Hurricane Remnants and Travel

Last June, when I left Indiana after the first TEEM onground intensive that I attended, I thought ahead to our next gathering in October, where I anticipated autumnal shifts with still-warm days.

I did not anticipate a hurricane affecting the weather that far inland.  But here we are.  I've changed travel plans, and instead of leaving on Sunday, I'm leaving in a few hours.  There's already a bit of rain here, but nothing like what is expected later this morning.

We are supposed to have record breaking warmth in the 80's in the early part of the week, and cooler temps by week's end.  I have packed a variety of clothes--lots of layers for my upper body, some with sleeves and some not, and shorts for my lower body which is odd-shaped and hard to fit for long pants in this time of my life.

This hurricane has turned out to be a normal-ish hurricane, not a monster that zoomed up several categories just before landfall--how refreshing!  It moved ashore as a category 2, very survivable for most structures--not a fun way to spend an evening, but likely not life threatening for many.

I am still glad I changed my travel plans.  I should be able to stay ahead of the storm remnants today, and it will be good to head into the week being better rested.

When Jesus Plans Your Family Reunion

 On Sunday, I went through my old files looking for a St. Francis poem that I thought I had written--but I was thinking of an Ash Wednesday poem.  While searching, I found an old manuscript of Jesus in the world poems, many of which I had forgotten writing.  

Because my time is short this morning, I'll post one of them here.  Let me make sure to mention that the people in this poem are not based on real friends and relations.  It is published for the first time here.

Reunion



We let Jesus plan our family reunion,
and we won’t be doing that again.

He searched through the stunted
branches of the family tree and invited
them all: Weird PopPop Walter, who went to war
and was never the same, Cousin Buddy
who married that poor little black girl,
Aunt Leona, who we never forgave
for stealing all of Mamaw’s silver.

And then Jesus went and invited strangers
to our feast. People we didn’t know
from Adam’s housecat. We’re lucky
they didn’t rob us blind.
Where Jesus thought all these people
would park, I don’t know.

We usually cater these events, we told
him that. But no, Jesus had to go and change
things. Price of admission, he informed us,
was that we had to bring our favorite food, enough to share.
How could I do that?
My favorite food was Mamaw’s sweet
potato pie, and no one’s made it since she died.
But one rainy day, with restless
children to entertain, I set
one to work peeling potatoes and taught
one the secrets of pie crust.
The smell of those pies baking made me weep
with missing her, which alarmed
the children. To distract them, I dug
out the old quilts she made, and we lost
the rest of the day to looking at photo albums.

Fired by insider information, the children pestered
everyone at the reunion, and we told each other stories
we hadn’t thought of in years. I hope my girl stopped
thinking of herself as fat and sees herself as sturdy
like her Great Aunt Lillian who did the plowing
herself after flu felled all the menfolks.

But the greatest miracle of all was the singing.
Descended from northern Europeans, we keep
our mouths shut to keep from freezing, but Jesus
got us to open up. Jesus built a big bonfire,
and we spent the night singing while the leftovers multiplied
to feed us again.

Jesus planned our family reunion,
and we might let him do it again.
Maybe in five years or so.

Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

 The readings for Sunday, October 11, 2026:

First Reading: Isaiah 25:1-9

First Reading (Semi-cont.): Exodus 32:1-14

Psalm: Psalm 23

Psalm (Semi-cont.): Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23

Second Reading: Philippians 4:1-9

Gospel: Matthew 22:1-14

Today's Gospel sounds impossibly harsh. The kingdom of heaven is compared to this story of a king who can't get people to come to the wedding feast? Is God really like the King who murders people who won't come to the party and burns their city? Is God really like the king who punishes a guest who comes in the wrong clothes? And such a punishment!

But perhaps our brains are too quick to see God as judge. Maybe we're losing the point of the parable.

So, let's look at this parable from a different angle: what's keeping us from accepting the invitation to the wedding feast? If the wedding feast is the kingdom of God, what keeps us away?

What activities keep us from accepting or even hearing the invitation? Is it the work we do to earn the money to pay our bills? Have we let that work take over our every waking hour? Does our work wake us up at night?

Or maybe we don't have enough work, and we worry about how we will pay for our obligations. We can't accept God's invitation now, because we need to work our multiple part-time jobs or fill out applications or research our new career field.

Jesus is quite clear on this issue, and he instructs us again and again. What good will it do us to work ourselves this way, to devote ourselves to earthly things, like work and earning money?

Or maybe we reject God's invitation because we feel inadequate. We'll accept at a later time, when we've improved ourselves. But that's the good news of God's grace that we find throughout the Gospels. We don't have to wait. God loves us in all of our imperfections. In fact, we may find that what we see as an imperfection is what God will need and use to work for God's purposes.

Perhaps we should see ourselves in the wedding guest that didn't have the right garment. What clothes do we need to invest in to make ourselves better wedding guests? Maybe we need to clothe ourselves in the garments of love and acceptance. Think of what attitudes you need to wrap around yourself, and work to shed the ones that do not serve you.

Life is short, and Christ returns to this message again and again. We think we will have time to get to the things that will be important. We'll do it later, when the kids are older, or when we don't have to work so long and hard. We'll do it when we retire. We'll wait until we have more money. Once we lose that 20-100 pounds, we'll buy the right clothes and go to feasts to celebrate sacred occasions.

But God calls us to focus on the important things now. The apocalyptic tone of the recent readings may seem overly dramatic, but apocalypse dramas remind us that everything that is precious can be gone in an instant--and so the time to focus on what we hold dear is now.

It's a luxury that so many do not have, to appreciate what we have while we still have it, to be able to tell our loved ones that we love them while they're still with us.

Recording of Sermon for Sunday, October 4, 2026

We had a pretty good Sunday at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Tennessee.  My sermon focused more on Saint Francis, whose feast day was yesterday, than on any of the readings, but my sermon did circle back to the Gospel at key points.  I focused on rejected stones becoming the chief cornerstone. 

I always think about myself when I was a parishioner--would I have liked the sermon I preached or would it leave me yearning for something deeper.  I would have liked it.  I do realize that not everyone would like a sermon steeped in history, so I don't do that week after week.  But from a pastoral point of view, I think it's important to remember that we are part of a Christian tradition that stretches back across centuries.  I always try to talk about how the traditions still have relevance for us today--an easy task with St. Francis.

You can watch a recording of my sermon here on my YouTube channel; if you'd like to read along, I put the manuscript in this blog post.  

Sermon for Sunday, October 4, 2026, the Feast Day of Saint Francis

October 4, 2026
By Kristin Berkey-Abbott



Matthew 21:33-46


The parable in today’s sermon doesn’t need much explaining. We read it and see the landowner’s son as Jesus and the servants as the prophets. Even the earliest listeners who might not have heard the parable and thought about God and Jesus would have understood the message.


None of us probably see ourselves as the tenants who brutalize the messengers from the landowner and kill the landowner’s son. Jesus might tell us otherwise. The hopeful message of today’s Gospel is that even rejected stones can become the building block of something new, something lasting.


Today, October 4, we celebrate the life of one of these rejected stones. Today is the feast day that celebrates the life of Saint Francis of Assissi, who was born in 1181. He died 800 years ago yesterday, which means he was 44 years old. Most people have encountered this saint through concrete statues in our gardens, but we may not recognize him as a saint so much as we see a monk.


Many of us are familiar with the Saint Francis who was kind to animals. We celebrated that aspect of him last week, with our blessing of pets as part of worship. But Francis’ view of animals was more radical than many of us may realize. He called all creatures his brothers and sisters. Many of us think of our pets as our family, and we forget what a departure from the history of human treatment of animals this is.


For that matter, treating all humans as equal is a fairly radical, at least in western belief systems. When I teach literature of the 19th century, I remind my students that the evolving belief that we find in some of the literature, that women should have the same rights as men, would be as baffling a notion to most 19th century people as if I suggested that our computers have rights.


Of course, in a time of artificial intelligence becoming ever smarter, this idea may come to be one we’ll need to think more seriously about in our lifetimes.


Francis saw nature as one kind of testament to God, a way to know God, much the way most of us think of scripture. Others had this idea before Francis, but his popularity as a saint has made this idea a popular one. Most of us are quite happy with our Bibles as testament, but for those who have a more troubled relationship with Christianity, the idea that one can find evidence for God outside of scripture is important.


Francis was groundbreaking in other ways. He took Jesus’ preaching about including the outcast to new levels. Like Mother Theresa, Francis lived among the lepers, at a time when very few others were willing to do so. He traveled to Egypt, both to do missionary work, but also to reach out to Muslims to try to find a peaceful path out of the attempted genocide of the Crusades.


Let that sink in. He went to Egypt to try his hand at peacemaking with Muslims, even while other good Christians were trying to slaughter them. Francis’ contemporaries saw Muslims as a marauding force, murderous and not quite human. And Francis goes to negotiate with them. Not only did he treat animals as intrinsically valuable parts of God’s creation, worthy of respect, but also Muslims. And lepers. Basically, he treated all parts of creation as worthy of respect—which is an idea very much ahead of his time, and perhaps very much ahead of our own.


Francis founded 3 religious orders, 2 of which survive to this day. In one of his orders, he and his brothers went out as friars, living among the people who needed them most, like lepers. Francis came from a wealthy family, and he spent that wealth in pursuit of not more wealth, but care for those whom society had abandoned or tried to slaughter.


As a founder of religious orders, Francis wrote down rule books for how to live in community, rule books which are still being used today. He also created new ways of worship. He is given credit for creating the first Nativity scene. He is also the first to have living animals as part of a Nativity scene. He wanted worshipers to engage with all of their senses. Here in the 21st century, we’re still trying to find new ways of doing that. Think of what Francis might have done if he had access to our technology.


Of course, he might have been a back to basics man, as evidenced by all the ways he tried to include living creatures in worship. He is often depicted as preaching to the birds and other woodland creatures; he probably had some members of his religious community there with him too. I imagine Francis with an outdoor pavilion like ours, finding new ways to engage our senses by taking us out of our buildings and fortresses.


Let’s be very clear, though—in being ahead of his time, Francis was not seen as a chief cornerstone. The religious rulers of his time rejected him in the same way that the rulers of the first century rejected Jesus.


There has been a growing movement to have a season within the season of the time after Pentecost, the season of Creation, also called the Season of Christ in Creation or the Feast of Creation. It’s an ecumenical idea, grounded in the ancient liturgical tradition of the Orthodox church. This year, some churches began celebrating on September 1, the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, and for those congregations, this season within a season ends today, on the feast day that celebrates Saint Francis. Our liturgical materials that come from Sundays and Seasons have given us some liturgical elements that celebrate this new season during the past six weeks.


Francis has become one of the cornerstones that Christ foretold, building a stronger church. In a few weeks, on Reformation Sunday, we’ll hear about another cornerstone, Martin Luther. It’s good to remember that cornerstones don’t begin as cornerstones, not necessarily. They often look like the rubble left from once impenetrable fortresses.


In today’s parable and so many other teachings, Jesus declares that God has given us a good garden. Saints like Francis call us to care for that garden more deeply than we have in the past. These messages continue to resonate for a reason. We live in a time when all of creation groans, and so many of us yearn for something better, for deliverance from the murderous forces that surround us. May we be like Saint Francis, stepping forward to show that there is a different way to live in God’s garden. May we be the cornerstones, holding up the structures that will nurture future generations.

A Banquet and Archived History

Yesterday I drove down to Columbia, SC to meet my parents so that we could all go to the James R. Crumley Archives banquet.  In years past, I've seen pictures of the event, and I've always been curious.  This year, schedules aligned, and we could go.

Each year, as far as I can tell, the banquet is held at a different place.  So far, the Archive has not had a permanent home.  That's about to change:  Newberry College has donated land for a building and now the capital campaign begins.  We heard a bit about that new development last night.

(l-r Don Poole, Ina Berkey, Jane Mitcham,Tom Berkey)

But most of last night's banquet was to celebrate the accomplishments of the honorees:  an individual, a church, and a synod of the ELCA.  It was enough of a program to justify the banquet, but not so overwhelming/long that people started leaving early.

(l-r Honoree Dorothy Jeffcoat, Don Poole, Ina Berkey)

Before the event, we had been invited to be part of a program that told the story of African American Lutherans in the southeast.  That program turned out to be a documentary that's available to all (go here to watch), along with some segments about Atlanta from a forthcoming documentary in the same series.

It was a lovely evening with good food, good stories/speeches, and even better, the chance to reconnect with others from the region.  I was happy to be reminded of all my connections:  to individuals, to various churches, to synods from the southeastern United States, to Newberry College, and to church camps.  But more than that, I was happy to hear the stories of all the good happening in the world, in small ways and in big ways.

A Prayer for Blessing of Pets

Many congregations are doing some sort of Blessing of the Pets this Sunday.  We did ours last Sunday because we had already scheduled our last outdoor worship service when I had the idea of adding a Blessing of the Pets to our autumnal activities.  We didn't do it in 2023 because I had just arrived in June.  In 2024, we had Hurricane Helene, and last year, I was away doing a workshop for my mom's church's retreat in Williamsburg.

I got to last Sunday without having written any liturgy or prayer, or a blessing of any kind.  So I wrote one, by hand, because my computer mouse had stopped working, and writing by hand was faster.

I want to preserve the prayer, so I'm transcribing it here.

Creator God,

Please bless all of your creatures gathered here together, the humans, their beloved pets, and this piece of Eastern Tennessee.  Please bless those who couldn't be here with us.  And we ask your blessing on our wider world, with so many who need so much.   And let us always remember that you are more loyal than our most faithful pets, and you love us in the same generous way we love our pets.