Sermon for Sunday, December 14, 2025

December 14, 2025

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott




Matthew 11:2-11



You may be wondering when we’re getting to the Advent readings you were expecting: where is the angel Gabriel? When does Mary go to see her cousin Elizabeth? Those stories are in the Gospel of Luke, which is not the Gospel that provides our lectionary readings this year. Welcome to Matthew. This year, we stay with John the Baptist for one more week, John the Baptist who provides an interesting twist to our themes of watching and waiting.


Those of you who were here last week may be wondering what has happened to John the Baptist. Last week we saw John the Baptist in full prophet mode, proclaiming that the Kingdom of God was near and issuing dire warnings about what would happen if the people didn’t repent. We see him make bold claims about the Messiah who is drawing near. In a few weeks, we’ll return to this story, when John baptizes Jesus, but not before saying, “You should be baptizing me.” In other words, John is one of the first to recognize the grown up Jesus as the Messiah.


This week, just 8 chapters later in the Gospel of Matthew, John the Baptist sends his disciples to Jesus to ask him if John’s confidence is warranted—is Jesus the Messiah? Or should they keep waiting? How can John the Baptist be unsure? What has happened since last week’s text? Some of you may be remembering John the Baptist as the cousin of Jesus and be wondering if there’s a larger family drama—but again, that’s the Gospel of Luke. In the Gospel of Matthew, there’s no family connection. But all of the Gospels include John the Baptist as one of the primary voices proclaiming that the Kingdom of God, in the person of Jesus, is here.


So today’s Gospel reading is disconcerting. What has happened to John the Baptist since we first saw him in Matthew 3? Has Jesus disappointed him? Is Jesus not the Messiah that John expected? Not fierce enough or warrior enough for John the Baptist?


Well, we know that one thing has changed--John the Baptist is in prison, put there by Herod. Was John the Baptist expecting the Messiah to overthrow the empire? Is he wondering why Jesus as Messiah isn’t doing more to free him? Is John the Baptist surprised to find himself a casualty of this fight?


Today’s Gospel continues the theme of last week’s Gospel, and it offers us a chance to continue thinking about expectations: John the Baptist’s expectations, those of the people who waited through the centuries for God to fulfill the ancient covenant with a Messiah, and our own expectations. What do we think a Messiah will do?


Jesus answers this question by pointing to what he has done. As John may be becoming less certain that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus looks at what he has accomplished and is becoming more clear about his mission and his ministry.


In the Gospel of Matthew, the arrival of the Messiah is seen as the fulfillment of the covenant that God made with Abraham, way back in Genesis. Jesus uses actions that first century listeners would understand as a fulfillment of the promises of God: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, those with a skin disease are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”


For 21st century listeners with access to good medical care, we may not realize how miraculous these deeds would be to ancient people. Perhaps even as 21st century listeners, we may not always appreciate how miraculous these deeds still are. For people versed in the language of the prophets of old, like Isaiah in our first reading or the Psalmist who wrote what we read today, these deeds of Jesus reveal God’s presence.


Jesus goes on to ask the people what they want from John, this wilderness prophet of their own time. Why did they go to the desert to hear what John the Baptist proclaimed? What did they expect to find? You don’t go to the wilderness to see someone whose belief is as slender and shakable as a reed. You don’t expect to find the ruling class denying themselves out there in the desert. No, you go to the wilderness to find the truth. Jesus asks the people why they are doubting John the Baptist—and by extension, Jesus.


Here and throughout his ministry, Jesus tells us that God reaches out to humanity in ways that we don’t always recognize. Even if we have alternative explanations, they may cloud our understanding of what we see. God appears in places where we wouldn't expect to find the Divine. Jesus reminds the people that there's always hope in a broken world. God might perform the kind of miracles that don't interest us at first. The Palestinian Jews wanted a warrior Messiah to liberate them from Rome. Instead they got someone who healed the sick and told them to be mindful of their spiritual lives so that they didn't lose their souls. Jesus showed the people of the first century how to resist the oppression of Rome-- not by outright rebellion but by creating community that couldn’t be broken by empire and by bringing shame to Roman rulers and Jewish leaders and all the others collaborating with all the forces that oppress.


John the Baptist and Jesus ask similar questions that are still relevant for us: what are we looking for? Why is it so hard to believe that we’ve found it? Believing is hard because the world is still so hard. Because we still suffer. Because there are still false imprisonments. Because there are still casualties to those professing Jesus as Messiah. Because love is still countercultural, even during the holidays.


Many of us experience something similar to the crisis of faith that John the Baptist might seem to be having. We want something different than what God offers. We ask for signs and miracles, and when we get them, we sigh and say, "That's not what I meant. I wanted them in a different form." We might say of our miracles, “Well that’s just medicine.” Or science. We discount . . . We turn away. We find ourselves in prisons perhaps of our own making. If we’re lucky, though, we realize that God has such a vaster vision of what our lives could be, and if we’re really fortunate, we have this revelation in time to reach out to God for help and guidance.


Advent is a time of watching and waiting for a savior, and we often forget how much of that time has been spent watching and waiting in wilderness conditions: in times of crisis, in prisons, in times of societal chaos, in hospitals and specialist’s offices, in times of extreme doubt. If John the Baptist, who seems so very sure of himself before Herod imprisons him, if John the Baptist can have doubt and not be cast away, then let us take some comfort from that. We too can ask for reassurance, can ask questions of our Messiah, We can have a strength of faith that ebbs and flows. But we can still wait and watch for God in our lives. We can wait and watch for opportunities to repent, as John calls us to do. And we can rest assured that help is on the way, and we will find our opportunity to be redeemed wherever we encounter the Messiah.

The Feast Day of Santa Lucia

Today is the feast day of Santa Lucia, a woman in 4th century Rome during a time of horrible persecution of Christians and much of the rest of the population, and she was martyred.  The reasons for her martyrdom vary:   Did she really gouge out her eyes because a suitor commented on their beauty? Did she die because she had promised her virginity to Christ? Was she killed because the evil emperor had ordered her to be taken to a brothel because she was giving away the family wealth? Was she killed because a rejected suitor outed her for being a Christian?  We don’t really know.  

She is most often pictured with a crown of candles on her head, and tradition says that she wore a candle crown into the catacombs when she took provisions to the Christians hiding there.  With a candle crown, she freed up a hand to carry more supplies.  I love this idea, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out that it isn't true.

Truth often doesn't matter with these popular saints like Lucia, Nicholas, and Valentine.  We love the traditions, and that means we often know more about the traditions than we do about the saints behind them, if we know anything at all about the saints behind these popular days.

This feast day still seems relevant for two reasons.  First, Lucia shows us the struggle that women face in daily existence in a patriarchal culture, the culture that most of us still must endure.  It’s worth remembering that many women in many countries today don’t have any more control over their bodies or their destinies than these long-ago virgin saints did. In this time of Advent waiting, we can remember that God chose to come to a virgin mother who lived in a culture that wasn’t much different than Santa Lucia’s culture: highly stratified, with power concentrated at the top, power in the hands of white men, which made life exceeding different for everyone who wasn't a powerful, wealthy, white man. It's a society that sounds familiar, doesn't it?

On this feast day of Santa Lucia, we can spend some time thinking about women, about repression, about what it means to control our destiny.  We can think about how to spread freedom.

It's also an important feast day because of the time of year when we celebrate.  Even though we're still in the season of late autumn, in terms of how much sunlight we get, those of us in the northern hemisphere are in the darkest time of the year.  It's great to have a festival that celebrates the comforts of this time of year:  candles and baked goods and hot beverages.

I love our various festivals to get us through the dark of winter. In these colder, darker days, I wish that the early church fathers had put Christmas further into winter, so that we can have more weeks of twinkly lights and candles to enjoy. Christmas in February makes more sense to me, even though I understand how Christmas ended up near the Winter Solstice.

I made my traditional Santa Lucia bread last week, for a gathering where I wanted one slightly healthier treat to be available.  Today, I'm baking a different bread, but you could make a more traditional offering.  If you’d like to try, this blog post will guide you through it.  You could end with bread braids cooling on racks in just a few hours:

If you’re the type who needs pictures, it’s got a link to a blog post with pictures.  Enjoy.

Happy Santa Lucia day! Have some special bread, drink a bracing hot beverage, and light the candles against the darkness.

Recording of Sermon for Sunday, December 7, 2025

The video of my sermon for Sunday was posted a few days late; usually it's posted within an hour of the time I deliver it.  You can view it here on my YouTube channel.  You can read the sermon manuscript in this blog post.

Returning to Bethlehem Again

I spent much of yesterday doing volunteer work, but not the traditional kind.  I haven't been stocking the food pantry or knitting scarves.  Yesterday I went over to a local Methodist church that allows its gym to be transformed into ancient Bethlehem for a walk-through, immersive experience, Return to Bethlehem.  All proceeds go to Asheville Buncombe Community Christian Ministry (ABCCM), an interfaith group which works on hunger and homelessness issues in Buncombe county, the county which contains Asheville.

I first started doing this volunteer work in December of 2023, and I wrote a blog post about it, which I'll quote here:   "I thought it might be something like a living Nativity scene, maybe with a few extra scenes. I was wrong. It's a whole living Nativity village. One of the supervisors walked me through the space, telling me about how the visitors would stop at each station to hear actors tell about the space. For example, there's a weaver's house, and the Temple, and a place where a person dyes cloth. Eventually the tour ends up at the inn and the stable outside of the inn."

It takes a lot of work to make this transformation:  lots of hanging and draping of fabric, LOTS of industrial stapling, lots of arranging of baskets and chairs and potted plants and such.  I love doing it, and I'm happy to help.  It hits a weird combination of my interests:  the illusions of stagecraft, theatre, fabric, color and texture--creating illusions and believability.

Here's a 2023 picture, when the theatre flats were first being assembled.

Eventually each station gets its own furniture and tubs of supplies.  We have other tubs of fabric we can use, all sorts of fabrics.

And then, finally, a finished product, in this case, the Temple (this is a 2023 picture--I forgot to take pictures of  yesterday's creation, where I used more blue fabrics and velvets).

It's more standing on a ladder than I'd like, but I'm happy I can still do it.  I expected to be much more sore this morning than I am.

After a morning working on the Return to Bethlehem sets, I went over to the local Lutheran church to work on Lutheran World Relief quilts.  We assembled 4 quilts to get them ready for knotting.  I prefer to assemble quilt tops out of all the fabric we have, but by assembling those quilts, one of our members could take them home to get the knotting done.  I did bring some fabric home in the hopes that I/we can assemble a quilt top or two in the next week.  And then I made some repairs to a quilt top that my spouse had been assembling before he got frustrated and made ill-advised cuts.

Today I'll go back to the Methodist church--we're racing against the clock, since Return to Bethlehem opens at 6 tonight.  When I left yesterday at 1, we had made good progress, and more volunteers were expected.  Many of us have some experience now, which makes it easier to get things done.  And we seem to have enough ladders and enough staplers, lacks which have slowed us down in the past.

And now it is time to shift my morning into a different gear, to get ready for another day of volunteering in this way.

 

The Gospel for Sunday, December 14, 2025

  The readings for Sunday, December 14, 2025:

First Reading: Isaiah 35:1-10

Psalm: Psalm 146:4-9 (Psalm 146:5-10 NRSV)

Psalm (Alt.): Luke 1:47-55 (Luke 1:46b-55 NRSV)

Second Reading: James 5:7-10

Gospel: Matthew 11:2-11


Here again, in this week's Gospel, Jesus reminds us of the new social order--the first will be last, the last will be first. Since many of us in first world churches would be categorized as "the first," this edict bears some contemplation. What do we do if we find ourselves in positions of power? Are we supposed to walk away from that?

Well, yes, in a sense, we are. Again and again, the Bible reminds us that we find God on the margins of respectable society. Again and again, we see that God lives with the poor and the oppressed. Nowhere is that message more visible to Christians than in the story of the birth of Jesus.

We get so dazzled by the angels and the wise men that we forget some of the basic elements of the story. In the time of great Roman power, God doesn't appear in Rome. No, God chooses to take on human form in a remote Roman outpost. In our current day, it would be as if the baby Jesus was born on Guam or the Maldives. Most of us couldn't locate those islands on a globe; we'd be surprised to hear that the Messiah came again and chose to be born so far away from the most important world power centers, like New York City or London or Beijing.

God came to live amongst one of the most marginalized groups in the Roman empire--the only people lower on the social totem pole would have been captives of certain wars and slaves. Most Romans would have seen Palestinian Jews as weird and warped, those people who limited themselves to one god. Not sophisticated at all.

God couldn't even get a room at the inn. From years of Christmas pageants, we may have sanitized that manger. We may forget about the smelliness of real hay, the scratchiness, the bugs, the ways that animals stink up a space.

God chose a marginalized young couple as parents. Did God choose to be born in the palace of Herod? No. We don't hear about Joseph as a landowner, which means that his family couldn't have been much lower on the totem pole, unless they were the Palestinian equivalent of sharecroppers. God does not choose the way of comfort.

Again and again, Jesus tells us to keep watch. God appears in forms that we don't always recognize. God appears in places where we wouldn't expect to find the Divine. Jesus reminds us again and again that there's always hope in a broken world. God might perform the kind of miracles that don't interest us at first. The Palestinian Jews wanted a warrior Messiah to liberate them from Rome. Instead they got someone who healed the sick and told them to be mindful of their spiritual lives so that they didn't lose their souls.

Many of us experience something similar today. We want something different from God. God has different desires for us than our desires for our lives. We ask for signs and miracles, and when we get them, we sigh and say, "That's not what I meant. I wanted them in a different form." We turn away.

The John the Baptists of the world remind us to turn back again. Repent. Turn back. Forswear our foolish ways. Go out to meet God. Your salvation is at hand.

Week-End Update: Cooking and Other Types of Mood Management

In some ways, it was a good week-end.  Sunday at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Tennessee went well, the kind of Sunday where I find myself wishing this position as a Synod Appointed Minister could continue for several more years.  It might, but much of that decision will not be up to me.

It was the kind of week-end where I hear about the travel plans of neighbors and feel a weird sense of emotion.  It's not envy, exactly.  They're taking a 10 day walk across England, 7-8 miles a day, carrying everything they need on their backs, following the same path that the pilgrim's in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales traveled.  They are at least 10 years older than I am, maybe 15.  It's the kind of plan that makes me wonder if I should retire/work less now rather than later.  But I am not sure we could make this kind of trek now.  For one thing, the long airline flight to get there is a dealbreaker for me.  And my spouse would need a very flat route, and he would need to do some training to be ready for even a flat route.

So, not envy, but the kind of feeling I have had so often in my life, wondering what is wrong with me that I don't want what so many other people seem to want.  In the above paragraph, it's vacation plans and bucket lists.  I look at the larger culture, particularly the desire to have the latest cell phone and hours to spend scrolling, and I don't feel like something is wrong with me.  I do worry about the health of the larger culture, particularly when I stumble across particularly disturbing information about what tech is doing to our brains.

I organized a cookie tasting for our neighborhood group, and I tried to make a recipe, pecan sandies, from childhood.  As with the chocolate chip cookies I've tried to make, the butter seemed to melt outside the cookie and fry it.  Not untasty, but not the memory of the cookie.  And there was that distressing moment when I said, "I can't cook anymore."  A ridiculous thought, but a distressing one.

Yesterday, though, we had great success making pizza with cast iron pans.  Before putting them in the oven, I turned the burner to medium heat for 3 minutes, as recommended by this blog post from King Arthur Baking Company.  It was the first time since being in this house when we've had a good homemade pizza.  My usual experience is to go through all the effort to make homemade pizza, only to be left with a mess of a kitchen and a blah pizza and a yearning for pizza from somewhere else. 

Yesterday as we ate pizza, we watched the recording of the Sunday worship service at the National Cathedral.  The service was beautiful, and once again, I found myself observing a strange mood evolving in me.  There was some nostalgia for the year I spent in seminary, where I went to the Cathedral occasionally.  I felt nostalgia and wistfulness and sadness for a time that is gone and won't be coming back.  I felt fortunate to have had the experiences and the opportunities and at the same time, I know what I had planned to do with that time in the city and the ways I fell short.  I tried to keep focused on what I did manage to do.  

When the worship service was over, we switched to Saturday Night Live snippets, so it was easier to manage my mood.  And then it was off to bed; I've been going to sleep increasingly earlier, and I feel like I need to get back on a more reasonable track.

Sermon for Sunday, December 7, 2025

December 7, 2025

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott



Matthew 3: 1-12


Today's Gospel continues with the Advent theme of watching, waiting, and listening for the call. Today it's John the Baptist who tells us what's to come and what we are waiting for.

Many of John's listeners in today's Gospel probably thought that John was talking about himself when he said, “This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight.'"” First century Palestine was full of self-proclaimed Messiahs, and I suspect many of them spoke of themselves in the third person telling (or warning) of the deeds they would do. Many of John’s listeners yearned for a Messiah that would come in a form they'd recognize: that warrior spoken of by ancient prophets and the Psalmist to save them from the Romans or a temple reformer to get rid of corrupt priests and other perverters of the word of God.


Of course, people yearning for that kind of messiah would not be wanting John the Baptist to be their Messiah. He is not that kind of warrior who can save them from the Romans or reform the Temple, although the later part of today’s Gospel, with John addressing Pharisees and Sadducees shows that he does have some appetite for confronting religious officials. People who came to the wilderness to see John the Baptist might have been hoping for a Messiah, but what they saw hearkened back to an earlier age. Even before he gave his message, just by his clothes and diet, John the Baptist would be familiar in his role as a prophet, out of the line of Isaiah or Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, or Micah.


His message would be right at home coming out of the mouths of those prophets. It’s important to remember that most Biblical prophets are not foretelling the far away future. On the contrary, God sends prophets to the people to remind them of the covenant, to call them back to right and righteous living in their time. Some prophets to do this by painting a picture of what could happen if people do this, the glorious world that is waiting if we would just move to God’s vision of the world. Some prophets do this by warning about what happens when people don’t set themselves right with God, who is just, loving, and powerful.


With his language of axes and winnowing and unquenchable fire, John the Baptist is clearly in the latter camp of prophets. And it works on some level. Consider verses 5 and 6: “People went out to him from Jerusalem and all Judea and the whole region of the Jordan. 6 Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.” Geographically, this means that everyone came to see John, city dwellers, people who lived in the desert, and everyone in between—John the Baptist wasn’t just a local phenomenon.


And unlike Old Testament prophets who might have to make a perilous journey to bring God’s message to God’s people, in today’s Gospel, John is on the margins, in the wilderness, and the center comes to him, just as wise men came to the baby Jesus just a chapter earlier in Matthew. And John’s influence is clearly more than the center of civilization. In this short passage, the whole of Judaism comes to him: everyone from religious elite to the common folks.


If John had been a different kind of person, he could have claimed enormous power for himself. Clearly, he’s charismatic. After several thousand years of baptisms, we might forget that John was doing a new thing. While ancient people would have taken part in ritual baths for purification after certain events, like pregnancy or other body processes that involved fluids, the idea of baptism for purification from spiritual impurity seems to be new, introduced by John the Baptist. And people go along with this idea and go into a river—ritual baths, by contrast, were human-created structures, a much tamer, safer experience than what John offers.


Once purified, John the Baptist preaches that the people are ready to meet their Messiah, the one prophesied in today’s Old Testament texts, the bloom that comes from the stump of Jesse. These kinds of prophecies prepare people to expect a warrior Messiah, and John’s language suggests that he, too, would welcome the arrival of this kind of savior, a Savior who would, to use the words of the prophet Isaiah from today’s reading, “strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.”


This kind of language is part of why people expect the Messiah to be a warrior type. This kind of language doesn’t prepare us to be on the lookout for a baby in a manger or a healer moving from place to place.


In next week’s Gospel, we’ll discover that John the Baptist isn’t quite sure that Jesus is the Messiah. He asks the question asked by many through the ages: “Are you the one we’ve been waiting for?”


In this Advent time of watching and waiting, it’s a good question for us, too. What are we hoping for? What are we yearning for? Although we might wish that others would be winnowed and thrown in the fire, we know we don’t want that for ourselves.


John reminds us that God has always wanted for us to be sprouts that grow up to bear good fruit. It’s a powerful image, one that’s not unique to John the Baptist. Indeed, it’s an image that Jesus will use, and it’s one that we’ve returned to as a congregation. What are the fruits of faithfulness?


John the Baptist emerges from the wilderness, and at first look, he seems to be a prophtet rooted in the Old Testament tradition of prophecy, of calling people to repent from past transgressions and to remember their roots of faithfulness. But John is also pointing to a new direction, with his baptizing in the river Jordan, the river associated with the promised land of old, and the new world that the Messiah will usher in.


Let us take some Advent time to consider the Messiah we are longing to meet, the God who longs to meet us where we are. Is it the baby that looks so harmless, lying in a feeding trough? Do we long for someone fierce like John the Baptist, someone who pulls no punches and tells it like it is? Are we hoping for that gardener that will prune back all the dead wood? Can we separate the charismatic imposters from the true Messiah? John the Baptist warns us to be alert even as we yearn.


Many of us in this congregation are coming to the end of a very hard year, a wilderness time of our lives. Indeed, if we look at events around the planet in the past few years, it’s not hard to see this decade as a wilderness time for the world. Today’s Gospel gives us a new way to frame this wilderness time, as an opportunity to get on the right path. And if we’ve been in this wilderness place for so long that we feel immobile, our Buddhist friends would remind us that the easiest way to get on the right path is to step out to whatever part of that path is closest.


John the Baptist reminds us of the potential of this desert space. For those of us who feel hollowed out, let us remember the vision offered in today’s Gospel—wilderness as a place of preparation, yes, but also of promise. We have not been forgotten. God has not gone off to greener galaxies. Out of a wasteland of locusts and wild honey, new hope arises. Let us prepare the path of our lives and make the way straight. Our redemption is at hand.