Music Week Day 1: The Contrasts and the Contradictions

 The last 24 hours have been full of contrasts.  On the one hand, it was the first full day of  Music Week at Lutheridge:

--Monday began with a long walk with the S. Florida church friend who is staying with us for the week.  Up and down hills, but I didn't really notice them because the conversation was deep and meaningful.

--Morning worship was also deep and meaningful.  I LOVED this prayer of the day:  "On the night he was betrayed, Jesus took bread, not revenge.  He offered bread to feed and to forgive.  On the night he was betrayed, Jesus took a basin of water to sooth [sic], liberate, and heal.  Help us, so washed and fed, to do the same."

--My inner English major was intrigued by the above spelling error, which made me think of soothsaying, which I continued to think about all day.

--My inner English major also was there for Bible study, which will take us to some villains in the Bible.  We began with one of the biggest, the serpent in the Garden of Eden.  One participant talked about the devil possessing the serpent, which sent me to the text, which reminded me that it's not in the text.  Ah, Milton, how your version has taken over everything we think we know about the story--which is what I said, in more non-English-major accessible form.

--One of our last questions for Bible study was "What does the serpent get out of this?"  I keep misspelling serpent, and this morning, I thought about serpent and repent, and now I want to write a poem, "The serpent repents."

--I was there for general choir rehearsal.  From the very beginning, this group can sing.  They sounded amazing, like they had been practicing for weeks, instead of just beginning together.

--The director has interesting ways of describing what he wants:  "You just sang the color dusty rose.  But it was the dusty rose of a piece of tuille or a curtain so faded you can see through it.  Now try it as a deeper rose color."  I immediately thought of a creative writing class idea, having students write a description and me bringing in different fabrics and colors and saying, "Now write it this way." 

--We had good meals together at our house.  The prep work was easy because I did most of it in advance.  It's becoming clear that I have prepared too much food--happily, much of it is freezable.

All of yesterday happened against a back drop of World Cup drama, both the games themselves, and the rumors of a phone call pressuring the officials to change a decision about red cards.  And then, this morning, the U.S. team lost anyway.

I got up this morning to news not only of that sports/political development/scandal, but also of the one in Maine.  If I left that sentence standing by itself, would future me remember which scandal I'm referring to?  In the interest of history, let me note that there are new rape charges against the Democratic candidate for Senate.  The charges that were already known (inappropriate sexting, inappropriate use of force against girlfriends) by the time of the primary would have been more than enough to disqualify him in the not-so-distant past.  Sigh.

I don't have a pithy way to end this post.  After all, if we're lucky, every given day is full of these contrasts if we just know to look:  deep friendship and deep spirituality and the farcical elements of modern life particularly the political bits and pieces, along with song and sustenance of all sorts.

Recording of Yesterday's Sermon: Christian Life as Young Teen Girl Slumber Party

Yesterday's sermon went well.  Three years ago when I preached on Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30, I did more talking about the process of yoking.  This year, I envisioned a different metaphor:  the Christian life as young teen girl slumber party.  It seemed well received.

I'm always happy when I can introduce a metaphor that seems new to me.  My metaphor brain went immediately to a sports team, which seems obvious.  The slumber party was not immediately obvious, and it got some attention--particularly from the young teen girls in the congregation, who aren't always paying attention to the adult sermon time after having their own youth sermon.

I posted the recording of my sermon here on my YouTube channel.  You can read the sermon manuscript in yesterday's blog post.

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.