Midway Points: Inspirations and Revelations

I am grateful to have been blogging for so long, grateful for many reasons.  I often go back to re-read old blog posts--by often, I mean at least two or three times a week.  I go back to see what I was thinking/doing, to find recipes, to find rough draft ideas and inspirations, to spark my brain when I feel I have nothing new to blog about.  This morning I found this blog post about a poem idea I forgot I had for a poem called "The Holy Spirit Takes a Holiday"; I haven't finished the poem, now, a year later, but I still have the rough draft.

This meandering made me think about a summer project, making a rough draft into a finished draft each week.  And yes, that's one of my new year's aspirations that has fallen apart as the year progressed (this January blog post has details about my specific intentions for 2026).  But that's the joy of early July--there's still time to adjust my trajectory.

Speaking of inspirations, during my driving to the grocery store yesterday, on NPR's Fresh Air, I heard an interview with romance writer Kennedy Ryan.  She's the first African American to win the RITA, the highest romance writing award.  I started thinking about romance novels and wish fulfillment and the voices and faces that aren't characters in romance novels.  I thought about older women characters who might get one last shot at their dreams coming true.  Romance novels need an obstacle, and the inability to see oneself as romance worthy could be that obstacle.  Another potent one would be that one dream is coming true, and the inability to believe that multiple dreams could come true at once.

If I wrote romance novels with older female protagonists, I'd approach it as alternate life Kristin explorations.  But I was also attracted to this idea, from yesterday's interview, about creating an imaginary town, a place that becomes an escape, like all those clergy novels of the 90's.

Before I head out on my morning walk to beat the coming heat, let me also record this snippet from last year's blog post on this day:  "I wonder where we will be at the halfway point of next summer. Hopefully I will be meeting with my candidacy committee to proceed to endorsement, which is usually a halfway point to ordination, but in my case, I'm doing things a bit out of order. At Lutheran seminaries, students would do CPE much earlier, often in the summer after the first year, and then they'd get to endorsement sometime in the following year, before internship (year 3 of seminary) and the last year of seminary."

Last year Kristin had no idea how much would have changed and for the better.  My candidacy has now transferred to a different synod, which means I can progress towards ordination more quickly.  A year ago, I was expecting to have to do a part-time internship which would last two years, in addition to needing additional seminary classes, which would mean that summer of 2028 would be the earliest I could be ordained.  Now I am on track to be ordained in the first half of 2027.

Last year Kristin had hopes that she might get a tenure track job at Spartanburg Methodist College, but she would have assumed that it probably couldn't happen soon.  And now I am an Associate professor on the tenure track.

This morning, I'm feeling a bit fretful about the electrical work happening at our S'burg house--we bought all sorts of fixtures thinking that the installation was included in the expensive cost to rewire the house, only to be told we'd get an update on Monday.  Does this mean a proposal/invoice, as it sounded on the phone with the scheduler?  Or just an update on timelines?  It's tiring.

Tiring, but fixable--let me remember the saying that I first heard in one of Anne Lamotte early books, when one of her friends said that a problem solved by an infusion of cash is not really an interesting problem. It's especially not a problem when one has the money.

The sun is up to begin the day's roasting--let me go for my walk.

Life/Spiritual Lessons at the Dermatologist's Office

Yesterday, I went to the dermatologist.  I came home and made this Facebook post:  "The intense heat and sun of today takes me back to a high school time, similar weather, when high school Kristin said, "Hey, if I start now, maybe I'll have a good tan by the time we go back to school" -- which is why later life Kristin had to have another spot biopsied today. Happily, it's on my shoulder, not my face, so even if it needs more cutting, it's bearable."

I am supposed to go to the dermatologist every 3 months because of my melanoma diagnosis in December.  Because of that diagnosis, because we missed the significance of that spot for 18 months when we thought it was a weird bug bite, my dermatologist PA now biopsies more than she might otherwise, a mindset that I encourage.

She's a very kind PA.  I apologized for being sweaty.  She told me about the people who ride their bikes to the dermatologist and thus, are more sweaty than I will ever be.  I apologized for being fat, and she said, "You're in great shape," while the MA nodded enthusiastically.  I do realize that plenty of people are fatter than I am, but it still feels strange to have enough flesh in places that the very professional PA needs to move aside to inspect.

Well, that's likely too much information for the multitudes  one or two people still reading this blog.

But I also want to add that she also said I have great skin.  In some ways, she's correct--for a woman who is about to be 61, I do have great skin.  For a woman who has spent a lot of time in the sun with no protection of any kind, I do have great skin.

I am working on feeling the same thing about my extra weight--some days are easier than others.  When I'm out every day, walking and eating berries and appreciating the world in other ways, I feel fine about my body.  When I don't compare my current body to past years, I'm better than when I think about how many miles I could once run/jog.

As a wise yoga teacher once said to me:  "Quit comparing yourself to everyone else.  It won't help."  It's not solely yoga teachers who know this, of course.  Most world religions contain this wisdom somewhere.

It's a life lesson I'll continue to say to myself, probably on a daily basis.

Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

 The readings for Sunday, July 5, 2026:

First Reading: Zechariah 9:9-12

First Reading (Semi-cont.): Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67

Psalm: Psalm 145:8-15 (Psalm 145:8-14 NRSV)

Psalm (Semi-cont.): Psalm 45:11-18 (Psalm 45:10-17 NRSV)

Psalm (Alt.): Song of Solomon 2:8-13 (Semi-continuous)

Second Reading: Romans 7:15-25a

Gospel: Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30


In this week's Gospel, we see the mystical Jesus, the one of bizarre stories and metaphors that confuse. The first part of this week's Gospel has those strange comparisons calling us children in the marketplace, and then Jesus reminds us that he and John are the latest in a long line of people sent by God to get our attention. And then the Gospel ends with that strange bit about easy yokes and light burdens, when the very definition of yoke and burden encompass experiences that aren't easy and light.

Maybe in these days of rising prices, you're feeling the more traditional definition of yoke and burden, a strangling and a crushing sensation. Maybe you're weary of the world's problems and the inability of governments to even attempt to solve them. Maybe you wish for a savior to show up in our troubled times. But then you'd have to wonder if we'd even notice, in our world of noise and distraction.

Sometimes, when I feel most bleak, I like to return to the words of the Old Testament prophets. It's good to remember that no matter how terrible our historic age seems, it's not really a new situation. This week's reading from Zechariah commands us: "Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope."

That command is our burden and our yoke. We must be prisoners of hope. We are called to commit to resurrection. That doesn't stop with our belief in a resurrected Lord. That's just one sign, among a galaxy of signs, of a God who creates and recreates the cosmos daily.

In our deepest despair, we must remember that we're Resurrection People. To me, that's one of the beliefs that separates Christianity from the other major religions. We don't believe in a fixed universe. We don't believe that we're doomed. We don't believe that we have to accept our lot with stoic resignation and wait for a better life--in a future lifetime, in Heaven, but not right now.

No, our burden and our yoke is that God calls us into partnership in this remodeling of the world into one that is more in line with God's vision and plan. Could God just step in and order it to be so? Perhaps. But God didn't create that kind of universe. For whatever reason, God found it much more interesting to design a world in which we have free will. We can put our necks into the yoke that God offers us and discover that what appears to be a burden is, in fact, a blessing that transforms us as we transform the world.

Sermon on Acceptance Finds Acceptance

Yesterday was a good Sunday.  As I was driving and driving and driving on Saturday followed by a night when I was up and down, I wondered if I would be just exhausted on Sunday.  Happily, I felt fine.  I got up and reworked my sermon, taking out the bit I had written about grad school experiences as a Community Outreach Worker for a Methodist church, leaving in the later experiences about a church welcoming a transgender visitor who became a member.

I did wonder if I should feel worried about children in church hearing about a transgender human and asking their parents questions, but I decided that it was likely to be fine.  Most children aren't paying much attention during the non-youth sermon.  If the teenagers paid attention, I reasoned that they're likely to know what a transgender person is.

I had an encounter after church that reassured me.  One of the younger members, a father of two of those teens, thanked me for my sermon, thanked me for including modern issues.  I said that I had worried a bit about the children hearing about transgender issues for the first time, and he said, "They already know.  It's all over the place."  He thanked me again, and I thanked him for reassuring me.

As we drove home, I reflected on the sermon, which isn't nearly as radical as I might have made it sound with my worries about it.  The Gospel, Matthew 10:  40-42, is a standard hospitality text, and I used the example of my South Florida church welcoming a transgender visitor to show that radical acceptance and radical hospitality blesses everyone in all sorts of directions, like how remodeling a bathroom with cramped stalls into a single use bathroom benefitted people in wheelchairs or with mobility issues, who now had more room, and parents with babies who needed a diaper change, who now had a bathroom with a changing table.

But of course, the more important change is hearts and minds.  Once we know a transgender person (or any one member of a minority group), it's much less easy to accept the demonization of a whole group of people.  And it's so vital for members of minority groups to find support from majority groups so that the forces of empire and forces of evil have less traction.

You can find the manuscript of the sermon here, and you can watch/hear the sermon here.

Sermon for Sunday, June 28, 2026

June 28, 2026
By Kristin Berkey-Abbott



Matthew 10:40-42



At first, this text seems like a standard hospitality text, and we’re not wrong to read it that way. It’s a familiar lesson that repeats over and over again through the Gospels, and indeed through a variety of texts both ancient and modern. Not that we agree, of course. You don’t need me to remind you of how different our opinions can be when we talk about who is welcome and who is not. Today’s Gospel reminds us of the stakes. If we’re not welcoming, we risk turning away God, who often comes to visit in forms we don’t expect.


Of course, there are other risks to hospitality. When we fling open our doors or our borders, when we are welcoming, things can get messy. Look at Jesus mentions: prophets and children. Even righteous people come with a risk: that insistence that we follow God’s law, not our own rules.


We understand the chaos that comes with children and teens. For every story that I’ve heard about how a chaotic child came to the church and by the end of the year was helping with altar guild duties, I could tell you 10 more about the grumbling and complaining that comes when we truly welcome children in a way that lets them be both seen and heard.


But today’s Gospel is an optimistic one. Look at what is missing: there’s no threat of punishment for those who aren’t welcoming. You could say it’s implied, sure. But in this Gospel, we are promised reward for right behavior. But it goes even deeper. Bible scholar Stanley Saunders says, “These three designations—prophets, the righteous, and little ones—do not differentiate members of the community so much as they describe interrelated aspects of Christ-discipleship.”


To see how that might work, let us consider an experience from a different church, one of my home churches, the one in South Florida, where we used to go to worship early because the choir rehearsed before worship. I took a book and read and sometimes talked to the pastor. One Sunday, he told me he’d gotten a strange phone call from someone who was looking for a place to worship, and when the pastor invited the person to join us, the person on the phone asked, “Would your church be welcoming to a transgender person?”


“What did you say?” I asked the pastor, who would know the hearts of the members better than I did.


My pastor said, “I said ‘Of course you’d be welcome.’” He waited a beat and said, “I hope I’m right.”


When my pastor tells the story now, he’s very honest that he didn’t know for sure. Many of the members were older, and one had a habit of saying outrageous and moderately offensive opinions at coffee hour. But those older members turned out to be the most welcoming, which helped other members to be welcoming too. We worked through issues of rest rooms, updating our 1970’s era bathrooms to become single use bathrooms, which let us put a changing table in them and have a bathroom that a person in a wheelchair could use.


Ellen, the church’s first openly transgender member, helped the church be more open minded, and the church transformed into a place that was welcoming to more members who hadn’t always felt welcome before. We gave her a safe place as she figured out the ins and outs of her transitioning. In turn, she invited us to ask her any questions that we had—and members did. She, too, asked questions. We all came to understand each other better.


In this story, we see discipleship in action. The church had been participating in county-wide justice events, where 25 or more churches gathered to demand justice for underserved populations. These actions led to more oversight in nursing homes and assisted living facilities, more affordable housing, a different approach to justice for juvenile offenders. The church had been prophetic on a county-wide level, and it was also able to live into its prophetic calling on a personal level. Similarly, the church had declared commitment to righteous living, following the ways of Jesus. In its acceptance of Ellen, the church practiced what it preached. Ellen came to the church needing the cup of cold water that is acceptance and welcome. We gave that to her.


She also gave us a cup of cold water, a cup that many of us may not have known that we needed. She showed us what prophetic righteousness looks like on a personal level. She gave us the opportunity to practice radical hospitality. Years after Ellen first came to worship, the church became a Reconciling in Christ church, which is the designation that many LGBQTIQA+ people look for when they are determining if a church will be a safe space. Many churches say that all are welcome. But it can be hard to put that into practice, especially when the visitor may look so different. It might be easier if it’s a cute child. But it’s harder if we have to adjust to people of different cultures, different practices, different clothing choices, different tattoos and piercings.


When we can practice radical acceptance, that’s the space where radical hospitality can take hold. We do this by offering a cup of cold water, which seems like such a simple thing in our day of refrigerators and ice. But it would have been a different symbol in the time of Jesus, when cold water came from a well, and quickly grew warm.


We’re to give a cup of cold water—not stale water that’s been sitting under the hot, desert sun since we drew it out of the well yesterday, not water that’s been sitting in a jar. We’re to give the cup of cold water to little ones, an inversion of the hierarchy that comes with many human relationships. Here, the vulnerable, the expendable get the water—a child, not a person in charge.



The world needs the cup of cold water that each and every one of us can offer. And we, too, are in need of a cup of cold water. Jesus came to give us that living water. And thus, transformed by the living water of Christ, we can go out renewed and refreshed. We can welcome the prophets, the righteous, the vulnerable ones. We can live into the life of renewal that Jesus came to give us, the life that radical hospitality makes possible. That’s the reward given to prophets, to the righteous, to the little ones. That’s the reward that can be ours too.

Kristin in Indianapolis, Paul in Spain

In another hour or so, I'll put the last of my stuff in the car and head back to the mountains of North Carolina.  I've been in Indianapolis, taking a class on Paul, another task done on the path to ordination in the Lutheran church (ELCA, the more progressive expression of Lutheranism in North America).  

It has been a great class, full of deep dives into Greek words and church history and Paul's theology, which can be summarized as Proclaim Christ Crucified.  We even had a fun digression into what we would proclaim--I find it problematic to proclaim Christ Crucified.  Christ incarnate, yes.  Christ risen from the dead, yes.  But crucified?  That's the most important thing?

The cross means something very different for Paul than it does for me.  The cross as a symbol/shortcut does something very different for Paul.  I get that. 

We talked about not knowing how Paul died, not for sure.  Church custom/tradition posits that it's likely that he died in Rome, executed by Emperor Nero.  But it's also possible that he left Rome and continued onward to Spain.

A random thought floated through my brain on Thursday:  that would make a good poem, Paul in Spain, late in life.  By yesterday morning, I decided to jot down some lines, and voila!  A poem emerged, mostly formed.

Here's how it begins:

Paul slices citrus for sangria, 

oranges and lemons plucked

from trees in the lingering light

of a late October evening.

Who would have dreamed or demanded

such a soft landing?

This morning I thought, oh dead, when does citrus ripen in Spain?  I chose "late October evening" because Paul is in the late autumn of his life.  Happily, a quick search this morning shows the detail can work--and even had I discovered that it didn't, I'd have probably kept it.

The poem ends this way:

Safe for now, he pours the sangria

and waits for the sun to set.

I do worry that the poem is cliched, and I also worry that it won't be interesting to non-Christian readers.  But we all age, and this poem looks at aging.  By using Paul as the vehicle, maybe it does say something new.

I'll put it away and look at it again later this week.  But I am happy to have created a poem the way I once did:  an idea comes and within 24 hours, I'm attempting a poem and seeing it to completion.  Hurrah!

Rethinking Paul

Yesterday was our first TEEM class on Paul.  It was riveting.  I'm still not much interested in preaching using Paul's letters, but because Paul has been so influential and so misused, it's good to find out what's really there.

The most interesting way of thinking about Paul that was new to me is to see him as a Jew framed by apocalyptic thinking, the apocalypse being when God comes to earth to judge the living and the dead, an event which will begin with the dead rising up from their graves as they come back to life to be judged.

So when Paul meets Jesus on the Damascus Road, a man who has been dead brought back to life and speaking to him, he assumes that judgment day is under way.  Being a good Pharisee, he would assume that Jews will be O.K. on Judgment Day--as people of the Covenant, God has chosen them.  But Gentiles are in danger.  Thus, off he goes to tell them how to be saved.

I asked the question that some of you might be asking.  Did Paul see a human Jesus on the Damascus Road?  I have always thought of that event as the heavens splitting open and the voice of Jesus speaking to him, not as an encounter with Jesus in his human body.  My professor talked about the different depictions of that event, including recountings of that event that we find in Acts and the letters of Paul.  In some of them, the encounter does sound disembodied, the voice from the heavens.  In others, we could interpret it as an encounter between Paul and a human-appearing Jesus. 

I still maintain my long-standing approach to Paul.  He wrote letters to specific churches/communities with specific problems.  Taking those letters and applying them to twenty-first century life makes very little sense--unless we're experiencing similar problems.  We had an interesting session looking at 1 Corinthians, the passage where Paul excoriates the Church for eating the good food before the whole community arrives and connecting this behavior with Communion.  How do our own Communion practices exclude or include in similar ways?

I still can't see myself preaching on Paul or even having the kind of Bible study that would interest most people.  But I'm very glad to have had this educational opportunity.