The Feast Day of Saint James

I did not realize until recently just how many James exist in the circle of Jesus.  The more famous Saint James is the one we celebrate in July, the one that people celebrate by walking to his shrine in Santiago de Campostela in Spain from a variety of starting points.

James the Brother of Jesus was one of the early leaders of the Church, which may or may not tell us that he's not one of the ones that the Gospel writer of Mark presents as coming to Jesus to try to get him to be quiet.  Or maybe he is, and he changed his mind.  James the Just is another name given to James the brother of Jesus, which suggests to me that he would be capable of changing his mind.

There are places in Acts and throughout the letters that make up so much of the New Testament that make us think that James is one of the ones in charge of the early Church, along with Peter.  He seems to be one of the ones making big decisions for the larger group.  He's given credit for helping move the early Church to the inclusion of Gentiles.  There are other scholars who see James the Brother of Jesus as more traditional, that it was Paul who reached out to Gentiles and James who argued for staying with Mosaic Law.  Circumcision played a big role in these deliberations, according to some scholars.

The more I look for answers, the more I am struck by how much we do not know about the early Church or about Jesus as a historical figure.  From there, it's a short realization to how easy it is to make the early Church figures be who we want or need them to be.

Still, I am grateful for their work.  On this morning where I've been listening to Ezra Klein's podcast about how Artificial Intelligence through Machine Learning has the capability to destroy the world (more specifically, humans), it's good to remember that the end of the world has been forecast many times, and so far, we persist.

Theology of the Pumpkin Patch

Every year, as the lectionary returns to readings that use sheep or crop yields as a metaphor, I wonder what has been lost to modern ears. Years ago, as I helped unload pumpkins from an 18-wheeler truck to our church’s pumpkin patch, one of the children asked, “Why are they so dirty?”

I said, "Because last week, they were growing in a field."

I could see the child looking at me as if I might be joking; after all, he's never seen pumpkins growing in a field. He may never have seen anything growing in a field. We are in an urban area, after all. I wondered if I should do more to explain.

And then I thought of all those agricultural metaphors, where Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is like ... .” That parable of the seeds and the different types of ground – do we really understand that parable if we’ve never planted anything?

Each year, many churches transform part of the grounds into a giant pumpkin patch. It’s one of the more popular fundraising and community outreach events that my congregation did in its old space, and subsequent references are to those past years, along with current pumpkin patches. In my search for relevant metaphors, I’ve wondered, what does this pumpkin patch tell us about God and God’s community?

Our pumpkin patch contains all sorts of pumpkins, both the traditional orange kind and several types of green pumpkins. We offer both pumpkins and gourds. We have every size of pumpkin you could want, from the largest pumpkins that could be a chair, to those we’d use for a pie, to the very small, cute kind that you can put on a fireplace mantel.

In the variety of the pumpkins, we get a sense of God the creator who doesn’t stop at just one possibility. We get a sense that in God’s creation there’s room for every kind of pumpkin.

Those pumpkins don’t come off the truck by themselves. Our church must provide the labor to get the pumpkins to where we want them to be. When I helped unload the pumpkins through the years, I thought, “I’ve never felt like a part of a more seamless Christian community than I do right now.”  

That’s not exactly true. But the times that shine in my memory are times of similar service: serving dinner to the homeless, doing a winterization project for homes of the poor in the inner city, working together to create a wonderful vacation Bible school experience for children. 

Unloading the pumpkins also reminds me of something else that I cherish about church communities: At their best, there is room for everyone. The littlest ones can carry pumpkins, if they want to help that way. Those of us without the strength to carry pumpkins can help sell them. 

I think of myself as having no upper-body strength, but clearly I’m wrong. By the end of an October night, I had carried at least 400 pumpkins. I would not have expected that I could do that since I can’t do 10 pushups at a time without my arms screaming at me. And yet, it needed to be done, and so I kept moving the pumpkins and pushing through my fatigue. At the end of the night, although I was exhausted and covered in dirt and pumpkin gunk, I felt an exhilaration that I hadn’t anticipated. Similarly, God has plenty of surprises for us. 

As I cradled those pumpkins, which so resemble human heads, I felt a strange tenderness toward them, the tenderness that I imagine God feels toward us all. In some ways, pumpkins are so sturdy and yet so fragile. All it takes is one slip and the pumpkin is rendered useless, a pulpy mess of slime and gunk. And yet, even from that accident could come new life, if one planted the pumpkin seeds. From that one pumpkin, we could grow a whole new patch, life out of death.

As I drove home after we unloaded the pumpkins, I thought about all the ways I was surrounded by evidence of God's grace: an abundance of pumpkins, a great group of fellow workers, the beautiful sunset, the almost full moon, the exuberant children, blessing after blessing. I felt gratitude for my healthy body that could carry all those pumpkins. I said a prayer for those who had grown and harvested the pumpkins in a distant field in New Mexico. I went home to wash the pumpkin gunk and soil off me, and I felt additional gratitude for warm water and a cold swimming pool in which to soak my sore feet. I felt more appreciation than usual for my soft bed and clean sheets.

The next morning, I woke up with very sore arms and a soul singing with gratitude. I said hello to the pumpkins I brought home, pumpkins that won't be here very long.

None of us will be here very long. I want to adopt a more sacramental approach to life. I want to see evidence of God's grace all around me, in the lowliest gourd, in the greatest pumpkin, in every human who crosses my path. 

Support Your Local Church Pumpkin Patch

I have been part of a church that offers a pumpkin patch every year, a huge undertaking, from the offloading of the pumpkins to the selling of them.

That South Florida church funded a variety of special projects and ongoing ministries with this pumpkin patch.  When the church had a traditional Sunday school, funds went there.  The church used the funds to help repair the roof that covers the part of the building that is more used by community groups than by the church..  The church used the funds to pay for Vacation Bible School, an event which is attended by more neighborhood children than church member children.

I love the fact that the pumpkin patch itself is a form of community outreach and a service of sorts.  I love that it funds other community services.  I imagine that most churches who have a pumpkin patch use the earnings in similar ways.

Picture from the Ghost of Pumpkin Patch Past

So, this week-end, as you prepare for Halloween, drop by a local church pumpkin patch.  Your dollars will go further than if you bought a pumpkin at a grocery store. 

Meditation on Reformation Sunday, 2026

The readings for Sunday, October 25, 2026:

First Reading: Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm: Psalm 46
Second Reading: Romans 3:19-28
Gospel: John 8:31-36

Here we are, back at Reformation Sunday.  Each year, as this Sunday of celebration approaches, I find myself thinking about what needs to be reformed and what should be preserved.

Perhaps you feel like we've been living Reformation, not just in the ELCA, but across denominations.  Maybe you’re in an angry space; maybe you’re saying, “Hey, I have some theses of my own that I’d like to nail to a nearby church door.” It’s been a tough few years/decades for many of us, as we’ve watched our denominations wrestle with various issues. Maybe you find yourself feeling very sympathetic to the Catholic church of Luther's day, the Church that found itself torn asunder by many movements of reform.

Regardless of the side on which we sit with these recent struggles, we might find ourselves feeling a bit fearful. We might worry about schism. We probably worry that there won't be a place for us in the church that emerges from all of this.

We should take heart that the Church has always been in the process of Reformation. There are great Reformations, like the one we'll celebrate this Sunday, or the Pentecostal revolution that's only 100 years old, but has transformed the developing world in ways that Capitalism never could. There are smaller ones throughout the ages as well. Movements which seemed earth-shattering at the time (monastic movements of all kinds, liberation theology, ordination of women, lay leadership) may in time come to be seen as something that enriches the larger church. Even gross theological missteps, like the Inquisition, can be survived. The Church learns from past mistakes as it moves forward.

Times of Reformation can enrich us all. Even those of us who reject reform can find our spiritual lives enriched as we take stock and measure what's important to us, what compromises we can make and what we can't. It's good to have these times where we return to the Scriptures as we try to hear what God calls us to do. It may be painful, but any of these processes may lead us to soil where we can bloom more fruitfully.

We may think of that metaphor and feel despair, as if we will never be truly rooted, flowering plants. But rootlessness can be its own spiritual gift. The spiritual wanderers have often been those who most revitalized the Church, or on a smaller level, their spiritual communities. The spiritual wanderers are often the ones who keep all of us true to God's purpose.

If you have been feeling despair, take heart. Jesus promises that we will know the truth, and the truth will set us free. You might not be feeling like you know what the truth is at this current point; you may feel tossed around by the tempests of our current times. But Jesus promises that we will know the truth. We will be set free. We don't have a specific date at which we'll know the truth. But we will.

Rest in God's promise that we are all redeemable; indeed, we are redeemed. Rest in the historic knowledge that the Church has survived times of greater turbulence than our own. Rest in Luther's idea that we are saved by grace alone. Rest.

Recording of Sunday Sermon

We had a good day at church yesterday, and I felt good about both sermons.  Usually, I'm a bit more proud of my youth sermon, but yesterday, I thought my adult sermon was better.  I was pleased that I could talk about modern politics in general, without approving of one political power/leader over another.  I used the election season ad as ongoing motif, using an ad as a reminder both to pray and to praise God's creation.

Here's how I described the sermon in a Facebook post:  "My sermon today at Faith Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bristol, Tennessee addressed taxes and empire (Cyrus' and Caesar's) and God's imprint and ended with a suggestion that we treat political ads as monastery bells."

You can view the recording here on my YouTube channel, and if you'd like to read along, I posted the manuscript in this blog post; I'm intrigued by how often I added to the script.

Sermon for Sunday, October 18, 2026

October 18, 2026
By Kristin Berkey-Abbott



Matthew 22:15-22


How interesting to have this text in an election year, in the closing weeks of this election year, when it seems impossible to escape political ads. Everywhere we turn, there’s someone yelling about what someone has done with our tax dollars, and we can be sure, in the closing weeks of an election campaign, these ads are not going to deliver good news.


The Pharisees in today’s text are not interested in good news either.


In fact, they are hoping to get rid of the person standing right in front of them, Jesus, who has been preaching good news. Make no mistake—the Pharisees aren’t pro-Caesar or pro-Rome. Then as now, no one likes paying taxes, particularly to a government that one doesn’t approve of but is forced to endure.


But Jewish leaders have navigated their way to what they see as the best of a bad situation. They collect taxes from worshippers, and Rome will leave them alone to lead worship and protect some of their interests as they wish—until the year when Rome destroys it all, which has already happened when the Gospel of Matthew was written.


Jesus knows he’s given an impossible choice of answers to the tax question. If he says to pay taxes, he looks like he’s on the side of the oppressors, the Romans, who are taxing people out of everything they own. If he says not to pay, he gives the Romans even more reason to crack down. He’s given 2 impossible answers, and he offers a third alternative.


As always, with Jesus, the answer offers a much deeper response than the Pharisees were expecting.



In today’s Gospel, as in so many encounters between Jesus and the people with more power, we can almost hear Jesus saying, “You could be asking me any question, and this issue is the one that you think most deserves our attention?”


Jesus uses the coin to ask the question of what has grabbed our attention. Jesus wants us to consider what has left its imprint on us. Is it God? Or is it the powers and principalities of this world? Caesar’s image was on the Roman coin, along with words proclaiming him God—it’s no different today, although the larger collection of voices proclaiming themselves to be the one true savior is much noisier and amplified.


In claiming to be our only hope for human flourishing, worldly powers will claim all sorts of people and possessions for themselves. It was true in the first century, and it’s true today. But Jesus proclaims an older message, one delivered by ancient prophets and in the Psalms, that everything belongs to God. Look at our reading from Isaiah today in verse 4: “I call you by your name; I give you a title, although you do not know me.” Here God speaks to a foreign ruler, Cyrus, king of Persia, centuries before Caesar, a warrior who had created the biggest empire the world had ever seen and which also no longer exists.


We have two readings that remind us that earthly empires come and go, even when they are so large that they seem to be as permanent as the mountains that surround us. In an election year, we realize acutely how our earthly powers want us to believe that they can achieve permanence for all of us. Our Bible texts tell us over and over again that the only permanence comes from God.


Humans always have worldly powers trying to pull our attention away from God. Worldly powers always demand our allegiance or our persecution. It might be political powers, and the attempt by worldly leaders to capture our loyalty is just more apparent in an election year—but make no mistake, it’s always there.


You may be like me, thinking you’ve been mostly successful at avoiding all this election year drama. You probably don’t need my reminder that worldly powers are a much larger collection of forces who are whispering or yelling an anti-God message into our brains or using God language to promote themselves.


Maybe it’s a boss. Maybe it’s other types of advertising that convinces us that if we could just buy the latest whatever, we’d be happy. Maybe it’s our phone that we can’t seem to put down for very long. Maybe it’s money worries or health worries.


We give our attention to many things that are not God. Maybe it’s time to retrain our attention.


Last week at the onground intensive that claimed much of my time and attention, we sat at tables arranged in a semicircle. As we considered this text, our leader, who just happened to be our SE Synod bishop Kevin Strickland, asked us to stare at each face around the circle. He reminded us that all of creation, including every human face, bears the imprint of God not Caesar. He asked us to see each other as God sees us, our God who claimed us long ago.


It was a powerful experience, and it was a profound repudiation of all the voices that are so loud we may not hear them distinctly anymore. I’m talking about all the external voices that we’ve internalized, the ones that tell us that we’re not good enough, that we’ll never achieve enough, the voices that remind us of all the ways we lack so much.


And now for the real challenge. It’s easy to stare at the faces of fellow pastors in training and see them as God sees them. Can I do the same for everyone?


If we could train ourselves to look at every face and see the imprint of God, the result will be transformative, on ourselves if not the larger world. Imagine, seeing the imprint of God in everyone, the ones we love, the ones that political ads tell us to fear. Paul’s letter, our 2nd reading, makes it clear that a practice of seeing God in all has the potential to change the larger culture too.


We can start this practice now, and we can use the election cycle to help us. We can use the political ads the way that monks use the ringing of the monastery bells as a reminder to bring their attention back to God. Every time an ad comes on, look away and praise God’s good creation, the way the Psalmist does. Every time we hear political conversations, let us pray for everyone who thinks that they can pull our attention away from God’s goodness by using fear tactics.


In today’s Gospel, as in many Gospels, we see the invitation of Christ contrasted with the expectations of the world, the promises given by Jesus in stark opposition to the empty promises of every political season. Let us ignore all the ways that the forces of empires, past and present, conspire to pull our attention away from God. Today and every day, let us notice what God is doing in the world, our God who has claimed us and loves us and calls on us to do the same for all of creation. Let us train ourselves to ignore the voices that tell us to fear and to hate. Instead, let us train ourselves to see the imprint of God on every part of all of creation.

The Long Drive Home from a TEEM Week

Soon I will put the last of my stuff in the car.  Sunrise comes later this much further north (at 7:57), so I'm not going to leave until 6:30 or 7.  Gone are the days when I would leave at 4 a.m.; driving that many hours in the dark is just too tiring.  Is this a sign of getting older or just a sign of being more cautious?  Part of it is wanting to linger in a lovely hotel room a bit longer, which is always balanced by knowing how much driving lies ahead and wanting to get that over with.

I've been in Indianapolis, taking the last required classes, another task done on the path to ordination in the Lutheran church (ELCA, the more progressive expression of the of Lutheranism in North America).  

We spent the first two days of the week studying Lutheran Liturgy, then a Wednesday workshop on Lutheran Polity, and we finished the week on Thursday and Friday studying Hebrew prophets, those prophets from the B.C.E. time period, the ones at the end of the Old Testament part of the Christian Bible.

I've studied those prophets before during an Old Testament class during my first year at Wesley Theological Seminary.  That class was asynchronous, and the material was not nearly as compelling as the last 2 days have been.  The history of the centuries before the Greek and Roman empires is much more clear to me now, and especially how we get from the time of David and Solomon to the Assyrian  and Babylonian exiles.

I came back to my hotel room on Thursday and made this Facebook post, which was just as true at the end of the day on Friday:  "Today and tomorrow, our TEEM group is doing a deep, scholarly dive into (B.C.E.) Hebrew prophets, a topic which seems very timely in ways I both did and did not expect."

I was impressed with various teaching techniques throughout the week.  During our Lutheran Liturgy class, Bishop Strickland had breaks where we sung, along with information about how we might use the songs in worship. Dr. Parker, our OT Prophets class instructor, had a variety of artifacts to show us or techniques (like using an imprinting device in clay) to show us how people wrote.  We worked in small groups for a break in lecturing, and that small group work will lead to papers we need to write.  For some of the prophets, we read the work out loud in a variety of ways, which made it more interesting to hear and understand.

I always learn a lot in classes that I take, both in subject matter and how to present the subject matter.  I go home with ideas for how to improve my own classrooms.

I've been with this group of classmates twice now, and my time with them is over, at least this time as a TEEM cohort.  It was a strange goodbye yesterday.  Any time of parting makes me think of all the other times of leaving, makes me melancholy and missing all the people who have passed through my life.

So maybe it's good to have a transition time of driving in the car, before hurling myself back into the rest of my life.  I do feel happy that I'm returning to regular life that is life giving, unlike pre-pandemic years when I would be returning to a toxic workplace and a boss bellowing about how I shouldn't leave ever again.  I know how lucky I am.