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.