Quilt Camp Homily: the Prophetess Anna and Our Quilting/Spiritual Life

I gave the homily for our Saturday night Quilt Camp closing worship.  I wanted to take a minute and make a record of the experience before it slips away.

Our Bible verse was Psalm 91: 4, and we focused on the first part, about God covering us with God's feathers and sheltering us beneath wings.  We talked about wings and feathers and angels.  We had a prayer board in the shape of wings, and we had feathers where we wrote prayers.

I wanted my homily to go in a slightly different direction--what happens when we don't feel that sheltering space?  What happens when it looks like everyone else's prayers get answered and not ours?  How many of us feel too old for whatever might have once seemed to make us special?

We had begun the retreat by talking about where we had sensed the presence of angels, and I started my sermon by talking about the angel Gabriel appearing to Mary, but that's really a young person's story.  Can you imagine if Gabriel came to any of us with that possibility?  We'd say, "Hmm, mother of the Messiah--not really my calling thanks."  

So I thought about other people who make an appearance in our Advent and Christmas texts.  I thought about Elizabeth, who gets to be the mother of John the Baptist.  But she doesn't even get the angel message herself; it comes through her husband, who laughs at the idea that his very old wife might have a baby.  He's struck mute through the whole pregnancy for his disbelief.  But it's still pregnancy, still not everyone's idea of fulfillment.

I continued:  I call your attention to a bit later in the story, when Joseph and Mary bring the baby Jesus to the Temple.  Simeon has been promised that he will not die without seeing the Messiah, and he holds the baby Jesus, holding the light of the world in his arms.  But I call your attention to Anna in Luke 2:  36-38 (I read the text).  We may think of Mary Magdalen as the first evangelist, the first to tell of the empty tomb, but I've come to think of Anna as the first, as she goes out to tell everyone about the Messiah.

Of course, it's sobering to realize that by the time the Gospel of Luke was written, that very Temple has been destroyed, and it will be thousands of years before there will be another one.

Then I took the turn to quilting:  it's a bit like quilting.  Some of us have everything we need, the right material, the sewing machine that is up to the job.  Other times, we discover we didn't buy enough cloth, and it's no longer available, and we have to figure out what to do.  There are times we are given a quilt started generations before, and it comes with no instructions, and we have to figure out a way.  And we, too, will die.  Maybe someone else will complete our projects, maybe not.  But we continue to do what we can do.

The life of faith is like this.  Some times, everything goes well.  Other times, the sewing machine explodes.  But we are in a group that can keep us going, keep us encouraged, help us solve the problems.

I concluded with what I think is the most important thing to remember:  when we feel abandoned by God or abandoned by our quilt group, we're not.  God is still there, although we may not be able to hear God.  Even someone like Mother Theresa has felt this way, as we discovered, when her letters were published after her death.  Some people thought her doubt diminished her, but I felt just the opposite, this relief that if even someone like Mother Theresa feels doubt, then I shouldn't feel alarm when I feel abandoned.

The trick is to keep going, keep working on our quilts, keep believing until the time when it isn't so hard to keep going.

As I delivered the homily, I noticed a few people wiping their eyes.  I noticed people smiling and nodding--happily, I didn't see any angry expressions.

I felt good about my homily, and I got good feedback, from people who appreciated the brevity to those who appreciated the message which gave them hope.  But most importantly, I feel that my homily spoke to those who were feeling loss and grief, emotions that are never very far away, especially for those of us who are on the older side of life.

Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

The readings for Sunday, November 16, 2025:

First Reading: Malachi 4:1-2a

First Reading (Semi-cont.): Isaiah 65:17-25

Psalm: Psalm 98

Psalm (Semi-cont.): Isaiah 12 (Isaiah 12:2-6 NRSV)

Second Reading: 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13

Gospel: Luke 21:5-19


This week's Gospel finds us back in the landscape of apocalypse, a landscape where we find ourselves periodically in our Bible readings.

In a way, these readings offer a kind of comfort. To be sure, it's a hard consolation, since these readings promise us that hard times are ahead. But surely we knew that.  If we've lived any amount of time at all, and we're the least bit observant, we see that hard times will always come on the heels of good times. We're currently in one of the longest economic expansions in our living memory, and yet a recession will surely come at some point.  And a long economic expansion isn't good news for the majority of citizens.  We see people engaged in all sorts of social justice struggles, some of which we're fighting all over again.  The cycle of history can feel like a torture wheel--but that's not a new feeling.

We read the words of Jesus, the words that warn we'll be hauled in front of harsh governments, and this indignity we'll suffer once we've lived through famine and pestilence and any other portent of doom. Our families will abandon us, and our friends will desert us. Many of us reading these words this Sunday may not perceive the threat. We're convinced we're safe, that we live under a Constitution that will protect us. But those of us who study the cycles of history know that we're very lucky and that we can't necessarily count on that. Millions of humans thought they were safe, only to find out that in short order, the hooligans were at the gate.

But Jesus offers us encouragement: "This will be a time for you to bear testimony. Settle it therefore in your minds, not to meditate beforehand how to answer; for I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which none of your adversaries will be able to withstand or contradict" (verses 13-15). Yes, we might lose our lives. But we will gain so much more.

In this time of gloomy news, it's important to take some deep breaths and remind ourselves of what's important. Our friends and families won't always be with us. We can appreciate them while they are. We may be facing trouble at work, but at least we're employed. Even if we're not employed, if we live in the U.S., we have a lot of advantages that we wouldn't have if we lived in, say North Korea or Russia.

A few years ago, my friend John told me about talking to an older black man who came into the state park where John was working. John asked how his Christmas had been. The man said, "Well, we had enough food and no one took sick. So, it was good." Now there's some life wisdom, especially as we turn our thoughts towards the upcoming holidays.

I've always loved Thanksgiving, for many reasons. There's not the pressure of gift giving. The holiday meal is hard to mess up, unless you forget to thaw the turkey. The holiday is rooted, at least in popular imagination, in the idea of colonists saved from the brink of destruction by natives who show them how to live in a new community. The cynical amongst us can deliver powerful counterarguments to my optimism, but for the rest of the month, we can tune them out.

As we get ready for this season, let us remember to be grateful. Let us remember to say thank you, especially to people who might not hear it very often. Let the prophecy of apocalypse from the gospel remind us of our ease of life now and remind us of those who are not so fortunate. Let us keep perspective and remember that we're called to a higher purpose.

Armistice Day with Monastic Poem

It has been many years since I was teaching the second half of British Literature in a Fall semester when Armistice Day/Veterans Day happens.  This year, I am.  We've already covered the material, although now we're discussing Mrs. Dalloway, a book which may be the first depiction of World War I caused PTSD in a novel.

I think it's hard for most of us to conceive of how many people died in World War I.  Even when I have my students imagine all of their male classmates going off to fight and no one coming back, I think it's hard to get our heads around the total.  I wish we could all go to the WWI cemeteries in France.  It's a visual that's tough to capture in a picture; it does make a very different impact.

Years ago, I was at Mepkin Abbey on Armistice Day.  It also happened to be near All Saints Sunday, the first All Saints Day after Abbot Francis Kline had been cruelly taken early by leukemia, and the Sunday we were there was the day of the memorial service for him. Part of one of the services was out in the monks' cemetery, and all the retreatants were invited out with the monks. I was struck by the way that the simple crosses reminded me of the French World War I cemeteries:

I took the above picture later from the visitor side of the grounds, but it gives you a sense of the burial area. I turned all these images in my head and wrote a poem, "Armistice Day at the Abbey."



 Armistice Day at the Abbey



The monks bury their dead on this slight
rise that overlooks the river
that flows to the Atlantic, that site
where Africans first set foot on slavery’s soil.

These monks are bound
to a different master, enslaved
in a different system.
They chant the same Psalms, the same tones
used for centuries. Modern minds scoff,
but the monks, yoked together
into a process both mystical and practical,
do as they’ve been commanded.

Their graves, as unadorned as their robes,
stretch out in rows of white crosses, reminiscent
of a distant French field. We might ponder
the futility of belief in a new covenant,
when all around us old enemies clash,
or we might show up for prayer, light
a candle, and simply submit.

Recording of Sermon for Sunday, November 9, 2025

Yesterday was a high-energy day at church.  We welcomed new members; actually, they were members here years ago and transferred to another Lutheran church across the state line, and now they've come back.  We went ahead and did the liturgy that my spouse created to welcome new members.  I think it's a good idea to have this recognition, which I'm hoping will keep people from drifting in and out and away.

We had donuts after worship.  We stopped at a Dunkin Donuts on the way to church, which is a very different experience than the donut stores of my youth:  no place to sit down, no display of donuts.  We ordered from a touch pad, and the very friendly teen worker brought them to us.

I'm not sure my sermon connected all the dots that I hoped to connect, but I do feel I made good points.  I posted the manuscript in this blog post, if you'd like to read it.  The recording of the sermon is on my YouTube page.

We came home, did some grocery shopping, and settled in for a cozy end to our Sunday, watching TV and me getting some additional stitching done, a lovely way to end a lovely Sunday.

Sermon for Sunday, November 9, 2025

November 9, 2025

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott



Luke 20:27-38



Finally, a Gospel that mentions the afterlife! Of course, it’s a bit late—All Saints Sunday was last week. But some of you might be saying, “Oh, good, at last we’ve got a chance to see what Jesus has to tell us about Heaven.”


Others of us might be back at that first sentence of the Gospel. Sadducees don’t believe in the Resurrection? No life after death? Are these the religious leaders who are in charge? And they don’t believe in a fundamental of the faith?


A brief historical note: Yes, they were in charge of much Temple practice, including the taking of the money and the paying of the taxes that Rome required. Yes, most members of priestly ruling class were Sadducees.


Do we know for sure what they believed? Is there a Book of the Sadducees? No.


But leaving that aside, the set up is even stranger than it seems at first. There’s the obvious question: if they don’t believe in the Resurrection, then why pose this question to Jesus, this question about who will be married to who in Heaven?

Here, too, we don’t really know. What we do know is that the Sadducees are working with others to test or trick Jesus. We’ve had story after story of people testing Jesus. More commonly, it’s Pharisees who offer Jesus a question that will damn him, no matter which way he answers. Now the Sadducees get their turn.


We could also criticize the Sadducees for asking a question that’s no longer important. Let’s make no mistake: the set up of the question, the childless widow who loses her husband and then has to marry brother after brother after brother in hopes of a child, this practice is Jewish law in the time of Moses. In the time of Jesus, people had rejected this ancient practice designed to protect inheritance and blood lines. Many of us think of Jesus as moving in cities that weren’t cosmopolitan. But even in the small fishing towns and outposts where Jesus traveled occasionally, the practice of widows marrying their brothers-in-law was not practiced, and frankly, would have been seen as a bit barbaric. Centuries of law and practice by conquering empires gave people a much more modern view of marriage, something closer to what we practice in the 21st century than in the time of Moses.


So why ask this question?


I take a kinder approach to the motives of the questioner, whether it be Roman, or Pharisee, or Sadducee. I think that Jesus truly baffles people, then and now. People pose questions hoping that they can figure out who Jesus is by the response that he gives. The questions might tell us more about the questioner than the answers tell us about Jesus.


As is so often the case, Jesus gives a response that could leave the questioner even more confused. In Jesus’ answer to the Sadducees, we see a familiar dynamic. Jesus knows that the Sadducees don’t really care about the answer to the question that they’ve asked. The Sadducees don’t believe that there is life after death. For the Sadducees, the answer to their riddle wouldn’t be a mystery: the woman and all the brothers would be dead, and there would be no reunion in the Resurrection. Why do they bother Jesus with this question?


Perhaps Jesus wonders the same thing, but as all good teachers do, he uses this moment as a wider teaching opportunity. As he so often does, Jesus answers the question that he wishes people might ask. He reminds the audience—and us—that so many of us ask the wrong question.




There’s another nuance to today’s Gospel that may be lost to us across the centuries. The Sadducees are no longer in power by the time the Gospel of Luke was written. No one is in power in terms of the Temple because there is no Temple. The Romans have crushed Jewish uprisings in the decade of the 70’s and destroyed the Temple, which they saw as the place that nurtured anti-Roman radicals. Here, as in other parts of Luke, we can almost hear the Gospel writer saying, “You’re arguing about trivial matters while the forces of the Roman empire are about to crush you. WAKE UP!”




It's tempting to feel we’re better than those ancient cultures, the ones who didn’t recognize the Messiah, even when he lived among them. But here, too, we find out that we have more in common with the Sadducees than we first suspected. We, too, are much more interested in questions that are rooted in a culture of death than in the new kingdom of life that Jesus calls us to live.


We, too, live in a culture of death. A quick look at the television, even when it’s not campaign season, reminds us that we are so often asking the wrong questions, thinking about riddles that don’t matter. We see it in our politics, we see it in our schools, we see it in our grocery stores. We even see it in churches where we might expect a community to be wrestling with the essential questions of life. Instead so many congregations spend time wrangling over issues of morality that will seem incomprehensible to future generations. We could spend some time thinking about which riddles of our day will seem like the question of widows marrying their brothers-in-law in centuries to come.


Jesus spends much of his ministry declaring that God has created humanity to be so much more than our culture expects us to be. Jesus sees us, names us, claims us-- as God has done for the earliest patriarchs, through the time of the Sadducees, right on through to our time. We are children of the resurrection. Resurrection culture is the one that matters.


It's a question worth asking then, and it’s a question worth asking now. What dead issues consume us? What cultures of death keep us distracted from the work Jesus calls us to do?


God invites us to move away from the culture of death in which we find ourselves, whether that’s the culture of death that is legalistic posturings and entrapment or the culture of death that is shaming and casting out those who are different or the culture of death that comes from endless worry, worry rooted our scarcity consciousness that tells us we can never have enough or do enough.


In today’s Gospel, Jesus asks this question: what gives us life and what keeps us connected to death? He asks it in a round about way, but that’s the question at the heart of today’s Gospel. In this time of creation getting ready for the season of hibernation, let us reflect on it again. What do we need to let go of, to let die? What is giving us life? What lies dormant, waiting for the Spring season of our time and attention? Let us resolve to ignore the forces that want to keep us buried in the grave. Let us commit ourselves to our Triune God, who has the power to transform life out of all the powers of death.

Quilt Camp Begins

 I am glad I was able to be here yesterday to help with set up for Quilt Camp.  We don't have to do the heavy lifting work, the getting the 90 tables in place in the Faith Center at Lutheridge.  But we did need to do the other work:  deciding where the cutting tables and ironing boards will be, putting plastic tablecloths on the tables in the worst condition, going out to get more plastic tablecloths, running extension cords from plugs to tables, and those kinds of things.

We also had to do the work that seems trivial but takes time:  putting nametags into plastic holders, putting those plastic holders on the table so that retreat members could find them easily, lots and lots of organizing of supplies.

By the time that everyone arrived and settled in, I was tired.  But it was a pleasant tired, a far cry from the tired that I feel after driving in from a distance for a retreat.  I got some sewing done, and today I hope to make serious progress on my big project:  a new quilt top for the quilt that we sleep under.  The quilt top is created.  I'll attach it to the old quilt and put on a new binding.  The quilt back is still in good shape.

It may seem like a strange approach, adding a new quilt top to an old quilt.  But in fact, it's a very old approach:  quilters in past centuries didn't have access to supplies that we do, so they used old quilts as the layer of batting in new quilts.

I also plan to make progress on my other big project, the log cabin quilt, the one I thought I might be able to finish back in March.  But when I stretched it on the bed, I realized I needed a few more rows.  I've been making log cabin patches, so we shall see.

We're having glorious weather, which is a gift.  I am leading a walk each day at 3, and if the weather this week was the rainy, cold weather of last week, we'd ditch those plans.  At Quilt Camp, we spend much of the day and night in a chair, and I spend it hunched over, which is my posture any time I'm in a chair. 

I am surprised to realize I took no pictures yesterday.   Happily there is still time.

Gratitude Before the Start of Quilt Camp

Quilt Camp starts today.  This time, unlike last Quilt Camps, I'm part of the leadership team.  I will help with set up today, I will deliver the very short sermon for Saturday closing worship, and beyond that, I'm not sure what being on the Quilt Camp leadership team means.

In the early days of summer, when I thought about Fall Quilt Camp, I thought I would head to Spartanburg today, do my teacher duties, and then arrive for Quilt Camp.  But as the semester has gone on, I've changed my mind.  My students can use today to get caught up, and I'd like to be a bit less tired when Quilt Camp starts.

I am so grateful to be working at a place where I have this kind of flexibility.  I am so grateful to be at a place where when I say, "I'll be leading a quilt retreat this week," and no one says, "What does that have to do with you as a teacher?  No, you can't be off campus this week."  I'm thinking of past bosses who made their disapproval known, even as I was using my personal vacation time to be away.

Make no mistake:  I do get teaching inspiration from retreats.  It may be a different kind of inspiration than I would get at a literary conference, but I am a different teacher, a better teacher, because I go on these retreats.

I am also grateful that I live closer to camp.  When I first heard about Quilt Camp at Lutheridge, back in 2018 or 2019, I lived in South Florida, a twelve hour drive if all the traffic went smoothly.   I was torn--on the one hand, it was a longer retreat, so the drive would be worth it; in those days, I never would have made the drive for a retreat that started Friday night and ended Sunday morning, as so many retreats did then.  But on the other hand, it was such a long drive.

Because I live here now, I have the best of several worlds.  I don't have a long drive.  I get to sleep in my own bed.  I don't feel like I'm abandoning my spouse or my other duties at home.  Of course, that benefit has a shadow side--it's also hard for me to completely disconnect on retreat.  But that was true of past retreats too.  My brain is always working at various levels, and it's hard for me to focus on just one.

This morning I realized another value to coming to Quilt Camp from my house that's less than a mile away.  I feel less pull to do the other area attractions:  apple orchards, fabric stores, and Appalachian arts and crafts.  At least my active brain will calm down around the other wonderful outings that I would want to be taking, if I didn't already live here.

On this morning of the day when Quilt Camp begins, I am most grateful to be feeling like my life is in better alignment than it was back in 2018/2019 when I thought about the possibility of coming to Quilt Camp and decided I couldn't make it work.