Recording of My Sermon for June 14, 2026

Yesterday's sermon went well at Faith Lutheran, the small country church I serve in Bristol, Tennessee.  Because 1/3 of our membership is an extended family, when they go on their family beach vacation, the worship space can feel a bit empty.  Yesterday we had no youth, so no youth sermon.  When I announced that there would be no youth sermon, I asked the congregation to think about what had brought them joy in their own youth.  I referenced a popsicle in the park event that one of the members had made the subject of a Facebook post.  The recording of the sermon referenced that popsicle event; the manuscript does not.

I've been trying to read my sermon less, which in some ways is good, primarily in the more lively energy.  But I don't like that I get tongue-tied, and I worry about my sermons getting longer.  I want a sermon to be 9-12 minutes.  

You can view yesterday's sermon here, on my YouTube channel.  You can read my sermon in yesterday's blog post.

Sermon for Sunday, June 14, 2026

June 14, 2026

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott




Matthew 9:35-10:8, (9-23)




A traditional way of interpreting this Gospel is to see it as a companion to the “Go and make disciples” type of text that weaves its way through the lectionary. Here Jesus tells the disciples what to do as they go out to make disciples. Many sermons approach this text as a mission statement: the mission of the disciples, which then becomes the mission of the church through the ages. Traditional thinking goes something like this: if it’s good enough for those disciples who then train others to go and do likewise, then we, too, can adopt this passage as our mission statement.


But what if this approach is wrong? What if this message of Jesus is only meant for those disciples who are hearing it? What if Jesus didn’t mean for us here in the 21st century to assume that we, too, are supposed to do what those 12 named disciples were called to do?


You might ask, well, what’s it doing here, then? If it’s not direct advice from Jesus telling us how to live our lives and how to judge the success of the church, then what is the purpose of this reading?


Part of the purpose is to bear witness to the good news that Jesus embodies. One way that the writer of the Gospel of Matthew does this is to introduce us to Jesus, and also to introduce us to the disciples, the first generation to continue the work of Jesus.


Some of the first hearers of this Gospel might have actually known the disciples. I imagine them hearing this text and saying, “Curing the sick—yes, John was great at that. Casting out demons—how did Jesus know that Peter would get to be so skilled in that area?”


At this point, let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine that the writer of Matthew needed to add some additional information, some newer disciples who lived in the centuries after the original 12 disciples named in this passage. Who might the Gospel writer choose? Let’s consider some of the great witnesses of the 20th century.


There’s Clarence Jordan, founder of Koinonia Farms, which gave birth to Habitat for Humanity. There’s Dorothy Day, who founded Catholic Worker houses all over the country, showing people how to live communally. There’s Archbishop Oscar Romero who was martyred for speaking out and demanding that the killing of non-combatants in El Salvador stop. And Martin Luther King, who ushered in a new era of human rights.


And of course, there are the less famous disciples, like a woman in my old church in South Florida who taught Confirmation classes for over 60 years; imagine how many people she told about the good news of Jesus. The number of schools and hospitals kept running by faithful people are too many to list in a sermon.


When you hear me list these witnesses, do you say to yourself, “Let me go and start a farm in the red clay dirt of Georgia to show that black and white citizens can farm in harmony like Clarence Jordan did”? I don’t. I don’t have farming skills in the best of circumstances, but I admire those who do.


Why, then, do we hear sermons and theologians tell us that the mission of the original 12 must still be our mission? In part, it’s because we have a long history of this interpretation. And don’t get me wrong: if you can heal the sick, that’s a great way of announcing the good news of Jesus.


But it isn’t the only way. Not by a long shot. Take a minute. Think about your own gifts. If the writer of the Gospel added your skills to the list of healing the sick, cleansing skin diseases, raising the dead, and casting out demons that we hear today, what would it be?


Frederick Buechner has a great quote for those of us who doubt we have any sort of call or who have lost sight of God’s call or who fear it might be too late. in his book Wishful Thinking he says : “The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."


Of course, even when we find that place, we won’t always find people who are happy we found it.


In part, today’s Gospel is also a cautionary tale. We can answer our call, our call that is unique to us, our own way of announcing that the Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near, but that doesn’t mean that the world will instantly accept our gifts. Jesus warns us that just the opposite might happen. It sounds pretty grim. Not a great way to win converts. But Jesus tells us not to worry. God will speak through us. We will not be left to our own devices.


Not so long ago, I would have written this sermon imagining that very few of us would face any sort of resistance when we answered God’s call. Humanity seemed on a path of improvement as we charted our way through the last several decades of the 20th century. But as I was pondering this week’s Gospel text, word leaked out that the Southern Baptist Convention has decided to curtail the ways that women can be involved in the church.


Southern Baptists already restrict women in terms of answering a call. A Southern Baptist woman who hears God calling her to be a pastor would not get support in that denomination. In a way, this is not a new development. But that denomination continues to wrestle with how to deal with the issue of women and power. Can women be guest speakers? Can they be lectors? Should women be allowed to supervise men? Can they be Sunday School teachers?


If your social media feed is like mine, you may have seen an upsurge in reminders of all the ways that women have been faithful, with Biblical examples, like Mary Magdalene, whom some call the first apostle, because she’s the first to see the risen Jesus and she tells others. And look what happened to her—most people are more likely to remember her as the woman possessed by demons than as the first apostle.

Not so long ago, I might have said that our religious communities could help us discern a call and help us to be sure that it’s God’s call we’re hearing and not the call of those who might not have our best interests at heart. Now I use the words of Jesus in advising us how to proceed: we must be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. We can ask ourselves if we’re part of a process that announces the Kingdom of God is at hand, or are we announcing someone else’s kingdom.


In this way, we will endure until the end. In this way, we will be saved.

Women and Authority and Southern Baptist Decisions

I wonder if the social media feeds of other people are full of rage at the Southern Baptist governing body and their decisions about women in leadership.  In many ways, it's not a surprise:  they've forbidden women pastors for decades now.  The recent decision seems to say that women can't even be church council members or Sunday School teachers or speak in worship at all--no lectors, much less assisting ministers.  

Obviously, I disagree with these decisions.  I am lucky to have other denominations, including my own, the ELCA, the more inclusive expression of Lutheranism in the U.S.  I am not Southern Baptist and neither are most of the people filling my feed with rage.  Living in a "free" society and believing in free will does mean that people get to make their own decisions, no matter how much I think they are on a wrong path.

I do wonder who will do all the work, if women aren't allowed to do even volunteer work, even the work traditionally done by women, like teaching of all kinds.  Are there really all these men, waiting in the wings who have been chomping at the bit to do the work?

It's hard for me to believe that they do.  Of course, I've been in congregations that are tiny, where everyone who is breathing has been put to work, churches that don't have the luxury of excluding half (or more) of the congregation.

I am happy to be part of a church that welcomes everyone into the circle to do the work of kingdom building.

All the Battles Worth Watching, One after Another

We spent a long chunk of time yesterday watching One Battle After Another.  It's a movie that's been out for awhile, but only recently free to stream on Amazon Prime.  I had forgotten how long it was, but happily, we started it in the late afternoon, not at 7:30 at night.

It wasn't until the later part of the movie, during one of the long (LONG) car chases that I became aware of how long it was taking to finish the movie.  It was compelling from the beginning until close to the end, compelling in ways that surprised me.

I was impressed with all the chunks of narrative that did manage to come together.  Paul Thomas Anderson deserved those Oscars for best director and best adapted screenplay.  There were moments when I did some math to try to figure out the revolutionary aspect of it all--if the daughter is 16 or 17, then the revolutionaries were active in 2008 or 2009?  The planting of bombs in government buildings and calling in bomb threats from a pay phone seemed so 1972 to me, but clearly, that timeline wouldn't work.  It was a nebulous revolutionary movement in the movie, so I was willing to suspend my initial disbelief.

There's another revolutionary movement in the movie, and it's the "Latino Harriet Tubman situation."  This movie has a lot to say about a great many issues, and one of the disadvantages of a vast movie is that some issues get short shrift.  I'd have liked more about all the Latino issues, especially the nods to the sanctuary movement that are hiding there in plain sight for those of us with eyes to see.  It's in the storylines about migration where we see revolutionaries who are working for social justice and working against a government that's against the flourishing of all people--unlike the other revolutionaries, the main characters who seem to be just blowing things up for the thrill of it all.

I try very hard not to fault movies or books or TV shows for not being the story that I wish they could have been.  In the end, I was happy to have a well-made movie to watch, a movie with much to mull over, a movie worth re-watching, as so few things are deserving of a second look these days.

Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

 The readings for Sunday, June 14, 2026:

Genesis 18:1-15, (21:1-7)

Psalm 116:1-2, 12-19

Romans 5:1-8

Matthew 9:35-10:8, (9-23)


In many modern churches, especially in the time around Pentecost, we spend a lot of time talking about mission, even if we're not realizing we're talking about it. Does the church exist to serve the members? Does the church exist to serve the community? And what do we mean when we talk about the church anyway?

In this Sunday's Gospel, we get a very different vision of the early church than we'll get in parts of Acts. In Acts, we often see the early believers arguing about doctrine, like who gets to belong and who doesn't--and once we've decided who gets to participate, there are debates about how to participate, like what can be eaten and when it should be eaten.

In this Sunday's Gospel, we see a vision of the early church in the way that Paul will practice it. Jesus gives instructions to his disciples to go out taking very little with them: no food, no money, not even a change of clothes. Their mission: "Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons."

And what will they get for their troubles? They will be flogged in the synagogues and drug before rulers, where we assume a gruesome death will follow. Their message will divide families, but they are to persevere, to endure.

I think about those early disciples and our current time. The early disciples lived in a time of upheaval, and Jesus had fomented even more unrest. We, too, inhabit a time of social unrest with threats both familiar and new. We, too, sense we are at a hinge moment in history, when the time before us will be completely different to the time we lived in not too long ago.

In these days when we can't budget in the ways we once did, how can we possibly plan for our mission in the coming months and years? We have spent years and decades learning to make plans and budgets, skills which seem geared for a different time in history.  Each day, if we listen to news and social media platforms, we get news of how the church seems increasingly irrelevant to the larger world.

Yet our mission remains the same: to care for the outcast of society, to speak truth to the ones who rule, to cast out the demons that oppress society. Jesus sends his disciples out into the world without a plan, without a budget, without supplies, without a script. He trusts them to be able to think on their feet, to react to the circumstances that they actually encounter, instead of planning for encounters that may never happen.

Jesus ends with one last piece of instruction: "See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves" (Matthew 10: 16). 

Let us all be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, a mission that is as important now as it ever was.

Recording of Two Sermons for Sunday, June 7, 2026

Yesterday was a good day in worship at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Tennessee.  I preached on the true miracle that Jesus performs across the linked stories in the Gospel reading, Matthew  9:9-13, 18-26, the ability to rescue us from the living death of isolation--and it's a miracle we can perform too.

You can view the recording of the sermon here on my YouTube channel.  If you want to read along and see where I went off script, I posted the sermon manuscript in this blog post.

My spouse also captured the youth sermon, where I reminded the youth that like the father in the Gospel, God will never give up on us, even in death.  You can view it here on my YouTube channel.

Sermon for Sunday, June 7, 2026

June 7, 2026

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott




Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26




The Revised Common Lectionary, our schedule of readings, was designed long before we had our smart phones. This Gospel text was written long before modern inventors created the smart phone and other ways of keeping humans isolated and miserable. In today’s text, we see that the problems that afflict humans aren’t so different from age to age. Today’s text shows Jesus healing in a variety of ways, but in addition, he creates the miracle of repaired community.


In today’s text, we have a call story, a chronic health problem cured by a woman’s insistence and initiative, and a little girl raised from the dead. Of these three, the last one is probably the one that most of us have not experienced, the one ordinary humans cannot claim to do ourselves, the one that seems like the truest miracle.


When we think about Jesus raising people from the dead, we probably think of Lazarus, but that’s not the only time he raised people from the dead. The most significant raising of the dead is in the 27th chapter of Matthew, when the souls of the righteous come out of their graves when Jesus died. In all these instances, the dead are very dead. Likewise, in today’s text, the girl has been dead for some time, at the very least, the amount of time it takes her father to find Jesus, ask for help, and bring him back to the house.


Death is the ultimate isolating incident, and in ancient times, death was even more isolating, with rules about how to treat the corpse and the family of the dead. The period of mourning was over a year, with the family isolated or in other ways excused from community duties for over a year. And of course, death is the most severe severance from community for the person who dies. Jesus comes and resurrects the girl and her family into community.


The bleeding woman, the other woman in today’s Gospel text, is also resurrected into community. This healing story appears in all three Gospels, which can be a key to how important the story is to understanding Jesus. As with the customs surrounding death, the customs surrounding bodily fluids have changed so much that we may lose sight of what happens here.


A woman bleeding in this way would be completely isolated. Bleeding people were seen as unclean, and like lepers, a person bleeding would not be able to live a normal life in communion with the larger community. Their bleeding would be seen as contaminating the larger community, and everyone would need to go through ritual purification if they were in proximity to a bleeding person. If a person bled for an hour or a few days, that bleeding was manageable, but a woman with chronic bleeding was likely to live continuously without much community contact or hope of it.


The Gospel of Matthew gives us less detail about the healing, but we do get the detail about the 12 years that she has been bleeding (Luke tells us she had spent all of her money on doctors). In this healing story, she grabs initiative and touches the fringe of his cloak. Instead of getting angry, Jesus uses her as an example of faithfulness. Desperation can lead to faithfulness, and this kind of experience is more familiar to us today, as more of us wrestle with health issues which seem incurable.


Matthew the tax collector may seem to have little to do with the dead girl and the bleeding woman, but he, too, is isolated from society. We may see him as a man with a good job, but that’s not how his fellow citizens would see him. Jews would hate him because he worked for the occupying empire and made money off their misery; Romans would despise him because he was Jewish. This dinner that he’s enjoying with Jesus is likely the first time he’s shared a meal with others since he took the job. One of the details of The Chosen which makes me respect the franchise is that the show does depict the hatred that everyone feels for this man, based not on his personality but on what he does for a living.


The other people in today’s Gospel text show us people who are isolated in much the same ways we are today. There are the Pharisees who ask why Jesus is behaving the way he is. If you’re on social media for any amount of time, you’ll see this behavior has just gotten worse instead of better—we know how everyone should behave and we’re hypercritical of those who want to live differently and those who want to express their opinions have a way to do so 24 hours a day. Social media just amplifies behavior that’s been part of humans since ancient times, behavior that we see in the people following Jesus, both those who approve of him and those who don’t.


The crowd at the dead girl’s house is also an isolating force. Jesus shows up to do things differently, and they laugh at him. Jesus goes ahead and raises the dead girl.


Isolation is one of the largest forces of death in our current world. Last week I concluded my sermon by saying that nothing is impossible with God. This week, we see that power in action, the impossible becoming incarnate in our world.


Those of us struggling with the losses that come with death or illness might say, “Well, from this vantage point, it sure does look like some things are impossible.” The ministry of Jesus shows that he understands that there are situations worse than death. Jesus comes to heal the living death that the most isolated people experience. Jesus comes to heal us in all the ways that life in community can be isolating.


We often hear how we are living in unprecedented times, facing existential threats that past generations never had to figure out, whether that be nuclear bombs or artificial intelligence. The wisdom of a 3 year lectionary cycle is the reminder that we’ve always been facing the same existential threat, even as the method of destruction varies. Jesus shows us that the true existential threat is how isolated we are from each other. The true miracle that Jesus works over and over again is his ability to reintegrate the most isolated humans in our culture.


Jesus reminds us over and over again that the way to heal our individuals is through reweaving the social fabric. If we refuse to accept the voices that gossip about those who do things differently, if we refuse to join in the mockery and laughter that often greet those who are making a different world, we are creating the Kingdom of God that Jesus came to proclaim is inbreaking.


Of course, in so many ways, this community gathered here this morning is already reweaving the social fabric of the community. The most obvious way might be our fish fry evenings, but there is so much more. I look around and see people who cook, people who teach, people who can repair any broken thing. I look around and I see people raising the food that will feed a hungry nation and people taking care of those who come to our lakes. I look around and I see people raising the next generation to be kind and community oriented, and I look at our youth, and I have renewed hope for the future. I look around, and I see a community who includes all who come here, a community that stops the hemorrhaging disease of isolation that is draining the life force out of so many communities.


In this way of building and strengthening community, ordinary humans can bring the dead back to life. Jesus showed Matthew the tax collector the way to do it. Let us continue in this work that has been given us to do.

Annual Dinner with Camp Counselors

Last night, we had dinner with the Lutheridge and Lutherock camp counselors.  We've done it before, and I always come away impressed.  The neighborhood community who lives in the residential section of Lutheridge brings a variety of desserts, and the camp provides burgers and hot dogs, chips and beverages.

We sat with a guy who's finishing the fall semester and then headed to Duke Divinity school and another senior staffer who hopes to come back for another summer or two before he said he probably should find a regular job.  I said, "Or you could continue working in outdoor ministries year round."

Happily, no one was there to point out the shrinking job opportunities in that field.  I will never understand why the larger church doesn't do more to help/commit to campus and outdoor ministries.  The counselors I spoke to last night are full of hope for all the ways their futures might unfold.  I've found that my SMC students are similarly optimistic.  It's refreshing.

Before the dinner, I spent the day trying to fix my course shell for my online class at Spartanburg Methodist College.  The book has changed editions (again--sigh), so the references to the book page numbers that students find in the assignments and discussion posts are wrong.  Ugh.  I'm teaching someone else's course, and so it's not intuitive to me, the way I would have if I had created it all--it takes more time to diagnose problems and fix them.

I also did some baking--I decided to bring a gluten free, dairy free dessert.  It worked beautifully.  It's an almond-coconut concoction, and I want to record it here:

1 C. sugar

3 eggs

1 1/2 C. almond flour (or grind up a lot of almonds into as fine a powder as possible)

1 1/2 C. coconut (I used sweetened and unsweetened in 2 different experiments--no difference)

Whip the sugar and eggs until tripled in volume or until tired of the noise of the mixer.  Fold in the almond flour and the coconut.  Pour in a 9 inch cake pan lined with parchment paper and greased or in cupcake pan.  Bake at 350 for 25ish minutes.  You can only tell if it's done by color--a golden, light brown color.  It will be sticky and delicious.  It keeps at room temperature for days, although the crispiness of the crust declines.

The Lectionary Cycle Begins Again

We are now at the 3 year anniversary of my being the Synod Authorized Minister at Faith Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bristol, Tennessee.  I still find it very fulfilling.  I've enjoyed the weekly worship, along with the high water moments, like baptisms and Confirmation.  I've learned so much.  I've wished that I could go back to apologize to some pastors when I was too tough in my judgments.  I'm amazed at how being the minister in charge has enriched my Sunday worship and sustained me through the week in ways that I both anticipated and did not.

But that's not what's on my mind this morning.

Three years means that we're back at the beginning of the lectionary reading cycle.

There's been repetition before, of course.  Christmas Eve is Christmas Eve--how to make it new every year?  But now we're back at the beginning.

I will continue to write something new every week.  I'm paid a specific amount, $100, to do that; the preaching and presiding is at a different rate.  I don't feel a temptation to use the sermon from three years ago.

I did pull it up to look at it.  It's a good sermon; I understand the temptation to use old material without revising it.

I am a bit relieved that while I'll be using some of the same ideas, it will be a different sermon.  I am also sad that some of the ideas about the ways that empires function by making outsiders and pitting us against each other sadly are even more relevant.  

It will be an interesting new phase of weekly ministry, finding ways to make the lectionary readings new in a place where I have preached them before.

Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

The readings for Sunday, June 11, 2023: First reading and Psalm
Genesis 12:1-9
Psalm 33:1-12

Alternate First reading and Psalm
Hosea 5:15-6:6
Psalm 50:7-15

Second reading
Romans 4:13-25

Gospel
Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26




In this Sunday's Gospel, we have a strange assortment of stories that don't seem to go together. We have a story about a tax collector being called to follow Jesus, and then a discussion about who should be eating with who, and a mysterious passage about who needs a doctor and mercy vs. sacrifice. And then we get to the bleeding woman who gets healing and a dead daughter. What on earth do these passages have to do with the first passage? But when I go back to look at the reading again, I begin to see what unifies it. I begin to see a larger pattern of healing. But it may not be healing in the form we expect.

Across all of these verses in today’s reading, we see outcasts of all kinds. There are the two women at the end of today’s text, the most obvious outsiders, one bleeding, one dead—both conditions making them beyond the borders of acceptance in an ancient culture. 

There’s Matthew the tax collector, whose profession puts him outside of acceptability to both Jews and Romans. Jews would hate him because he worked for the occupying empire and made money off their misery; Romans would despise him because he was Jewish. The leader of the synagogue is outside of acceptability; his daughter’s death has compelled him to seek out Jesus, which would not have been OK with his colleagues back at the synagogue. Bible scholars would want us to note that he kneels before Jesus, signifying his inferiority to Jesus. Even the Pharisees who want to know why Jesus shares a meal with sinners have cast themselves out from the society gathered around Jesus in this passage.

But what does this have to do with us?

The truth is that we live in a society that is rigid and stratified in similar ways to first century Rome. We live in an empire that is still in thrall to the military-industrial complex, and so we live under a current state of war and preparation for the next war. We live with traumatized survivors of past wars and families ripped apart. We take money that could be used to feed people to feed the war machine. War weapons are used against civilians: every week brings another school shooting, massacres of all sorts.

And even if we can maintain a healthy distance from the military-industrial complex, we live in a capitalist empire that wants us to buy more, more, more, and so we are bombarded with messages of how we are inadequate in the hopes that we will buy more and more. And to make matters worse, we willingly carry the tools of empire’s oppression with us all the time. How long can you go without looking at your phone? How often is your phone sending you the message that you are a beloved creation of God? Not often, I bet.

Maybe in our focus on the healing miracles, we’ve missed the point. We’ve focused on the individual healings and lost sight of the larger resurrection Jesus offers. Jesus came to heal our communities, to raise the larger society from the dead. And this healing happens by inclusion, outsiders made insiders, the realization that we are all outsiders desperately in need of inclusion. Jesus announces a kingdom of God that will be very different than the kingdoms of earthly empires.

As a society, we’ve been hemorrhaging our very life force for much too long. Many of our communities are as dead as the daughter of the synagogue leader. Like the Pharisees, we ask questions about who is eating with who instead of asking essential questions about the best way to live our lives, the most life-giving ways to order our societies. We are in desperate need of a physician.

I suspect that many of us feel like Matthew. We do work that doesn’t feel essential—or worse, we do work that helps an empire repress the people we claim as our own. But the Gospels remind us again and again, that God offers us an invitation to a life that can come in the middle of our living death. Jesus invites us to put down our cell phones and follow. Jesus invites us into a new community built on inclusion. 

The ways we create an inclusive community are as vast and varied as we are. When in doubt follow Jesus’ lead: invite people to dinner. Reach out to women with chronic health problems; reach out to anyone with a chronic condition. Jesus invites us to follow him.

I hope you will say yes to the call of Jesus in the ways that only you can.

Will you?

Recording of the Sermon for Sunday, May 31, 2026

Both of my sermons yesterday seemed to go well.  For the youth sermon, I focused on the reading from Genesis and used it as a chance to remind/teach about the 2 creation stories, that Adam and Eve are in the second one, the one that people use to explain why the world is bad.  But in yesterday's creation story, we see God creating with great happiness and declaring everything good, which is how God feels about us.

My adult sermon wove together Trinity Sunday and the Feast Day of the Visitation. I decided to go that direction as I contemplated how many Trinity Sunday sermons I might preach in my life and how rarely the Sunday will fall on May 31.

You can view the recording of most of the sermon here on my YouTube channel.  If you'd like to read along/instead, I posted the manuscript here on my theology blog.

Sermon for May 31, 2026, The Feast Day of the Visitation and Holy Trinity Sunday

May 31, 2026, Holy Trinity Sunday
By Kristin Berkey-Abbott



First Reading: Genesis 1:1--2:4a

Psalm: Psalm 8

Second Reading: 2 Corinthians 13:11-13

Gospel: Matthew 28:16-20





The wonders of technology make it possible for me to be part of the women’s group at the church in Florida where I used to be a member; once a month, we meet by way of Zoom to check in with each other and to have a bit of Bible study. We met the Saturday before Pentecost, and we talked about prayer and which part of the Triune God we talked to when we pray—or do we separate them in that way? I would offer the same question to all of us, as we think about Holy Trinity Sunday. It’s one way of thinking about what it means to have a Triune God.


In the Bible study group, we found out that most of us pray to Jesus and/or God, who we described as Creator or Father. None of us pray to the Holy Spirit. In a way, that’s not a surprise. We’re Lutherans, after all. In my Lutheran Theology class, we studied the foundational documents written by Luther and his fellow reformers. The focus was on Jesus and justification more than God and creation or the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit gets no mention at all.


When we look at the readings for today, we see something similar. Look again at what we just heard. In the first reading and the Psalm, we see God the Creator in full force. Not God as judge, not God as rescuer, not God as avenger-- three of the other main ways we see God across time, three of the main ways we see humans relating to God.


In our Gospel reading, we see the second part of the Triune God. We see Jesus at the end of his ministry, Jesus as dispatcher, sending the disciples out to carry on his work. In today’s Gospel reading, we don’t see Jesus as savior in the same way we do during Holy Week and Easter. In today’s reading, we don’t see Jesus as healer and worker of miracles.


The Holy Spirit only gets a brief mention, just part of a sentence in both the second reading and the Gospel. For Holy Trinity Sunday, this seems unfair. Sure, we had a focus on the Holy Spirit last week, but now we seem back to our non-Pentecostal life, all the parts of the Triune God back in their lanes, each responsible for different parts of our spiritual and church lives.


Throughout the centuries, the Church has wrestled with trinitarian theology, with the question about what it means to have God in 3 persons, blessed Trinity, as the hymnist writes it. Were all three there in the beginning? Can they exist separately, apart from one another? Different theologians would give us different answers.


Some theologians might tell us that the answers aren’t important. The important question is how we relate to this Triune God—how we understand the ways that God is at work in the world. This understanding can shape our spiritual practices: how we pray and to whom we pray, for example.


Our Gospel reading is one predominant way that Christians through the centuries have related to God, by going out and making disciples. Through the centuries, that has been interpreted as going to people who haven’t heard about Jesus and convincing them that Jesus walked the earth and died for us and rose again. That model has us converting people and moving on to the next group who hasn’t heard about Jesus.


That model doesn’t seem as useful today. Can there be any people out there who haven’t heard about Jesus? Would our showing up to preach and teach really make a difference?


Perhaps we’ve focused on the wrong verb in today’s Gospel. We’ve focused on the verb “Go”; for today’s world, “Make disciples” is a much more important focus. In the past, we’ve done that by preaching and teaching. But how does the Triune God make disciples?


One clear way is by coming to live with us. Christians focus on Jesus. Jesus comes to earth to show us what it means to be human, how to live our best human lives. From the beginning of the story, even before the birth of Jesus, the Triune God is showing us by example.


May 31, roughly 6 months before Christmas, is the Feast day of the Visitation, a day that commemorates Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, her kinswoman. In Protestant denominations, we hear about this visit in Advent, if we hear it at all. But it provides an interesting note for Trinity Sunday too. It’s an important counterpoint to Pentecost, which often is presented as something that happens to the disciples after they have been commissioned by Jesus.


The story of Mary and Elizabeth reminds us that others are also worthy of commissioning, worthy of doing God’s work in the world—and those people may look very different from those 11 disciples in today’s Gospel. Society and biology told Elizabeth that she was too old for a child; God said it wasn’t too late. Society told Mary that she wasn’t the appropriate choice for a mother of the Messiah; God invited her to ignore that judgment. Women said yes, God said yes, and the history of the world shifted.


It's a great day to celebrate those possibilities. And even if we've been feeling like our time is passed, that it's too late for us, it's great to remember that God doesn't see us that way. If we feel like we're too inexperienced, that we don't know what we're doing, it's great to remember that God doesn't see us that way.


On this Trinity Sunday, let us remember that our God is revealed through community—community between Creator, Redeemer, and Holy Spirit, and community between the Divine and humans. Let us follow God’s example. Let us rejoice in all that is possible when we say yes to God, when we join this community. In a world that rarely celebrates the ways we need each other to thrive, let us make disciples by being a living example of the value of community. So let us go, go about our days, secure in the knowledge that with God, nothing is impossible. With our Triune God, nothing—nothing—is impossible.

Our Next Fixer-Upper

If such a thing exists as a regular reader of this blog, that reader would notice that my regular schedule of posting has been disrupted.  On Monday, we left town until Wednesday for a wedding.  Yesterday we headed down to Spartanburg because I scheduled a turn-on date for water and electric utilities at our new-to-us fixer upper-house in Spartanburg.

Yes, we bought another fixer-upper when we're not done fixing up the house we have at Lutheridge.  Let me be clear--we're not selling that house.  We are fortunate enough to be able to afford 2 small houses.  And one reason why we can is that each house needed work, and very few homebuyers these days want to put in that sweat equity.

In the spirit of full disclosure and complete honesty, I, too, would like a house where I didn't need to think about upgrades, where someone else had already made the decisions and installations.  But as we looked at houses, we kept saying, "Why would someone make the kitchen this way?  Why didn't they do the bathroom that way?"

I almost didn't look at the house we bought.  The pictures were just too scary, like this one of the kitchen:

Did they have a fire?  Some catastrophic plumbing issue?  But it was around the corner from a very cute house, so I swung by.  As I peered in the window, I thought, well this isn't as scary as it looks.

When we had our realtor show it to us, we all said, "This house is much better than it looks.  And more solid than it looks."  So we made an offer which was accepted.  We closed on the house May 8 and because of travel plans made a year ago, we are only now having time to make upgrades.

You might say, "Yes, but why 2 houses?"  In March, I accepted an offer of a tenure track Associate Professor position from Spartanburg Methodist College, which means more job stability--income to count on and a schedule to count on, a schedule which means I need to be on campus every weekday, during the 8 months of the year that school is in session.  I have done that kind of commuting for the past 2 years, and it's getting tiring.

I'm still a Synod Appointed Minister at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, so our thinking is that we'll be at the Lutheridge house on the week-end, in the Spartanburg house during the weekdays.  And I will want to spend the summer months in the Lutheridge house.

Of course, much could change, as much has changed.  It hasn't been that long since we bought our current fixer-upper, the Lutheridge house.  It was just 4 years ago, when I had only done a year of seminary, when I didn't even know that SMC existed.

Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

The readings for Sunday, May 31, 2026:

First Reading: Genesis 1:1--2:4a

Psalm: Psalm 8

Second Reading: 2 Corinthians 13:11-13

Gospel: Matthew 28:16-20


This Sunday is Holy Trinity Sunday, one of those festival Sundays that seem a bit baffling, at first (like Christ the King Sunday, which comes at the end of the liturgical year). We understand the significance of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. But what exactly do we celebrate on Holy Trinity Sunday?

At first reading, the Gospel doesn't seem to help. And Jesus certainly didn't spend any time indoctrinating his disciples on these matters which would later split the church. He alludes to the Triune God: we see him pray to God and he tells the disciples that he will send a Comforter. But he spends far more time instructing the disciples on how they should treat the poor and destitute, about their relationship to the larger culture, about their role in creating the Kingdom in the here and now.

You get a much better understanding of the Trinity by reading all the lessons together (thanks to my campus pastor from days of old, Jan Setzler, who pointed this out in his church's newsletter over a decade ago). These aren't unfamiliar aspects: God as creator of the world, God as lover of humans, Christ who came to create community, the Holy Spirit who moves and breathes within us and enables us to create community.

Notice that we have a God who lives in community, both with the various aspects of God (Creator, Savior, Spirit) and with us. It's an image that baffles our rational minds. It's akin to contemplating the infinity of space. Our brains aren't large enough or we don't know how to use them in that way.

But maybe it's not helpful to spend time trying to understand these matters with our intellects.  Maybe we should focus on what the Triune God does, not what the Triune God is.

The God that we see in our Scriptures is a God of action. We see God creating in any number of arenas. We are called to do the same. This is not a God who saves us so that we can flip through TV channels. Our God is a God who became incarnate to show us how to be people of action: Go. Make disciples. Teach. Baptize. Keep the commandments. We do this by loving each other and God. We love not just by experiencing an emotion. Love moves us to action.

And that action doesn't have to have the boldness of those first, male disciples. They went very far when Jesus said to them "Go and make disciples."  But many of us don't need to travel more than a mile or two before we will find someone who needs us, someone we need, someone with whom we could form community.

How do we do that?  Here again, we can find many possibilities in our stories about our creator and our savior and our Holy Spirit Comforter:  rescuing captives out of bondage, teaching, eating meals together in a variety of ways, fishing, healing, going on retreat, praying, having conversations with both the popular people and the outcast, sharing resources, cleaning up messes, telling truth to power, on and on I could go.

We live in a time when the world offers us so many opportunities to act in the way that God acts.  How can we love our neighbor?  There are so many ways to do that.  Theologian Frederick Buechner reminds us in his book Wishful Thinking: "The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." Jesus promises to meet us there.

Memorial Day 2026

Today is Memorial Day, and through the years, I've come to realize how many different things this holiday can mean to people.  I've met people who won't celebrate it because of its roots in memorializing the Civil War Union dead.  My dad was an Air Force officer in the Reserves until he retired, so Memorial Day was personal for him.  I don't think I know anyone who was killed while on active duty, but I do want to honor those who died.  Some people I've known seem to have no inkling that the holiday has anything to do with soldiers at all--for them, it's about getting a good deal on a holiday sale or opening up the vacation home or having a cook out.

I remember feeling desperate for Memorial Day, for a day off, but during my days of working as an administrator, I was always desperate for a day off, a day off that didn't require me to use up any of my paltry allotment of vacation time.  For the past several years, Memorial Day as a three day week-end was not top of my mind, since I've already had a few weeks of schedule easing in May.

I also know that many people don't get to have time off.  All of our grocery stores are open today, for example.  When I taught in community colleges in South Carolina, we didn't have Memorial Day off.  Our nursing students needed every scrap of time in the summer, so that holiday had to be sacrificed so that we stayed in compliance.  Or maybe it was because of the Civil War; I got different explanations. In past years, I've used the day off to catch up on grading for my online classes.  

This year, I'm thinking about past years, when war seemed far away.  And now, here we are, with war in Europe (Ukraine) and war with Iran, and lots of smaller scale wars across the globe.

But let me circle back to the intent of this holiday.  On this day which has become for so many of us just an excuse to have a barbecue, let us pause to reflect and remember. If we're safe right now, let us say a prayer of gratitude. Let us remember that we've still got lots of military people serving in dangerous places.

Let us remember how often the world zooms into war. Let us pray to be preserved from those horrors.

Here's a prayer I wrote for Memorial Day:

God of comfort, on this Memorial Day, we remember those souls whom we have lost to war. We pray for those who mourn. We pray for military members who have died and been forgotten. We pray for all those sites where human blood has soaked the soil. God of Peace, on this Memorial Day, please renew in us the determination to be peacemakers. On this Memorial Day, we offer a prayer of hope that military people across the world will find themselves with no warmaking jobs to do. We offer our pleading prayers that you would plant in our leaders the seeds that will sprout into saplings of peace.

Sermon for May 24, 2026, Pentecost

May 24, 2026, Pentecost

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott



First Reading: Acts 2:1-21
Psalm: Psalm 104:24-34, 35b
Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13
Gospel: John 20:19-23



If we’ve been part of a church for any amount of time, say longer than 5 years, we might have opinions about Pentecost. We might consider it the birthday of the Church or the Holy Spirit. Maybe we associate Pentecost with Confirmation. Maybe it’s all about the color red or the geraniums.


Our readings for today show us the traditional scriptural depictions of Pentecost and how the Holy Spirit gets into the world. In the reading from the Gospel of John, the Holy Spirit arrives when Jesus breathes on the disciples. In the reading from Corinthians, we see Paul understanding the Holy Spirit giving believers a variety of skills and gifts with which to do God’s work. There’s also our first reading from Acts, the one that tells us what happened, the rush of violent wind, the tongues of flame, the ability to speak in languages that they didn’t already know—not mystical languages but languages that people from other places could hear and understand. Imagine the gift of being able to speak in Spanish or Mandarin Chinese—without years of study and practice. Imagine how many doors might open if we could do that. Or maybe, as our reading shows us, we’d face criticism and ugly inuendo.


The reading from Acts is probably what most of us think of when we think of Pentecost. When I was a child, it sounded marvelous, like getting a superpower. And indeed, that’s the story most of us are taught: the Holy Spirit comes and transforms the disciples and they go out and transform the world. Those stories of Christians transforming the world usually gloss over—or leave out completely—the difficulties.


It was not until the Pentecost Sunday after Hurricane Wilma when I considered how scary our Pentecost symbolism could and perhaps should be. Hurricane Wilma swept through South Florida in 2005, one of those one in a hundred year (or these days, 1 in every 10 year) supercharged hurricane times that included Hurricane Katrina. Katrina and Wilma both did damage to my house, and Wilma did extreme damage to St. John’s Lutheran Church in Hollywood, FL, our church at the time. After all the months of storm clean up, hearing about violent, rushing wind as a marker of the arrival of the Holy Spirit was disquieting, to say the least.


As I mentioned last week, if we look at the lives of the disciples, we see that the arrival of the Holy Spirit can be disrupting, like a supercharged hurricane season. Friday night, I had a very different vision of the Holy Spirit loose in the world.


On Friday afternoon, church members arrived for the fish fry to find that June Rasmussen had made these exquisite aprons in a variety of colors, all of them reversible. They’re all cut from the same pattern, but that pattern fit all of us—as a woman who has spent more time than I like to think looking for clothes that fit my non-standard body, I can say with certainty that one pattern that fits a variety of bodies, that’s a rare and wonderful pattern. I know that we’re here to think about our spiritual lives and all of the spiritual gifts we’ve been given, but just for a moment, think about all the physical bodies in this room. Some of us are tall, and some of us aren’t. Some of us have bodies that are wide—and some of us aren’t. Some of us are male, and some of us are female. Yet these aprons fit us all.


At one point I looked across the fellowship hall and saw all of us wearing our aprons, and I thought, now here’s a metaphor for the Holy Spirit at work in the world—these aprons are a great metaphor for the Holy Spirit itself. That idea felt scary and taboo, like I was transgressing some important religious boundary.


I’m a Lutheran who went to a liberal arts college, so transgression of a religious boundary doesn’t scare me the way it might if I was brought up in a different tradition. Let us think about the way the Holy Spirit is like this apron. As Jesus did with strange parables, let us see what happens if we use a different metaphor to think in new ways—Holy Spirit as reversible apron.


Many of us have limited exposure to the book of Acts, reading from it only at Pentecost. If we continued to read the book of Acts, we’d see the disciples arguing about what they had experienced. Who gets to use the apron? The Holy Spirit came for who, exactly? If it was just for the Jews, then why speak in different languages? And for the next two thousand years, that argument continues—how do we interpret Pentecost? Do we go out and bring the message to all nations? Or do we stay closer to home?


While Christians have been having these discussions/arguments for thousands of years, the Holy Spirit continues to travel, making appearances in interesting and unexpected places, draping itself over a wide variety of humans. Like an apron, the Holy Spirit gives the wearer the courage to act boldly. I would hesitate to stand in front of a deep fryer without an apron—too much danger of getting burned or ruining clothes that aren’t easy for me to find. But with an apron? Sure, I’ll help fry. An apron comes with the promise that we will be protected if we take chances; similarly, Jesus tells us that the Holy Spirit will bring protection when we are working for the Kingdom of God. We need not be afraid—we can act boldly for the Kingdom of God as we work for justice or create beautiful art or minister to the poor or take care of the generations coming after us or heal bodies or the earth or tend to families.


That promise of protection can give us courage, along with protection. Like an apron, if we trust in the Triune God, the Holy Spirit can help us find what we need in the moment—maybe it’s courage, maybe it’s boldness, maybe it’s the ability to communicate in new ways.

As I looked at the aprons, I was struck by how they are alike, yet different—different colors, different pockets that matched and contrasted, how the cloth on one side harmonized with the other side. I thought about how we each get the same presence of the Holy Spirit along with the mission of continuing the work that Jesus commissions us to do—and yet, like those aprons on Friday night, each person’s Holy Spirit experience is unique. The Holy Spirit moving in the world is like the best cloth shop with so many colors and patterns that the combinations are endless.


An apron doesn’t promise that our ventures will proceed in the ways that we’ve envisioned. And the presence of the Holy Spirit also does not come with the promise that we control the show—far from it. I wasn’t at Faith Lutheran when the first fish fries were planned, but I’m willing to bet that part of what was hoped for this project was new members. Do we have anyone here who came to membership in this church by way of one of the fish fry events?


No, most of us came for other reasons. But the fact that the fish fry doesn’t generate new membership doesn’t mean that they haven’t been valuable. I talked to many of our guests on Friday night, and they came for a variety of reasons, but almost all of them talked about the value of the fish fry to the community for so many reasons: the money raised, the chance to eat with old friends, the value of a good meal. I looked at all of us in our colorful aprons, so tired from the prep work and the service work, but having a good time, and I saw God at work in the world. I saw the Holy Spirit at work in the world, not in tongues of flame or violent rushing wind, but in a congregation having fun together, draped in protective aprons that another member made for us.


We might look around us, though, and worry about the future. Sure, we can pull together and do fish fries now, but what about in 10 years. We might rejoice in our 2 confirmands today, while feeling some sorrow that there aren’t more. We might lose sight of the fact that we only have part of the story.


Each Pentecost, we remember beginnings that might not have been seen as the start of something bold and new. Jesus breathes on the disciples—and then he leaves them. The Holy Spirit comes in the book of Acts, and the disciples will spend the rest of their lives trying to determine the direction they should go next.


Let us remember that we have not yet seen the completed creation or the fullness of the Triune God who breathed into the chaos and began this life we have together. We see God breathe new life in Genesis and Jesus breathe new life in John. On this Pentecost Sunday, let us remember to breathe. Let us go forth to claim our gifts that the Holy Spirit grants to us, sure in the knowledge, that, like a good apron, the Holy Spirit will equip us to do the work that needs us to do it.

Rain and Writing

It's the kind of rainy morning that's saying, "Wait and walk later."  Of course, the risk in waiting is that I might not go at all:  it could continue to rain or I could submit to laziness.  It's the kind of rainy morning where I have writing that I need to do, so waiting to walk makes sense.  

I was feeling bad that I had no sermon rough draft written, but by last night I was glad.  We went to the last fish fry of the season at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, TN, where we discovered that a church member had made aprons for everyone, reversible at that.  As I looked at us all wearing our aprons, I thought about Pentecost and the metaphors for the Holy Spirit, and I got an idea that hadn't been there before.  I don't want to write about it further, for fear of losing the energy of the idea.  Once I've posted the sermon, I'll come back and put the links in this post. 

I am happy for the rain, even if it means my walk never happens.  We've been in such a deep drought across the southeast.

Of course, last night I was not happy for the rain as we drove back from the fish fry.  At first, as we left at 7:30, it was beautiful, with clouds across the mountain.  The rain settled in as we got to the top of the mountain; once we got to the road construction outside of Asheville, the rain got heavier and the road conditions worse with construction debris and barriers and various lines on the road.  I have rarely been more relieved when we pulled into our driveway as I was last night.

Let me keep this blog post short so that I can take advantage of this rainy morning and get my Pentecost sermon written.

Parish Church as Community _____(Builder, Resource, Space to Breathe)

Later today, we head to Bristol, TN for the last fish fry for the community.  It's an outreach activity of a sort, but we're not really reaching unchurched people.  In the far-eastern mountain part of the state, most people who want a church home have found one, and almost everyone already knows we're there.

So why do it?  In part, my very tiny congregation raises an impressive amount of money for the local charities that feed the hungry.  But in part, we do it to feed the souls who come for dinner.  It's a great space for people to sit and eat and to linger with others that they don't see as often.

This morning, I read a blog post by Pastor Clint Schnekloth, and I want to capture part of that blog post here, so that I have it in the future, in case the post goes away.  It captures what I've been thinking about ways that the physical church community, including the building, can be important in new ways that are old ways, particularly in the space to breathe/refuge way:

"But over time I have also come to think that many of us internalized a false opposition between the local and the public. We sometimes imagined that meaningful ministry always happened elsewhere, beyond the congregation itself, when in reality local congregations can become some of the most important sites of public trust remaining in contemporary life. The parish was treated as a launching pad for the “real” work of the gospel, rather than itself being a primary site of public life.

Theologically, however, Christianity has always resisted that abstraction. The incarnation is not an argument for generalized spirituality but an affirmation of locality. God does not merely send ideas into history but inhabits a place, a body, a neighborhood, a people. Jesus comes from Nazareth. He lives among actual communities, eats in homes, and becomes recognizable through repeated relationships. Even the resurrected Christ remains marked by wounds. Christian faith is therefore never purely conceptual or placeless. It is embodied, located, and relational.

I no longer think about congregational life primarily in terms of maintaining institutional machinery. Increasingly, I think in terms of cultivating conditions under which grace can circulate through a community. What we are tending in parish ministry is not only institutional continuity but a social and spiritual ecology shaped by trust, accompaniment, hospitality, beauty, mutual responsibility, and shared life. People arrive for worship, for healing from religious trauma, for acceptance of LGBTQIA+ children, for relief from loneliness, for grounding amid exhaustion and outrage, or for practical support in grief, family breakdown, or economic strain.

What has struck me more and more is that people often experience churches like ours less as providers of religious goods and more as places where they can breathe.

That may sound simple, but culturally it is becoming rarer and more important. In an anxious, fragmented, performative society, spaces where people can exist without fear, humiliation, ideological sorting, or relentless productivity become deeply public realities.

None of these dimensions exist independently."

Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel (Pentecost)

  The readings for Sunday, May 24, 2026:

First Reading: Acts 2:1-21

First Reading (Alt.): Numbers 11:24-30

Psalm: Psalm 104:25-35, 37 (Psalm 104:24-34, 35b NRSV)

Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13

Second Reading (Alt.): Acts 2:1-21

Gospel: John 20:19-23

Gospel (Alt.): John 7:37-39



Ah, Pentecost, day of fire and wind and foreign languages.

Contemplate how much of Scripture circles around the breath of God. Reread Genesis--creation comes into being because God breathes it into life. Something similar happens in the Gospel of John. Jesus breathes on his disciples and transforms them. Likewise in Acts--that great rushing wind. For those of you in love with words and older translations, we often find the same word in these passages: Pneuma (yes, that root that creates our modern word of pneumonia).

The twenty-first century Church, at least some branches of it, is in serious need of the breath of God. Perhaps you are too.

I often think of those first followers, who went out with the breath of God in them, and transformed the world. In the history of social movements, few have been as broadly successful as Christianity. My atheist friends would chime in that few have been as destructive--we both may be right. What an unlikely story: a small band of weirdly talented or distinctly ungifted men and women head out in pairs, carrying very little with them, and they survive enormous obstacles. In the process, they change the culture--and often, then, they move on. Think of the distances that they travelled--often on foot. Think of how hostile the culture was. You wouldn't be able to suspend your disbelief if you read it in a book.

The breath of God can transform us in the same way. Jesus transfers his powers to his disciples; we're given the power to do what he does. Now, if only we could believe it.

Maybe the key is to act as if you do believe it. You can do remarkable things, even if you don't feel like you can.

We're at a point in history that may prove to be a pivot.  We've had plagues and pandemics.  We've had political upheavals from left and right.  Weather related catastrophes happen regularly.  Many people are already considering how to use this moment in history for their own purposes.  How can we use this moment to create a society that's more in line with the vision that God has for us?

Maybe the thought of transformation exhausts you in the best of times.  Maybe the question of transformation threatens to overwhelm you.  Maybe you are already drowning.

So let's begin from a much simpler place.  Let's return to a fundamental religious practice and focus on our breathing.  In his book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, researcher James Nestor points us to a study showing that breathing in for 5-6 seconds and breathing out for 5-6 seconds can help restore our sense of calm and well being.  Breathing more deeply can heal us in all sorts of ways, especially if we remember to focus on our breath more often.

As we focus on our breathing, let's add a powerful meditative element.  As you inhale, envision God breathing into you. Breathe deeply.  Receive the breath of God.  As you exhale, imagine God's grace and goodness flowing into the world. 

The world needs to receive the breath of God.  The planet cries out for healing.  The stories of Pentecost show us ways to begin.

The Feast Day of Saint Dunstan

On this day in 988, Archbishop Dunstan died.  In this blog post, medieval scholar Eleanor Parker calls him "one of the greatest saints of Anglo-Saxon England - statesman, archbishop of Canterbury, scholar, monk, musician, metal-worker, and noted tormenter of devils."

Well, there's a resume!

The blog post talks about the history of Dunstan's time, the tumultuous tenth century, tumultuous in England, at least.  It was a time of Viking raids--but not constant raids.  During the times of no raiding, could people relax or did they always know the raids would start again?

It was also a time of internal fighting, with battles between Scotland and northern England.  To read the timeline in this Wikipedia article exhausts me.  But I remind myself that medieval war wasn't relentless, the way our more modern wars could be.  I imagine that civilian populations might not have known much at all about those battles that are listed.

It was a time of monastic developments, with new orders founded and old monasteries and abbeys resurrected.  Was this renewed interest because of the constant state of war?

Despite my knowledge of English literature, I don't really know much about this time period.  My knowledge of English literature in any kind of deep way begins with Chaucer, who lived from 1343-1400.  Most of us think of the post-Roman, pre-Chaucer time period as the Dark Ages, but historians have often pointed out the limits of that term.  Saint Dunstan shows that the time was much more complex. 

Sermon for Sunday, May 17, 2026

May 17, 2026

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott




John 17:1-11



The Gospel of John is the only Gospel that doesn’t have the disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray and have Jesus offer the prayer we use every week in worship, the prayer we call The Lord’s Prayer. Instead, we get this prayer, which appears in our lectionary every year for the last Sunday in the Easter season, the Sunday before Pentecost.


Across the Gospels, we see Jesus pray in a variety of ways, in a variety of places, for a variety of reasons. Here we see Jesus pray as part of the Last Supper, when he’s been doing some last instructing after the meal, and now he prays for the safety and the success of these disciples who have traveled so far with him, yet still have so far to go.


As I’ve thought about this picture of Jesus in prayer, I’ve thought about what it means to have a savior who prays for humans. Does Jesus already know the outcome of his prayers in a way that humans do not, when we pray? That’s another way of asking if the future is pre-determined, and if we believe in free will, we would have to say that even though Jesus is part of our Triune God, he doesn’t know in advance that the disciples will take his teachings to the ends of the known world.

We get this Gospel reading every year, just after the Feast of the Ascension, which we heard about in our first text for today. I think about those disciples getting Jesus back from the tomb. And now, he leaves them again. The Holy Spirit has yet to make an appearance in the spectacular way that will happen on Pentecost. Did any of the disciples think back to this time of prayer? Did they find comfort in a savior who prayed for their protection?


This Sunday is also Rogate Sunday, and at the end of today’s worship, we’ll head outside to do some planting. I’ve been keeping an eye on a neighbor’s garden while they’ve been walking and praying their way across a hundred miles in England on the Canterbury trail. As I’ve thought about prayer and this Sunday’s Gospel, I’ve thought about how much prayer and planting are similar.


Like Jesus, we often pray for something specific. Jesus prays for protection and unity. When we plant a seed or a seedling, we often have something specific in mind. We don’t plant a tomato seed hoping to have an apple orchard by August.


And yet, we don’t have complete control over the garden that will emerge. Maybe we’ll have so many tomatoes that we’ll have to give them away. Maybe it will be a summer of too much rain and the harvest will rot on the vine or never get rooted.


We pray as we plant, not knowing the final outcome. I have to assume that Jesus, being both human and divine, also prayed not knowing the final outcome.


Here’s what struck me as I was thinking about this text and this prayer down on the beach yesterday. Like us, Jesus doesn’t always get his prayers answered, at least not in the way I assume he was hoping.


Think about what we see in today’s Gospel. Jesus prays for safety for the disciples. In many essential ways, Jesus didn’t have his prayer answered. By the time the Gospel of John was written, around 100 AD, hearers of today’s reading would know that Jerusalem was destroyed and the Jews sent into exile. By the time the writer of the Gospel of John records Jesus’ prayer, all the disciples except one had died horrible deaths, often Roman executions, as they attempted to do what Jesus prayed for them to be able to do, to go out to be living witnesses to the truth that Jesus has showed them and instilled in them.


But if we take a longer view of this prayer of Jesus, in another 200 years, the Church has taken root in the places where the disciples died. In another 300-500 years, seeds from the first seedling congregations have sprouted in much more distant places. If we take a longer view, Jesus’ prayers have been answered. His work has been glorified—perhaps in ways that would surprise him.


I'll admit that it's simplistic to look at Jesus' ministry in this way. We might also feel defensive. We might say that these early followers had the advantage of doing something new.


But of course, if we read all of the book of Acts, we’ll see that those first followers of Jesus weren’t always sure that they were doing something new. Many of the arguments circled around whether or not Jesus had called them to a new way of practicing Judaism or a new way of being in community with God and with one another.


We, too, are at a crossroads, maybe several crossroads. The world, as we knew it, no longer exists in the same way. We might envy those disciples, sent out two by two, with just a change of clothes. But those disciples, too, were wrestling with a world that had changed. They were still in need of the protection that Jesus prayed they might have. They still had to figure out how to live the lives devoted to the truth that Jesus had showed them.


Here again, Jesus shows us a path forward. We can pray, like Jesus prays.


We plant our seeds of prayer, not knowing how they will take root or sprout. We pray our gardens, not knowing if we will see the answers to our prayers in our lifetimes. We pray, as Jesus did, knowing that we are only part of the process. We pray for others and for the larger world. We pray, trusting that God will find a way.


We pray for many of the same reasons that Jesus prayed. We have troubles that are bigger than ourselves. We pray because we need power greater than our own. We pray to calm our nerves, so that we can face the tasks that must be done.


God calls us to resurrection not just once, but daily. God calls us to ascend above all the earthly powers that try to hold us in their grip. Prayer is one of the ways that we stay rooted in God, planted in a garden designed for our flourishing. This summer, as we watch our gardens grow, as we go to farmer’s markets to find the food that nourishes our bodies, let us take care to nourish our souls as well, by tending to our prayer lives the way we care for tender seedlings.

Notes from an Off-Season Beach

We are at the beach in a slightly off season, here in mid-May.  It's warm enough to work up a summer-like sweat in the late afternoon.  But my morning walk today had a chilly enough wind that it was almost unpleasant.  Let me record a few other observations.

--Being here in mid-May means that the only children who are here are younger than elementary school age, which translates into lots of cute toddlers.

--We are also here with lots of older people, the ones with either very flexible vacation times or retired people.

--I am likely in the same age category as many of these older women, yet I am working from a different jewelry sensibility:  a nice way of saying that I love colorful glass beads that aren't very valuable, and I'm surrounded by precious gems and metals that are.  I am not wearing jewelry on vacation, and I'm in the minority.

--I have started judging restaurants by their playlists.  High marks go to Poseidon for having 3 Queen songs, including the more obscure "Hammer to Fall," which I am listening to in my earbuds right now.  What a great song--and it still feels very relevant.

--I do realize that "Hammer to Fall" was released as a single and went up the charts.  When I say it's more obscure, I mean that it no longer gets much airplay.  We're much more likely to hear "Somebody to Love," when we're out and about.

--A different musician performs by the pool each day.  Yesterday the musician could play steel pan drums, guitar, and saxaphone, but he didn't always know the song lyrics.  Strange to hear his version of Sting's "Englishman in New York," which didn't sound very English-y, and we're far, far away from both England and New York.

--Yesterday was my last Lutheran Confessions class.  It was a good class, and I learned a lot, although I'm not sure that much of it will be useful in my future life.  I love the idea that the creeds are not like a pledge of allegiance, but more like a love song of the early Church, more like a hymn than a confession of faith.  It seems counterintuitive--we say we confess our faith using the words of the _____Creed.

--It's been a good week, both bittersweet and tiring and inspiring.

The Feast Day of the Ascension

Today is the Feast Day of the Ascension, 40 days after Easter, 10 days before Pentecost. This feast day commemorates Jesus being taken up into Heaven.

In the church of my childhood, we must have celebrated this festival on a Sunday. I have memories of hearing the story in church; I don't have much memory of celebrating Pentecost as a child. Now, Ascension can go by without a peep.

Imagine it from the eyes of those who have followed Christ from traipsing around Galilee, Crucifixion, and then Resurrection. You have just gotten your beloved Messiah returned to you, and then, poof, he's gone again. What a whipsawed feeling they must have had.

How do we celebrate this day, so many thousands of years later? Many churches have chosen to simply ignore it. We march on to Pentecost.

By the point that the disciples witness the Ascension, are they used to these sorts of wonders? Their savior has risen from the dead, after all. Maybe being scooped up into heaven wasn't as wonder inducing--and yet, I suspect it was.

When I think of the events of Holy Week, Easter, and the time up to the Ascension, I wonder if any of them came close to a breaking point. I think of the Pentecost story, where once again we find the disciples holed up in a room. I wonder if some of them were rocking themselves in a corner, muttering about how the world had cracked open, and not in a good way.

In our current time, we may have lost our sense of wonder. When I watch us talking or tapping on our cell phones, I sometimes remind myself of the miraculous developments that the cell phone represents. For better or worse, it provides phone coverage to places that once were remote. It puts an enormous amount of commuting power in a very portable container. Satellites circle the earth to assist with these processes.

Sure, we might use them in the most mundane way: to coordinate the car pool pick up or dinner plans or to find each other in a crowd. And yet, maybe it's profound, in ways we don't acknowledge. We ascend by way of satellites to find each other, to tell each other of our love.

I think of Jesus and all of the others who have ascended before us. I think of the love that is our mission. I think of times I've watched the moon rise. I think of satellites, the ones we've made of metal and the ones that existed long before we hurled things into space. All of us, circling, all of us lost in both our daily orbits and our larger obsessions.

On this feast day of the Ascension, let us keep our eyes on the Savior who has gone before us. Let us stay grounded in the love that declares us wondrously made. Let us go forth and love similarly.

Prayer for the Feast of the Ascension:

Ascending God, you understand our desire to escape our earthly bonds, to hover above it all, to head to Heaven now instead of later. Remind us of our earthly purpose. Reassure us that we have gifts and talents that are equal to the tasks that you need us to do. Help us close our gaping mouths and get to work.

Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

The lessons for May 17, 2026:

First Reading: Acts 1:6-14

Psalm: Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36 (Psalm 68:1-10, 32-35 NRSV)

Second Reading: 1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11

Gospel: John 17:1-11

In today's Gospel, we see Jesus at the end of his mission. We see Jesus praying, telling God all the things he (Jesus) has done. We also see Jesus handing over his ministry to his disciples.

Notice that all of Jesus' followers were given responsibilities. They didn't just show up at church and wait to be entertained. They didn't march off in a huff when Jesus didn't do things the way the last savior did. I'm sure that Jesus lost some people along the way--after all, he made some stringent demands. But he also gave people ownership and expectations.

Jesus taught his followers to live in the moment, to not worry so much about 5 year projections or the future of the faith. He taught people to focus on the needs of the community and not on power structures that they hoped to maintain.  He taught people how to live in community and how to resist the very powerful structures of empire.

Jesus commanded his followers to be dependent on each other and to trust that God would provide for them.  When they're sent out, they're sent out two by two, with only what they can carry (and it's a light load). This ensures that they'll make connections in the new community, not just trust in each other and the people that they already know.

I'll admit that it's simplistic to look at Jesus' ministry in this way. We might also feel defensive.  We might say that these early followers had the advantage of doing something new.  In our century, we have all sorts of burdens:  tradition, responsibilities, buildings.  We can't decide to start over in thinking about the way we do ministry.

Or can we?  These last several years have showed us that we can do things differently.  And our time of innovation is not yet done.

God calls us to resurrection not just once, but daily.  God calls us out of all that has left us abandoned in our tombs.  Let us fold our gravecloths and emerge.

Sermon for Mother's Day Week-end

May 10, 2026
By Kristin Berkey-Abbott




John 14: 15-21



Jesus speaks the words in today’s Gospel reading to the disciples in the last hours they’ll have together before the Crucifixion. He is preparing them for the hard times of separation that will be coming—not only his Crucifixion and death, but the Ascension too.


We will celebrate the Ascension on Thursday. Every year as Ascension Day approaches, I think of those poor disciples. They have such a short time with their resurrected Lord, before He goes away again. How on earth do they cope with these developments, the fierce grief moving to great rejoicing, moving back to grief again?


I wonder if they thought back to this teaching. I imagine them remembering the Crucifixion—nothing could have prepared them for what came next. They were probably just getting used to the idea of Jesus defeating death. So why can’t he stay?

I also see this situation as a metaphor for our own modern lives. We may be feeling a bit whipsawed by grief and loss ourselves. We may recover from one crisis, only to find ourselves staring down the next one. As I've gotten older, I've noticed that these crises seem to be increasing in frequency and severity in the lives of those I love. I look back to the dramas of my high school and college years, and I understand why so many elders chuckle dismissively at the troubles of youth. We forget, however, that trouble is trouble, no matter what our age.


Again and again, across the span of life, we find ourselves wrestling with similar questions. Why is there so much suffering? Why did God create a world where cancer and other diseases have their ravaging way with people? Why do the rich and powerful care so little about the world they’re living in and why doesn’t God punish those who don’t care? Why do we lose the ones we love, while the ones we wouldn’t mind losing are the ones who live the longest?

We are not the first to ask these questions, of course. Theologians have been happy to give us answers—here’s a favorite: it’s because Eve ate the apple. Or maybe we’d prefer this explanation: it’s because God and Satan are in a battle, and some days, Satan is winning.



But notice how Jesus does not answer the questions that we might wish we could ask God directly. Jesus did not come in human form to explain the ways of God to us. No, Jesus came to show us how to live more God-drenched lives, by living among us and showing us the way.


So now our question might be, why does he have to leave? Here, too, Jesus doesn’t explain why he can’t stay forever, why he is resurrected, only to leave again 40 days later.


Instead, Jesus offers this assurance: we will never be alone. Although we may feel orphaned, we are not. We may feel desolate, another way of translating verse 18. But we have a holy comforter on the way.


Today’s Gospel ends by Jesus reassuring us that we are not losing him. Indeed, the Gospel ends with an expansive vision of how we will abide with the Triune God, all of our lives intertwined, a place to rest and a place to be energized.


On this Mother’s Day, it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to notice how Jesus describes a relationship that is nurturing, in the way that the best mothering relationships are. These days that celebrate parenting—Mother’s Day today, Father’s Day in June—can be emotionally wrenching for people. Parenting is not always an easy relationship, so these holidays can remind us of what we didn’t have with our parents or our children, or maybe they remind us of times together that are gone forever. Mother’s Day can remind us of paths not taken. Maybe we wish we’d had a different family configuration: more children or more time with extended family or children spaced apart differently. Maybe we made sacrifices for our children, and we wonder what would have happened if we made different choices. Mother’s Day can be a holiday that comes with emotional landmines.


In this context, too, the words of Jesus take on fresh meaning. We are not left orphaned, even though we may feel orphaned in our family relationships: children grow up and start their own families and most of us will outlive our parents. It’s enough to leave us feeling desolate, and the stories of the disciples might not make us feel much better. We don’t hear much about the family relationships of these men as they went out to spread the Good News of the inbreaking Kingdom of God to all of the Roman empire.


On Mother’s Day, let us turn our attention to the mothers in the Bible, particularly those at the beginning of the story of Jesus. I’m thinking of Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, who is very old, much too old to have a child. I’m thinking of Mary, mother of Jesus, who is very young, much too lacking in resources to be a good mother. And yet, both women received unexpected invitations from God, and both women said yes.


Today, I invite you to think about who you are in these stories. Are you one of the disciples, careening between joy and grief, as you move from Holy Week to Easter to Ascension? Are you Elizabeth, a woman who comes to fulfillment late in life? Are you Mary, facing huge hurdles as you discern a way forward? Are you the main nurturer in your life? Are you in need of nurturing? Do you feel orphaned or desolate?


Hear with your ears and with your heart the words of Jesus, who promises us that we are not abandoned, we are not left orphaned, we are not desolate, stripped of everything that might have mattered to us.


If we’re feeling old and washed up, God still has a place for us. If we’re feeling young and insignificant, God has opportunities that the rest of our culture may not offer. If we’re worried that we never understood Jesus the way we should, we have an advocate in the Holy Spirit. If we feel too weighed down by our burdens, Jesus assures us that our lives are knit with his; we’re not carrying our burdens alone.


No matter how many ways we feel barren, new growth is possible. God’s good news is more inclusive than we dared imagine. And we are at a hinge point of history where it is more important than ever to deliver that good news to a world that is so hungry to hear it. Rest assured that we are up to the challenge. We are nurtured by Jesus as we abide with God and the Holy Spirit, all our lives sewed together into a comforter of peace that passes all human understanding.

The Feast Day of Julian of Norwich

May 8 is the feast day of Julian of Norwich in the Anglican and the Lutheran church; in the Catholic church, it's May 13.  Is Julian of Norwich as famous now as Hildegard of Bingen or Ireland's St. Brigid?  Are any of these women more widely known now than they were in grad school when I first started searching for the females that had been left out of a variety of narratives?  I have no idea.  They are more widely known in the subcultures to which I belong, but in the wider world?

In those early days (the late 80's) of discovering female voices that had been left out of literature anthologies, I most treasured Julian of Norwich for her writing.  In later years, the theology of her writing fascinated me--so many centuries before any blooming of anything that could be called feminist, here was a woman writing about a feminine face of God.

Now, as I head into the second half of my life, Julian of Norwich calls to me in a different way.  For me, the last decade can be seen through a lens of loss:  my best friend from high school died a horrible cancer death, there have been other deaths along with a pandemic, we left South Florida for many reasons, job loss among them.  Why would Julian of Norwich speak to me in this new way?

I think of her, alone in her cell, all of her focus shrunk into so small a space.  I think of her as a model of living more with less.  So, I may never hike the Appalachian Trail in one long trek, but that doesn't mean that my life needs to come to a halt.  I may come to a point where I'm living in one room, but that might be a room that is more full than any of my previous homes.

When I've thought about my older age, I've assumed that I would create communities the same way I've always attempted.  I've thought about the Hildegards and the Brigids and their nunneries--I've always wanted (or thought I did) a community like that one.

Of course, having lived in smaller communities, I realize how much work goes into making that kind of community--but the rewards can be so amazing.

As my friends and family have had health crises, it has occurred to me that I may outlast my friends.  There may be no one to follow me to the commune.  What then?

I used to write to my friend with cancer:  "When we are little old ladies, rocking on the porch, we'll look back on this time . . ." and then I'd fill in with various visions.  When she died, I thought, well, I might be rocking on that porch all by myself.

Instead of that lonely vision, I'm going to train myself to think of Julian of Norwich.  Many of us may spend our later years not in some kind of community, but all alone, in our various houses and apartments.  While some isolation will occur, perhaps it can be a time of creativity, a time to focus that many of us won't have had before.

Mystics like Julian of Norwich can show us the way!

Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

  The readings for Sunday, May 10, 2026:

First Reading: Acts 17:22-31

Psalm: Psalm 66:7-18 (Psalm 66:8-20 NRSV)

Second Reading: 1 Peter 3:13-22

Gospel: John 14:15-21


In today's Gospel, we get a hint of Pentecost. Jesus tells his followers that he will never leave them orphaned or desolate, to use words from several different translations.

Every year as Ascension Day approaches, I think of those poor disciples. They have such a short time with their resurrected Lord, before he goes away again. How on earth do they cope with this?

I also see this situation as a metaphor for our own modern one. You may be feeling a bit whipsawed by grief and loss yourself. You may recover from one crisis, only to find yourself staring down the maw of the next. As I've gotten older, I've noticed that these crises seem to be increasing in frequency and severity. I look back to the dramas of my high school and college years, and I understand why so many elders chuckle dismissively at the troubles of youth. We forget, however, that trouble feels like crisis, no matter what our age.

But Jesus offers this comfort: we will never be alone.

Notice what Jesus does NOT offer: our God is not Santa Claus. Our God is not a fix everything quickly God (at least not all the time).

I have some acquaintances who claim to have lost their faith on September 11, 2001. They had been faithful in their church attendance, but once that disaster happened, they declared they couldn't believe in a God that would let such terrible things happen. No talk of free will would deter them in their determination to let go of their faith.

Earlier generations had a similar difficulty with Auschwitz (perhaps you do too). How can God let such awful things happen?

Evil has real power in the world, and we forget that at our peril. As Christians, we are called to take a longer view, and we are called to believe that God will eventually emerge victorious--but that doesn't mean that this victory will happen in our lifetimes. We are part of a larger story, and we all have our part to play. But we must be aware that we might be like Moses or the early apostles: we may not see the fruits of our labors; we may not get to the promised land (at least not in this life). The Good News that Jesus delivers should give us comfort: all of creation will be redeemed eventually, and that redemption has begun.

Return to that promise of Jesus: we are not orphaned. We are not abandoned. Even in our darkest days, when we feel at our most unlovable, God sees our value. God remembers our better selves. God knows what we could accomplish. If God can use deeply flawed people like Saul who becomes Paul, God will also weave us into the great fabric of Kingdom life.

Retreat Chef

I have spent this week-end down at the Isle of Palms (near Charleston, SC), being part of a team that cooked for a retreat.  I used to cook for larger groups more often, so I knew I could do it.  But I'm also relieved that we're coming to the end of the retreat, and it's been a success.

We were helped by the fact that it's a group of people who are easy to cook for:  no dietary restrictions, no allergies.  We made pork tenderloin last night, and everyone ate it, and many went back for seconds.  Most of the participants spend much time in caring professions and providing care for family members--it's been years since anyone cooked for them, and they haven't been shy about expressing their gratitude.

It's an amazing kitchen--that helps too.  The kitchen has 2 dishwashers, 2 stoves, and 3 refrigerators.  It's got lots of equipment and all the basics, like dishes and silverware, every type of pot and pan, baking containers in every size and shape.

It hasn't all been cooking.  There's been Bible study and worship and lots of great conversation.  Back in October, on a chilly morning walk, when I agreed to help with the retreat, I hoped it would be this kind of experience.

It's been interesting being back at this retreat center, which is one of two Lutheran retreat centers in South Carolina.  I first came here as part of a campus group long ago in 1983.  My family came here in 1984 with a church group; it was the beginning of summer, and I wondered how I would last without seeing my college friends for a WHOLE SUMMER.

Now I'm thinking about coming back here at some point this summer to reconnect with old friends. 

I haven't done much grading, but I still have time.  Grades are due on Monday and Tuesday--plenty of time, but as I tell my students in the waning days of a term, not as much time as we once had.  I haven't done much writing, but there is plenty of time--a WHOLE SUMMER.