today when we pray: “Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort…” i It's a nice image, isn’t it? I like to picture how when things get challenging for us, the Holy Spirit might wrap us in a nice, soft throw blanket and bring us a cup of tea for a bit of respite. And while that does happen occasionally, when I talked to people about their experiences with the Holy Spirit, it’s not usually like that at all. They talked about doing things that they didn’t necessarily want to do but felt moved to do, after a sort of relentless insistence from the Holy Spirit. They talked about energy and heat, about creativity out of chaos; others have talked to me about how the Holy Spirit gives them persistent spiritual taps on the shoulder. They talked about how things come together in the most unexpected ways. This week, I read this quote by the writer Jason Byasee: “Another translation of Paraclete is as the ‘Comforter’…The image in English is altogether too placid, restful. Celtic Christians have long imagined the Holy Spirit as a wild goose—loud, demanding, aggressive if necessary, but not at all calm or quiet.” ii (You thought I’d forgotten about the goose, didn’t you?) The Holy Spirit as a wild goose….It’s an image of chaos and disruption, of persistence and insistence. But geese are also fiercely loyal and protective. They look out for each other, and they make good watch animals. (There’s a story in Celtic lore of how a flock of geese helped foil a Celtic invasion of Rome by alerting the Romans of the sneak attack by the invaders.) The Celtic Christians even had a saying about this image of the Holy Spirit: “the goose is on the loose!” (It’s a little bit terrifying!) The goose is on the loose! Today we close the door on the Easter season, and we are aware that this seeming end is only the beginning. The Holy Spirit is even now at work in our lives, in the Church, in the world. The goose is on the loose in ways beyond what we could even ask for or imagine: chaotic, disruptive, creative, insistent. And just like poor Noble Mosby, once that mama goose gets ahold of us, she will not let go! I see it here all the time: how creative endeavors turn out differently (and often better) than planned. How we have been forced to adapt to a changing world and culture, and even when it is hard, there comes a vitality in the wrestling. We see it in how the Holy Spirit continues to send us new people, people looking for a home, and how we continue to be challenged to create space for home for others. We see it in an insistent tug to look outside ourselves, beyond these walls and this property, to dream about how the Holy Spirit is urging us to share our joy with a needy world, to create a space of belonging, a gathering place for this neighborhood, this community. (For those who volunteer with children’s chapel, you see the Holy Spirit very much in that scarcely controlled chaos. It’s why we clergy always come back a bit disheveled from that experience.) The goose is on the loose! Where are the places of chaos or disruption in your life right now? How might the Holy Spirit be insisting that you move into a new direction? Where are you seeing the goose on the loose here in this church, and how are you being called to respond? i.Some information from this section came from the Exegetical Perspective by Paul Hammer on p 21 and 23 of Feasting on the Word Commentary Year B Vol 3 (WKJ: 2009). ii.Haverkamp, Heidi. Everyday Connections: Reflections and Practices for Year B. WJK: Lousiville, 2023, p 513.

The Sixth Sunday of Easter Year B-Meditation on Joy

The Rev. Melanie Dickson Lemburg The Sixth Sunday after Easter-Year B May 6, 2024 In his long-goodbye to his disciples, in this second half of the Easter season where we focus on Jesus’s teachings around what intimacy with God looks like, Jesus says, “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.” Part of Jesus’s final blessing or wish for us is joy. So I want us to reflect on joy for a few minutes here. And I’ll give you time to ponder the questions I ask. How do you define joy? When’s the last time you experienced joy? What did joy feel like in your body? Is Jesus’s joy different from ours? How? Our Wednesday healing service community reflected on these questions, and they observed that joy often bubbles up in them through connections with other people, God, or nature. It is often a brief feeling of effervescence, and it is often connected with gratitude in some form or fashion. They spoke about encountering joy in small, mundane ways, and they talked about how one you start paying attention to joy, then it seems to become more readily available. Sociologist Brene Brown writes about joy in her book Atlas of the Heart (after conducting thousands of hours of research around all the human emotions). It’s in her chapter titled Places We Go When Live is Good: “joy is sudden, unexpected, short-lasting, and high-intensity. It’s characterized by connection with others, or with God, nature, or the universe. Joy expands our thinking and attention, and it fills us with a sense of freedom and abandon.” “While experiencing joy, we don’t lose ourselves, we become more truly ourselves.” And finally, she writes about how research shows that joy and gratitude work together in “an intriguing upward spiral.” The two are interconnected and an increase of one leads to an increase of the other.i. So I’ll ask the questions again: How do you define joy? When’s the last time you experienced joy? What did joy feel like in your body? Is Jesus’s joy different from ours? How? This week, I invite you to pay attention to your moments of joy, and to lean into gratitude in those moments. i. Brown, Brene’. Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connections and the Language of Human Experience. Random House: New York, 2021, pp 204-205.

Fourth Sunday of Easter Year B

The Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg The Fourth Sunday of Easter Year B April 21, 2024 In 2023, the US Surgeon General issued a report titled Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The US Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. Since then, Dr. Vivek Murthy has been traveling the country working to help us as a society to deal with this epidemic. Research has shown that loneliness—when people feel isolated, invisible, insignificant—has profound negative consequences for individual health, increasing a person’s risk “for cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death.” Now when the Surgeon General issues an advisory, it acts to call “the American people’s attention to an urgent public health issue and provides recommendations for how it should be addressed. Advisories are reserved for significant public health challenges that require the nation’s immediate awareness and action.” This loneliness epidemic is something that I’ve been pondering for a while now, looking for ways for the Church to help meet this need and offer tools of social connection that- when we have been at our best-we have cultivated over centuries. I’ll talk more about this in a minute. This week, the fourth week of Easter, we see a shift in our readings. In the first three weeks of Easter, our gospel readings have given us stories of Jesus’s encounters with his disciples after his resurrection. Today, we begin to hear Jesus’s teachings on intimacy with God (which will be our focus for the next four weeks). In today’s reading, Jesus compares individuals’ relationship with God to the relationship between a sheep and a shepherd. And one of the marks of a true or a genuine shepherd, Jesus says, is that he knows his sheep and his sheep know him. There is an intimacy in relationship that is suggested here, in the knowing and being known by God, and it is this intimate knowing that causes Jesus to lay down his life for all sheep and thus transform the very fabric of creation. So, I want you to reflect for a moment about what it means to be known by someone. We had a lovely discussion about this with the Wednesday healing service community. We talked about how we can be known by others, what that means to us, and how that impacts loneliness. We talked about how being known is a gift, how when we are known we feel cherished and how when we know someone else, we are given the opportunity to cherish them. We talked about the importance of showing up with our whole selves, about how being real with one another makes us vulnerable, but that is how we are truly known. Many talked about how hard it is to ask for help when we need it, but how that is another way of being known, and many also talked about how when people reach out (in a time of need or otherwise) that makes us feel known and loved. One person shared how she has felt loneliness at times when she knew there was a need, but she didn’t know how to reach out. And we talked about how there is this mystery to human connectedness, how the Holy Spirit shows up in the midst of us when we are our truest selves and about how sometimes we have to set ourselves aside to be fully present to another. The more we practice showing up before God and each other with our whole, true selves, the more we experience this knowing and being known, which is, I believe, the antidote for loneliness. But it’s not easy. It’s risky and maybe goes against what we’ve been taught, that we need to go through life protecting ourselves, armor on, only letting those whom we trust see our truest selves. So, how do we practice this being real, this knowing and being known by God and by others? Jesus models for us how to know and be known in his relationship with God. It is a relationship that is marked by trust, by listening, by faithfulness, by the willingness to give up his very self for the greater purpose of divine love and reconciliation for all. So to know and be known, there has to be an awareness of who we are in relationship with God and others, a willingness to see others as they truly are, and also a willingness to give up parts of our own agendas to love them how they need to be loved, to meet them where they need to be met. Here's one small example. We have so many people in this church who have cultivated deep friendships over many years. You look forward to seeing each other at church to sit together and catch up and spend time together. We also have lots of new people who are being sent to us by the Holy Spirit, people who are in search of a faith community and the meaningful relationships that come with that. Those of us who have been here a while need to be attentive to the opportunity to know and be known by those who are joining us; and we need to step out of our comfort zones and even step out of ourselves to meet them. I invite you to think about these ideas this week: how have you seen or experienced the loneliness epidemic in your life or community? What does it mean to you to be known? What’s interesting to me about the Surgeon General’s advisory and his work touring the country in talking about our loneliness epidemic is that we already have basic tools to help combat loneliness and strengthen relationships and communities. In our Wednesday conversation, I was amazed at how we were able to identify these key practices just in how we talked about times when we felt known. In the podcast titled Everything Happens with Kate Bowler in an episode titled Made to Belong , Dr. Murthy explains the 5 for 5 challenge that he has created to combat the loneliness epidemic in our country, and he talks about how, if we all begin doing this work of connecting, we can change the social fabric of our communities and our nation. His challenge is that each person take 5 actions over the next 5 days that will help you connect with someone else. There are 3 different ways you can connect. 1. By expressing your gratitude for someone. Tell them. Write them. Call them. Text them. What they mean to you or how you have been changed by them for the better. 2. By extending support to someone. Reach out to let someone know you’re thinking about them. Offer a stranger a simple kindness when the opportunity presents itself. 3. By asking for help. It is astoundingly simple! And each of us can be responsible for doing this work, for making a difference in our communities, for making peoples’ lives just a little less lonely. Five days. Five actions. 1. Express your gratitude for someone. 2. Extend support to someone. 3. Ask for help from someone. Will you try it? https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf https://katebowler.com/podcasts/made-to-belong/#transcript