The Rev. Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg
The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 23A
St. Michael’s Episcopal Church Little Rock
October 11, 2026
Good morning! My name is Melanie Lemburg, and I serve as the Canon to the Ordinary for the Diocese. I’m delighted to be making my first “official” visit with y’all today (although I have worshipped with y’all previously, sitting in the pew with my friend Caroline). When I make these official visits, I’m often asked in the “holy handshake” line, what exactly is a Canon to the Ordinary? Or what do you do? So I’ve learned it’s good to just get that cleared up early on. As Canon to the Ordinary, my main job is to support, assist, and advise the ordinary, our bishop, in his work, and I offer him support by overseeing work around ordinations, as well as in cultivating leadership in the diocese and helping administrate the governance of the diocese.
In addition to my work for the Diocese, I also do a little bit of work for the broader Episcopal Church. Three times a year, I join a team of three women, and we go to different locations in the Episcopal Church and teach lay and ordained leaders about conflict. The class is called Managing Yourself During Conflict, and as a part of this class we teach that conflict is inevitable and can even be good, and we try to equip people with different skills for navigating conflict faithfully. This past week, I was at Camp Allen in Navasota, Texas (about an hour from Houston) teaching one of these weeks. Part of the work for this course is to invite the participants to share a current church conflict in which they have a part. Each person shares their conflict with the group early in the week, and at the end of the week, we workshop their conflicts, and they present a plan for how they want to engage with the conflict when they return home, using some of the different tools that we’ve taught over the course of the week.
It is such a hard and holy week. The conflicts are often so messy and deeply painful, and the participants are so brave, stepping out and sharing these vulnerable stories with a room full of mostly strangers. It blows me away, every time we do it!
Imagine my surprise, when I looked to the propers for this week to begin my conversation with the scriptures and you all only to find….more conflict!
First, we have the reading from Philippians. We see Paul writing from prison this letter of thanks to his favorite church. And in this letter, Paul is encouraging the Philippians to live in unity with each other, to be humble, and to live lives worthy of Christ, following Christ’s example by putting the good of others before themselves. In our portion for today, we see Paul give a shout-out to two women leaders of the church—Euodia and Syntyche—who are apparently in conflict with one another. Now, we don’t know what the two women are fighting about when Paul writes the letter, but what we can be almost certain about-because conflict follows predictable patterns-is that people have probably started taking sides. It’s a part of our human nature to self-select into two, binary groups, especially when things start heating up. So I’d be willing to bet that the two women’s argument, whatever it is, has begun to create division in the wider community of the church at Philippi. As a part of their reconciliation, Paul urges them all to employ the practices of gentleness, non-anxiousness, thanksgiving, and rejoicing.
Then we have today’s gospel passage. Can I just say…this parable is awful! I mean, what are we supposed to do with this?!
I’ve read more scholars than usual this week, trying to make sense of this parable, and here’s the thing I think we need to remember. The context of this parable in Matthew’s gospel is especially important in our engagement with it. Matthew’s community to which he is writing is a primarily Jewish community, and scholars believe that Matthew’s gospel is written shortly after the complete destruction by the Romans of the Jerusalem temple, the beating heart of Jewish worship. So, there is profound grief along with a deep tension in Matthew’s community of believers. And we are at the point in Matthew’s gospel where the conflict between Jesus and the Jewish leaders is reaching a crescendo. In last week’s reading, Jesus has just ridden triumphantly into Jerusalem (the story we hear every year for Palm Sunday); he’s cleared out the money changers and the sellers in the temple, overturing tables and driving them out, and then he starts teaching in the temple via parables. First is last week’s parable about the tenants of the vineyard who kill the vineyard owner’s servants and eventually the son. And last week’s reading concludes by telling us that when the chief priests and Pharisees hear Jesus’s teaching, they determine to try to arrest him.
Then we have today’s parable about the horrible wedding banquet. Our reading today tells us that today’s parable is a direct response from Matthew’s Jesus to the chief priests and Pharisees who are determining how to get rid of him.
So what we are seeing today is what another preacher has termed “a low point in an intense family feud.” Here’s what that preacher writes about it: “I want to emphasize the word ‘family’ here because Matthew and his community are caught up in a struggle with their Israelite kin about how to be faithful to the God of Abraham and Sarah and, in particular, whether Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah Israel’s prophets had promised. This is not a Jewish-Christian dispute – though in the centuries that follow Christians will use this passage to further their anti-Semitism (which is one of the things that makes this passage dangerous) – but rather represents the pain of a community sundered from its family and trying to justify itself.”
He writes about how this parable is also found in both Luke and the Gospel of Thomas, but this version in Matthew is dramatically different from those two other versions. He continues, “On the whole, Matthew’s version is darker, more violent, and pushes even the typical parable’s tolerance for absurdity to the edge. Why? Because at this point in the family conflict, [Matthew] is willing to say that God not only rejects those cousins and kin of his that rejected Jesus but actually sent the Romans to destroy the Temple as punishment (a conclusion not uncommon to Matthew, but intensified in this parable). This is painful stuff… and we’d best not ignore it. Why? Because this parable has been used across the centuries – and still by some Christians today – to drive a wedge between Jews and Christians and even to justify Christian mistreatment of Jews.”[i]
Both of these passages for this Sunday got me to thinking about what it might look like if some of our current conflicts were to be written down in parable form or memorialized for all time in a letter from Paul? Surely, we’ve become advanced enough in our Christian practice that we wouldn’t become embroiled in these sorts of family feuds?! Right?
So there I was at Camp Allen and feeling pretty good about the progress our students were making in their conflicts over the course of the week, when it happened. On Thursday, Camp Allen also became the site for an evangelical, non-denominational church somewhere nearby in Texas to host their annual Men’s retreat. The brought over 200 men with at least 200 pickup trucks and two large trailers of sound equipment for their praise band, and they set up in the room right next door to us. We were, thankfully, able to shift in our location due to the overwhelming sound from the drums and bass, but what we hadn’t been able to prepare for was the intensity of mealtimes. There were 16 of us, and even though we had designated tables, we were completely surrounded by all these men. (Now don’t get me wrong. I like men. I have a great dad, who lives one a farm and drives a pick-up truck, two younger brothers, a husband, who was actually born in Texas, and a son. We all get along pretty well, mostly because they pretty much all do what I tell them to do! I grew up in Mississippi and have served the church in Mississippi, Georgia, and Arkansas. I am not generally uncomfortable interacting with Southern men).
But 200+ men is a lot of men. And while our group contained people of color and LGBTQ folks, these 200+ mostly white men were quite proud of their particular version of patriotism and Christianity, proclaiming it through a variety of t-shirts and baseball caps. A number of t-shirts had pictures of guns, and not just guns, but assault rifles. They were loud and intense, and they had so much facial hair. At breakfast on the last day, when we sought refuge in a side dining hall (because they had fully taken over our reserved tables), several were in there sitting at separate tables by themselves and pouring over open bibles. And we who had spent the week talking about how curiosity and humility were the tools to help unlock conflict, hunkered down in our group and we judged them. We said things like, “Can you believe they don’t take their baseball caps off at the dinner table?!” “Look at that cap: it says, “Jesus and John Wayne!” Or “check out the guy with the t-shirt with the red, white and blue AK-47!” We judged their choice of clothing and their loudness, their worship music and even the fact that they were gathering for a men’s only retreat.
When I got home and was safely removed from all that testosterone, it occurred to me that this is the family feud of modern Christianity—evangelical Protestantism that creates space for the expression of Christian nationalism, and the rest of us. And it helped me understand and empathize with Matthew’s community and this parable just a little bit better. Because not once did I think it would be a good idea to talk to one of those men to try to find common ground, to try to be curious instead of judgmental. There most likely wasn’t any threat to me, a middle-aged white woman, but I was profoundly afraid for and protective of our group members who were people of color or LGBTQ+. And so I chose not to engage. And maybe that was a missed opportunity? I’ll never know if just a little bit of courage and curiosity on my part might have brought just a little bit more understanding in this family feud we contemporary Christians find ourselves in the midst of.
So where does that leave all of us this week? I wish I could tie this all up neatly for us, but the best I can do is to invite you to join me in the wrestling with what it means to be faithful to God in this unique moment. In thinking about Paul’s letter, I can’t help but wonder how rejoicing might be an antidote to fear and the divisions or conflict caused by fear? What might that look like for me to try to practice that in the face of the current family feud of contemporary Christianity and especially as we approach the next election? Where are the places in our lives or in our world where we are being called to employ the practices of gentleness, non-anxiousness, thanksgiving, and rejoicing?
[i] From David Lose’s blog In the Meantime. https://www.davidlose.net/2014/10/pentecost-18-a-preaching-an-ugly-parable/
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