The Third Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 8C

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg Third Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 8C June 29, 2025 A letter to Lillian Alice Johnston upon the occasion of her baptism. Dear Lily, Today we are celebrating your baptism here at St. Thomas. Today your parents and godparents are making promises on your behalf about how you will live your life, and we, the gathered congregation, are making promises to support you and them in your life of faith. In baptism, we are acknowledging that God has already claimed you as God’s beloved. We are all saying “yes” to that belovedness for you, even as you are reminding us of our own belovedness as well. There’s a saying in the church that “baptism is becoming who you already are.” You are already God’s beloved, and today, you are becoming God’s beloved as you and those who speak for you say “yes” to your belovedness. In fact, our whole lives of faith are a growing deeper in this becoming who we already are. It’s what the church refers to as discipleship. Jesus models for us the way of growing deeper into true belonging as God’s beloved, of becoming who we already are. He teaches that that becoming is marked by dying to ourselves and our own selfish desires; in living lives of empathy and compassion and forgiveness of and service to others. The ways that we become who we already are as God’s beloved are encoded in our baptismal covenant. Our becoming is nourished in prayer, scripture, and sacrament; it is rooted in seeking and serving Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves, asking for and offering forgiveness, repenting and returning to God when we fall away, striving for justice and peace and respecting the dignity of every human being. But as we see in our gospel lesson for today, this call to discipleship, the call to continued becoming is not an easy path. Sometimes it calls us to forsake things that are good in and of themselves; and sometimes we find that if we cling too tightly to these good things they get in the way of our becoming or our growing in our belovedness. Our hearts can make idols of even the best things in our lives, so that they come between us and God. And our hearts can also cling too much to the wounds and slights and shadows of the past, holding us hostage for living fully in this present moment. That’s part of what our becoming is; it is being fully present to God and those in our midst in each present moment. It’s challenging, uncomfortable work, and so we need each other. It’s why we gather here week after week together, so we can support one another in our becoming. Today is the beginning of that journey for you, sweet Lily. Today you begin your becoming. There will be so many more moments before you when you will be challenged to become more than you already are, to grow deeper in God’s love for you. These moments of becoming can be deeply unsettling and uncomfortable. They are filled with both hope and terror, as we leave behind what is old and don’t yet exactly know what is to come. i It is what the apostle Paul refers to when he says that anyone who is in Christ is a “new creation.” It’s what Jesus is getting at in our gospel reading when he calls the people on the road to follow him in discipleship and then rebukes them for wanting to turn back; even though what they are turning back for is worthy, it divides their hearts and holds them back from following him into their becoming a new creation. Lily, today is the first moment of many becomings for you. There will be so many more than you can ever count. Any time you stand in the crossroads of such seemingly ordinary things as choosing kindness or forgiveness over retribution or setting aside your own selfish desires to create space and welcome for another. And of course, there will be bigger moments of becoming as well, times when you stand on a precipice and are called to jump into the unknown; sometimes it will be your choice to jump, and sometimes it won’t. But the truth that undergirds all of this, for you and us, is that you have been, are, and always will be God’s beloved: marked as Christ’s own forever. No matter what happens in your life, you will never be alone. God will not forsake you, God’s own beloved. We promise to help you remember this, sweet Lily, and we hope you will do the same for us. May you continue to become what you already are! Your sister in Christ, Melanie+ i. A friend of mine recently quoted a line from her favorite Jane Austin book Persuasion in reference to these moments of becoming, saying, “I am half agony, half hope.”

The Second Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 7C

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg 2nd Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 7C June 22, 2025 “Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul? * and why are you so disquieted within me?” In our two psalms assigned for today, we read this verse three different times. “Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul? * and why are you so disquieted within me?” It could easily be the refrain for our modern times. “Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul? * and why are you so disquieted within me?” There is so much noise in our lives and in our world. And our souls just seem to soak it up. Even in our hyper-connected society, we find ourselves lonely, our souls burdened and disquieted, cut off from God, our source of life and light and oppressed/overloaded with so much noise. And you know what’s crazy? We choose this noise all the time! The 24 hour news cycle. The text-threads. The endless doom scrolling on social media. The to-do lists. And don’t even get me started on the leaf-blowers! (Oh, how I hate the leaf blowers!) Take a minute and think about how you often choose noise in your life? Think about how you have done it just this week? Just last night, as we were going to bed, we heard the news that the US had dropped bombs on Iran, and instead of saying a prayer for all those affected and going on to bed, what do you think I did? I picked up my phone and started reading as much news about it as I could. Also, I can’t help but notice that we do it here, too. Just about every week, we fill up the silence before worship with talking. Why do we do this? Why do we choose the very things that are making us disquieted and restless? And even more importantly, how do we stop it? How do we stop choosing for our souls to be disquieted? Let’s look at our Old Testament reading for today to gain some insight into all of this. Our portion from First Kings picks up right in the middle of things with the prophet Elijah. Now, Elijah has gotten himself sideways with the king and queen of his day, Ahab and Jezebel, who were quite corrupt. God has used Elijah as God’s mouthpiece to tell Ahab and Jezebel to return to following Yahweh, but they have upped the ante, worshipping the false god Baal and killing off the prophets of Yahweh. So Elijah puts on a show where he goes against the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. He prophesies how God will end the drought, and Elijah calls down God’s fire from heaven (while doing some epic taunting of Baal’s prophets), to demonstrate the sovereignty of Yahweh over all other gods. And then, Elijah encourages the gathered witnesses to round up all the prophets of Baal, and Elijah kills them all. That’s when our story for today picks up. After his tremendous victory, Elijah goes on the run as Queen Jezebel threatens to kill him. We see God sending an angel to Elijah to tend to him in the wilderness. The angel provides him with food and encouragement to rest and to continue. Elijah runs all the way to a cave at Mount Horeb (where God had given the 10 commandments to Moses), and at this point, Elijah is feeling persecuted and quite self-righteous. When God asks him what he’s doing there, he replies (quite full of himself), “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away." God, tells Elijah to stand out on the mountainside and God will pass by. And then, comes the noise of several cataclysmic events: wind, earthquake, fire. But Elijah knows that God is not in those. It is when Elijah hears the sound of sheer silence that he knows that God is approaching, so he goes out of the cave, and he encounters God in the silence. And in the silence, God speaks to Elijah and reveals what Elijah is to do next. Where Elijah feels like he is the only one left who is faithful to God, God reminds Elijah that there is a whole community of people who remain faithful, and there is still work for Elijah to do among them. God tells Elijah to anoint two new kings, and to anoint his prophetic successor, and God reminds Elijah that there are 7,000 people who are still faithful to God. So Elijah leaves that encounter with God in the silence with renewed mission and purpose. He finds courage in knowing that he is not alone after having received God’s care for him in the form of food and rest. And he becomes renewed by a sense of a new call-- that he is called to be an important part of the community of those who remain faithful to God, and he leaves Mount Horeb and gets back to work. So, what does this all have to teach us about our own disquieted souls and how to stop choosing the noise in our lives but instead making space for God to speak in the silence? The Episcopal priest and spiritual director Margaret Guenther writes about this encounter between God and Elijah in her book My Soul in Silence Waits. Here is what she writes: “The voice of God was not in the powerful, potentially devastating phenomena, but in the silence. I try to imagine the clarity and expansiveness of that silence. Looking within myself, I am baffled and chagrined by my simultaneous yearning and resistance. I am drawn to the intimacy of that prayerful silence, and at the same time I am genius at avoiding it. The silence of God… is living, active, and filled with the Holy Spirit….The silence of God demands our surrender. It demands that we shut up and listen, abandoning our defenses and taking off our masks. [She continues,] Elijah, standing outside the cave on Mt Horeb, must have felt helplessly open, as vulnerable and exposed as a mortal can be. He must have wondered if the wind and the fire would destroy him, if the earthquake would swallow him up. When we let ourselves wait upon God in God’s silence, we too become receptive and open. We rid ourselves of non-essentials… [She concludes] To wait for God in silence demands that we pay attention. It demands our awareness of subtlety and smallness. In the silence we become mindful of what might otherwise be dismissed or ignored.”i Where in your life is God inviting you to surrender, to be vulnerable, to be open to how God speaks to you in the silence? How are you being called to choose the silence of God over the noise of your life or the world? Where is God inviting you to lean into uncertainty, to relationship, to trust in God? Consider ending each day of this coming week in intentional silence. You might consider using the Psalmist’s refrain as a mantra: “Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul? * and why are you so disquieted within me?” i. Guenther, Margaret. My Soul in Silence Waits: Meditation on Psalm 62. Cowley: 2000, pp 37-39