The Election of a New Bishop

I don't have much information about the Presiding Bishop-elect, Bishop Yehiel Curry.  I do know that many people whom I love and/or respect are overjoyed at his election, so that fact makes me feel some easiness in my soul.  Still, I do not discount the size of the task at hand.

Last night I wrote an e-mail update to the congregation where I serve as Synod Appointed Minister.  I realize that they may not be nearly as interested in this bishop election as I am, but I wanted to update the ones who wanted more information.  My spouse encouraged me to include information/reminders about the fact that I serve at the discretion of the bishop of our synod, and I thought it was a wise suggestion.

Here's what I wrote:

Dear Faith Evangelical Lutheran Members,

I write with good news of our national denomination and its impact on us at the local level. The national church gathers in a Churchwide Assembly every few years to conduct the national business of the church, and this year, a major task was to elect a Presiding Bishop.

I know that it hasn't always been easy to follow the Churchwide Assembly proceedings as they were livestreamed, so I thought I'd write to us all to let us know that Bishop Kevin Strickland, our bishop of the Southeastern Synod, came in second in the election for Presiding Bishop of the ELCA (the national leader of the church), which means he remains our bishop of our synod.

I don't know as much about our bishop-elect, Bishop Yehiel Curry, who comes out of the Chicago Metro Synod, where he is bishop of that synod. But I do know that plenty of people whom I respect are happy that he was elected, which makes me feel like the ELCA will have good leadership.

As I looked at the roster of candidates from the beginning to the end of the election process, I was happy to see such a wide range of faithful people from so many parts of the country, people with all sorts of backgrounds. One must be ordained in Word and Sacrament to be nominated for Bishop, and I was happy to know that so many people are answering God's call this way, both at the individual level and by the willingness to serve on a national level.

I am selfishly happy that Bishop Strickland will continue to be our bishop; he is the one who approves people like me who are serving as Synod Appointed Ministers, and not every bishop would be as supportive as he has been. Had Bishop Strickland been elected Presiding Bishop, a new incoming bishop for our synod might have had very different ideas about who should be leading churches; I serve at the discretion of the bishop, and a new bishop would have been an unknown quantity.

I look forward to seeing what the coming years will bring for the ELCA, on both the national and local levels. I know that the world needs the kind of vision that churches like ours have for the future, and I look forward to hearing more from our new Presiding Bishop-elect.

Peace,
Minister Kristin

Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

The readings for Sunday, August 3, 2025:

First Reading: Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23

First Reading (Semi-cont.): Hosea 11:1-11

Psalm: Psalm 49:1-11 (Psalm 49:1-12 NRSV)

Psalm (Semi-cont.): Psalm 107:1-9, 43

Second Reading: Colossians 3:1-11

Gospel: Luke 12:13-21

Here is another Gospel where Jesus tells us how to live, and he does it both directly ("Take heed and beware of all covetousness; for a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions") and through the use of a parable.

In this parable we meet a common figure in Jesus' parables, the person saving up treasures on earth. Recognize yourself? We've moved away, many of us, from needing larger barns, although I've met more than one person who moved to a bigger house, just to have room to put all their stuff. In fact, the average square footage of new construction grows increasingly large, while the US family grows smaller. Barn, silo, house--it's all the same to Jesus. And it all goes back to the human need for security. We store up treasures because we're so afraid of the future.

It will be interesting to see how the next decade might change us. Will our houses grow increasingly large when fewer people can afford to buy a house? Will we trust more in God, since we've seen how much we can trust in our economic institutions? Or will the events of recent years make us that much more graspy and scared to share?

Jesus comes to preach the radical Gospel of sharing. One aspect of his good news? We have a Creator who will provide for us. That news is supposed to free us up to give away what we have. Not just our surplus, but all of it.

Most of us don't even do a good job of giving away part of what we have. We're not good at sharing. We're good at hoarding, although if you look at the US savings rate, you might argue we're not even good at that. Most of us fill our longing for security by buying more and more and more--and wondering why we feel so empty.

We live in spiritually dangerous times, and the Gospel speaks to that. But most people, if they think about this concept, would tell us that the spiritual danger lies in a different place than Jesus tells us. Ask most people about spiritual danger and they'll talk about a toxic popular culture (video games, movies, song lyrics), public violence, private violence, wanton sexuality, moribund government, fundamentalists of all stripes, liberals, conservatives--the list could go on and on.

But again and again Jesus tells us to look to how we treat the poor and oppressed, that we will be judged based on how we treated the marginalized. Jesus rarely preaches about the family (he never mentions homosexuality), and when he does, he sounds downright anti-family. Again and again, Jesus tells us to pay attention to how we think about our money and how we use it.

Usually, as we get more money, we want more money. We turn our attention to building our wealth and securing our wealth--and it takes a lot of time and attention. That process takes time and attention away from what matters: our relationship with God and our care for God's Kingdom.

Again and again, Jesus calls us to recalibrate our values. Again and again, Jesus reminds us to turn to God. Again and again, Jesus calls us to have the courage to trust God and not our money.

The Feast Day of the Bethany Siblings: Martha and Mary and Lazarus

 In the decades/centuries before 1969, on July 29, we would have celebrated Saint Martha, one of few named women in the Gospels. Now we celebrate not only Martha, but also her sister Mary and their brother Lazarus.  Their story is in the eleventh chapter of John.

In a way, I think it's a shame, as each of these siblings deserves their own feast day. But today let us ask if we can we learn something from celebrating all of them together?

In more recent years, scholars have questioned whether the Mary and Martha in John are the Mary and Martha in Luke.  There are good reasons to believe both that they are the same and that they are not.  For now, I'm going set that question aside.

In many ways, Martha is the most famous of the siblings, and I've written about her extensively. Many others have written about Mary. I'm intrigued by the people who go back to the Greek to try to prove that Mary actually had some authority, that the reason that she wants to sit at the feet of Jesus while Martha gets the meal ready is that she had been out and about in the countryside, in the way that the disciples had been sent.  

The Greek word for the work she is doing is "diakonia," which is not the word for housework, but for the work of the church.  Perhaps it is this work that has left her busy and distracted.

Lazarus, also famous, is one of the few humans brought back from the very dead. He didn't just die an hour before Jesus arrived. He had been dead for days. I've always thought he deserved a story of his own, a follow up. I'm not the only one who thinks this, of course. Yeats is one of the more famous writers to revisit Lazarus after the tomb; I should revisit his play "Calvary."

Depending on how you attribute the various references to the women named Mary (all the same Mary? Who is the sister of Martha and who is the Magdalene? And then there's the mother of Jesus), Martha gets more space in the Gospels than her two siblings. We see her complaining about Mary not helping her, and we see her scolding Jesus for not coming earlier to keep her brother from dying.

I have always sympathized with Martha, and I still can feel the shock that come when Jesus doesn't. But in my later years, I see compassion in the words of Jesus when he reminds Martha that she worries about many things. It's only been in my later years that I see Martha's anxiety in a more clinical way. It's only been in later years that I see the harm in Martha's behavior, the way that obsessive anxiety for the ones we love can destroy so much.

Do I know what to do about my own obsessive anxiety? I know a few tricks, sure. I haven't explored every possibility; so far, I don't take any meds for my anxiety outbreaks. When I'm in the throes of an anxious day, I wonder if it's time to find a health care provider who can prescribe them. When I'm having a normal day, I think that I am managing just fine.

In some ways, I see a thread running through the stories of these siblings. Christ shows up to tell them that they're not doing fine. One of the siblings, Mary, is open to Christ's message, while Martha is not. We might think it's too late for Lazarus, but it's not.

Once again, I find myself wanting to know what happens in a year or two or ten. Does Lazarus return to regular life? Having lost him once, does his family appreciate him more? Does Martha ever get a handle on her anxiety? Does Mary go out to create the first convent? Or is she so tired of having to deal with her sister that she finds a solitary existence in a nearby desert?

The Gospels give us such small snippets, but that leaves us room to find ourselves in these stories. One of the benefits to feast days and lectionaries is that we have the opportunity to return to them periodically to see if we're finding something new.

Each year, I'm reminded that God works in ways that humans don't fully understand, and that we need to resist the impulse to micromanage the miracles. But even if we don't, God won't go off in a huff and abandon us.

This year, and every year, I'm hoping that humans can also model that behavior. We're beset with anxiety, as are those around us. Let us remember that resurrection can still occur.

Recap: Sermons and Potluck Lunches on July 27

We had planned to have worship in the outdoor pavilion at Faith Lutheran yesterday.  But it's been both stormy and unpleasantly hot in Bristol, Tennessee, so church leadership decided to have worship in the fellowship hall.  It was our Blessing of the Backpacks Sunday, so we were almost at full capacity in the fellowship hall; it felt good to sing in close proximity.

But if you watch the video of my sermon, you'll notice some toddler noise in the beginning.  I'm always happy for the noise of small children, but I was also a bit relieved, in a guilty way, when the two moms took the toddlers to a nearby Sunday School classroom.

After the worship service, we had a delicious lunch, with shredded pork barbecue and a potluck of sides and desserts.  We lingered and talked, and it felt like the kind of Sunday that people hope for when they seek out a church.

To read the sermon manuscript, see this blog post.

To view the recording of the sermon, head to my YouTube channel:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHdrZn3Yn7E&t=21s

Sermon on The Lord's Prayer for Sunday, July 27, 2025

July 27, 2025

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott



Luke 11: 1-13


If you were reading this passage in your Bible, you might say, “Ah, a new chapter, a new subject.” But that’s not the way the Gospels were written. Chapter and verse breaks were put in later, for a variety of reasons, but originally, they weren’t there—each Gospel was one long manuscript. The Lord’s Prayer takes on extra nuance if we read it in context of the chunk of text that comes before it, the Good Samaritan text and the story about Mary and Martha.


Both of these are often taught and preached as a stand-alone story. Indeed, we’ve just seen that approach ourselves: 2 weeks ago we had the Good Samaritan as our Gospel reading and last week Mary and Martha.


My New Testament professor was convinced that those two stories, plus the Lord’s Prayer and the teaching on it, were designed to go together, that they speak to each other. The Good Samaritan shows us how we are to love our neighbors, and it stresses that everyone is our neighbor. The Good Samaritan uses his own resources and enlists the help of others, namely the innkeeper.


The story of Martha shows us the dangers that can come from being the Good Samaritan to the larger world. As we discussed last Sunday, Martha is distracted by the kind of work that still has power over us. She is doing the work of diakonia, which can be interpreted as the work of discipleship. Martha’s work is similar to the work that the Good Samaritan does: the work of making people healed and whole. But she’s likely doing this work on a larger scale.


It's important work. But if we approach it the wrong way, we run the risk of becoming like Martha: tired and irritated and exasperated by it all—and much too caught up in the exhaustion to remember why we’re doing this.


It’s a question that has permeated much of Christian teaching through the centuries: how can we stay grounded at the feet of Jesus, like Mary, while doing the work that Jesus calls us to do, like Martha. In today’s Gospel, we get the answer.


We pray.


Jesus knows how hard this simple action can be, and so he gives us the words to use. Many of us have prayed them so often that we might forget how radical they are. We pray to God in the familiar way that we would talk to a parent who loves us. This approach to speaking to any of the gods of ancient times would be unheard of. Indeed, if we look at almost any ancient god, we’d probably want to avoid talking to them if we could. We wouldn’t want them as parents. We certainly wouldn’t seek them out.


When we pray to this Divine power who loves us, we begin by praying for our daily sustenance, our daily bread. We can’t do much else if we’re starving. If we are ever confused about the work that God calls us to do, it begins with sustenance. A starving body can’t focus on much else beyond sustenance. Yet God does call us to so much more, both as individuals and as humans.


Once our daily needs are met, we can focus on larger issues. We pray for forgiveness. We may have been taught that we’re praying that God forgive our individual sins, but Jesus probably had a larger vista in mind. Some translations interpret this passage as a kind of debt relief ("forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors"). Scholar Marcus Borg notes that these two aspects--food and debt--would have spoken to Jesus' followers in the first century, who often found themselves short of bread and currency. Many Jews found themselves in a downwards spiral as they leveraged their land, and eventually lost their land, to pay an increasingly heavy tax burden imposed on them from Rome.

It's not so far away from the lives that many 21st century people lead—many of us face financial uncertainty, where we’re just a few unexpected bills away from hardship or catastrophe. Even if we have a more secure financial foothold, it doesn’t take much to make the stock market wobble, which means our portfolios, too, are precarious.

In addition to financial forgiveness, we pray not to be led astray. I like the language "save us from the time of trial," but all the variations speak to me, and sometimes I include them all, praying not to be led into temptation, to be delivered from evil, and to be saved from the time of trial. We are praying that we can resist all that calls us away from the best selves that Christ calls us to be.


You may be wondering where the rest of the Lord’s Prayer went. It’s in the Gospel of Matthew. In Luke, we get this shorter version. There’s a benefit to brevity. A short prayer means that we can pray whenever we have a minute or two—which means we can pray throughout the day.

Notice that Jesus doesn't tell us we have to be in a certain mood to pray. We don’t have to be ready to forsake our bad behaviors or be in a repentant mood. We don't have to wait for the right time of day. We don't even need to come up with the language for ourselves. Christ provides it.

And then at the end, after the prayer itself, Jesus gives us imagery to teach us how God will listen to us: as a loving neighbor or better yet, a parent. Jesus once again reminds us that our God is a loving God. We are to ask for what we need. We should not be afraid to yearn. God has not abandoned us to our own devices. We have chosen to partner with a powerful force when we pray--and yet, it's not a distant force. God loves us, the way a parent loves a child, offering love and protection and comfort.

It seems so simple. But often, we can find it hard to pray—not hard to find the words—Jesus has given us the words, and if we want to fill in with our own petitions, we’ve got a great template. However, it can be hard to remember to actually do it—to be in conversation with God as we go about the day. Martha may be doing important work, the work of the church—but she has ceased being mindful of why she is doing the work. Perhaps Jesus, witnessing her, begins to formulate the prayer which could keep her grounded as she remembers who has called her to do the work in the first place.


Martha’s sister Mary offers another glimpse of the contemplative life, a life which might seem attractive in its silence and stillness. I’ve looked at monastics and envied them their life that is set up to return them to prayer at set hours during the day. But most of us aren’t living in those kinds of communities. I’ve envied monks like Thomas Merton who have a hermitage made out of gardener’s shed and the command from his superior to meditate on Jesus and to write. Most of us have other commitments that we must attend to. Those commitments can claim so much of our attention that we forget to pray.


Notice the shortness of this prayer that Jesus gives his disciples. It’s a prayer that only takes a minute or two. And yet, that moment or two can recalibrate us, centering us in the work that God calls us to do, reminding us of the One who has called us to do it.


Jesus isn’t just talking the talk. Throughout the Gospel of Luke, we see Jesus praying more than in any of the other Gospels, and he often prays after the most intense miracles. The disciples know that Jesus has tapped into something different than the prayers that they’ve seen modeled by priests and Levites. They’ve seen Jesus do great miracles without burning himself to a crisp. They know that he’s tapped into a powerful force with his prayer life.


We are not called to burn ourselves to a crisp like Martha. We are not called to be silent like Mary. We are called to continue the work of Christ, loving our neighbor the way the Good Samaritan did.


Jesus tells those first disciples to talk to God with both familiarity, like when one talks to a family member, and insistence, as one might talk to a neighbor whom we need to share resources. Jesus assures us that we will not be give scorpions or snakes when we ask for what will sustain us.


What work does the world need us to do? Ask, seek, knock—tap into the same powerful force that propelled Christ and centuries of followers to show the world a new kind of love. What do you need as you do this work? Ask, seek, knock—Jesus assures us that God will answer.


Ask, seek, and knock—and know that God will hear and God will not leave you in the cold night needing help. Ask, seek, knock—the world needs what we will find when we do.

The Feast Day of Saint Anne

Today is the feast day of Saint Anne, although in the Eastern Orthodox church, her feast day was yesterday. Saint Anne was the mother of the Virgin Mary, which means she was the grandmother of Jesus. She's not mentioned in the canonical Bible. The apocryphal Gospel of James mentions her. I haven't read that text, but I am sure that the details I want to know are not there--what did daily life look like? How did Mary and Anne get along? What did Anne think of Jesus?

Anne is the patron saint of many types of women: unmarried women, housewives, seamstresses, women in labor or who want to be pregnant, and grandmothers. She's also the patron saint of educators, which are still primarily women.

As I was researching her, I came across this image from a 15th century Book of Hours, and it's quickly become my favorite:

I love that both Saint Anne and Mary have books in their hands. According to many traditions, Saint Anne taught Mary to read, and she's often seen doing this. As I look at those images, I wonder if the artists realized what a subversive image it is: a woman teaching a girl to read.

Anne is sometimes depicted in scenes of Jesus as a baby, but so far, we have no image of her at the cross. I suspect that's because so many of this artwork comes from centuries ago, when it would have been very unusual for grandparents to survive to see their grandchildren in adulthood. Plus, one tradition around Saint Anne has her having Mary when she's very old--another story of the impossible coming out of improbable wombs!

So today, let us celebrate all the miracles which seem so impossible. Let us ask Saint Anne for protection, the way that Martin Luther did in the thunderstorm that terrified him. Let us know that all for which we yearn may yet be delivered to us.

The Feast Day of Saint James

 Today we celebrate the life of James, one of the 12 disciples, the first to be martyred (Acts 12:1 tells us by Herod's sword). He's known as James the Greater (to distinguish him from James the Lesser, James the son of Alphaeus). He's the brother of John. He was one of the first to join Jesus, and Jesus chose him to go up the mountain to witness the Transfiguration. He is the patron saint of veterinarians and pharmacists, among others.

Lately, I've heard more about St. James, as more people become aware of the pilgrimage that involves walking to his shrine in Santiago de Campostela in Spain from a variety of starting points. Walkers who cover 100 km or cyclists who cover 200 km get a compostela, a certificate, and a blessing.

St. James is associated with scallops, and if you look at a map, you'll see that the pilgrims arriving from a variety of beginning points to the same end point does look like a scallop shell. There are now travel agencies that will help pilgrims, but I've been told that it's not hard to set up one's own journey. There are all sorts of lodgings along the way, all sorts of support.

In 2023, I finally saw the Martin Sheen/Emilio Estevez movie, The Way, which features this pilgrim's path. I'd love to actually walk part of it, but it seems increasingly unlikely. But life has taught me never to say never. If I could go on the Santiago or Iona, I'd probably choose Iona, but who says I would have to choose.

I'm not the only one who finds the idea intriguing. In 1985, only 690 pilgrims made it to the end point, the Cathedral of Santiago de Campostela; last year 179,919 pilgrims completed the journey. The most hardcore pilgrims walk barefoot. I would not be one of those pilgrims.

A few years ago, one of my good church friends figured out how to walk part of the Santiago de Campostela, how to make sure her pets and children were taken care of for 2 weeks, and off she went with her husband. I found her journey so inspiring. She kept a blog while walking and has continued to keep writing posts in her "regular" life.

Let us remember that we're all on a variety of pilgrimages, even if we're not leaving the house. Let us remember that God is with us.