The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 21A_St. Luke's North Little Rock

 The Rev. Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg

The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 21A

St. Luke’s North Little Rock

September 27, 2026

 

       Good morning!  I’m Melanie Lemburg, and I serve as the Canon to the Ordinary for the Diocese of Arkansas.  I’m delighted to be making my first visit here with y’all!  When I reached out to Carey a couple of months ago about coming, I could tell he put a lot of time and thought into when he wanted me to come.  He asked for my dates in September and October and when we narrowed down my availability, he asked for either today or October 25^th.  It was only a couple of weeks ago that I learned that these dates just happen to coincide with key dates for your Fall Annual Commitment Campaign that just so happens to kick off today.  So…. well, played, Sir!  

       But I actually do love preaching about stewardship! I’ve seen vestries and congregations transformed when we fully embrace a more robust understanding of stewardship (beyond the annual fall commitment campaign), and I’ve seen many miracles of God performed by the modern church sheerly through an understanding of generosity and abundance!

       So, let’s talk about stewardship.  In the early years of my priesthood, I learned this definition of stewardship:  “Stewardship is all that I do with all that I have after I say, ‘I believe.’”  (repeat that).  Or, if we’re talking about stewardship for a whole church or congregation or even a diocese we could say, “Stewardship is all that we do with all that we have after we say, ‘we believe.’”  I love this definition because it helps us remember that all that we have is already entrusted to our care and keeping and stewardship by God, and this act of stewardship is a key aspect of how we live out our discipleship faithfully, both as individuals and as communities.  

       When I was in seminary at General Seminary in the early 2000’s we were fortunate to have the late Terry Parsons, who was the Stewardship Officer for the Episcopal Church at the time, join us for a class.  Terry was a lay woman from Kentucky who had been raised Southern Baptist, and she had a wonderful sense of humor.  Those two things made her absolutely fearless in talking about the biblical tithe in ways I had never seen in my life spent in the Episcopal Church.  I can remember sitting in that class and hearing Terry say to us when asked about the Old Testament scriptures that instructed God’s people to give 10% back to God (what is known as the tithe).  She told us, “People ask me all the time why they should tithe, or give 10% of their income back to God through the church.  I always tell them, ‘Well, the Old Testament tells us to give 10% to God; and Jesus tells us to give up everything, so I don’t know about y’all, but I’ll take the 10%.”[i]  

                  In her work around the Church as stewardship officer,  Terry often spoke about steps around faithful stewardship.  Some of these included praying to God about what God is inviting or encouraging us to give; engaging the gospels to see what Jesus calls us to do; rebuking scarcity, and claiming and practicing abundance.[ii]

       It’s the rebuking scarcity and claiming or practicing abundance that I really want to focus on today.  Because it’s really easy to say that we as both individuals and a church want to rebuke scarcity and claim abundance, and we all know how difficult that can be as a spiritual practice and a way of life.  So, let’s look at this rebuking of scarcity and claiming abundance in light of the Old Testament reading for today.

       Today we find ourselves at the beginning of Chapter 17 in Exodus.  But let’s do a quick recap of the story of God’s people that we’ve heard over the last few weeks.  Exodus starts with God’s people living enslaved in Egypt, and God raises Moses up as a leader to help lead God’s people to freedom in the promised land. God sends a series of plagues on Egypt to convince Pharoah that he is better off letting God’s people go, and even though Pharoah lets them go, he changes his mind, and begins to pursue them with his entire army.  Moses and the people flee the might of the Egyptian army until they reach the impassable Red Sea.  God tells Moses to use his staff and God will, through Moses, part the water of the Red Sea, so the people can walk through the water on dry land.  When the Egyptian army pursues them, Moses and God release the waters, and the army is washed away, no longer able to pursue and threaten God’s people.  The people sing and rejoice at how God has saved them and freed them, and then, two and a half months after the parting of the Red Sea, they enter the wilderness.  (That’s where last week’s reading picked up.). Almost immediately upon entering the wilderness, the people start to complain against God and Moses:  where are we going to get water to drink?  Where are we going to get food to eat?  Remember how awesome it was in Egypt when we could eat our fill of bread?!  And meat!  Remember the meat!!!  Oh, that you would have just killed us there in Egypt rather than bringing us out here into the wilderness to starve with our children and our livestock!!  Leading up to today’s reading, we’ve already seen two miracles by God (through Moses) that have helped save the people and offer them God’s providence in the wilderness (the sweeting of the bitter water at Marah and the gift of manna in the wilderness- from last week).  

       And then we have today.  As God’s people move further into the wilderness, they are not able to find water sources, and they are understandably panicked.   Moses asks God for help, and God tells Moses to take the staff which he used at the Red Sea and at the Nile and to go before the people to strike the rock from whence God would make water flow.  And scripture tells us that Moses names the place Massah (from the Hebrew verb “test”) and Meribah (from the verb “find fault”).  

       I can’t help but wonder what it would have looked like if God’s people had rebuked scarcity in this moment?  Over and over again, the people have witnessed God’s miraculous, saving work in their lives and in the life of their community, but it is as if they have amnesia.  They do not remember how God has saved them and how God continues to save them.  Over and over, throughout scriptures, we hear this call to “remember.”  So perhaps a rebuking of scarcity and an claiming and practicing abundance could have started for them with this remembering. 

       But so often fear is an impediment to our remembering.  We know this, don’t we?  When we think about our own individual lives and the lives of our congregations, it is so easy to have this sort of amnesia that is caused by fear.  We see the numbers on the gas pump go higher and higher.  We see the costs on the grocery receipt jumping exponentially for fewer and fewer items.  We see the deficit between what people give and the cost of the ministries of the church growing wider.  It would be so easy for us to be like God’s people in the wilderness and to let our fear and a sense of scarcity take over.  We forget how God has provided for us over and over again and how God continues to provide for us.  Because, thankfully, we serve and follow a God of abundance, a God who easily makes the water to flow for God’s people in a place where this is not water.  God does not hesitate to give God’s people what they need, even when they are doubtful, fractious, complaining, and fearful. 

       And while it is right for us to trust in God’s abundance and God’s generosity, we are called, invited to do our part as well.  We have all already been given tremendous and abundant gifts by God, and we have been invited and encouraged to share those.  Embracing and practicing abundance while rebuking scarcity means that we are called to an honest, and prayerful inventory of our lives and our gifts—as individuals and as a congregation.  

       Years ago, I preached on stewardship in my congregation and asked people to focus on Jesus’s teaching, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”  For this practice, I encouraged everyone to look intentionally and prayerfully  at how they spend their money and what that says about where their hearts might be inclined.  One of my parishioners came up to me the next week and told me he was absolutely dismayed to discover that he paid more in his two country club/golf club memberships in a given month than he gave to the church, and that he was committed to changing that immediately.  He cancelled one of his memberships, and he added that money to his pledge to the church for the coming year.  It’s a wonderful example of how an individual chooses to rebuke scarcity and claim or practice abundance in their spending and giving practices.  

       So here are some questions for you to think about, as individuals and as a congregation, as you engage in this intentional fall practice here at St. Luke’s of rebuking scarcity and practicing abundance in your fall commitment campaign:  Plenty of Room at God’s table.  

       If stewardship is all that I do with all that I have, after I say I believe, then how am I being invited by God to rebuke scarcity and embrace abundance in my own life?  How are you being called to do that as a congregation here in this season?  What percentage of your income are you really offering to God through God’s church and where do your spending habits indicate where your heart truly lies?  How might you move closer to the spirit of the Biblical standard of 10% in giving, keeping in mind that it doesn’t have to happen all at once in one year, but it certainly could.  

       And what does it look like for you all to work together to rebuke scarcity and to claim or practice abundance here at St. Luke’s in the coming season?   

                  

 

---

[i] This story was originally shared in my sermon at St. Peter’s by-the-Sea in Gulfport, MS  for the 15^th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 18C, September 5, 2010

[ii] https://www.vancouver.anglican.ca/news/kentucky-woman-shines-with-her-own-kind-of-light

 

The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 20A_Grace Siloam Springs

 The Rev. Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg

Grace Episcopal Church, Siloam Springs, AR

The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 20A

September 20, 2026

       Good morning!  My name is Melanie Lemburg and I serve as the Canon to the Ordinary for the Diocese.  I’m happy to be making my first visit here with y’all and am grateful that Stan asked me to provide supply coverage for y’all this morning while he’s in Iona.  We’ve had to make a bit of a change in our plans this morning, due to the water issues, so I won’t be able to give you a full overview of the transition process, but I will talk a little about that in the announcements during the service.   

“God gives us what God knows that we need, in God’s time.”  I was in my early 20’s when I first heard these words, working at Stewpot, an inner-city soup kitchen and non-profit in downtown Jackson, Mississippi.  I was just out of college; it was my first job, and I also happened to be discerning a call to priestly ministry.  Stewpot was on the frontlines there in inner-city Jackson and had been for many years.  We were the recipients of abundance and generosity, and we also stood alongside people daily trying to help keep them afloat and help them get the most basic of things needed to survive:  food, clothes, medication, blankets.  

“God gives us what God knows that we need, in God’s time.”  

On a weekly basis, we saw the truth of this revelation in ways that never ceased to surprise us.  

One of the ways this bore fruit was in our food pantry.  It was not uncommon that our shelves would be almost bear, and someone would show up with an 18-wheeler of donated food that we had no idea was coming.  Every year, we’d give away food parcels at Thanksgiving and Christmas.  We’d have people sign up ahead of time, so we knew how much food we needed, and every year, our food pantry coordinator, Nancy Dennis, would be wringing her hands for weeks, fretting that we didn’t have enough turkeys.  And every year, the turkeys would come, right when we needed them.  We started referring to it as “Nancy’s turkey dance.”  

“God gives us what God knows that we need, in God’s time.”  

Over twenty-five years have passed since my time at Stewpot, and yet it was that refrain that echoed for me in my life this week while being in conversation with two of our readings for the day.  First, the gospel.  It’s a challenging parable, especially coming on the heels of Jesus’s teachings from the last few weeks of our lectionary-- teachings around power dynamics, right relationships in the church, and how many times we are called to forgive.  This week, we see this story from Jesus comparing the Kingdom of Heaven to a landowner who goes out throughout the day to hire workers for his vineyard.  He hires as many workers as he can find throughout the day and in the end, he pays them all the same thing, with the ones who start at the end of the day getting the same payment as the ones who work the full day. We are invited to take up the juxtaposition of envy and generosity, and at least for me, it is all too easy to find myself relating in this parable to the all-day workers in the vineyard as opposed to the ones who come late to the work and still receive an all-day’s wage. 

But what if….we look at this parable through the lens of God’s faithfulness and providence, we look at our lives through the lens of God’s faithfulness and providence, how might that shift our relationship with God, with others, with the world around us?  

Another writer puts it this way: “This parable is essentially about the generosity of God.  It is not about equity or proper disbursement of wages but about a gracious and undeserved gift.  It is not about an economic exchange but, rather, about a bestowing of grace and mercy to all, no matter what time they have put in our how deserving or undeserving we may think them to be.  God’s generosity often violates our own sense of right and wrong, our sense of how things would be if we ran the world.  [She continues,] Are we unable to celebrate another’s good fortune because we have not celebrated our own?  How often am I ungrateful for God’s graciousness and mercy?  How often do I deny God’s love and forgiveness in my own life?”[i]

“God gives us what God knows that we need, in God’s time.”  

And if this week’s parable wasn’t enough, we also have the reading from Exodus where God gives God’s people the gift of manna in the wilderness at the very beginning of their wilderness journey.  “Where are we going to get food?”  the people fret, understandably.  And God says, ok, how about this?  “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day [you] shall go out and gather enough for that day.”  Let’s take a minute and think about this.  For fifteen chapters of the book of Exodus, God has worked to free God’s people from slavery in Egypt.  The first line of chapter 16 (which we didn’t get as a part of the reading today) tells us that the people are entering the wilderness “one the fifteenth day of the second month after they had departed from the land of Egypt.”  Two and a half months since God parted the Red Sea for God’s people to walk through on dry land and then swept Pharoh’s army away so that they could be free!  And already the challenges of the wilderness are taking their toll.

In his Commentary on the Five Books of Moses (Part II In the Wilderness) translator Everett Fox writes this about the section of Exodus for today’s passage: “The portrait of a people…undergoing transformation in a place outside of normal geographic/cultural boundaries is a well-known phenomenon in traditional stories.  Anthropologist Victor Turner speaks of the “liminal” experience, where the protagonist…is separated spiritually and geographically from his origins in order to be changed into something new…This is paralleled by the process of pilgrimage in the world of ritual, as can still be observed among many community of the world to this day.  The desert is the site of liminality par excellence:  it is a harsh place that contains none of the succoring elements of human civilization, yet at the same time it leads the wandered into truer communication with nature and the divine…It is a place of betwixt and between, which mirrors the experience’s psychological state.  In the case of Israel, later biblical sources speak of the wilderness period with striking force, either as an example of the people’s long-standing and deeply ingrained rebelliousness…or fondly, as a kind of honeymoon period between God and Israel.  In both cases what is evoked is only a stage on the way, and not the final goal.”[ii]

It's interesting because this moment in time, this gift of manna—God giving Israel what they need in the wilderness—becomes a touch point that future generations carry forward as a key part of their story, and a reminder of what lies at the foundation of their relationship with God. 

“God gives us what God knows that we need, in God’s time.”  

You find yourselves at an interesting point, here in your life together at Grace.  You are in a place of remarkable health and vitality, and you have flourished here together with gifted lay leadership and staff, alongside the steady, brilliant presence of your rector.  And, you can see the liminal season coming not too far down the road with Stan’s retirement at the end of this year.  I wonder what key understandings of your unique identity here coupled with the unique way you all live out God’s call to you as a community will be the touchpoints for you in your coming liminal season?  Or what are the key things about you and your relationship with God as it is lived in this place that can be the touchpoints for you as you prepare to enter the wilderness?  How has God already provided you with all that you need in God’s time, and how are you being called to be open to receive that generous gift from God in new ways? 

       “God gives us what God knows that we need, in God’s time.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Saying Goodbye—the beginning of the wilderness (for the announcements)

“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”[iii]

-Annie Dillard (writer who died this week at age 81)

  

       

 

---

[i] Celghorn, Charlotte Dudley.  Pastoral Perspective in Feasting on the Word Year A Vol. 4 Ed. David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor. WJK: 2011, p 96. 

[ii] Fox, Everett.  The Five Books of Moses…A New Translation with Introductions, Commentary, and Notes.  Shocken Books, New York, 1995, pp341-342

[iii] Annie Dillard quote shared by The Englewood Book Review on Facebook on September 17, 2026

The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 18A-All Saints' Bentonville

 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. 

 

        

---

[i] https://mariannbudde.substack.com/p/a-time-to-be-brave

 

The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 17A-Grace, Pine Bluff

 The Rev. Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg

The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 17A

Grace Church, Pine Bluff, AR

August 30, 2026

       Good morning!  I’m Melanie Lemburg, and I’m glad to be making my first visit here with you as Canon to the Ordinary for the Diocese of Arkansas.  As Canon to the Ordinary, my main job is to support and assist the bishop in his work, and I offer him support in work around ordinations, as well as in cultivating leadership in the diocese and helping administrate the governance of the diocese.  I also help in clergy transitions and helping vacant parishes find clergy support in a variety of ways.  

       I’ve officially become an Arkansan in the last month or so, as my husband David and I bought a house in Little Rock.  And we also have had another significant life transition.  In the last few weeks, we helped move our oldest daughter to an apartment on Long Island for grad school, and we helped move our youngest son to college at University of Georgia.  So, just in the last few weeks, we have entered that new and uncharted realm of empty-nesting!  

       I’ve realized these last few weeks, that this new life of being an empty-nester is deeply connected to and entangled with my identity and my calling or vocation as a wife and a mother, so it has raised questions for me like—“what does it look like for me to faithfully parent young adult children in this new season?” and “how is our marriage moving into a different season or changing shape, now that we have ample space to focus on only the two of us in our day to day functioning?” 

       It is not uncommon for questions of identity to be all bound up in questions of vocation—both in our everyday lives and in the spiritual life.  I’ve been reminded this week of writer Frederick Buechner’s famous quote about vocation when he writes on vocation: “It comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a [person] is called to by God.  

There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Super-ego, or Self-Interest.” 

He continues, “By and large a good rule for finding out is this. The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you've missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you're bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren't helping your patients much either.” 

He concludes, “Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.”[i]

        The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.  

       In our gospel reading for today, which is an immediate continuation of the story from last week, we see Jesus and Peter wrestling with questions of Jesus’s identity and vocation.  Last week, Jesus asks his disciples “who do people say that I am?”  and they answer: “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”

       Then he asks them, “who do you say that I am?”  And Peter answers: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

       Jesus affirms Peter’s response and gives Peter a new identity, a new calling—naming him petrus or the rock upon which Jesus will build his church.  But then we see today, things take a pretty quick turn.  Jesus is speaking about the suffering which he must undergo as a part of his vocation, and Peter takes him aside to try to talk him out of it.  Jesus then publicly rebukes Peter, calling him now Satan and saying, “You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

       There are two things that are happening here that I think are pertinent to us.  The first has to do with suffering.  Peter, understandably, doesn’t want to see his friend Jesus suffer or die.  And Jesus is inviting Peter and the other disciples into a different understanding of suffering.  He is inviting them to understand that there are certain ways of suffering that can lead to new life and resurrection.  Now, this is a hard pill for us to swallow.  It’s been helpful to me to think about this in terms of a question someone else posed this week: “What is the difference in your life between suffering that leads to new life and resurrection and suffering that destroys life?”  (repeat the question)

       The other thing that is happening here is that Jesus is clearly articulating his vocation, who God is calling him to be.  The disciples, who are given voice by Peter, are wrestling with this vocation of Jesus toward suffering, death, and new life, but I suspect they are also wrestling with the implications for their own identity and vocation as followers and friends of Jesus.  Let’s face it; none of us signs up to be on the losing team!

       So, what does all of that have to do with us today?  Earlier this week, I read the daily meditation from Franciscan priest Richard Rohr.  It was shared this past Wednesday, and it has been in conversation with me around these ideas of identity and vocation this latter part of the week.  

Rohr writes, “ The author Sue Monk Kidd reflects on her midlife discovery of the concept of the true self:  Over and over again God calls you and me … to the cultivation of what Meister Eckhart called the “true seed” within us. God calls us to tend what lies seeded in the soul, this kernel of our truest nature—the God-image or True Self….

He continues, “Throughout our lives we create patterns of living that obscure this identity. We heap on the darkness, constructing a variety of false selves. We become adept at playing games, wearing masks as if life were a masquerade party. This can go on for a long while. But eventually the music of the True Self seeks us out. Sooner or later (often in midlife), we’re summoned back to the garden. We’re called to soul-work….”

He writes about how “Monk Kidd compares soul work to the art of whittling:  The art of soulmaking is taking our lives in our hands and—with all the love and discernment we can muster—gently whittling away the parts that don’t resemble the True Self. In spiritual whittling, though, we don’t discard the shavings. Transformation happens not by rejecting these parts of ourselves but by gathering them up and integrating them. Through this process we reach a new wholeness.

He concludes, “Spiritual whittling is an encounter with Mystery, waiting, the silence of inner places—all those things most folks no longer have time for. I’ll be honest. As I began my own spiritual whittling, I often clung to my “block of wood” resistantly. After all, wasn’t I fine just as I was?…But there were also days when I felt drawn to try, when I yearned to discover how I was living falsely….”[ii]

I love this idea of spiritual whittling as part of the work around what it means to understand our vocation and identity as followers of Jesus.  What are the parts of the shavings of my life, my identity, my vocation, that I would prefer to discard but that really need to be reintegrated back in so that I can be more fully the person God is calling me to be?  And where does suffering fit into all this?  How does suffering become life-giving and producing new life and resurrection versus being destructive?  

I wonder if these questions resonate with you as well—as individuals and as a congregation?  How is God calling you—as individuals and as Grace Episcopal Church in Pine Bluff?  Where is the place where the world’s deep hunger and your deep gladness meet?  What might be the spiritual shavings that you’d prefer to discard but that need to be integrated back in?  

       

 

---

[i] https://www.frederickbuechner.com/quote-of-the-day/2021/7/18/vocation

[ii] https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-true-seed-within/

The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 16A-St. Luke's Hot Springs

 The Rev. Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, AR

The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 16A

August 23, 2026

 

       Just this week, my husband David and I experienced a major identity shift.  We became “empty nesters.”  After 23 years of marriage (today!) and 22 years and 2 and ½ months spent with children in our home, we moved our youngest to college last weekend.  Now, I’ve had enough conversations in recent weeks with other empty nesters to know that there is one chilling phrase that more seasoned empty nesters offer us newbies with a smile.  (I wonder if you know it?)  It is, “Sometimes, they come back!”

       So for now, David and I are quietly taking up residence in a new home and in this new identity.

       And here’s what I’m learning about myself as I grow into this new identity:  for the entirety of the years of my priestly ministry in which I have always also been a mother, I have relied on the accountability of my family to keep me from overworking.  Because, let’s face it, there’s always more work to be done in the church and in the Kingdom of God!  So as a part of this new identity, this new season, I’m beginning to feel in my own soul a real wrestling with questions of vocation, of calling:  “What does it look like to faithfully parent young adult children?  What does a healthy work/life balance look like for me in this season of life, when the structure of home looks different?  Who is Jesus inviting me, calling me to be in this new season?”  

       In the gospel reading for today, Jesus invites a conversation with his closest friends and followers that dances with questions of his identity (and theirs as well).  He asks them, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”  and “who do you say that I am?”  I wonder what’s behind these questions for Jesus?  Is he testing them?  Asking them to hold up a mirror for him?  Trying to learn more about the word on the street or how much of an influencer he is currently?  What’s he doing here?

       Most of us learn about ourselves, our identity, through our relationships with others.  We develop patterns of behavior that both serve and hamper us in the development (and redevelopment) of our identity, and in the growing into our vocation, our calling of who God is inviting us to be.

       We see this dynamic at play in next week’s gospel reading.  (And here’s a spoiler alert for y’all and next week’s preacher!  Sorry/not sorry!). In our reading for this week, Peter is lauded by Jesus for his answer to the question: “who do you say that I am?”  It is only Peter who is courageous or bold enough to answer, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God!”  But then next week, in the portion of the gospel that immediately follows this reading, Peter gets rebuked by Jesus as Peter’s understanding of who Jesus is and their very relationship, itself, quickly turns to an impediment to who Jesus is being called to be by God and how he is being called to live into his mission.

       Paul hints a bit at this in the Romans passage for this week as he urges his readers (and us): “do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed so that you may discern what is the will of God.” I can’t help but wonder how our identities are so often conformed to this world?  What would it look like for our identities as individuals and as a Church to be transformed so that we may discern what is the will of God?  We get rare glimpses of this transformation in the spiritual life, and I wonder what could make us more open to this working of the Holy Spirit in, around, and through us? 

       This week, I read an article that’s had me thinking all week.  It’s titled “You Are Not a Robot Yet” and written by Kate Bowler who’s a writer and a professor at Duke Divinity School.  This article was fascinating to me because in it, Bowler is wrestling with understanding human identity in the face of Artificial Intelligence (or AI), and in the article, Bowler writes about “the kind of work it takes to resist what AI will do to our experience of being a person.”

       She writes, “The other day, I was reading advice from the heads of social media empires, and I began with a firm sense that I am a writer, a professor, and a podcast host.  But according to this advice, the more significant role I should inhabit is that of an ‘influencer’- a horrifying description of any person-rendered-as-a-brand inside the modern attention economy.  After that, it mostly devolved into advice about whether we all feel ready for TikTok.”

        “Are we ready?” She continues. “Do you feel ready to dance your life story or primary theological arguments on TikTok?” 

       “No ma’am, I don’t think so.  I’m a Mennonite, and the one great gift the Lord gave us is that he looked into our eyes and said:  I love you. You are precious to me.  Stick to that four-part harmony.  Just please, don’t dance.”      

       Bowler continues in the article to reflect on the life of Abraham Lincoln—how Lincoln possessed “an unshakeable sadness” and an understanding of and willingness to “live with the tragic.”

       She writes, “Living with the tragic means we understand the degree to which we act in concert with forces we cannot control.  We start to understand that the future isn’t simply lived; it is grappled with.  We ask ourselves:  what do we do with what’s left of our energy?  What truth needs to emerge? What evil must be confronted?  And we do all this as people who know that the hardest parts are unavoidable.  We never simply talk about progress because we would be acting like we forgot all that we learned when we are unmade.”[i]

       It’s an interesting notion to contemplate, how the hard, difficult, unavoidable parts contribute to the making and the unmaking of our identities in ways that are so important in our becoming who God has created us to be.  And can we just pause for a moment and acknowledge, just how uncomfortable and even sometimes devastating it is when something comes along with the power to unmake our identity?  

       There’s a line in today’s Old Testament reading from Isaiah that can also help serve as a touchstone for our identity and calling: “look to the rock from which you were hewn.”  This invites us into contemplating the question of what is the foundation of our identity—as individuals, as a Church?  What parts of our identity are foundational and unchanging, even in the seasons of deep change or unmaking?  I love how Bowler starts with a clear understanding/foundation of her identity: “a writer, a professor, and a podcast host.”  And she clarifies her call from God in light of that identity: “I’m a Mennonite, and the one great gift the Lord gave us is that he looked into our eyes and said:  I love you. You are precious to me.  Stick to that four-part harmony.  Just please, don’t dance.” 

       I invite you to join me in contemplating these questions this week.  As individuals, as members of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Hot Springs, as members of the Episcopal Diocese of Arkansas and The Episcopal Church, how are we being invited by the Holy Spirit to understand and maybe even reimagine our identities?  What parts of our identity are “the rock from which we were hewn” -- unchanging and unchangeable?  How are we being called to transformation rather than conformation to this world?  (Or another way of putting this is, if we aren’t being called to dance our theology on TikTok, then what is our calling?). Who is Jesus inviting you, calling you to be in this new season?”

 

---

[i] Bowler, Kate.  “You Are Not a Robot Yet”. Substack post on 8/20/26. https://katebowler.substack.com/p/you-are-not-a-robot-yet?r=l4l89&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

 

The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 14A-St. Matthew's Benton

 The Rev. Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg

The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 14A

St. Matthew’s Benton, AR

August 9, 2026

 

       Good morning!  My name is Melanie Lemburg, and I serve on the Bishop’s staff as the Canon to the Ordinary.  I’m glad to be making my first visit here with you today, even as I regret the circumstances of Jay’s health that have necessitated your need for supply clergy today.  I’ve really appreciated working with Debbie this week; y’all are in very capable hands as you navigate these next days, and I’ll be continuing to offer support to her and y’all from our office as well.  

       A few months ago, I read a book, and I jotted this quote down in my journal: “You don’t have to be particularly brave.  You just have to be a tiny, tiny bit more interested in something than you are frightened of it.  You just have to be one percent more curious than afraid.  This idea is powerful and transformative.”[i]  

       I was reminded of this quote as I spent time this week in conversation with the gospel passage.  Our reading for today from Matthew is coming right on the heels of last week’s passage.  Jesus has just learned that his cousin, John the Baptist, has been executed by Herod.  He seeks to withdraw (maybe to mourn? to rest or reset? to reckon with the fate that he sees laid out before himself?), but the crowds follow him.  And they are hungry, so he has compassion on them and feeds them with a miraculous feast.  Our reading for today picks up, and Jesus again seeks to withdraw to a deserted place for rest, restoration, and reconnection with God.  He sends the disciples on ahead across the lake where the seasoned fishermen spend all night being battered by the waves.  In the early hours of the morning, Jesus comes to them walking across the water, and this is when they really get scared.  (And who can blame them?  Seeing a person walking across the water toward their besieged boat in the middle of a storm defies everything we know about how the world works!)

       When they cry out, Jesus speaks to them; and I suspect it is the sound of that familiar voice as much as the words that he speaks that calm and reassures them: “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

       It is in that moment, filled with Jesus’s reassurance, that Peter becomes one percent more curious than afraid, a tiny bit more interested than frightened.  He wants to know what it’s like to walk on water with Jesus. 

       Miraculously, Peter gets out of the boat and walks on the water, but Matthew tells us, when he notices the strong wind, Peter becomes frightened, begins to sink and cries out: “Lord, save me!”  And his friend grabs him by the hand, gently chides him for losing his nerve, and they get back into the boat together.

       For a moment at least, Peter’s curiosity wins out over his fear.  It’s an interesting story about faith and fear and curiosity and how we navigate the storms and opportunities of life.  The disciples don’t have any control over the storm that blows up and batters the boat with wind and waves, and also, Peter doesn’t have to get out of the boat to join Jesus walking on the water. 

       In her book How We Learn to Be Brave:  Decisive Moments in Life and Faith, Bishop Mariann Budde writes about how we as individuals navigate our lives bravely through a series of decisive moments (like the one Peter experienced when he got out of the boat).  She writes, “I am convinced that we all have the capacity to live within a narrative of great adventure, no matter our life circumstances.  The courage to be brave when it matters most requires a lifetime of small decisions that set us on a path of self-awareness, attentiveness, and willingness to risk failure for what we believe is right.”  She continues, “It is also a profoundly spiritual experience, one in which we feel a part of something larger than ourselves and guided, somehow, by a larger Spirit at work in the world and in us.  Decisive moments make believers out of everyone, for no matter what name we give to it, the inexplicable, unmerited experience of a power greater than our own working through us is real.”[ii]

       Our curiosity, our courage both open us to a partnership with the workings of the Holy Spirit that are life-giving for us and for the world around us and allow us to be participants in the resurrection life that Jesus offers.  

       There are times in our lives when we get to choose to get out of the boat, to take a risk, to be brave and curious and see where Jesus is calling us.  There are other times when life forces us into situations that invite curiosity and courage from us, with the help of the Spirit.

       Several years ago, when I was on sabbatical in Hawaii, we decided with a group of friends to go sky-diving.  Now, I’ve never really wanted to go skydiving, and I knew that the hardest part for me would be getting out of the plane.  When the time came to jump, I found myself harnessed to the front of a man named Viktor, and when they rolled open the door in the side of the plane, I thought there was no way I was going to be able to jump.  But Viktor knew what he was doing.  He had us sit down on the floor of the plane with my legs dangling out and before I knew it, we were plummeting through the air.  

       What I learned later from my friends is that Viktor basically through me out of the plane, and as we free-fell, he kept encouraging me to open my eyes, to look around at the beauty—the sparkling blue of the Pacific Ocean and the lush green of the mountains, to be just a little bit more curious than I was afraid.  

       Sometimes when it’s time to get out of the boat, and we can’t do it on our own, the Holy Spirit acts like Viktor and throws us out, all the way encouraging us to be just a bit more curious than we are afraid.  

       Your invitation this week is to think about where in your life or in the life of this congregation God is inviting you to be a tiny bit more curious than afraid? How are you being invited to step out of the boat in faith?  Or if you have already been thrown out, where are you being invited to be curious, to see beauty and opportunity?  What work is the Holy Spirit already doing that invites you further into the resurrection life?       

 

---

[i] Jaouad, Suleika.  The Book of Alchemy. P 62

[ii] Budde, Mariann. How We Learn to Be Brave:  Decisive Moments in Life and Faith p. xviii

The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 12A-St. Paul's Newport, AR

 The Rev. Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg 

The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 12A

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Newport, AR

July 26, 2026

 

      Good morning!  My name is Melanie Lemburg, and I’m the (still relatively new) Canon to the Ordinary for the Diocese of Arkansas.  I’m delighted to be with y’all for the very first time today; I’ve heard wonderful things about you from your rector, Theresa!  

      It’s been a stressful week for me and our family.  We’re in the process of moving; we bought a home in Little Rock just this week, and we’re selling our home in Savannah, GA at the beginning of August.  When I leave here today, I’m going to drive to Savannah to help my husband and our two young adult children start sorting and throwing away and organizing our stuff to get ready to move. (I’ve become ridiculously excited about the prospect of ordering a roll up dumpster to be placed in our driveway!). However, this move has already had its share of bumps (and I suspect there are more to come.). Somewhere along the way, between the company who is supposed to be overseeing our move and the company who is actually going to move us, we got lost.  And so late this week, there has been a decided scrambling on both companies’ parts to try to get our move scheduled in the time frame we need it to be scheduled.  And let me tell you:  it does not feel good to feel like we’ve been lost in the midst of this already major and stressful transition in the life of our family. 

      In our gospel reading for today, we see Jesus continuing in Matthew’s gospel with a series of 8 parables that are found in this chapter 13.  (Part of our reading today is actually wedged into the reading from last week, falling between Jesus’s teaching of the parable of the weeds that were sown among the good seed and the explanation of the parable.). And in today’s reading, Jesus tells a series of very short stories about things that were hidden or found that were great treasurers or that bear good fruit.  Now, what’s interesting to me about these stories today is that in order for something to be found, it is implied that, at some point, it was lost (or maybe just hidden).  

      Our collect for today also gives us little hints and tastes of finding and losing as we prayed: “O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal…”

      It’s interesting that today we are asking for an increase and a multiplication of God’s mercy so that we may not lose eternal things as we pass through things temporal.  

      The Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor writes this about these parables from Matthew’s gospel: “The striking thing about all these images is their essential hiddenness—the mustard seed hidden in the ground, the yeast hidden in the dough, the treasure hidden in the field, the pearl hidden among all the other pearls, the net hidden in the depths of the sea.  [She concludes] If the kingdom is like these, then it is not something readily apparent to the eye but something that must be searched for, something just below the surface of things waiting there to be discovered and claimed.”[i]  

      And what I’m wrestling with this week (and I suspect y’all are no strangers to this as well), is that it is so much easier to search below the surface of things to find the Kingdom of God when things are going well or easily.  It is infinitely harder to do this work of looking below the surface of things to see the Kingdom of God when we, ourselves, are feeling discouraged or stressed or lost.  That’s why the collect has been a necessary companion for me this week with this gospel reading: as a reminder and an invitation to me to ask for God’s mercy to help me see God’s kingdom below the surface of things.  

      So what are the ways that we can do that looking to see the Kingdom of God that is hidden or dwells just below the surface of things?  Well, here’s what has helped me this week:   Staying connected in those relationships that help us feel found.  Being open to joy and to the places that the hidden kingdom of God peeks out and us and gives us glimpses of where to look deeper.  Spending time in prayer with God, who is worthy of our trust, who protects us, who is abounding in steadfast mercy and loving-kindness, and for whom we will never be lost.  

      Years ago, I was introduced to the singer, songwriter and poet Carrie Newcomer.  Her music and poetry and writings continue to be a lovely companion to me on my own spiritual journey.  Many years ago, I came across a song of hers that is titled Every Little Bit, and it’s all about how the kingdom of God can be hidden in plain sight just below the surface of things.  

      Here’s how it goes:

[VERSE 1]
Just beyond my sight
Something that I cannot see
I've been circling round a thought
That's been circling round me
Like the vapor of a song
That is just out of earshot
And I thought I knew the question
But I guess not

[Chorus]
There it is just below the surface of things
In a flash of blue, and the turning of wings
Drain the glass, drink it down, every moment of this
Every little bit of it, every little bit

[VERSE 2]
I swam against the tide
I tripped on my own pride
So I'll try again today
To get out of my own way
The face was always in the stone
Said Michelangelo
We just have to chip and clear
To see what is already thеre

[Chorus]
There it is just below the surface of things
In a flash of blue, and the turning of wings
Drain the glass, drink it down, every moment of this
Every little bit of it, every little bit.[ii]

       Your invitation this week is to pay attention to what is lost, what is hidden, what lives just below the surface of things, in your life, in this church, and in the world around you, both in good times and in challenging times; and to ask for God’s mercy to find and be found by God. 

        

 

 

---

[i] Taylor, Barbara Brown. The Seeds of Heave:  Sermons on the Gospel of Matthew.  As quoted in Everyday Connections; Reflections and Practices for Year A.  ed. Heidi Haverkamp.  WJK: 2022, p 387.

[ii] Newcomer, Carrie. Every Little Bit of It.  A Permeable Life.  2014.