Sermon for Sunday, July 5, 2026

July 5, 2026

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott



Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30


Our Gospel today has bits and pieces that we’ve often heard out of context, like verse 28: "Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” Doesn’t that verse fill you with yearning? At last, a person who can help us figure out a way to shed our heavy burdens! Surely then we’ll get the rest we’ve been needing!


But then there’s that problematic ending: “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Wait! There’s a yoke involved in this getting rid of our heavy burdens???!


You probably don’t need me to paint the paradox. We’re in a little church in the country—you’ve probably seen a yoke, that device designed to keep oxen in line and moving together instead of moving in different directions—all the better to get a field plowed. All well and good—but that doesn’t mean we want a yoke around our necks. Especially not if we don’t know who will be on the other side of the yoke.


A yoke does tether one animal to another, but it also reduces the work load for each animal.


Thinking of reduced work loads takes me back to 8th and 9th grade, where I went to some wild parties in my youth—no, not those kinds of parties. I had a friend with Type 1 diabetes, the kind that one is born with, the kind that can be so difficult to manage and make being a kid so hard. Every 3 months, she hosted a party, complete with sleepover afterward. We slept over not because we had drunk so much that we couldn’t drive. No, we were 13-15 years old. We weren’t driving.


We also weren’t drinking. Our friend was allowed one party every 3 months. For 12 hours, she could eat whatever she wanted, every treat she couldn’t have in ordinary life when too much accumulated sugar could kill her. On party night, we all brought our favorite treats and stayed up as late as we could, far after midnight, gorging on sweets. We went home sick with sugar and lack of sleep.


We were teenage girls, so we all tried to spend the intervening 3 months also not eating sugary treats. I wish I could tell you that we did it because we wanted to support our friend. Sadly no. We were all hoping to lose weight or have clearer skin. We supported each other in our desire for healthy eating habits regardless of the reason why.


Yes, I often think about what might have been different, had we been obsessed with another project, say writing novels or learning another language. It does make me sad the way that diet/appearance culture invaded our lives in that way, and I feel sad that this diet/appearance culture has now infected young boys, along with all of us really. It’s not just pre-teen girls who are going to extremes to meet the culture’s beauty standards, and it’s not just here in the U.S.


Our reading from Paul (Romans Romans 7:15-25a) might be the obvious place to go next, Paul’s letter about the body not obeying the mind, when the mind wants us to do good, but our bodies have other desires. But if you’re like me, you’ve had decades of this kind of body shaming beaming in at you from so many directions. If you’re like me, you’ve had quite enough of body shaming.


Instead, let us return to that band of teenage girls at a slumber party so that they can gorge on sweets, both for the joy of gorging on sweets and to support their friend, who needed to be careful most of the days of her life. When I was at those parties, I remember saying, “This must be what heaven is like! We can eat whatever we want and calories don’t count!” I don’t think I was wrong, but I think I was wrong about the reason. Absolutely I think that Heaven involves all the treats. I am willing to bet that God never cared about the calories, but only about our long term joy.


Jesus came to tell us that the Kingdom of Heaven is already here. Does that mean that we can eat like teenage girls at a slumber party now? You don’t need me to tell you the answer. However, there are other ways that the Kingdom of Heaven is like that slumber party.


I am always thinking about the symbols and metaphors that Jesus uses, how they may be unfamiliar if we didn’t grow up on a farm, like today’s yoke metaphor. Let’s use the teenage slumber party to see if we can update the yoke image that Jesus uses in this Gospel.


If I said that a life following Jesus is like a slumber party of teenage girls too young to drive and too law abiding and responsible to drink, many people would say, “No thank you.” Popular culture has a lot to say about mean girls, but much less to say about responsible and supportive communities. A group of teenage girls can be a force for pain and a source of pain. But they can also be a fierce support group. And that group can accomplish far more than one young teenage girl working alone to preserve her life.


That’s the nature of groups, of people who yoke themselves together. Like those children in the marketplace at the beginning of the Gospel, this metaphor of the power of teenage girls has a message for us. We can do more yoked together than we can ever achieve alone. At the very least, it makes our burdens lighter.


I think of writer’s groups I’ve been part of, and how we each accomplished more in the years that we met than I have since. I think of the running groups and other groups of athletes that do more as a team than they would alone. I think of the groups of campers that I hear each week, singing as they walk up and down the hilly trails, singing to support each other as they make their way through each day.


But Jesus isn’t giving us a message about the value of teamwork. Jesus reminds us that if we yoke ourselves to him, we’re working in alignment with something even more powerful than a group of teenage girls, an artist’s collective, or a running club. We’re transforming ourselves into a stronger force, plowing new fields for the kingdom of God.


Some will still try to pull in opposite directions, but yoked together, we won’t ignore the messages that God has for us or the messengers, like John the Baptist, or Jesus himself, who have been sent to us. We will learn from them and our souls will find rest and find our burdens lighter.


If we have heavy burdens, and who among us does not carry heavy burdens, Jesus invites us to put them down. We put them down by sharing them. Jesus invites us to yoke ourselves to him, and then, unlike Paul, we can find our body, mind, and soul working as one, one joined to the Divine, all of us together, yoked to our desire to do good, along with the ability to see that desire through because of the yoke that keeps us all enjoined and connected to God.

Happy Independence Day: History as Life Preserver

 I have begun this 4th of July listening to a variety of podcasts:  an interview with The Rest is History British podcasters and David Remnick and a NYT Book Review podcast with Jill Lepore talking about history and good books for Independence day.  I listened to this story on heartland rock, which didn't tell me anything I didn't already have figured out about Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A."  This piece on Octavia Butler's typewriter was disappointingly short. 

I have been re-reading Octavia Butler's Wild Seed, and I might go on to re-read Kindred, both interesting approaches to understanding history.  The interview with Jill Lepore meanders into a remembering of what it was to be immersed in books, especially the summer reading in childhood type.  Glorious!  I am always grateful to have longer stretches of reading time than I sometimes do during the school year.

This morning, I've also been re-reading past July 4 blog posts that I wrote.  Every 4th of July post is both similar and different, full of hope, yet also tinged by dread of what might be coming.  This year is no different.  Sure, we have a corrupt president, but that has usually been a national truth revealing how many different ways one can be corrupt, if one has enough power.

Here is the way I concluded my 2012 July 4 post.  It seems perfect for any ordinary Independence Day, but also for this one, which celebrates the U.S. at year 250:

I love this picture of a flag and a life preserver.  I often wish that our country could do more to hold out a life preserver to oppressed people across the globe.  But it's good to remember that our history serves as a life preserver of sorts, a beacon of hope to so many.

Midway Points: Inspirations and Revelations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life/Spiritual Lessons at the Dermatologist's Office

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

 The readings for Sunday, July 5, 2026:

First Reading: Zechariah 9:9-12

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

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

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

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

Second Reading: Romans 7:15-25a

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon on Acceptance Finds Acceptance

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon for Sunday, June 28, 2026

June 28, 2026
By Kristin Berkey-Abbott



Matthew 10:40-42



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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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



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