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.