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.

Sermon for May 31, 2026, The Feast Day of the Visitation and Holy Trinity Sunday

May 31, 2026, Holy Trinity Sunday
By Kristin Berkey-Abbott



First Reading: Genesis 1:1--2:4a

Psalm: Psalm 8

Second Reading: 2 Corinthians 13:11-13

Gospel: Matthew 28:16-20





The wonders of technology make it possible for me to be part of the women’s group at the church in Florida where I used to be a member; once a month, we meet by way of Zoom to check in with each other and to have a bit of Bible study. We met the Saturday before Pentecost, and we talked about prayer and which part of the Triune God we talked to when we pray—or do we separate them in that way? I would offer the same question to all of us, as we think about Holy Trinity Sunday. It’s one way of thinking about what it means to have a Triune God.


In the Bible study group, we found out that most of us pray to Jesus and/or God, who we described as Creator or Father. None of us pray to the Holy Spirit. In a way, that’s not a surprise. We’re Lutherans, after all. In my Lutheran Theology class, we studied the foundational documents written by Luther and his fellow reformers. The focus was on Jesus and justification more than God and creation or the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit gets no mention at all.


When we look at the readings for today, we see something similar. Look again at what we just heard. In the first reading and the Psalm, we see God the Creator in full force. Not God as judge, not God as rescuer, not God as avenger-- three of the other main ways we see God across time, three of the main ways we see humans relating to God.


In our Gospel reading, we see the second part of the Triune God. We see Jesus at the end of his ministry, Jesus as dispatcher, sending the disciples out to carry on his work. In today’s Gospel reading, we don’t see Jesus as savior in the same way we do during Holy Week and Easter. In today’s reading, we don’t see Jesus as healer and worker of miracles.


The Holy Spirit only gets a brief mention, just part of a sentence in both the second reading and the Gospel. For Holy Trinity Sunday, this seems unfair. Sure, we had a focus on the Holy Spirit last week, but now we seem back to our non-Pentecostal life, all the parts of the Triune God back in their lanes, each responsible for different parts of our spiritual and church lives.


Throughout the centuries, the Church has wrestled with trinitarian theology, with the question about what it means to have God in 3 persons, blessed Trinity, as the hymnist writes it. Were all three there in the beginning? Can they exist separately, apart from one another? Different theologians would give us different answers.


Some theologians might tell us that the answers aren’t important. The important question is how we relate to this Triune God—how we understand the ways that God is at work in the world. This understanding can shape our spiritual practices: how we pray and to whom we pray, for example.


Our Gospel reading is one predominant way that Christians through the centuries have related to God, by going out and making disciples. Through the centuries, that has been interpreted as going to people who haven’t heard about Jesus and convincing them that Jesus walked the earth and died for us and rose again. That model has us converting people and moving on to the next group who hasn’t heard about Jesus.


That model doesn’t seem as useful today. Can there be any people out there who haven’t heard about Jesus? Would our showing up to preach and teach really make a difference?


Perhaps we’ve focused on the wrong verb in today’s Gospel. We’ve focused on the verb “Go”; for today’s world, “Make disciples” is a much more important focus. In the past, we’ve done that by preaching and teaching. But how does the Triune God make disciples?


One clear way is by coming to live with us. Christians focus on Jesus. Jesus comes to earth to show us what it means to be human, how to live our best human lives. From the beginning of the story, even before the birth of Jesus, the Triune God is showing us by example.


May 31, roughly 6 months before Christmas, is the Feast day of the Visitation, a day that commemorates Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, her kinswoman. In Protestant denominations, we hear about this visit in Advent, if we hear it at all. But it provides an interesting note for Trinity Sunday too. It’s an important counterpoint to Pentecost, which often is presented as something that happens to the disciples after they have been commissioned by Jesus.


The story of Mary and Elizabeth reminds us that others are also worthy of commissioning, worthy of doing God’s work in the world—and those people may look very different from those 11 disciples in today’s Gospel. Society and biology told Elizabeth that she was too old for a child; God said it wasn’t too late. Society told Mary that she wasn’t the appropriate choice for a mother of the Messiah; God invited her to ignore that judgment. Women said yes, God said yes, and the history of the world shifted.


It's a great day to celebrate those possibilities. And even if we've been feeling like our time is passed, that it's too late for us, it's great to remember that God doesn't see us that way. If we feel like we're too inexperienced, that we don't know what we're doing, it's great to remember that God doesn't see us that way.


On this Trinity Sunday, let us remember that our God is revealed through community—community between Creator, Redeemer, and Holy Spirit, and community between the Divine and humans. Let us follow God’s example. Let us rejoice in all that is possible when we say yes to God, when we join this community. In a world that rarely celebrates the ways we need each other to thrive, let us make disciples by being a living example of the value of community. So let us go, go about our days, secure in the knowledge that with God, nothing is impossible. With our Triune God, nothing—nothing—is impossible.

Our Next Fixer-Upper

If such a thing exists as a regular reader of this blog, that reader would notice that my regular schedule of posting has been disrupted.  On Monday, we left town until Wednesday for a wedding.  Yesterday we headed down to Spartanburg because I scheduled a turn-on date for water and electric utilities at our new-to-us fixer upper-house in Spartanburg.

Yes, we bought another fixer-upper when we're not done fixing up the house we have at Lutheridge.  Let me be clear--we're not selling that house.  We are fortunate enough to be able to afford 2 small houses.  And one reason why we can is that each house needed work, and very few homebuyers these days want to put in that sweat equity.

In the spirit of full disclosure and complete honesty, I, too, would like a house where I didn't need to think about upgrades, where someone else had already made the decisions and installations.  But as we looked at houses, we kept saying, "Why would someone make the kitchen this way?  Why didn't they do the bathroom that way?"

I almost didn't look at the house we bought.  The pictures were just too scary, like this one of the kitchen:

Did they have a fire?  Some catastrophic plumbing issue?  But it was around the corner from a very cute house, so I swung by.  As I peered in the window, I thought, well this isn't as scary as it looks.

When we had our realtor show it to us, we all said, "This house is much better than it looks.  And more solid than it looks."  So we made an offer which was accepted.  We closed on the house May 8 and because of travel plans made a year ago, we are only now having time to make upgrades.

You might say, "Yes, but why 2 houses?"  In March, I accepted an offer of a tenure track Associate Professor position from Spartanburg Methodist College, which means more job stability--income to count on and a schedule to count on, a schedule which means I need to be on campus every weekday, during the 8 months of the year that school is in session.  I have done that kind of commuting for the past 2 years, and it's getting tiring.

I'm still a Synod Appointed Minister at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, so our thinking is that we'll be at the Lutheridge house on the week-end, in the Spartanburg house during the weekdays.  And I will want to spend the summer months in the Lutheridge house.

Of course, much could change, as much has changed.  It hasn't been that long since we bought our current fixer-upper, the Lutheridge house.  It was just 4 years ago, when I had only done a year of seminary, when I didn't even know that SMC existed.