Sermon for Sunday, June 14, 2026

June 14, 2026

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott




Matthew 9:35-10:8, (9-23)




A traditional way of interpreting this Gospel is to see it as a companion to the “Go and make disciples” type of text that weaves its way through the lectionary. Here Jesus tells the disciples what to do as they go out to make disciples. Many sermons approach this text as a mission statement: the mission of the disciples, which then becomes the mission of the church through the ages. Traditional thinking goes something like this: if it’s good enough for those disciples who then train others to go and do likewise, then we, too, can adopt this passage as our mission statement.


But what if this approach is wrong? What if this message of Jesus is only meant for those disciples who are hearing it? What if Jesus didn’t mean for us here in the 21st century to assume that we, too, are supposed to do what those 12 named disciples were called to do?


You might ask, well, what’s it doing here, then? If it’s not direct advice from Jesus telling us how to live our lives and how to judge the success of the church, then what is the purpose of this reading?


Part of the purpose is to bear witness to the good news that Jesus embodies. One way that the writer of the Gospel of Matthew does this is to introduce us to Jesus, and also to introduce us to the disciples, the first generation to continue the work of Jesus.


Some of the first hearers of this Gospel might have actually known the disciples. I imagine them hearing this text and saying, “Curing the sick—yes, John was great at that. Casting out demons—how did Jesus know that Peter would get to be so skilled in that area?”


At this point, let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine that the writer of Matthew needed to add some additional information, some newer disciples who lived in the centuries after the original 12 disciples named in this passage. Who might the Gospel writer choose? Let’s consider some of the great witnesses of the 20th century.


There’s Clarence Jordan, founder of Koinonia Farms, which gave birth to Habitat for Humanity. There’s Dorothy Day, who founded Catholic Worker houses all over the country, showing people how to live communally. There’s Archbishop Oscar Romero who was martyred for speaking out and demanding that the killing of non-combatants in El Salvador stop. And Martin Luther King, who ushered in a new era of human rights.


And of course, there are the less famous disciples, like a woman in my old church in South Florida who taught Confirmation classes for over 60 years; imagine how many people she told about the good news of Jesus. The number of schools and hospitals kept running by faithful people are too many to list in a sermon.


When you hear me list these witnesses, do you say to yourself, “Let me go and start a farm in the red clay dirt of Georgia to show that black and white citizens can farm in harmony like Clarence Jordan did”? I don’t. I don’t have farming skills in the best of circumstances, but I admire those who do.


Why, then, do we hear sermons and theologians tell us that the mission of the original 12 must still be our mission? In part, it’s because we have a long history of this interpretation. And don’t get me wrong: if you can heal the sick, that’s a great way of announcing the good news of Jesus.


But it isn’t the only way. Not by a long shot. Take a minute. Think about your own gifts. If the writer of the Gospel added your skills to the list of healing the sick, cleansing skin diseases, raising the dead, and casting out demons that we hear today, what would it be?


Frederick Buechner has a great quote for those of us who doubt we have any sort of call or who have lost sight of God’s call or who fear it might be too late. in his book Wishful Thinking he says : “The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."


Of course, even when we find that place, we won’t always find people who are happy we found it.


In part, today’s Gospel is also a cautionary tale. We can answer our call, our call that is unique to us, our own way of announcing that the Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near, but that doesn’t mean that the world will instantly accept our gifts. Jesus warns us that just the opposite might happen. It sounds pretty grim. Not a great way to win converts. But Jesus tells us not to worry. God will speak through us. We will not be left to our own devices.


Not so long ago, I would have written this sermon imagining that very few of us would face any sort of resistance when we answered God’s call. Humanity seemed on a path of improvement as we charted our way through the last several decades of the 20th century. But as I was pondering this week’s Gospel text, word leaked out that the Southern Baptist Convention has decided to curtail the ways that women can be involved in the church.


Southern Baptists already restrict women in terms of answering a call. A Southern Baptist woman who hears God calling her to be a pastor would not get support in that denomination. In a way, this is not a new development. But that denomination continues to wrestle with how to deal with the issue of women and power. Can women be guest speakers? Can they be lectors? Should women be allowed to supervise men? Can they be Sunday School teachers?


If your social media feed is like mine, you may have seen an upsurge in reminders of all the ways that women have been faithful, with Biblical examples, like Mary Magdalene, whom some call the first apostle, because she’s the first to see the risen Jesus and she tells others. And look what happened to her—most people are more likely to remember her as the woman possessed by demons than as the first apostle.

Not so long ago, I might have said that our religious communities could help us discern a call and help us to be sure that it’s God’s call we’re hearing and not the call of those who might not have our best interests at heart. Now I use the words of Jesus in advising us how to proceed: we must be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. We can ask ourselves if we’re part of a process that announces the Kingdom of God is at hand, or are we announcing someone else’s kingdom.


In this way, we will endure until the end. In this way, we will be saved.

Women and Authority and Southern Baptist Decisions

I wonder if the social media feeds of other people are full of rage at the Southern Baptist governing body and their decisions about women in leadership.  In many ways, it's not a surprise:  they've forbidden women pastors for decades now.  The recent decision seems to say that women can't even be church council members or Sunday School teachers or speak in worship at all--no lectors, much less assisting ministers.  

Obviously, I disagree with these decisions.  I am lucky to have other denominations, including my own, the ELCA, the more inclusive expression of Lutheranism in the U.S.  I am not Southern Baptist and neither are most of the people filling my feed with rage.  Living in a "free" society and believing in free will does mean that people get to make their own decisions, no matter how much I think they are on a wrong path.

I do wonder who will do all the work, if women aren't allowed to do even volunteer work, even the work traditionally done by women, like teaching of all kinds.  Are there really all these men, waiting in the wings who have been chomping at the bit to do the work?

It's hard for me to believe that they do.  Of course, I've been in congregations that are tiny, where everyone who is breathing has been put to work, churches that don't have the luxury of excluding half (or more) of the congregation.

I am happy to be part of a church that welcomes everyone into the circle to do the work of kingdom building.

All the Battles Worth Watching, One after Another

We spent a long chunk of time yesterday watching One Battle After Another.  It's a movie that's been out for awhile, but only recently free to stream on Amazon Prime.  I had forgotten how long it was, but happily, we started it in the late afternoon, not at 7:30 at night.

It wasn't until the later part of the movie, during one of the long (LONG) car chases that I became aware of how long it was taking to finish the movie.  It was compelling from the beginning until close to the end, compelling in ways that surprised me.

I was impressed with all the chunks of narrative that did manage to come together.  Paul Thomas Anderson deserved those Oscars for best director and best adapted screenplay.  There were moments when I did some math to try to figure out the revolutionary aspect of it all--if the daughter is 16 or 17, then the revolutionaries were active in 2008 or 2009?  The planting of bombs in government buildings and calling in bomb threats from a pay phone seemed so 1972 to me, but clearly, that timeline wouldn't work.  It was a nebulous revolutionary movement in the movie, so I was willing to suspend my initial disbelief.

There's another revolutionary movement in the movie, and it's the "Latino Harriet Tubman situation."  This movie has a lot to say about a great many issues, and one of the disadvantages of a vast movie is that some issues get short shrift.  I'd have liked more about all the Latino issues, especially the nods to the sanctuary movement that are hiding there in plain sight for those of us with eyes to see.  It's in the storylines about migration where we see revolutionaries who are working for social justice and working against a government that's against the flourishing of all people--unlike the other revolutionaries, the main characters who seem to be just blowing things up for the thrill of it all.

I try very hard not to fault movies or books or TV shows for not being the story that I wish they could have been.  In the end, I was happy to have a well-made movie to watch, a movie with much to mull over, a movie worth re-watching, as so few things are deserving of a second look these days.

Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

 The readings for Sunday, June 14, 2026:

Genesis 18:1-15, (21:1-7)

Psalm 116:1-2, 12-19

Romans 5:1-8

Matthew 9:35-10:8, (9-23)


In many modern churches, especially in the time around Pentecost, we spend a lot of time talking about mission, even if we're not realizing we're talking about it. Does the church exist to serve the members? Does the church exist to serve the community? And what do we mean when we talk about the church anyway?

In this Sunday's Gospel, we get a very different vision of the early church than we'll get in parts of Acts. In Acts, we often see the early believers arguing about doctrine, like who gets to belong and who doesn't--and once we've decided who gets to participate, there are debates about how to participate, like what can be eaten and when it should be eaten.

In this Sunday's Gospel, we see a vision of the early church in the way that Paul will practice it. Jesus gives instructions to his disciples to go out taking very little with them: no food, no money, not even a change of clothes. Their mission: "Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons."

And what will they get for their troubles? They will be flogged in the synagogues and drug before rulers, where we assume a gruesome death will follow. Their message will divide families, but they are to persevere, to endure.

I think about those early disciples and our current time. The early disciples lived in a time of upheaval, and Jesus had fomented even more unrest. We, too, inhabit a time of social unrest with threats both familiar and new. We, too, sense we are at a hinge moment in history, when the time before us will be completely different to the time we lived in not too long ago.

In these days when we can't budget in the ways we once did, how can we possibly plan for our mission in the coming months and years? We have spent years and decades learning to make plans and budgets, skills which seem geared for a different time in history.  Each day, if we listen to news and social media platforms, we get news of how the church seems increasingly irrelevant to the larger world.

Yet our mission remains the same: to care for the outcast of society, to speak truth to the ones who rule, to cast out the demons that oppress society. Jesus sends his disciples out into the world without a plan, without a budget, without supplies, without a script. He trusts them to be able to think on their feet, to react to the circumstances that they actually encounter, instead of planning for encounters that may never happen.

Jesus ends with one last piece of instruction: "See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves" (Matthew 10: 16). 

Let us all be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, a mission that is as important now as it ever was.

Recording of Two Sermons for Sunday, June 7, 2026

Yesterday was a good day in worship at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Tennessee.  I preached on the true miracle that Jesus performs across the linked stories in the Gospel reading, Matthew  9:9-13, 18-26, the ability to rescue us from the living death of isolation--and it's a miracle we can perform too.

You can view the recording of the sermon here on my YouTube channel.  If you want to read along and see where I went off script, I posted the sermon manuscript in this blog post.

My spouse also captured the youth sermon, where I reminded the youth that like the father in the Gospel, God will never give up on us, even in death.  You can view it here on my YouTube channel.

Sermon for Sunday, June 7, 2026

June 7, 2026

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott




Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26




The Revised Common Lectionary, our schedule of readings, was designed long before we had our smart phones. This Gospel text was written long before modern inventors created the smart phone and other ways of keeping humans isolated and miserable. In today’s text, we see that the problems that afflict humans aren’t so different from age to age. Today’s text shows Jesus healing in a variety of ways, but in addition, he creates the miracle of repaired community.


In today’s text, we have a call story, a chronic health problem cured by a woman’s insistence and initiative, and a little girl raised from the dead. Of these three, the last one is probably the one that most of us have not experienced, the one ordinary humans cannot claim to do ourselves, the one that seems like the truest miracle.


When we think about Jesus raising people from the dead, we probably think of Lazarus, but that’s not the only time he raised people from the dead. The most significant raising of the dead is in the 27th chapter of Matthew, when the souls of the righteous come out of their graves when Jesus died. In all these instances, the dead are very dead. Likewise, in today’s text, the girl has been dead for some time, at the very least, the amount of time it takes her father to find Jesus, ask for help, and bring him back to the house.


Death is the ultimate isolating incident, and in ancient times, death was even more isolating, with rules about how to treat the corpse and the family of the dead. The period of mourning was over a year, with the family isolated or in other ways excused from community duties for over a year. And of course, death is the most severe severance from community for the person who dies. Jesus comes and resurrects the girl and her family into community.


The bleeding woman, the other woman in today’s Gospel text, is also resurrected into community. This healing story appears in all three Gospels, which can be a key to how important the story is to understanding Jesus. As with the customs surrounding death, the customs surrounding bodily fluids have changed so much that we may lose sight of what happens here.


A woman bleeding in this way would be completely isolated. Bleeding people were seen as unclean, and like lepers, a person bleeding would not be able to live a normal life in communion with the larger community. Their bleeding would be seen as contaminating the larger community, and everyone would need to go through ritual purification if they were in proximity to a bleeding person. If a person bled for an hour or a few days, that bleeding was manageable, but a woman with chronic bleeding was likely to live continuously without much community contact or hope of it.


The Gospel of Matthew gives us less detail about the healing, but we do get the detail about the 12 years that she has been bleeding (Luke tells us she had spent all of her money on doctors). In this healing story, she grabs initiative and touches the fringe of his cloak. Instead of getting angry, Jesus uses her as an example of faithfulness. Desperation can lead to faithfulness, and this kind of experience is more familiar to us today, as more of us wrestle with health issues which seem incurable.


Matthew the tax collector may seem to have little to do with the dead girl and the bleeding woman, but he, too, is isolated from society. We may see him as a man with a good job, but that’s not how his fellow citizens would see him. Jews would hate him because he worked for the occupying empire and made money off their misery; Romans would despise him because he was Jewish. This dinner that he’s enjoying with Jesus is likely the first time he’s shared a meal with others since he took the job. One of the details of The Chosen which makes me respect the franchise is that the show does depict the hatred that everyone feels for this man, based not on his personality but on what he does for a living.


The other people in today’s Gospel text show us people who are isolated in much the same ways we are today. There are the Pharisees who ask why Jesus is behaving the way he is. If you’re on social media for any amount of time, you’ll see this behavior has just gotten worse instead of better—we know how everyone should behave and we’re hypercritical of those who want to live differently and those who want to express their opinions have a way to do so 24 hours a day. Social media just amplifies behavior that’s been part of humans since ancient times, behavior that we see in the people following Jesus, both those who approve of him and those who don’t.


The crowd at the dead girl’s house is also an isolating force. Jesus shows up to do things differently, and they laugh at him. Jesus goes ahead and raises the dead girl.


Isolation is one of the largest forces of death in our current world. Last week I concluded my sermon by saying that nothing is impossible with God. This week, we see that power in action, the impossible becoming incarnate in our world.


Those of us struggling with the losses that come with death or illness might say, “Well, from this vantage point, it sure does look like some things are impossible.” The ministry of Jesus shows that he understands that there are situations worse than death. Jesus comes to heal the living death that the most isolated people experience. Jesus comes to heal us in all the ways that life in community can be isolating.


We often hear how we are living in unprecedented times, facing existential threats that past generations never had to figure out, whether that be nuclear bombs or artificial intelligence. The wisdom of a 3 year lectionary cycle is the reminder that we’ve always been facing the same existential threat, even as the method of destruction varies. Jesus shows us that the true existential threat is how isolated we are from each other. The true miracle that Jesus works over and over again is his ability to reintegrate the most isolated humans in our culture.


Jesus reminds us over and over again that the way to heal our individuals is through reweaving the social fabric. If we refuse to accept the voices that gossip about those who do things differently, if we refuse to join in the mockery and laughter that often greet those who are making a different world, we are creating the Kingdom of God that Jesus came to proclaim is inbreaking.


Of course, in so many ways, this community gathered here this morning is already reweaving the social fabric of the community. The most obvious way might be our fish fry evenings, but there is so much more. I look around and see people who cook, people who teach, people who can repair any broken thing. I look around and I see people raising the food that will feed a hungry nation and people taking care of those who come to our lakes. I look around and I see people raising the next generation to be kind and community oriented, and I look at our youth, and I have renewed hope for the future. I look around, and I see a community who includes all who come here, a community that stops the hemorrhaging disease of isolation that is draining the life force out of so many communities.


In this way of building and strengthening community, ordinary humans can bring the dead back to life. Jesus showed Matthew the tax collector the way to do it. Let us continue in this work that has been given us to do.

Annual Dinner with Camp Counselors

Last night, we had dinner with the Lutheridge and Lutherock camp counselors.  We've done it before, and I always come away impressed.  The neighborhood community who lives in the residential section of Lutheridge brings a variety of desserts, and the camp provides burgers and hot dogs, chips and beverages.

We sat with a guy who's finishing the fall semester and then headed to Duke Divinity school and another senior staffer who hopes to come back for another summer or two before he said he probably should find a regular job.  I said, "Or you could continue working in outdoor ministries year round."

Happily, no one was there to point out the shrinking job opportunities in that field.  I will never understand why the larger church doesn't do more to help/commit to campus and outdoor ministries.  The counselors I spoke to last night are full of hope for all the ways their futures might unfold.  I've found that my SMC students are similarly optimistic.  It's refreshing.

Before the dinner, I spent the day trying to fix my course shell for my online class at Spartanburg Methodist College.  The book has changed editions (again--sigh), so the references to the book page numbers that students find in the assignments and discussion posts are wrong.  Ugh.  I'm teaching someone else's course, and so it's not intuitive to me, the way I would have if I had created it all--it takes more time to diagnose problems and fix them.

I also did some baking--I decided to bring a gluten free, dairy free dessert.  It worked beautifully.  It's an almond-coconut concoction, and I want to record it here:

1 C. sugar

3 eggs

1 1/2 C. almond flour (or grind up a lot of almonds into as fine a powder as possible)

1 1/2 C. coconut (I used sweetened and unsweetened in 2 different experiments--no difference)

Whip the sugar and eggs until tripled in volume or until tired of the noise of the mixer.  Fold in the almond flour and the coconut.  Pour in a 9 inch cake pan lined with parchment paper and greased or in cupcake pan.  Bake at 350 for 25ish minutes.  You can only tell if it's done by color--a golden, light brown color.  It will be sticky and delicious.  It keeps at room temperature for days, although the crispiness of the crust declines.