Sermon for Sunday, October 25, 2026, Reformation Sunday

October 25, 2026
By Kristin Berkey-Abbott





Reformation Sunday



Here we are at Reformation Sunday, a Sunday chosen because it is closest to the day when Luther nailed his 95 Theses on the door in Wittenberg, Germany. Having this day as one of our big Lutheran festivals might make us think that those 95 Theses are Luther’s biggest and best theological ideas. In the Spring, I took a Lutheran Confessions class at United Lutheran Seminary, one of our 6 Lutheran seminaries. It’s a class that looks at the foundational documents written by Luther.


On the first day of class, our professor made the startling claim that Luther’s 95 Theses, one of the founding documents we celebrate today, was not the most important work of theology that Luther wrote. By then, at the age of 33, some of his earlier theology is much more groundbreaking. You might say, “Who was this renegade professor that the seminary allowed to teach this class?” In fact, my professor was Guy Erwin, president of the seminary and former bishop of the Southwest California Synod. During the semester, Erwin proved his point. It is too easy to be raised Lutheran and have a distorted or shallow view of our theology as Lutherans.


In fact, if you read the 95 Theses, you’ll see that most of them are fairly straight forward and not radical at all. If you’re like me, you might have spent much of your life thinking the theses nailed to the door were all about indulgences, the medieval church practice of taking money with the promise of reduced time in purgatory and a faster route to Heaven for loved ones who have died.


His critique of indulgences is what got him into trouble with both the church and the emperor—and during his time the fortunes of both church and emperor were intertwined in a way that can be hard to remember today. In fact, today, about 60% of the Lutheran church budget in Germany still comes through the German government—but the fortunes of the government are independent from the church. Luther’s attack on indulgences is one of the events that eventually leads to the separation of church and state enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.


We might think of the medieval Church that shaped Luther and imagine it was the kind of church like the ones we miss, the ones we’ve heard about that existed in the 1950’s and 1960’s, churches that were full of activities not just on Sundays but throughout the week. We might think of a church like Faith Lutheran this week-end: a harvest festival on Saturday and worship on Sunday.


Medieval cathedrals may have been community centers, but they did little to enrich the spiritual lives of those who entered. People came to Church primarily for individual Confession, not worship. Medieval believers, before the reforms of Luther and others, were unlikely to have the Eucharist very often; most believers might have it once or twice a year. And most of those believers would not be able to explain why it was important.


We remember Luther’s critique of indulgences, but his vision of a church as a force for education is a far more important change. In Luther’s day, people knew that they had rules they had to follow, rules handed to them by the church and reinforced by the government, but they couldn’t explain why. Most believers couldn’t read, but they did memorize the rules—a condition which may remind us of the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, who wanted everyone to follow the rules given in the Law. Luther wanted believers to think about what they memorized and why it was important.


In order to accomplish this task of a deeper understanding, Luther engaged in a life-long re-forming of the local church. He saw the church of his day as a sacramental gate keeper, managing who got to go to Heaven and how long it would take to get there. In contrast, Luther built a church focused on teaching and educating, a church in service to worshippers instead of a church with church leaders in charge.


To become a church serving believers, Luther focused on changing the priesthood. Many priests in Luther’s day didn’t have much education. But Luther was much more concerned with corruption, particularly priests who had sexual relationships with women. It was not uncommon for priests to have marriage-like relationships, and Luther believed this hypocrisy undermined faith—faith in God and faith in the Church. Luther talked about the need to regulate clergy and to focus on the parish. He redefined power saying that priests should be in service to the parish, not the other way round. Luther spent his life formulating the best ways for clergy and lay people to build a life together in a parish.


Luther also focused on home life, seeing the home as a kind of parish, another place where faith should be fostered. Many of us are familiar with Luther’s Small Catechism or we’ve heard of it (it’s in the ELW, if you want a refresher, p. 1160). Luther wrote this work as a teaching tool to be used around a household table, a way for families to have conversations about what really matters.


We spend time praising Luther for his work to get rid of indulgences, but we really should also be praising him for his work on education and literacy. He believed we should all be able to read the Bible for ourselves and interpret it in community. During his time, if someone wanted information, he or she would need to go find the one or two people who knew how to read and trust their reading. During his time in hiding, Luther translated the Latin Bible into the everyday German used by ordinary people and new technology, the printing press, made it widely available. The world would never be the same.


I don’t want to ignore the problems that came with Luther’s reforming ways. You can go back through my Reformation Day sermons and note that I don’t spend much time talking about Luther’s antisemitism or about the Peasant’s Revolt which resulted in the slaughter of 100,000 poor farmers. Times of reformation can be a time of powerful change, but those changes aren’t all positive.


We live in a time more similar to Luther’s, and Christ’s, than we may realize. People in Luther’s time were worried about a variety of gathering storms, from peasant uprisings to conflicts further away. Constantinople to the east had fallen to the Muslims, in Christ’s time, Jerusalem had fallen to Rome, and it was clear that neither would stop at the capture of those ancient capital cities. We, too, feel malevolent forces gathering, a variety of forces set to wreak havoc upon our lives.


Then as now, people were increasingly oppressed: faith in the church was diminished, adherence to law, church and civil, was strict, individualism and individual rights were suppressed, and the cost to simply live was becoming more difficult to achieve.


Based on the last three decades, the balance of the twenty-first century will have as many challenges as the time period during which Luther and the reformers lived and worked. With the grounding provided by these confessional documents, with their emphasis on grace, mercy and learning, a willingness to lift a pint with our political adversaries and share a song, along with a bit of luck and Divine providence, perhaps we, too, as a committed people of God, can successfully navigate our current century and emerge with even richer traditions that will shape future generations for centuries to come.

Reformation Eve

Reformation Sunday comes early this year--it's tomorrow.

You don't have much time left to decide how you'll spend Reformation Sunday.  Will you be going to church?  Protestant or Catholic?  Will you sing some stout German hymns?  Will you drink stout German beer?

Even if you're not a church going type, the Reformation has changed your life--after all, you can worship in your own language and read the Bible and think about theology for yourself.  I won't cover 500 years of history here, but suffice it to say that those Reformers launched us further down the road towards modernity than we would have been without them.  I have argued that Martin Luther did more to promote literacy for the masses than anyone before or since--and that's just one example.

In 2016, The New York Times had a great article about Martin Luther.  It talks about the Reformation pamphlet, which Luther perfected--it could be read to illiterate masses, and it was short enough that literate Germans would actually read it.  He knew how to use imagery and how to choose collaborators.  He could write quickly--and he knew the publishing process inside and out, in terms of the mechanics and onward.

The article ends this way:  "'He [Luther] created a media storm with virtually no precedent in the age of print and became the most published author in the history of publishing, up to that moment,' he [Dr. Pettigrew, a Luther scholar] said. “Great men and women seize the moment, and I think he did.'”

It's good to remember that individual people can change the course of history.  If you could travel back in time, before Luther became so famous/infamous for his work, would people believe that Luther would be the person that changed the world so much?  A tortured monk and a university teacher?  I can imagine most people saying, "Who?  Not the emperor?  Not the pope?"

Is there a religious person or group that is even now working to change the Church in such ways that we will barely recognize it 500 years from now?  Or is the lesson that we don't recognize the true reformers in our midst?

Or maybe these thoughts are too heavy for a Sunday morning.  Maybe you want to dress in red today and think about your personal Reformations for which you yearn.

May your bulwarks never fail! Wait, we don't use that line (from "A Mighty Fortress") any more. Drat! How will children learn that word?

That song seems more appropriate than ever for our age. Societal institutions left and right have shown us of their inadequacy. We're lucky to have God as our shield and comfort.

So, in whatever way you celebrate, may you have a meaningful Reformation Sunday.  I plan to spend some time thinking about grace and the places in my life that could use some grace.  I will pray that God fill me with the spirit of grace as I move through these darkening days of November.

The Feast Day of Saint James

I did not realize until recently just how many James exist in the circle of Jesus.  The more famous Saint James is the one we celebrate in July, the one that people celebrate by walking to his shrine in Santiago de Campostela in Spain from a variety of starting points.

James the Brother of Jesus was one of the early leaders of the Church, which may or may not tell us that he's not one of the ones that the Gospel writer of Mark presents as coming to Jesus to try to get him to be quiet.  Or maybe he is, and he changed his mind.  James the Just is another name given to James the brother of Jesus, which suggests to me that he would be capable of changing his mind.

There are places in Acts and throughout the letters that make up so much of the New Testament that make us think that James is one of the ones in charge of the early Church, along with Peter.  He seems to be one of the ones making big decisions for the larger group.  He's given credit for helping move the early Church to the inclusion of Gentiles.  There are other scholars who see James the Brother of Jesus as more traditional, that it was Paul who reached out to Gentiles and James who argued for staying with Mosaic Law.  Circumcision played a big role in these deliberations, according to some scholars.

The more I look for answers, the more I am struck by how much we do not know about the early Church or about Jesus as a historical figure.  From there, it's a short realization to how easy it is to make the early Church figures be who we want or need them to be.

Still, I am grateful for their work.  On this morning where I've been listening to Ezra Klein's podcast about how Artificial Intelligence through Machine Learning has the capability to destroy the world (more specifically, humans), it's good to remember that the end of the world has been forecast many times, and so far, we persist.

Theology of the Pumpkin Patch

Every year, as the lectionary returns to readings that use sheep or crop yields as a metaphor, I wonder what has been lost to modern ears. Years ago, as I helped unload pumpkins from an 18-wheeler truck to our church’s pumpkin patch, one of the children asked, “Why are they so dirty?”

I said, "Because last week, they were growing in a field."

I could see the child looking at me as if I might be joking; after all, he's never seen pumpkins growing in a field. He may never have seen anything growing in a field. We are in an urban area, after all. I wondered if I should do more to explain.

And then I thought of all those agricultural metaphors, where Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is like ... .” That parable of the seeds and the different types of ground – do we really understand that parable if we’ve never planted anything?

Each year, many churches transform part of the grounds into a giant pumpkin patch. It’s one of the more popular fundraising and community outreach events that my congregation did in its old space, and subsequent references are to those past years, along with current pumpkin patches. In my search for relevant metaphors, I’ve wondered, what does this pumpkin patch tell us about God and God’s community?

Our pumpkin patch contains all sorts of pumpkins, both the traditional orange kind and several types of green pumpkins. We offer both pumpkins and gourds. We have every size of pumpkin you could want, from the largest pumpkins that could be a chair, to those we’d use for a pie, to the very small, cute kind that you can put on a fireplace mantel.

In the variety of the pumpkins, we get a sense of God the creator who doesn’t stop at just one possibility. We get a sense that in God’s creation there’s room for every kind of pumpkin.

Those pumpkins don’t come off the truck by themselves. Our church must provide the labor to get the pumpkins to where we want them to be. When I helped unload the pumpkins through the years, I thought, “I’ve never felt like a part of a more seamless Christian community than I do right now.”  

That’s not exactly true. But the times that shine in my memory are times of similar service: serving dinner to the homeless, doing a winterization project for homes of the poor in the inner city, working together to create a wonderful vacation Bible school experience for children. 

Unloading the pumpkins also reminds me of something else that I cherish about church communities: At their best, there is room for everyone. The littlest ones can carry pumpkins, if they want to help that way. Those of us without the strength to carry pumpkins can help sell them. 

I think of myself as having no upper-body strength, but clearly I’m wrong. By the end of an October night, I had carried at least 400 pumpkins. I would not have expected that I could do that since I can’t do 10 pushups at a time without my arms screaming at me. And yet, it needed to be done, and so I kept moving the pumpkins and pushing through my fatigue. At the end of the night, although I was exhausted and covered in dirt and pumpkin gunk, I felt an exhilaration that I hadn’t anticipated. Similarly, God has plenty of surprises for us. 

As I cradled those pumpkins, which so resemble human heads, I felt a strange tenderness toward them, the tenderness that I imagine God feels toward us all. In some ways, pumpkins are so sturdy and yet so fragile. All it takes is one slip and the pumpkin is rendered useless, a pulpy mess of slime and gunk. And yet, even from that accident could come new life, if one planted the pumpkin seeds. From that one pumpkin, we could grow a whole new patch, life out of death.

As I drove home after we unloaded the pumpkins, I thought about all the ways I was surrounded by evidence of God's grace: an abundance of pumpkins, a great group of fellow workers, the beautiful sunset, the almost full moon, the exuberant children, blessing after blessing. I felt gratitude for my healthy body that could carry all those pumpkins. I said a prayer for those who had grown and harvested the pumpkins in a distant field in New Mexico. I went home to wash the pumpkin gunk and soil off me, and I felt additional gratitude for warm water and a cold swimming pool in which to soak my sore feet. I felt more appreciation than usual for my soft bed and clean sheets.

The next morning, I woke up with very sore arms and a soul singing with gratitude. I said hello to the pumpkins I brought home, pumpkins that won't be here very long.

None of us will be here very long. I want to adopt a more sacramental approach to life. I want to see evidence of God's grace all around me, in the lowliest gourd, in the greatest pumpkin, in every human who crosses my path. 

Support Your Local Church Pumpkin Patch

I have been part of a church that offers a pumpkin patch every year, a huge undertaking, from the offloading of the pumpkins to the selling of them.

That South Florida church funded a variety of special projects and ongoing ministries with this pumpkin patch.  When the church had a traditional Sunday school, funds went there.  The church used the funds to help repair the roof that covers the part of the building that is more used by community groups than by the church..  The church used the funds to pay for Vacation Bible School, an event which is attended by more neighborhood children than church member children.

I love the fact that the pumpkin patch itself is a form of community outreach and a service of sorts.  I love that it funds other community services.  I imagine that most churches who have a pumpkin patch use the earnings in similar ways.

Picture from the Ghost of Pumpkin Patch Past

So, this week-end, as you prepare for Halloween, drop by a local church pumpkin patch.  Your dollars will go further than if you bought a pumpkin at a grocery store. 

Meditation on Reformation Sunday, 2026

The readings for Sunday, October 25, 2026:

First Reading: Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm: Psalm 46
Second Reading: Romans 3:19-28
Gospel: John 8:31-36

Here we are, back at Reformation Sunday.  Each year, as this Sunday of celebration approaches, I find myself thinking about what needs to be reformed and what should be preserved.

Perhaps you feel like we've been living Reformation, not just in the ELCA, but across denominations.  Maybe you’re in an angry space; maybe you’re saying, “Hey, I have some theses of my own that I’d like to nail to a nearby church door.” It’s been a tough few years/decades for many of us, as we’ve watched our denominations wrestle with various issues. Maybe you find yourself feeling very sympathetic to the Catholic church of Luther's day, the Church that found itself torn asunder by many movements of reform.

Regardless of the side on which we sit with these recent struggles, we might find ourselves feeling a bit fearful. We might worry about schism. We probably worry that there won't be a place for us in the church that emerges from all of this.

We should take heart that the Church has always been in the process of Reformation. There are great Reformations, like the one we'll celebrate this Sunday, or the Pentecostal revolution that's only 100 years old, but has transformed the developing world in ways that Capitalism never could. There are smaller ones throughout the ages as well. Movements which seemed earth-shattering at the time (monastic movements of all kinds, liberation theology, ordination of women, lay leadership) may in time come to be seen as something that enriches the larger church. Even gross theological missteps, like the Inquisition, can be survived. The Church learns from past mistakes as it moves forward.

Times of Reformation can enrich us all. Even those of us who reject reform can find our spiritual lives enriched as we take stock and measure what's important to us, what compromises we can make and what we can't. It's good to have these times where we return to the Scriptures as we try to hear what God calls us to do. It may be painful, but any of these processes may lead us to soil where we can bloom more fruitfully.

We may think of that metaphor and feel despair, as if we will never be truly rooted, flowering plants. But rootlessness can be its own spiritual gift. The spiritual wanderers have often been those who most revitalized the Church, or on a smaller level, their spiritual communities. The spiritual wanderers are often the ones who keep all of us true to God's purpose.

If you have been feeling despair, take heart. Jesus promises that we will know the truth, and the truth will set us free. You might not be feeling like you know what the truth is at this current point; you may feel tossed around by the tempests of our current times. But Jesus promises that we will know the truth. We will be set free. We don't have a specific date at which we'll know the truth. But we will.

Rest in God's promise that we are all redeemable; indeed, we are redeemed. Rest in the historic knowledge that the Church has survived times of greater turbulence than our own. Rest in Luther's idea that we are saved by grace alone. Rest.

Recording of Sunday Sermon

We had a good day at church yesterday, and I felt good about both sermons.  Usually, I'm a bit more proud of my youth sermon, but yesterday, I thought my adult sermon was better.  I was pleased that I could talk about modern politics in general, without approving of one political power/leader over another.  I used the election season ad as ongoing motif, using an ad as a reminder both to pray and to praise God's creation.

Here's how I described the sermon in a Facebook post:  "My sermon today at Faith Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bristol, Tennessee addressed taxes and empire (Cyrus' and Caesar's) and God's imprint and ended with a suggestion that we treat political ads as monastery bells."

You can view the recording here on my YouTube channel, and if you'd like to read along, I posted the manuscript in this blog post; I'm intrigued by how often I added to the script.