Sermon for Sunday, July 26, 2026

July 26, 2026
By Kristin Berkey-Abbott




Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52



During Music Week at Lutheridge, Carl and I went to a workshop for people who are part of small choirs. I’m no trained musician, but even I could tell that my version of a small choir is very different from those folks in charge of the workshop. My version of a small choir is the type you’d find at a church that only has 70 or so people, a choir of six or seven where one or two people might be able to carry a tune or play an instrument, where the other five choir members have enthusiasm but no ability to harmonize, the kind of choir where getting everyone to sing the melody well is accomplishment enough.

 

At the small choir workshop, one of the leaders talked about the small Vespers choir that he leads in Minneapolis. When you hear “vespers choir,” how many people do you think are in the choir? I thought about a small size, that choir of 10 people, although with more training. Nope—his “small” Vespers choir is 70 people, which led me to wonder how many people are part of this church. In every church in my adult life, we’ve usually had less than 70 members in the congregation as a whole. It dawned on me that the workshop I thought I would be attending would actually be a very different one.


Today’s Gospel celebrates very small things and hidden things and catches of fish that must be sorted. Jesus presents them to explain “the Kingdom of Heaven.” Our 21st century ears might hear that phrase and think that Jesus is explaining exclusively about what life after death will look like. We hear Heaven and most of us probably have an image of angel choirs of thousands, pearly gates, maybe a family reunion where nobody fights and the food doesn’t disappoint. Even Aunt Evelyn’s salmon salad stays fresh and the jello compositions are delightful in Heaven.


Jesus spends much of his ministry describing the Kingdom of Heaven, which he also calls the Kingdom of God. Over and over again, he tells us that the Kingdom of Heaven Kingdom of God is among us, right here and now, that we don’t have to wait. Jesus takes every opportunity to remind us that God’s kingdom isn’t a far away place. God’s kingdom can be found in the communities we create. And they probably won’t look like the kingdoms we might expect. They might be small, like the mustard seed or the grain of yeast. They might be hidden away, like wealth or a pearl of rare price, so that very few people know they are there. They might be messy, like the net full of fish—we hear about a net full of fish and think, “Abundance!” A first century fishing audience would think of the chore of sorting them all out.



And then Jesus directs our attention to the sorting that will come at the very end of human time, when God judges all, the living and the dead.


Perhaps Jesus gives us this vision of end times to reinforce his message of being alert so that we don’t miss the Kingdom of God. All of the examples in the parables are of items easily overlooked or not noticed—yeast and mustard seeds, hidden treasure, one rare pearl. Even that catch in the nets, with the messiness of a mix of fish, is an abundance that’s easy to dismiss, if we were hoping for just one fish or type of fish to be in the net.


Humans don’t usually celebrate small things. We’re trained to equate bigness with importance: big militaries, big budgets, big buildings, big muscles, lots of followers/donors/supporters. In the economy of the world, it’s the little things that get trampled, and worse, perhaps never even noticed as they are being trampled.


Jesus turns the world’s economy on its head: from a bit of yeast comes a feast big enough for an army. From one mustard seed, a tree big enough to shelter the birds. The overlooked treasure is the greatest, and even in a catch of fish that is messy, can come abundance.


Think back over the past several weeks of parables—they all come from the same chapter in Matthew, where Jesus is trying to tell people, especially the disciples, what the kingdom of Heaven is like, in both the now and the not yet. We’ve had a variety of seeds across the past several weeks, only some of which will grow into trees like the mustard seed. We’ve had wheat and weeds mixed together, too small to sort out early. Here, too, we have seeds, along with other small things.


In some ways, the message is obvious—small is beautiful, to use that phrase from the past, that slogan which encouraged us to live in a way that is sustainable, unlike big, industrial agricultural ventures that were beginning to appear in the middle part of last century. It’s a message that is still countercultural, even in churches, where we might expect a different approach. But as our experience at Lutheridge shows, even a choir director leading a workshop on small choirs has a very different idea of what small means from what Jesus meant.


Three years ago, I first preached on this set of parables, and I had only been here two months. Back then, I thought this assignment would be temporary, nine months at most. Back then, I knew this congregation was small, but I didn’t realize how mighty this congregation is and not as hidden as I might have assumed.


All of my adult life, I’ve been a member of very small congregations, churches that had less than 50 members in the pews on Sunday mornings. We’ve had stewardship campaigns and workshops that showed us new ways to do outreach so that we could get more members. The standard thinking was that churches must grow and grow and grow so that they could survive, that church health was measured solely by size, not vibrancy.


That message of growth ignores a significant part of today’s message and the message of the parables of past weeks. If we use the metrics of the world to judge whether or not we’re doing something right and good, we may miss the larger focus that we need to see what is truly happening. If we’re counting people in pews to decide whether a church should stay open or close, we’ve taken a shallow measure of success.


That metric doesn’t include the mom who creates devotional opportunities for those in the car pool line at school; because we’re a small group, she can easily share those devotions with all of us, even if we’re not driving children to school and back. That metric doesn’t include the member who buys us all special gifts when he goes to auctions—in a larger church, he wouldn’t know our names, much less be able to buy us gifts. If I was pastor of a church with 100 members or more, I couldn’t pray for each individual person on my morning walk—unless I had several hours to walk and a memory that is stronger than mine is now.


Of course, not every small community is as vibrant as this one. That’s why the larger world loves metrics that simply ask us to quantify—why our bishops ask us for head counts or a tally of who gives money. But the larger Church is moving towards a more nuanced assessment—which is why we generate the annual reports that we do each year.


However, Jesus reminds us that even these nuanced reports will not capture all of what it means to be the community of God here on earth. As I was writing a rough draft of this sermon, I took a break to eat dinner with Eileen, an old church friend who was passing through town. After dinner, we served blueberry pie, made with the pie filling that the Rasmussens brought us all, and come to find out, Eileen had never had blueberry pie before. We talked about choir experiences past and present. Once we played in a very small church choir together, for Easter sunrise service. I was on the upright bass, she was on the ukelele, Carl was on the violin, and another friend played banjo ukelele. Our small choir of 4 led the music, all the music, for the congregation of 15 that assembled in the church’s butterfly garden. Our pastor posted pictures on Facebook.


One church member who had drifted away saw the pictures and decided to come to the later service because she remembered how much she missed the music. She hoped to hear Carl and Eileen play and sing a duet.


I wish I could tell you that lives were changed because of those moments. I wish I had some kind of climatic, zingy example to give you, to end this sermon with a bang. But then I remind myself of the parables, of the gentle teaching of Jesus who reminds us that the kingdom of God is created in small acts, not splashy ones, and the long term wealth of those acts likely will remain hidden.


We can trust that God is the ultimate music director, whether our choir has 4 people or 70. God can use any voice that shows up, and God will know how to create the best harmonies with those voices. And if our singing voices fail, God has other options: the call of the cicadas, the percussion of the rain, the late night discussions as we eat blueberry pie, the devotional time of the car pool lane, all the ways, great and small, that we create a soundtrack for the community of God that we’re building, right here, right now.

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; recently, 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.

Other Symbols of Smallness: The Small Choir

This week's Gospel reading revolves around small things (mustard seeds and yeast) and hidden things (treasure and pearls of rare price and fish that are worthy hidden around a net full of sea creatures).  I have preached on mustard seeds and weeds before.  I'm always on the lookout for new metaphors and symbols.  I've used symbols like mold in a bathroom as a synonym for yeast. 

This year, I thought of an experience during Music Week, where we went to a workshop for people who are in charge or are part of small choirs.  It quickly became clear that we (me, my spouse, my S. Florida church friend) have a very different definition of  "small":  one of the workshop leaders talked about his small Vespers choir, and then casually mentioned the 70 members of the small Vespers choir.

We looked at music that three workshop leaders would be good for "small" choirs.  Almost all of them relied on choirs that had sopranos, altos, and deeper voices of some variety.  Many of the pieces rely on some level of musical skill from those voices.

I am guessing that most truly small choirs don't even have these resources.  Here's how I put it in the rough draft of my sermon for Sunday:  

"My version of a small choir is the type you’d find at a church that only has 70 or so people, a choir of six or seven where one or two people might be able to carry a tune and play an instrument, where the other five choir members have enthusiasm but no ability to carry the non-soprano sections by themselves, the kind of choir where getting everyone to sing the melody is accomplishment enough."

The Feast Day of Mary Magdalene

Decades ago, many of us might not have heard of Mary Magdalene. When I went to undergraduate school, in the mid-80's, we didn't know about many women in the Bible outside of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Maybe we had a vague memory of a woman with demons that Jesus healed.

Now it's a different story. We've had decades of feminist theology that has opened our eyes and our theology to the presence of women. Now scholars are doing an even deeper dive into ancient texts. I'm thinking of Diana Butler Bass's sermon in the summer of 2022 which alerted us to the research of Elizabeth Schrader who is looking at manuscripts and trying to see if Mary Magdalene has been literally erased and written over to transform it to Martha.  Her scholarship also leads her (and others) to suggest that Mary might have been one of the pillars of the first church:  Mary the Tower and Peter the Rock.  But over the centuries, only Peter the Rock endures.

It's an interesting theory, and it seems like just one more example of how the ancient Church tried to minimize and hide the involvement of women in the life of the first group of believers. It's not that different from emphasizing the Mary Magdalene of demon possession and/or prostitution, not the Mary Magdalene as the first witness to the resurrection.  As I think of the Easter morning story, I wonder if we’re seeing a vestige of Mary Magdalene’s possessed personality. What drove her to the tomb? I understand the ancient customs surrounding the care of dead bodies, and I understand the laws regarding dead bodies and the Sabbath. But in one Gospel, it’s only Mary who is so deeply concerned about the body of Jesus. What drives her to the tomb?

In Mary’s reaction to the man she assumes is the gardener, I recognize my own demon of anxiety. I watch her ask a perfect stranger about the body of Jesus. I watch her throw all caution and decorum away, so desperate is she to complete this task, as if completing the task will restore the world to right order.

Many of us suffer in the grip of these demons of anxiety, these beliefs that somehow, through our manic quest for control, we can keep the world from spinning into chaos. We might argue for the benefits of medication, and indeed, if it’s a matter of brain chemicals that are out of balance, we would be right.

But all too often, something else is at the root of our modern possession. Maybe we haven’t stopped to grieve our losses, as Mary needs to do in the garden. Maybe it’s the fear of loss that is coming to all our lives. Maybe it’s that insistent hiss from both inside and out that says that we will never be enough: good enough, clean enough, accomplished enough, nice enough, attractive enough, loved enough.

The Easter message comes to cast out these demons again and again. Christ reminds us that he’s here, always waiting, always watching, always ready for us. Even if we don’t recognize him, Jesus will not cast us away. It is the voice of Jesus that can silence all of our demons and help us to be at peace. Christ’s voice calls us to what’s important in our lives.

Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

 The readings for Sunday, July 26, 2026:

First Reading: 1 Kings 3:5-12

First Reading (Semi-cont.): Genesis 29:15-28

Psalm: Psalm 119:129-136

Psalm (Semi-cont.): Psalm 105:1-11, 45b

Psalm (Alt.): Psalm 128 (Psalm 128 (Semi-continuous) NRSV)

Second Reading: Romans 8:26-39

Gospel: Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Today we have a series of interesting parables which Jesus uses to explain the Kingdom of Heaven. I don't think that Jesus is explaining the afterlife, the way that many of us might assume when we hear the word "Heaven." Instead, Matthew uses that word as shorthand for a concept that's closer to "life as God intended." Of course, I'm grossly simplifying, but instead of doing an in-depth exploration of the word "Heaven," let's look at the images Jesus uses.

Note the smallness, the almost invisibility, of the first two images (verses 31-33): mustard seeds and yeast. There are two elements which are interesting. One is that these small grains left alone will transform themselves into something bigger--and in the case of yeast, will transform the surrounding elements too. Leave flour alone, and it won't change much in terms of volume. Even if it gets buggy, the bag won't explode. But add yeast and water and a bit of sweetness and leave the bowl in a warm place for a few hours--when you return to the bowl, the dough might be overflowing. Likewise with a seed. Plant it in the earth with a bit of fertilizer, add some water each day, and leave it alone--if you're lucky, you get a shrub or a tree. If we go out looking for the kingdom to be a big, glorious thing, we might miss the Kingdom.

Many people simply don't register the presence of God because they're looking for the wrong thing. They're looking for something huge and powerful. For example, think about the Jews of Jesus' time. They didn't want spiritual salvation. When they talked about a savior, they wanted someone who would kick the Romans out of their homeland. They missed the miracle of Jesus because they looked for the wrong sign.

The next set of metaphors (verses 44-46) talks about the preciousness of the Kingdom and also a bit about the effort required to find it. The treasure/pearl doesn't just fall into the men's laps--they're out looking.

We live in a culture that doesn't want to put in a lot of work. If you don't believe me, watch the claims that advertisers make: I can lose weight by working out 7 minutes a day, I can make thousands of dollars a month by working just 15 minutes a day, I can get a college degree without leaving my house. I love talking to my colleagues and collecting their strange student stories. One of my colleagues had a student stomp out in a huff when she realized she'd have to write essays. Keep in mind, my colleague teaches an English Composition class. Did the student think they'd be creating macaroni collages?

And then I start to wonder why this student imagines that she can go to college and not have to work. Where does she get that message? Of course, the culture in which she lives beams that to her all the time.

Likewise, Kingdom living requires some effort on our part. God wants to meet us, but we have to go forward towards God. We have to look for the right signs, and we have to make some effort. That effort might be regular prayer, spiritual reading, going to church, turning ourselves into caring people, giving more of our money away.

But the end of this week's Gospel assures us that the effort will pay off. We don't want to be in the furnace where men weep and gnash their teeth. For those of you who read the end of the Gospel as a metaphor of Hell after death, you might be right. But I would argue that life is terribly hellish right here and now for people who aren't doing transformational work.

Weeds and Seeds and Sermons

I thought my sermons, both the youth sermon and adult, went well yesterday.  Then my spouse and I listened to the adult sermon on the drive home, and had a rollicking discussion about whether or not it worked.  We agreed that my approach to weeds and wheat wasn't true to the parable, which tells us that you're born a wheat seed or a weed seed.

But as a sermon, it works.  I think.

You can view the sermon here.  If you'd like to read along, you can read the sermon manuscript here.

Sermon for July 19, 2026

July 19, 2026
By Kristin Berkey-Abbott



Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43


If Jesus was going to explain parables, there are other parables that need more explaining than today’s parable and last week’s. These parables of seeds, sowing, good soil, and sorting don’t really need additional explanation, not from Jesus, not from generations of preachers that have come after Jesus.


You might be objecting to this parable from a standpoint of Lutheran theology—what happened to grace? We’re using the Revised Common Lectionary, and the idea of a common lectionary is that all Christians are hearing the same text on the same Sunday across the world. Today’s parable will fit in more neatly with the theology of other denominations than with Luther’s ideas of a God of grace.


This vision of the end of time, when God returns to judge the living and the dead, would be one that energized the apostle Paul. Last week, I talked about Paul and how so many generations of Christians have treasured his letters, but he had a very different vision of his mission. He was not writing letters in the hopes of being the chief theologian of a new church. He thought that God would be returning very soon, in his lifetime, to judge the living and the dead. His letters were written in the hopes that they would guide new believers in ways that would save them from the harsh judgment described in this parable’s explanation.


Paul would not be worried about the Jews and their salvation. They have a covenant with God after all. They’ve had a head start. But we see from his letters that Paul is deeply concerned about the salvation of the Gentiles, who don’t have much time to prepare for God’s return to judge them.


When we interpret the parables in traditional ways, we, too, are likely thinking in terms of a human lifespan, not a cosmic span, in our timeline, not God’s timeline. We think about the spiritual practices that are likely to save us from the fire, from the final judgment. I’ve preached these sermons, so I know the pull of that interpretation, how easy it would be to bring my sermon to a close by urging to seek out spiritual disciplines that work and to jettison the habits that are keeping us from being our best spiritual selves.


In today’s parable, we see Jesus reminding us that it’s not always obvious which seeds are which at the time of sprouting. God the gardener takes a wait and see attitude. The interpretation of the parable at the end reminds us that God takes a much longer view, the kind of view that waits to see what the garden produces. The Apostle Paul has always been important to Christians, even in his lifespan. But what about apostles that had their work undermined by those workers who are so ready to yank out weeds?


This week, I have found my thoughts returning to Mary Magdalene. We usually hear about her on Easter, if we hear about her at all. But her feast day is Wednesday, July 22. Hers is one of the first feast days devoted to someone other than the 12 male disciples. Modern Christians have a plethora of feast days to celebrate. Ancient Christians would have had far fewer, one for each disciple, a few for the earliest apostles, and a few that celebrated events in the Gospels, like the Annunciation, 9 months before Christmas, when the angel Gabriel visits Mary the mother of Jesus.


The fact that Mary Magdalene had a feast day early should have told us of her importance, but for centuries, most of us haven’t learned much about her. At best, we were probably told that she was the first witness to the resurrection, important because she alerted the disciples.


However recent scholarship suggests that she was far more important, a woman who was present with the disciples for many of the important events, including the Last Supper. But as early Church fathers became more protective of the faith, in the 3rd and 4th centuries, Mary Magdalene was written out of the Gospels—for a variety of reasons. Scholar Elizabeth Schrader-Polzer has done important work in the last ten years to establish how Mary Magdalene was written out of the Gospel of John so that it would seem less radical and be included with the other 3 Gospels when the New Testament was compiled in the 4th century. Four years ago, in a sermon given by theologian Diana Butler Bass talked about Elizabeth Schrader-Polzer’s scholarly work on Mary Magdalene. That sermon, given at the Wild Goose festival, is now one of 3 of the most watched sermons of all time; the other two were Bishop Budde's sermon at the interfaith worship service after the second inauguration of Donald Trump and the sermon preached at the wedding of Prince Harry and Mary Markle.


Going forward, study Bibles will have a footnote that will refer to Elizabeth Schrader-Polzer’s work—this development is a very big deal. Recognition for the work of Elizabeth Schrader-Polzer has come fairly quickly. But we all know that we don’t always recognize important people in a timely way.


I could give plenty of examples closer to our own time period. Let me choose just one. Summer always puts me in mind of long afternoons in childhood with the luxury of getting lost in a good book. When I was a kid, I was often reading and re-reading Madeleine L’Engle. You probably already know about her book, A Wrinkle in Time. But she wrote many, many more, for children and for adults.


She always said she wrote for readers, not for age groups, and if it’s been awhile since you read A Wrinkle in Time, I encourage you to return to it. It’s a book we need now more than ever, a book that insists on the power of love, and a book with a provocative message that what may seem like our most difficult faults and personality traits may in fact be the way we save the world.


It’s a novel that almost didn’t get published. L’Engle had 10 years of not being published before she wrote the book, and in her 40’s, after writing it, she had publisher after publisher reject it. The rejections were so intense that she almost gave up writing. Thank goodness she didn’t. That book has gone on to win awards and to remain in print, along with most of her other books. We can’t say that for most books published in 1963.


When we look at people like Paul or Mary Magdalene or Madeleine L’Engle through God shaped glasses, we see how successful they were. To keep the garden metaphor going, imagine them as carrying on the work of the Son, the work of Jesus. Jesus gives the disciples and apostles the seeds of the Good News, and those very human first Christians spread them far and wide. Later believers have continued to widen the garden. Some seeds that are sown are obviously wheat, like the Apostle Paul and the scholar Elizabeth Schrader-Polzer. Other seeds may look like weeds, like Mary Magdalene and Madeleine L’Engle, holding on where they don’t appear to be welcome. But time reveals that they, too, have a place in God’s garden.


We all have a place in God’s garden. Don’t listen to the people who treat others like weeds. Instead, grow in the soil of Jesus’ teaching, sure in the promise that we will shine like the sun as we flourish in God’s garden, watered by grace, nourished by God’s love.