The Third Sunday of Advent-Year C

The Very Rev. Melanie Dickson Lemburg The Third Sunday of Advent Year C December 15, 2024 A letter to James Francis McLaurin upon the occasion of his baptism. Dear James, Today is your baptism day. It is the official beginning of your life in the faith, the day when your parents and godparents and all of us are recognizing that God has, even before your birth, claimed you as God’s beloved, and we are all saying “yes” on your behalf. We are all promising that we will help raise you to live your life as God’s beloved, even as we try to live our lives as God’s beloved alongside you. And our baptismal covenant gives us the framework of how to do that. (It’s why we renew it, periodically, throughout the year, when others are baptized and on special Sundays.) On this third Sunday of Advent, our gospel reading gives us a baptism sermon from Jesus’s cousin, John the Baptist. John is out in the wilderness and the people are flocking to him to be baptized. John tells them that in baptism and beyond, they will find themselves converted to living life differently. They should no longer hold fast to the priorities of the world but rather they should seek to live out God’s priorities which are justice, mercy, compassion, and equity for all God’s people, and that when they live out these priorities, they will be revealed in the fruit of their actions. John tells his listeners to repent, and even though it’s strange to think about as we baptize you today, sweet baby James, baptism is a call to both conversion and to repentance. Conversion is setting our feet on the path that Christ has trod before us: a path of humility, a path of compassion and mercy, of healing and reconciliation. Conversion is setting our feet on the path of love and following it through hills and valleys, over mountains and through deserts. It means committing to living and walking the way of Christ in times of hardship and in times of plenty. In your baptism, James, we acknowledge that this path is not always easy. We need each other as fellow travelers on the way to give encouragement, support, and even correction. Because we also acknowledge that each of us will stray from this path, over and over again, throughout our lives. And it’s not just about how we stray individually, either. At times, we will all stray together, as a whole people, and we will step or fall off the path of justice and mercy, equity and compassion. And so, we have the call to repentance, that whenever we “fall into sin” or step off the right path, we will turn away from following our own selfish desires or the demands that the world whispers or shouts in our ears that we should seek, and that we will turn back toward God. Repentance means turning away from all that divides us from each other and from God and turning back again to loving God with our whole heart and mind and strength and loving our neighbors as ourselves as we try to live the way that Christ has showed us. Advent is a time when we recognize the many ways we both inadvertently and purposefully fall into sin, and we heed this call to turn back toward God, to make our hearts ready for God’s return in Jesus. Our whole lives are made up of this dance of falling away from God because we have sought the own devices and desires of our own hearts and repenting and returning to God. And the good news is that no matter how many times and in whatever fashion we fall away, nothing can keep us from being God’s beloved. As we say in your baptism today, we are “marked as Christ’s own forever.” No matter what. And that truth inspires us to live our lives as God’s beloved, to bear fruits worthy of repentance, to show people know that we are God’s beloved by the way that we love. Because that is what it means to live life as God’s beloved. Today, sweet James, is the third Sunday of Advent which is also Gaudete Sunday, and Gaudete means rejoicing! We light the pink candle, which is the church’s color for rejoicing; we hear readings about rejoicing, even as we are called to repentance. It may seem strange, but they are two sides of the same coin, repentance and rejoicing. So today, I will close with a blessing that was written by the writer Kate Bowler and shared in her Advent Devotion titled A Weary World Rejoices. It is both prayer to God and blessing that is especially appropriate for you and us on your this Gaudete Sunday which is also your baptism day. It’s titled A Blessing for Our Part in the Bigger Story. Blessed are we, gathered already into the plot, part of the epic story you, [God,] have been writing from long before we were ever born. Thank you that we are not separated into lives of loneliness but joined together as those who were loved into being. We are made for meaning and a purpose that only our days can breathe into action. Pull us closer to the bigger story that reminds us that our ordinary lives are the stuff of eternity. You fitted each of our days for small efforts and endless attempts to pick ourselves up again. In our triumphs and embarrassments, we need to be told again (sigh) that we are not just everyday problems. We are a story of extraordinary love.” i May you always remember, sweet James, that you are a part of God’s story of extraordinary love. Your sister in Christ, Melanie+ i. https://courses.katebowler.com/courses/advent-devotional-2024/lessons/week-3-2/topics/day-15-2024/

The Second Sunday of Advent Year C

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg The Second Sunday of Advent-Year C December 8, 2024 We don’t really get to see Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, in today’s readings. But we do get to hear from him; and that’s pretty extraordinary given his story. Zechariah is a small-town priest. He’s at work, in the holy of holies, offering prayers and incense on behalf of the gathered people. Maybe he’s praying for himself, for his wife Elizabeth, for God’s people Israel? Or maybe he’s preoccupied—wondering what Elizabeth is making him for dinner that night? Suddenly, unexpectedly, an angel appears and tells Zechariah not to be afraid. The angel assures Zechariah that God is going to give Zechariah and Elizabeth a son who God will raise up to be a prophet like Elijah, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit. And his job will be to “make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” But Zechariah scoffs and questions Gabriel saying, “‘How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years.’ (Don’t you appreciate how he shows a little diplomacy for his wife’s age? You can tell he’s been married a while.) And the angel, who seems to get his feathers ruffled a bit with Zechariah’s scoffing replies, um, excuse me! “‘I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.’” So Zechariah is silenced for at least nine months, and in that silence and space, something changes in Zechariah. Because when John is born nine months later, Zechariah is suddenly able to speak again, and the first thing he does is to sing a song that is overflowing with joy. Just as John grows inside Elizabeth, being nurtured by her while waiting to be born, joy grows in Zechariah in his season of enforced silence. And he gives birth to joy in his song that we all read together this morning. This past week, I read a meditation on Advent 1 by the biblical scholar Diana Butler Bass. She was writing about how Advent is a season that focuses on both justice and joy, and here’s what she writes about joy: “Joy is not happiness, even though the two are related. Joy is delight, gladness, and pleasure — a deep inner wellspring of contentment and comfort. It is a disposition, an outlook, and maybe even a purposeful practice. Happiness is what we feel in relation to external conditions; joy is experienced regardless of circumstances. A wise maxim says, ‘We pursue happiness, we choose joy.’” She continues, “Neither justice nor joy are easy. Indeed, they can be elusive. We need new eyes to see them, renewed hearts to experience them, and willing hands to act on them in the world.” i. Perhaps the silence gives Zechariah the space to see, experience, and act on joy in new and different ways, giving him the opportunity to see where he can choose joy in his own life and recognize the presence of God’s joy in God’s people Israel. Because Zechariah’s song isn’t just about the wonderful gift that has been given to him and Elizabeth; it also is recognizing how God’s work, God’s dream is being brought to fulfillment in a way that will benefit all people. There’s simultaneously an individual and a cosmic scope to Zechariah’s song and to his joy. In our epistle reading for today, the apostle Paul also knows something about choosing joy, and he does this in less than ideal circumstances. When Paul is writing his letter to the Philippians which is overflowing with joy, he is actually imprisoned, which shows us that we don’t have to be happy or even comfortable to choose joy. In fact, Paul’s joy seems to find its roots in gratitude, in remembrance, and in reflecting on his intimate relationship with the people in the church of Philippi along with a commitment to his work in spreading the good news of Jesus Christ while he tries to give them the tools they will need once he is gone. So, how do we choose joy this Advent? First, we have to be able to recognize joy in our lives, to name it when it shows up, and to embrace it. For each of us, joy will look and feel and taste differently. But ultimately, joy is “an intense feeling of deep spiritual connection, pleasure, and appreciation.” ii Joy is often something unexpected, often a surprise. Joy is a sense of well-being, and sense that things are as they should be. In his poem “Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves,” poet J. Drew Lanham writes, …Joy is being loved up close for who we are. …Joy is the day off, just because. Joy is the kiss of that one, or the just verdict delivered by twelve. Joy is the everything, the nothing. The simple, the complex. Joy is the silly, the serious, the trivial. The whale enormous, the shrew’s small. Joy is the murmuration, then the stillness. Joy is the inexplicable coincidence. Joy is what was meant to be. The mystery of impossibility happening. The assurance of uncertainty. Joy is my seeking. Your being. It is mine for the taking. Ours to share. More than enough to go around, when it seems nowhere to be found. iii As one of our Wednesday healing service community shared, joy is the current that runs underneath and through our lives, like Nat King Cole’s Joy to the World playing in the background while she was doing her dishes. One of the spiritual practices proposed by Kate Bowler in her Advent Devotion A Weary World Rejoices this week is that when we discover joy in our lives, then to give ourselves permission to hum Joy to the World in acknowledgement.iv Once we start to see and acknowledge joy in our lives and the world around us, then, we are called to seek, to choose joy. We do this through nurturing connections with others; through time in silence and with God; through spending time in nature which can nurture and feed our joy; through expressing gratitude, even in the midst of hardship; through God’s reorienting of us after things don’t go as we had planned. Joy is a sense of connection with a story that is so much bigger than our small selves. Joy is the current that runs throughout our lives. This week, may you have new eyes to see it, renewed hearts to experience it, and willing hands to act on it in the world. i.From Diana Butler Bass’s Substack page, The Cottage: Sunday Musings: Advent 1 - by Diana Butler Bass ii.Brown, Brene. Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and The Language of Human Experience. Random House: New York, 2021, p 205. iii.Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves – J. Drew Lanham iv.The Weary World Rejoices Individual Download - Kate Bowler p 23

The Twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 28B

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg 26th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 28B November 17, 2024 Years ago, before I went to seminary, I created and organized enrichment programming for senior citizens and adults with mental disabilities at the Stewpot soup kitchen in inner city Jackson, MS. Many of these folks lived in the personal care homes in the area, on small, fixed incomes, and they would get turned out onto the streets during the day with not much to occupy their time. Stewpot gave these folks a place to go, and it was my job to give them something to do. One of these participants was a woman named Cheryl. Cheryl was crazy as a betsy bug. Her favorite thing to do art therapy, and I’d often sit beside her and listen to her talk about all the famous people she knew and how they’d interacted with her life recently (often in really unhealthy ways). One day, Cheryl showed up with a beautiful, gold butterfly necklace. She was clearly proud of her necklace, and I complemented her on it, telling her how pretty it was and how I also liked butterflies. She cocked her head at me for a moment, and then she surprised me by pulling the necklace over her head and wordlessly offering it to me. Well, I was mortified. Here she is with this cherished piece of beauty in an otherwise drab and impoverished life. I was there to help her, and she was trying to give me her necklace. I told her I couldn’t possibly take it, and she became more and more insistent, and in that moment, I realized that she needed to be able to give the necklace to me, and that I needed to be able to accept it. So, I did. Even after all these years, that story reminds me that there’s a strange dance between hope and gratitude, in giving and receiving. We see it in our Old Testament reading for today. Hannah has longed for a child for many, many years. She goes to the temple to pray, and she asks God to grant her a child. But then, get this! In that same prayer, she promises that if God grants her a child, she’s going to turn around and give that child right back to God, raising him as a Nazirite, someone who was dedicated to the service of God, giving him away just as soon as he is weaned. In the midst of her hope, Hannah offers a promise of gratitude in this pledging of her long-awaited child to the service of God. And I can’t help wonder which came first for Hannah, gratitude or hope, giving or receiving? For they are so closely intertwined in her story. For Hannah, the incarnation of her hope becomes her child Samuel, and she willingly and gratefully turns him back over to God. It’s a huge gift that no one even asked of her. When we hope, we acknowledge that we are, in fact, powerless. And at the same time, when we hope, we become active agents in the world. We often think of hope as an emotion, but it’s not; not really. Hope is a cognitive-behavioral process; hope is an action. And it is when we connect with our gratitude, that our hope is further fueled, more deeply inspired. Today, our annual giving campaign is drawing to a close. The theme for this year has been “Rooted in Hope” and the passage we chose to support this is from Jeremiah17:7-8: Blessed are those who trust in the Lord… They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. At the beginning of the campaign, we asked you to consider: What are the ways that the roots of your faith are nourished, and what role does the spiritual community of St. Thomas play in that nourishing? I would also encourage you to think today about hope and gratitude. What are the hopes you can name for your life and for this community? What is that gratitude that you can also name? How are those interconnected? My hope for St. Thomas in the coming year is that we will be a place that creates space for belonging for everyone; that we will nourish and encourage each other in the spreading of the good news, that though the presence of the Holy Spirit, each of us will be transformed, more and more, into the image and likeness of Christ. My hope for St. Thomas is that we will take our discipleship of Jesus seriously, committing to it faithfully in new and exciting ways. I am so grateful for all the ways that we are already doing this work together, and I am eager to see what God has in store for us next! I am grateful for our Wednesday healing service conversations, and for the ways we gather in a circle with kind hands outstretched to pray for each other and the needs of the world. I am grateful for all the glorious music we make together—singing and bells, organ and piano, and so many other ways. I am grateful for wise women who laugh and who invite us to see diminishment not with discouragement but with joy; and I am grateful for people with the gifts of making things more hospitable. And I am grateful for you who show up and get things done. I am grateful for all the ways that we share our joys and our sorrows, for the ways that we teach and learn from each other. I am grateful for our children and grandchildren and all the ways that surprise me and give me hope. I am grateful when we step out and try new things, and I am grateful for tried and tested ways of being community. There is so much that I receive from each and every one of you, and I am so grateful for you and for St. Thomas. The butterfly has long been used as a symbol of the resurrection. For me, it’s also always been a symbol of hope. And when I see them, they spark my gratitude. What are you grateful for here at St. Thomas? What are you being called to give and what are you being called to receive in this next season in the life of the church as a part of your gratitude and as a part of your hope?

The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 27B

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg 25th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 27B November 10, 2024 A letter to Sullins Hughes and Tinsley Watson upon the occasion of their baptisms. Dear Sullins and Tinsley, Happy baptism day, babies! And what a joyful day it is! You are gathered here with your families and your friends, with your church family, and in just a few moments, your parents and godparents will make an important statement on your behalf. As you all stand together before God and this gathered congregation, your parents and godparents will acknowledge that God has created each of you and has claimed you as God’s beloved since even before your births. In your baptism, we are all accepting God’s claim on you as God’s beloved, and we are promising to uphold you in living your life as God’s beloved. We all are promising that just as we try to live into our baptismal covenant, the framework of what living life as God’s beloved looks like, we will teach you to live this way, too: proclaiming the gospel by word and example; seeking and serving Christ in all persons; loving our neighbors as ourselves; striving for justice and peace among all people; respecting the dignity of every human being. It’s not easy living this way, and it’s why we need each other: to offer encouragement, forgiveness, and hope when need it most to continue on this path of faithful living as God’s beloved and disciples of Jesus. Two of our readings offer interesting perspectives on your baptism today, sweet Sullins and sweet Tinsley. In the Old Testament reading of Ruth, Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi leave Ruth’s home of Moab to journey back to be with Naomi’s people the Israelites. Now Moab and Israel were two neighboring nations who shared the same language, and much of the same history—they were essentially cousin-nations. And throughout much of their existence, they were at war; they did not get along. There was a deep enmity between the two peoples. So for Ruth to leave Moab and journey with Naomi back to Israel was a real challenge. There was a risk that she would not have been welcomed there. Naomi has encouraged Ruth to stay with her own people, but she refuses, and so she travels with Naomi to a place where she is a stranger in a strange land, where people will look down on her because of who she is. In today’s reading, we see Naomi working with Ruth to catch Ruth a husband and to secure the future of these two vulnerable women. The story of Ruth and Naomi is a story that emphasizes the loyalty and fidelity that can be found in familial relationships, and you both know something about being firmly ensconced in a loving, extended family. In fact, each of you bears a name that ties you firmly into the line of your family, even as your names are unique enough to give you space to forge your own paths. Interestingly enough in today’s passage, we see how Ruth and Naomi’s family becomes enlarged even beyond Ruth’s marriage to Boaz, as the women of the neighborhood act as surrogate family for Ruth and Naomi, even going so far as to name Ruth’s child. It’s an important reminder for all of us today that when we become a part of God’s family, our family expands to include all of God’s beloved—even those people we wouldn’t normally choose, those who we might consider to be stranger or even enemy. All are included in the family of God; all have been created as God’s beloved. And together we have so much to offer others, even the stranger, (especially the stranger) as God’s extended family. In our gospel reading for today, we see two parts to this reading. In the first part, Jesus in Mark’s gospel is offering a critique of his own religion—specifically calling out the hypocrisy and the ways that the religious elite take advantage of vulnerable people. He lifts up the widow, who is one of the vulnerable, and points out her generosity as a commendation of generous living and a critique of those who harm her because of their own greed and selfishness. We would do well to be mindful that Jesus’s critique is just as pertinent to Christianity today as it was to the Judaism of his day, as we renew our baptismal covenants today and we see clearly all the ways that we fall short of being faithful followers of Jesus. We are mindful of the ways that we choose ourselves over the needs of others. We remember all the ways that we have been hypocritical in saying one thing with our mouths and doing another with our actions. Jesus gives us the widow today as an image of what faithfulness and what generosity can look like, when we are seeking to serve God over ourselves. The widow can inspire us to ask ourselves the question: What does it mean to live a generous life? What might my life look like if I were to try to live it more generously? Maybe it means giving more to those in need? Maybe it means seeing injustice and working to remedy it? Maybe it means giving people the benefit of the doubt instead of making assumptions? What might my life look like if I were to try to live it more generously? It is the call of the family of God, and it is a question that we, God’s beloved, should wrestle with throughout our lives, and we will help you remember it and wrestle with it as well as you grow here in the life of your faith. You will teach us, Sullins and Tinsley, and we will teach you. And together we will fail, and learn, and grow, and try again, offering forgiveness and hope and the promise of the resurrection life as the family of God’s beloved. I’m so grateful you are joining us! Your sister in Christ, Melanie+ The Big Question this Week: Who are the vulnerable people in the family of God who I need to pay attention to, to open my heart to, to give the benefit of the doubt? How am I being called to live a more generous life?

The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 25B

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg 23rd Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 25B October 27, 2024 This morning, we’re going to engage with the gospel story in way where I will invite you ponder aspects of your own life with some guided questions.i Feel free to close your eyes as you listen, if that is helpful. Bartimaeus is a beggar, blind and alone while surrounded by a sea of people. How are you like Bartimaeus today? What are the things that are keeping you from seeing Jesus? He hears of Jesus and for the first time in a long time, he begins to hope—hope that someone will truly see him, help him, show him a way out of begging toward wholeness and belonging. What tiny bud of hope blooms in you? Bartimaeus calls out to Jesus, “Mercify me!” And the crowd tells him to be quiet; don’t make a scene; know your place. What are the voices who tell you not to change, not to hope? And he almost listens to them, obeys them, not taking the chance. Because sometimes it’s just too painful to hope. What part does your own voice play in your silencing, in the silencing of your hope? But that tiny bud of hope has fully flowered in Bartimaeus and can no longer be ignored, so he calls out again, this time even louder: “Mercify me!” And Jesus stops. And he turns. But Bartimaeus can’t see any of this. And Jesus tells the crowd to call Bartimaeus. The very ones who had held him back, suddenly shift to help him saying: “Take heart! He is calling you!” And in that moment, Bartimaeus has a tremendous choice: to stay there in the safety of his cloak—his blanket, shelter, source of income, his place of home-or to leave it behind so he can answer the Lord’s call. What comforts do you cling to that you think sustain you, that you need to throw off so you can move forward as Jesus calls you to grow, to change, to deepen, to be healed? Where might Jesus be inviting you to step forward, to move toward him in trust, even when you cannot see the path before you? Bartimaeus makes his way to Jesus, and Jesus asks him: “What do you want me to do for you?” What do you want Jesus to do for you? How would you answer him? Bartimaeus doesn’t ask for Jesus to make him not be a beggar anymore; he goes deeper, asking Jesus to “open these eyes, Lord, long closed.”ii What do you need to see differently? What are your impediments to seeing, to trusting? (Or what blocks you from seeing, from trusting?) What lies below the surface of your longing? Dive deep for it, like a shiny penny in the deep end of the pool, your hand outstretched to claim it. Jesus tells Bartimaeus that he can go home now; his faith has made him well; his trust has saved him. Where is the healing, the hope bubbling up from within you? When Bartimaeus regains his sight, he doesn’t go home. Instead he follows Jesus on the way, along the path of discipleship toward Jerusalem and the cross. What new direction will your faithfulness to Jesus lead you into next? i. This is inspired by a reflection titled Choosing Life in the book Finding Jesus, Discovering Self by Caren Goldman and William Dols. ii. This is from a line in David Whyte’s poem “The Opening of Eyes.”

The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 23B

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg 21st Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 23B October 13, 2024 A letter to Ollie and Ian Hartley upon the occasion of their baptism. Dear Ollie and Ian, Today is a big day in your lives and in the life of this church; it is the day that you are being baptized. Your dad tells me that ever since you first attended St. Thomas, you have known that this is your church, and I think that just as you’ve known you belong here, we’ve known that, too. And today, that becomes official! The other day, we met and talked about baptism, and I told you some really important things that I’m going to say again here today so that you can remember them, and we can all help you remember. Before you boys were born (9 and 6 years ago), God created you and made you good. God has loved you since even before you were born, and God has said of each of you, “you are my beloved.” You are and always will be God’s beloved, and nothing can change that. Today, all of us together are saying along with you: Yes! Ollie and Ian are God’s beloved! (And y’all are saying it too: Yes! I am God’s beloved!) You are saying that you want to try to live your lives as God’s beloved. Your family is saying that they will help you live your lives as God’s beloved. And we your church are saying that we will help you live as God’s beloved. It’s wonderful being God’s beloved, but it’s not easy. That’s why we need each other so much. We help each other remember what it means to live as God’s beloved, and we encourage each other to do that. Living as God’s beloved means that we treat everyone with love, kindness, respect; we work to try to treat other people how we ourselves want to be treated. It means that when we make mistakes and hurt someone, we try to make things right with them. It means that we commit to gathering together regularly for worship and praying together and listening to bible stories and having communion. And it means that we try to share the good news of God’s belovedness with everyone we encounter out in the world beyond this place. You’ve seen some of that already in the lessons you learn in children’s chapel, in Vacation Bible School, and in your friendships with the other children here. We’ll help you and you’ll help us to remember that we are always God’s beloved and this is the heart of what it means to be the Church. You’ve already helped me remember this just this week. When you asked me if you could dunk your whole heads in the baptism font at your baptism, it helped me remember the call to belong to God isn’t always neat and tidy but sometimes is messy and demands our whole body, our whole selves. When you asked me if I thought the church would cheer for you after you are baptized, I thought, well, we certainly should, because how better could we show you how joyful we are about your belonging. Our job today and beyond is to help you remember that you belong to God—and there is absolutely nothing that can ever change that. From this day forward, you will be “marked as Christ’s own forever.” We see the truth of this in our readings for today—when Job has lost absolutely everything, Job still belongs to God; God is with Job even when Job can’t feel God. When the young man comes to Jesus, eager to prove himself, telling Jesus he already follows all of the commandments, Mark tells us Jesus looks at the man and loves him, and then tells him to go sell all that he owns and follow Jesus. Jesus is reminding the young man that no matter what he might give up or lose, nothing can change the fact that he is beloved of God. That is essence of what it means to follow Jesus. And so, Ian and Ollie, yes we will cheer today after you are baptized. And we’ll cheer for you and support you all along the way, just as you will do for us. Welcome to the family of God! Your Sister in Christ, Melanie+ The Big Question this Week: Imagine what it might be like if you gave away or lost your income, insurance, savings, home, and possessions. Who would you still be? What would you have left? How might this imagining invite you to see your life, your worth, and your relationship with God differently? Or think about a time in your life when you suffered a life-changing loss (relationship, job, person, possessions). And think about the questions above in light of that experience.

The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 21B

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg 19th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 21B September 29, 2024 Once upon a time there were two neighbors who had adjoining farms. They were good neighbors. Members of their families had married over the years, and they’d all had a good relationship. They tended to lean the same way politically and they had shared the border between their farms peacefully for over half a century. One day Randolf visited his neighbor Floyd’s farm and thought he recognized one of his pigs among Floyd’s. Randolf convinced himself that Floyd must have stolen his pig, and no one could convince him differently. So Randolf complained to the authorities, and they organized a trial. In order to be fair, the judge appointed the jury to be equal parts from each family-six from Randolf’s and six from Floyd’s. The great surprise came when one of Randolf’s family members decided against him, tipping the jury in favor of Floyd’s claim that the pig had always been his. Randolf seemed to accept the results, although it must have been a humiliating experience, and life went on. A year and a half later two of Randolf’s nephews got into a fight with one of the trial witnesses who had testified against Randolf, and they beat the man to death. “Over the course of the next decade the two families were at war; there was vicious stabbing, a string of vigilante shootings, posse raids, and a Supreme Court case. A house was burned to the ground. A man was hanged. Women were beaten. All told about 80 different people got drawn into the feud across the region.” This is the story of the infamous dispute between the Hatfields and the McCoys on the border between Kentucky and West Virginia. And it is a quintessential example of how regular people can get drawn into the forces of high conflict that are very difficult to escape. One of the key aspects of high conflict is the invisible force that encourages us as humans to sort ourselves into groups or categories. This is actually a biological imperative that has been necessary for our survival as a species, this impulse to sort into groups can be both helpful and harmful. It is helpful in its encouraging us to protect the other members of our group. It is harmful in that it nudges us into an us versus them mindset, collapsing complexity. We see these forces at work in three of our readings for today—the Old Testament reading of Esther, the Psalm, and the gospel. The book of Esther reads like a soap-opera. “It tells the story of Esther who becomes Queen in Persia after she wins a beauty pageant that the king puts on (after having set aside his previous wife who refused to show off her beauty at his request). Esther, who is a Hebrew, follows the counsel of her uncle and guardian Mordechi, and keeps her faith a secret from her new husband. Meanwhile, political machinations unfold between Haman, the king’s right-hand man and Esther’s uncle. When Mordechi refuses to pay homage to Haman because of his faith, Haman hatches a plot to kill all the Hebrew people in Persia. In an epic plot twist, which we see today, Esther orchestrates the salvation of her uncle and her people and ensures the assassination of the dastardly Haman.” It’s a classic us-versus-them, good-versus-evil conflict in which the underdogs are saved, and the bad guy with all the power gets his comeuppance. And then there’s the psalm. Do I need to even say anything about the pslam? It’s all about how God has protected God’s people from their enemies, siding against the enemies in their us-versus-them conflict. Our gospel reading for today is a continuation of Mark’s gospel that we’ve been reading over the past few weeks. This week picks up right after last week, when the disciples have been arguing about who is the greatest among them, and Jesus takes a little child into his arms and tells them they must all be like the little child. When today’s reading begins, we can assume that the little child is still sitting there in Jesus’s arms, as the disciples begin to complain that they have seen someone doing deeds of power in Jesus’ name who was not one of his followers. The disciples are leaning into their group as Jesus’s in-crowd, falling into the trap that we all fall into, but Jesus’ flips it all upside down by responding that “whoever is not against us is for us.” Ok, that’s not what they were expecting. Isn’t the line supposed to be “whoever’s not for us is against us?” That helps with the clearly defined lines between us and them; it makes things so much simpler to be able to identify who’s in our group and who isn’t. Whoever isn’t against us is for us? Well, how on earth are we supposed to draw lines with that? But Jesus pushes his disciples and us even beyond that, emphasizing that a key aspect of discipleship is how we keep or make peace. It can be overwhelming to think about keeping or making peace once we find ourselves in a high conflict situation. It doesn’t even have to be a Hatfield/McCoy type feud. It can be overwhelming to think about how to make peace even in the midst of ordinary life, in the midst of our current election year with all of its dramatic polarization. Can you think of a time when you found yourself in a polarized or intractable situation? How was it resolved? Was it peaceful? What could a peaceful resolution have looked like? So many times, in the midst of disagreements, when we find someone we care about on the “other side,” it’s easier to say, well, let’s just agree to disagree. And while that may preserve the relationship, it does not really promote true peace. It (maybe) allows us to stay on our own sides and be friends across the fence, but it does nothing to shift the forces that work to drive us apart. So what, then, can we do? Well, one of the first things that we can do is to pay attention to a lesson from this trying weekend, as we have watched and (to some degree) experienced how Hurricane Helene has devastated whole communities across the southeast. We can remember our common humanity. There’s nothing like a disaster that can bring people together. Is there a way that we can put aside our differences right now and find a way to work together as humans? Other things that we can do is to work to bring complexity back into the equation. Embrace curiosity. Resist caricatures. Look below the surface of what is being presented to what may be going on. Ask questions and really listen to the answers. Assume nothing. This week, I invite you to think about those places in your life where you have drawn lines between “us” and “them.” Ask God to help you to begin to be curious about those divisions and to help you to begin to discern a way forward that leads to peace for you and others.

17th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 19B

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg 17th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 19B September 15, 2024 I’m currently reading the book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out by Amanda Ripley. In the book, Ripley distinguishes between healthy conflict, which we all need-like the warmth of fire—to grow and change, and high conflict which is a system in which participants become entrapped, fully ensnared in a self-perpetuating mentality of good versus evil/right versus wrong. Ripley uses the image of the LaBreya tar pits to talk about high conflict. Scientists have discovered more than three million bones, the remains of thousands of animals (including two thousand saber-toothed tigers) who became trapped in the La Brea Tar pits, which is only one, small, dark lake. Researches believe that thousands of years ago, a large creature like an ancient bison stumbled into the Tar Pits. It quickly became stuck and began making sounds of distress, flailing around and getting more and more stuck. The bison’s distress attracted the attention of predators, like dire wolves a pack of whom came to investigate this easy meal, and then they got stuck. They howled out in their distress, drawing more and more animals to their eventual doom. i Sound like anything you’ve experienced recently? One of the hallmarks of high conflict systems or situations is that people lose the ability to listen to the other side, to employ the necessary practice of curiosity to help get underneath the highly simplified surface issues to below the surface where complexity and story dwell. Our gospel story for today from Mark is a fascinating example of this phenomenon. Jesus and his disciples are on the road-traveling around the Judean countryside. Jesus has been teaching and healing; the Pharisees and the Herodians have pushed back on some of his teachings, arguing with him and then beginning planning how to destroy him. Sides have been chosen; the conflict is high and entrenched. Jesus asks his disciples two questions: who do people say that I am, and who do you say that I am? Peter proclaims Jesus as the Messiah, and Jesus continues on to teach about what being the Messiah entails, predicting his suffering, rejection, death and resurrection. Peter takes Jesus aside and rebukes him. Is it because Peter can’t fathom that such would be the fate of the long promised, long-awaited Messiah? Is it because tensions are rising and Peter can’t fathom this sort of loss of their side/victory by their enemies? Is it because Peter doesn’t want to believe this is the future for his beloved friend and teacher? Whatever the case, Jesus rebukes Peter publicly, and Jesus goes on to teach more to the disciples and all who have gathered about what following him, what true discipleship, entails. It involves a sort of unfurling, of looking outward, an opening up to life beyond our own expectations and desires. Peter is so caught up in his own expectations for Jesus as Messiah that he is unable to listen deeper, to be curious about how Jesus could so willingly embrace his own suffering and death and about the implications for that to which Jesus hints. Our Old Testament reading from Proverbs personifies Wisdom as a woman calling people to listen. She (Wisdom) proclaims that those who listen can often avert disaster, while those who don’t listen often face destructive consequences of not heeding her. And the passage from James for today is all about speaking and about the damage that occurs when we don’t speak wisely and carefully. The book of James is written as a letter, but it’s unclear who the audience or intended community is. It also belongs to the category of Wisdom literature that was wide-spread in the Middle East in that time (the mid-1st century). The book of James emphasizes the main point that faith must be exercised and expressed through good actions. Both the wise, curious listening of Proverbs and the wise, careful speaking of James are aspects of how Jesus calls us to practice discipleship. They are both, in fact, spiritual disciplines or spiritual practices we are called to develop or deepen as people of faith. We talked about listening at our Wednesday healing service this week. One of the members of that congregation shared a saying that she used to teach to nursing students: “Some people listen. Other people wait to talk.” Another, who is a retired librarian, reflected on how the first question people would ask at the library reference desk was never the question that they really wanted an answer to. She learned she had to ask more questions, to be curious, to burrow deeper, peeling back layers and listening beyond what is said to the essence of the exchange. One of the parts of the book High Conflict that I’ve been intrigued by is the data that most of us think we are better listeners than we actually are. We are quick to make assumptions and to apply meanings which are often inaccurate. And the data shows that when people don’t feel like they are being listened to, they stop sharing and what speaking they do share becomes more simplistic and less nuanced. In High Conflict, Amanda Ripley follows the story of attorney and conflict mediator Gary Friedman. Gary worked in a groundbreaking way to bring inter-personal mediation into the practice of law in the 1970’s starting when his friends asked him to mediate their divorce. Gary developed a technique of questioning which he teaches to mediators about how to go deeper into conflict, beyond the surface; he calls this going down the “Why trail.” If he is mediating between a divorcing couple who are fighting over a crockpot, he investigates why the crock pot matters so much. “…Gary might ask the wife, with genuine curiosity, what [the crock pot] means to her. It was from the couple’s wedding registry…it was a shiny version of the one her own parents had used in her childhood home, where as a little girl she could smell a pot roast cooking all Sunday afternoon. She and her husband had not created that home in real life. They didn’t even like to cook, let’s be honest. But she wants the crock pot anyway. Her husband, hearing this, feels a sadness, one he shares with his wife. He admits that he only wanted the crock pot because, well, she seemed to want it so much. This is hard to confess but it comes as a relief. She is the one who wanted the whole divorce, he says, and since he can’t stop the divorce, he supposes he’s trying to make her at least feel some of the pain he’s feeling. They start to see the understory of the crock pot. And that means they can loosen their grip on it. And on other things. They get unstuck, little by little.”ii This way of discipleship, of listening, requires courage and curiosity, a willingness to hold our own perspectives and expectations a little more lightly, being more open to the ways that the Holy Spirit shows up in our lives and invites us to listen. This week, I invite you to think about a time when wisdom was revealed to you by listening? What was that like? What did you learn from it? Pay attention, this week, to the ways you listen and the ways that you speak, and be mindful of how you live out your discipleship of Jesus through wise, curious listening and wise, careful speaking. i. Ripley Amanda. High Conflict. Pp26-27 ii. Ripley, Amanda. High Conflict. Pp35-36

The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 17B

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg 15th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 17B September 1, 2024 The other day I was cooking supper and listening to Pandora as I do. (For those of you who are younger than me: yes, I know Spotify is way cooler and so much better. My children have been trying to convert me for years, but I like what I like, and I’m stubborn. So now that we’ve gotten that out of the way. I was listening to Pandora and) They played a song that I hadn’t heard in years and I was captivated: I’ve Just Seen a Face by the Beatles. Y’all know this song? It’s such a happy little song about falling in love. It’s fizzy and optimistic with a little sprinkle of longing. And it made me start thinking about love songs. What makes a good love song? Why do they hold such an appeal for us? Take a minute and think about your favorite love song. I’m sure we could come up with quite a list: My Girl by the Temptations; I say a little prayer by Aretha Franklin or Elvis’ Can’t help falling in love; Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together; Whitney Houston’s I will always love you. Faithfully by Journey and Rick Astley’s Never gonna give you up. For our 90’s babies: My heart will go on by Celine Dion and Crazy in Love by Beyonce’. You get the picture. So what is it that makes a good love song? Love songs help transform the every day into something special, bathed in the glow of love. They are whole-hearted, tender and filled with sweet poignancy. There’s usually a healthy dose of earnest longing and sometimes a quality of playfulness linked with falling in love that is appealing. You might be surprised to realize that one of our scripture readings for today is actually a love song—Song of Solomon. We don’t often get to read from this book on Sunday mornings, so it’s an interesting choice for today’s readings. Song of Solomon (also known as Song of Songs) is a love poem that is written with two voices —a male and female voice-speaking to each other along with a chorus. It is sensual and written in the style of Mid-Eastern love poetry of the time, and it’s an interesting choice to be included in the Old Testament. It’s attributed to Solomon but scholars think it was written long after Solomon in the time after Israel’s exile in Babylon. Over time, scholars have also looked at this book through the lens of allegory, connecting it with the love between God and God’s people and also God and individuals. God loves us like the beloved. I love the lush, garden imagery in this passage and also the aspect of playfulness that is captured—of the beloved leaping like a gazelle, and peeping through the lattice to catch a look at his beloved. Part of this passage is often read at weddings, along with a part from the end of Song of Solomon (chapter 8 verses 6-7): Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. If one offered for love all the wealth of one’s house, it would be utterly scorned. So that’s a traditional love song. But what about untraditional loves songs? My husband David and I just celebrated our 21st wedding anniversary last week, and since we were apart on our actual anniversary, he sent me several reels that he’d been cultivating. (Y’all know what reels are, right? Short videos that people make of ordinary things often set to music.) 21 years ago, I would have never thought that short videos could be a love song, and yet they are. Which made me start wondering what are other ways that people show that they love us—these untraditional love songs? (It’s what the writer of James means when he talks about being doers of the word and not just hearers.) Our Wednesday congregation talked about ways they have showed or received love through untraditional ways or love songs like preparing a favorite meal for someone; small acts of kindness; hooking and unhooking a necklace; neighbors who show up and mow your lawn just to be nice; and even travel planning can be an untraditional love song. Can you think of untraditional ways that someone has shown you love or you have offered love recently? And what about God’s love songs for us? An Episcopal priest once wrote that the bible is the love song between God and humanity and I agree with that, and I also believe that God sings traditional and untraditional loves songs to us all the time- because we are God’s beloved who God longs to be in deeper relationship with. In fact, loving relationship is at the very heart of God. As our presiding bishop often says, “if it’s not about love, it’s not about God.” It’s part of the critique of Jesus for the Pharisees in today’s gospel reading for today that holds equally true for us as well—that the call of belovedness is for our hearts to be close to God and our actions reflect that; and when our hearts are far from God, then our actions reflect that too—in the evil intentions that he lists. And because it is always easier to act in love when we are secure in love, it’s important for us to pay attention to the ways that God loves us, the love songs that God sings to us in expected and unexpected ways. Expected love songs could come in the form of worship, singing, receiving (or giving) communion. Being in nature can also be how we receive an expected or traditional love song from God. And there are also times when God sneaks up on us or taps us on the shoulder in invitation to pay attention: times when God offers healing, or in other peoples’ kindness, in friendship or in unexpected warm welcome. When in doubt for what to look for, look for the places that playfulness peeps into your life. Your invitation this week is to look for love songs in your life. What is your favorite love song? What is it about it that makes it a good love song? What are some untraditional love songs (that don’t even have to be songs) that speak to you of love or ways you have received love from others in an unexpected way? What are some ways that you have received a love song from God lately? Pay attention to the ways that God sings to you in and through your life and the world around you.

The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 15B

The Very Rev. Melanie Dickson Lemburg The 13th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 15B August 18, 2024 Our gospel reading for today is the fourth out of five weeks in chapter 6 of the gospel of John where Jesus is talking to his disciples and others about bread. John’s gospel uses repetition of certain phrases to help emphasize points, and it is the only gospel of the four that doesn’t include Jesus’s Last Supper with his disciples. Instead, John has Jesus washing the disciples feet in their last night together. So our reading for today is the culmination of this chapter where Jesus talks about bread over and over again, and it is how the writer of John’s gospel chooses to introduce the Eucharist or Communion. But if we flash forward to next week’s gospel (which actually includes some lines from this week’s gospel), we see that Jesus’ original hearers, including some disciples, struggle with the difficulty of this teaching around the Eucharist. And that can actually be comforting to us. Because who in this church is willing to say that you actually understand what is happening in the Eucharist? (Don’t look at me!) We can certainly talk about it, about how experience it. We can talk about what we have been taught about it-like how eucharist is the Greek word that means thanksgiving. And even though we participate in it week after week after week, there’s an aspect of mystery to Eucharist that defies our language. It’s a mystery that we know through our participation, that invites us more into a heart knowledge than a head knowledge. When we come before God and hold out our hands, our hearts know that this act of thanksgiving is both about our individual relationships with God through Christ as well as how we are connected to God through Christ all together as Christ’s body. We know that this gift is something that is completely unearned on our part, something we may at times feel unworthy to receive, and it is the free gift of God’s love offered to all people, a sign that each of us is made by God and belongs to God and to each other. We know that even as the bread is broken, we come to the altar-each one of us-with all of our own brokenness, and we celebrate Jesus’s brokenness which heals our own. Today at St. Thomas, we are celebrating Back to School Sunday. We’re blessing students, teachers, and administrators. We’ve got Children’s Chapel resuming after its summer hiatus, and we’re celebrating the grand-reopening of our nursery. Today is a day when we intentionally celebrate children. And I think that children have a lot to teach us about how they receive Eucharist. I’ve often had parents tell me that they want their children to wait to receive Eucharist until they understand it. And I will say back to them, so do you understand it? Because I don’t. When I see children receiving communion, I see people who freely receive the gift of belonging that Jesus is offering without overthinking it. I see open hearts and small, open hands stretched out eagerly to receive. I think children have much they could teach us about what the Eucharist means, so in closing, I’ll share with you the book the kids are reading together in children’s chapel today. (Here we read the book We Gather at This Table written by Anna V. Ostenso Moore and illustrated by Peter Krueger.) Big Question this week: Think about how you experience the Eucharist or communion. How has God been revealed to you in the Eucharist? What lessons can children teach you about the Eucharist? What are you being invited to take from the Eucharist out into the world?

The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 13B

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg 11th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 13B August 4, 2024 I’ve just started reading a book on organizational development titled Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less-and Achieve More Than You Ever Imagined. In the introduction, the author, Scott Sonenshein, poses three questions: “Why do some people and organizations succeed with so little, while others fail with so much? Why do we get caught up chasing what we don’t have? How is it possible to achieve more prosperous organizations, rewarding careers, and fulfilling lives with what’s already at hand?” He begins to answer these questions by identifying two different ways of being in the world or dealing with resources: stretching versus chasing. He writes, “Stretching is a learned set of attitudes and skills that comes from a simple but powerful shift from wanting more resources to embracing and acting on the possibilities of our resources already in hand.” He continues, “Chasing, and those who frequently rely on it, chasers, orient themselves around acquiring resources, overlooking how to expand what’s already in hand. Their decisions and actions might appear very reasonable on the surface, but I will expose the harmful consequences that lurk deeper and ultimately upend success and make people miserable.” i Here’s an example that Sonenshein gives. Let’s say you need to put a nail into a wall. Chasers will spend time looking for a hammer, and if they can’t find one, then they’ll go buy one to get the job done. If they can’t acquire a hammer, then the job starts to break down and they can’t complete the task. So to anticipate future challenges, the chasers will try to acquire as many tools in their tool box as possible, even when those tools don’t meet an individual need. Over time, the toolbox gets larger and larger, making it difficult to remember what’s inside. But Sonenshein writes that Stretchers “make good use of the tools around, experimenting and testing the conventional limits of what’s a hand. If a rock is the only think around, a stretcher can pick it up to bang a nail into the wall-or an available brick, can of beans, high heel, or heavy flashlight.” Both are ways that can competently get a nail into the wall but with very different consequences. [While using a hammer may appear to be a more elegant solution to hammering a nail, much time and effort may be wasted on looking for the right tool and not putting nails into the walls. And, when we see that others have better tools, we not only feel bad but also think we can’t get things done with an inferior tool box.]ii So, what does all that have to do with church or faith or the gospel? This is our fourth week out of seven as we make our way reading through the book of Ephesians as our epistle reading. Scholars believe that Ephesians probably wasn’t written to the specific community in Ephesus, but rather that it is what is known as a “circular letter” which means it was written to be circulated to a number of different early Christian communities or churches. (It has been attributed to Paul, but scholars now think that Paul probably didn’t write it because there are many inconsistencies in the style and language used from the letters we know were written by Paul, but it was most likely written by someone working with Paul.) And one of the beautiful things about Ephesians is that it is a hymn or a love song to the Church or to Christian community. Our reading for today reminds us of the importance of unity among people in Christian community, that it is unity that is modeled for us in and through God. If this passage makes you think of baptism, then you get a gold star because it makes up the opening acclamation of our baptismal liturgy. Our portion for today also talks about how within a Christian community, each person is given gifts that come from Jesus, and these gifts are spread out among a community, so that not everyone has the same gifts. And the gifts that Ephesians enumerates here are to different roles or callings withing and beyond the community—all for the sake of building up the body of Christ and bringing people into unity in the faith. Our gospel reading today gives us a reminder of how we don’t always receive the gifts that are right in front of us. The people questioning Jesus have just received the gift of food (and the miracle or sign that provided it) in the feeding of the 5,000, and they have chased Jesus down and are asking for more miracles so that they might believe. They even reference the gift of manna, which is the bread that God provides for the Children of Israel when they are wandering in the wilderness so they wouldn’t starve, and at first they are grateful, but shortly after, when manna is the only thing they had to eat, they quickly pivot from gratitude to complaining. And we get this, don’t we? There’s an old saying that “familiarity breeds contempt.” We don’t always recognize gifts, even when they are right in front of our faces. It often takes some stretching to see gifts in a different light. This is true for both individuals and for organizations, even and especially the church. Can you think of a time when something that you took for granted was revealed as a gift, or when you stretched a bit to accept a new gift or a new way of being in the world? Was there someone who helped you see that gift or helped you grow into it? So many times, it takes another person recognizing a gift in us, holding up a mirror for us, in order for us to recognize it in ourselves. What are the gifts that you have right now that you might have overlooked or which new circumstances might be calling you to stretch into? Ephesians reminds us that this nurturing of and recognition of gifts is a part of the gift given to us by the Holy Spirit at our baptism, and it is the work of the church to seek out the giftedness in each other because when a variety of gifts is offered to the community, the community thrives. I can’t help but wonder what are the gifts that we as a faith community have that we might have overlooked or what new gifts are we being called to stretch into? i Sonenshein, Scott. Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less-and Achieve More Than You Ever Imagined. Harper Collins: 2017, pp xi, 7, and 8. ii. Ibid. pp10-11.

The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 11B

The Very Rev Melanie Lemburg The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 11B July 21, 2024 I’m sure y’all know that we’ve had Vacation Bible School here at St. Thomas in the evenings this past week. Now I’ve been doing VBSes for my whole ordained life. (I did miss it one year; I was getting dressed to go, and then discovered that I had gone into labor with our son Jack. We sent Mary Margaret to church with my brother and sister-in-law because “The VBS must go on.”) So it’s strange that in all my years of doing VBS, every year, I seem to forget just how much fun it can be. I’ve been thinking about that this week and talking with colleagues about it, and I’ve realized that it is because at VBS even the adults give ourselves permission to play. In our gospel reading for today, Jesus and his disciples have regathered after Jesus has sent them out in pairs to proclaim the good news of the gospel, calling people to repent, casting out demons, and curing the sick. The disciples are excited to tell Jesus about all that has transpired while they were out working, and Jesus says to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” Jesus gathers them all together and invites them to rest together after their work. And I can’t help but wonder if there is a certain amount of play and playfulness in this homecoming gathering? Dr. Stuart Brown, who is the founder of the National Institute of Play defines play as “anything that is spontaneously done for its own sake…(Play) appears purposeless and produces pleasure and joy.” Brown’s research focuses a great deal on the importance of play for children and how that helps them build identity, but he also writes about the importance of play for adults. He writes, “The human being really is designed biologically to play throughout the life cycle…From my standpoint as a clinician, when one really doesn’t play at all or very little in adulthood, there are consequences: rigidities, depression, lack of adaptability, no irony…things that are pretty important that enable us to cope in a world of many demands.” i. So, can you think of the last time you really played? When was the last time you did something that was spontaneous and for its own sake, with little or no other purpose? What was that like for you? How did you feel? What might play have to teach you about your relationship with God? Your invitation this week is to pay attention to how and how often you play, and to intentionally work to cultivate play as a sabbath practice this week. i I can’t find an original sources for either of these quotes from Brown. They are quoted by Ben Conachan in his sermon “Getting Rest: Hours for Sabbath, Rest, and Play” for Pearl Church on May 21, 2023: https://www.pearlchurch.com/sermon-archive/2023/5/21/getting-rest-hours-of-sabbath-rest-and-play?format=amp

The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 10B

The Very Rev. Melanie Dickson Lemburg 8th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 10B July 14, 2024 This week, as I was working out on the E-gym machines at the Y, I noticed the woman on the machines next to meet kept drinking from her water bottle. As we made the circuit, it bothered me more and more. You see, there’s a rule that we’re not supposed to drink anything on the machines; there’s even a big sign that says that right by the entrance to the machines. But this woman was openly defying the rule and drinking her water in front of God and everyone. As I made the circuit and contemplated my potential action or continued inaction, I began focusing more on myself and what I was feeling. In a moment of clarity, I was able to peel back the layers of righteous indignation to see what was below; and below it was resentment. In our readings for today we have two different pictures of resentment and its destructive power. Our gospel reading tells us of John the Baptist’s grisly demise at the hands of the machinations of Herod’s wife Herodias. Mark tells us that John had been telling Herod that it wasn’t lawful for him to marry Herodias, who was his brother’s wife, and so “Herodias had a grudge against him, and wanted to kill him.” She sees an opportunity, and she takes it, and as a result of Herodias’s resentment of John (and Herod’s weakness), John the Baptist’s head ends up on a platter. In the Old Testament reading, we have one line that gives us a glimpse into resentment: “As the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal daughter of Saul looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart.” Now, as you might imagine, there is so much more to this story. It starts way back in 1 Samuel 18. Michal is Saul’s daughter, and she loves David. Saul is working really hard to hold onto his kingship after he has lost both God’s and the people’s favor, and David is his chief rival for that. Saul decides to offer his daughter Michal to David as his wife to try to bring David under his influence. He even makes it easy for David by only asking as a bride price of 100 specifically graphic severed body parts of their common enemy the Philistines. (If you want to know what body part, then you’re going to have to google it. I’m not saying it from the pulpit. But let’s just say it rhymes with “storefins”) Yep, 100. David and Michal marry and because Michal loves David, she becomes a part of team David instead of team Saul. At one point, Saul sends assassins to murder David, and Michal helps lower David out the window and then places an idol with a shock of goatshair in the bed and tells her father’s people that David isn’t well. But then David goes on the run, and at some point, Saul reclaims Michal and marries her off to someone else—a guy named Palti son of Laish. And they are happy. But then Saul dies, and David is working to solidify his claim to the kingship, and someone tells David he will only talk to David about being king if Michal, as a member of Saul’s family, is present. So David reaches out to Michal’s brother, who goes and gets Michal and returns her to David, and Michal’s husband Paltiel follows her crying until they tell him to go home. In our reading for today, David is king, and he has worked to bring the Ark of the Covenant home to his city Jerusalem. It is a huge victory for him and his people after years of war and scheming. So, he dances before the ark as it comes into the city. And Michal despises him in her heart. She is understandably resentful. (Later on in this same chapter, we hear Michal’s comment to David about his behavior implying that he’s not dignified enough to be king. She says, “How the king of Israel honored himself today, uncovering himself today before the eyes of his servants’ maids, as any vulgar fellow might shamelessly uncover himself!”) But because of her understandable resentment, she misses experiencing this moment of joy when the Ark of God containing the 10 commandments is brought home. It’s a powerful symbol of God’s relationship with God’s people, and she can’t fully experience it because of her resentment toward David. So, let’s talk about resentment. Can you think of a time when you were resentful? How did it feel? How did it impact your relationship with that person? With God? This week, I’ve been thinking about how resentment feels to me like a piece of popcorn kernel that is wedged in my teeth, maybe even up under my gum, and can’t be dislodged. It’s hard, and it’s nagging, and it feels so much bigger than it actually is, and it can be inaccessible to the ordinary ways of knocking it loose. Many folks feel shame around feeling resentment. I mean, neither Michal or Herodias are people we would ever want to emulate. Their resentment makes them unattractive to us. In her book about human emotions titled An Atlas of the Heart, sociologist Brene Brown writes about her life-long battle with resentment. She writes about how she always thought that resentment was an extension of anger, but a friend and emotions researcher corrected her and told her that resentment is actually a part of envy. This was an epiphany for her as she began to now examine her resentment through the lens of envy. Brene Brown writes, “Now when I start to feel resentful, instead of thinking, What is that person doing wrong? Or What should they be doing? I think, What do I need but am afraid to ask for? While resentment is definitely an emotion, I normally recognize it by a familiar thought pattern: What mean and critical thing am I rehearsing saying to this person?” And here’s Brown’s definition on resentment: “Resentment is the feeling of frustration, judgement, anger, ‘better than’ and/or hidden envy related to perceived unfairness or injustice. It’s an emotion that we often experience when we fail to set boundaries or ask for what we need, or when expectations let us down because they were based on things we can’t control, like what other people think, what they feel, or how they’re going to react.”i Our Wednesday congregation talked about resentments, about how they are burdensome, how they can be much more toxic to us than to the people whom we resent, but also how resentments make us do crazy things, shameful things that we will probably regret latter on (maybe, like asking for someone’s head on a platter!). We talked about how it’s important to recognize and process resentment as soon as possible, before it can take root and fester and run amuck, and we identified two tools to combatting resentment. The first is forgiveness. We have to forgive the person or situation that has inspired our resentment. And the second is to recognize our common humanity in a person toward whom we are resentful. That’s empathy. I was thinking about Brown’s definition of resentment as envy as I was working the circuit on those e-fitness machines at the Y, and I took a step back from my seething resentment and righteous indignation to ask myself Brene’ Brown’s question: “What do I need but am afraid to ask for?” And y’all, I realized that I was thirsty! When I dug down deep into why I resented her having her water bottle against the rules, I realized I was thirsty, so I got myself up in between sets and went and got a good long drink of water, and then I no longer cared that she wasn’t’ following the rules. Now, we all know it’s not always that easy or that simple. It was certainly much more complex for Michal who had been consistently used as a pawn in her father’s and husband’s political machinations. But the tools to combat resentfulness are sound and can be employed in a variety of situations. So, your invitation for this week: Can you think of a time when you were resentful? How did it feel? How did it impact your relationship with that person? With God? If the resentment is still stuck in your soul like a piece of popcorn kernel, then consider offering it to God in prayer and ask God to help you see the person or situation with empathetic eyes and to help you begin to forgive. i. Brown, Brene. Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience. Random House: New York, 2021, pp30-33.

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.