The Rev. Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg
The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 17A
Grace Church, Pine Bluff, AR
August 30, 2026
Good morning! I’m Melanie Lemburg, and I’m glad to be making my first visit here with you as Canon to the Ordinary for the Diocese of Arkansas. As Canon to the Ordinary, my main job is to support and assist the bishop in his work, and I offer him support in work around ordinations, as well as in cultivating leadership in the diocese and helping administrate the governance of the diocese. I also help in clergy transitions and helping vacant parishes find clergy support in a variety of ways.
I’ve officially become an Arkansan in the last month or so, as my husband David and I bought a house in Little Rock. And we also have had another significant life transition. In the last few weeks, we helped move our oldest daughter to an apartment on Long Island for grad school, and we helped move our youngest son to college at University of Georgia. So, just in the last few weeks, we have entered that new and uncharted realm of empty-nesting!
I’ve realized these last few weeks, that this new life of being an empty-nester is deeply connected to and entangled with my identity and my calling or vocation as a wife and a mother, so it has raised questions for me like—“what does it look like for me to faithfully parent young adult children in this new season?” and “how is our marriage moving into a different season or changing shape, now that we have ample space to focus on only the two of us in our day to day functioning?”
It is not uncommon for questions of identity to be all bound up in questions of vocation—both in our everyday lives and in the spiritual life. I’ve been reminded this week of writer Frederick Buechner’s famous quote about vocation when he writes on vocation: “It comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a [person] is called to by God.
There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Super-ego, or Self-Interest.”
He continues, “By and large a good rule for finding out is this. The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you've missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you're bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren't helping your patients much either.”
He concludes, “Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.”[i]
The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
In our gospel reading for today, which is an immediate continuation of the story from last week, we see Jesus and Peter wrestling with questions of Jesus’s identity and vocation. Last week, Jesus asks his disciples “who do people say that I am?” and they answer: “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
Then he asks them, “who do you say that I am?” And Peter answers: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus affirms Peter’s response and gives Peter a new identity, a new calling—naming him petrus or the rock upon which Jesus will build his church. But then we see today, things take a pretty quick turn. Jesus is speaking about the suffering which he must undergo as a part of his vocation, and Peter takes him aside to try to talk him out of it. Jesus then publicly rebukes Peter, calling him now Satan and saying, “You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
There are two things that are happening here that I think are pertinent to us. The first has to do with suffering. Peter, understandably, doesn’t want to see his friend Jesus suffer or die. And Jesus is inviting Peter and the other disciples into a different understanding of suffering. He is inviting them to understand that there are certain ways of suffering that can lead to new life and resurrection. Now, this is a hard pill for us to swallow. It’s been helpful to me to think about this in terms of a question someone else posed this week: “What is the difference in your life between suffering that leads to new life and resurrection and suffering that destroys life?” (repeat the question)
The other thing that is happening here is that Jesus is clearly articulating his vocation, who God is calling him to be. The disciples, who are given voice by Peter, are wrestling with this vocation of Jesus toward suffering, death, and new life, but I suspect they are also wrestling with the implications for their own identity and vocation as followers and friends of Jesus. Let’s face it; none of us signs up to be on the losing team!
So, what does all of that have to do with us today? Earlier this week, I read the daily meditation from Franciscan priest Richard Rohr. It was shared this past Wednesday, and it has been in conversation with me around these ideas of identity and vocation this latter part of the week.
Rohr writes, “ The author Sue Monk Kidd reflects on her midlife discovery of the concept of the true self: Over and over again God calls you and me … to the cultivation of what Meister Eckhart called the “true seed” within us. God calls us to tend what lies seeded in the soul, this kernel of our truest nature—the God-image or True Self….
He continues, “Throughout our lives we create patterns of living that obscure this identity. We heap on the darkness, constructing a variety of false selves. We become adept at playing games, wearing masks as if life were a masquerade party. This can go on for a long while. But eventually the music of the True Self seeks us out. Sooner or later (often in midlife), we’re summoned back to the garden. We’re called to soul-work….”
He writes about how “Monk Kidd compares soul work to the art of whittling: The art of soulmaking is taking our lives in our hands and—with all the love and discernment we can muster—gently whittling away the parts that don’t resemble the True Self. In spiritual whittling, though, we don’t discard the shavings. Transformation happens not by rejecting these parts of ourselves but by gathering them up and integrating them. Through this process we reach a new wholeness.
He concludes, “Spiritual whittling is an encounter with Mystery, waiting, the silence of inner places—all those things most folks no longer have time for. I’ll be honest. As I began my own spiritual whittling, I often clung to my “block of wood” resistantly. After all, wasn’t I fine just as I was?…But there were also days when I felt drawn to try, when I yearned to discover how I was living falsely….”[ii]
I love this idea of spiritual whittling as part of the work around what it means to understand our vocation and identity as followers of Jesus. What are the parts of the shavings of my life, my identity, my vocation, that I would prefer to discard but that really need to be reintegrated back in so that I can be more fully the person God is calling me to be? And where does suffering fit into all this? How does suffering become life-giving and producing new life and resurrection versus being destructive?
I wonder if these questions resonate with you as well—as individuals and as a congregation? How is God calling you—as individuals and as Grace Episcopal Church in Pine Bluff? Where is the place where the world’s deep hunger and your deep gladness meet? What might be the spiritual shavings that you’d prefer to discard but that need to be integrated back in?
