Cold days, dying leaves, squirrels running to and fro.

Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost--The Reign of Christ, Series B

As I edit these Preaching Helps for the close of the liturgical year, LSTC's academic year is drawing to a close. I experience the month of May as a bittersweet time. While I am sad to say goodbye to seniors who are growing into fine preachers, I am excited that their voices will be added to the church's proclamation of the gospel.

Sara K. Olson, who graduated from LSTC in June with a Master of Divinity degree, is one of those students. Sara received her undergraduate degree from the College of St. Benedict. Before coming to seminary, she volunteered in Denver, Colorado, with the Urban Servant Corps, working at Urban Peak, a shelter for homeless youth, and at Redeemer Lutheran Church in Minneapolis. Her internship was at the Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy in Moscow, Russia. She has been called to serve as pastor of St. Peter's Lutheran Church in North Plainfield, New Jersey. For the past year, Sara served as my assistant. While I relied on her efficiency and attention to detail, which enhance my teaching and scholarship, I rejoiced in our weekly conversation. Sara has a passion for the environment and finding ways to give creation a voice in preaching. She is also an artist who effectively partners preaching and visual arts. But I am most impressed by Sara's way of painting word pictures in narrative sermons. I am delighted that through these Preaching Helps you, too, can converse with Sara.

As my assistant, Sara is keenly aware that I am anxious to clear my desk in order to begin a sabbatical. From June 2006 through January 2007 I will be doing some writing on the assumptions that preachers and parishioners bring to the sermon and the ways they shape preaching and congregational life. I will spend June through September preaching in the same pulpit, a real treat for a guest preacher. Sara helped me on my way by offering the following introduction, as well as these Preaching Helps.

We have spent a long time with green. We hang green in our churches, and green hangs around us--in trees, parks, and among flowers. But now, we move into a season when things begin to shift. Now, at least in the northern part of the northern hemisphere, the leaves turn beautiful red, orange, and gold in their dying as the days become shorter and colder.

Just as the leaves scatter, so the texts for this season at the end of the long time of green seem scattered. They seem to move from one theme to another, from one idea to the next, almost like a squirrel running this way and that to get the last acorn gathered and buried. But there is a common theme among these texts, a sense that these texts are running this way and that to gather the understandings and vision necessary for God to bury them deep into our hearts before Christ once again moves us to journey alongside in his incarnation, birth, life, death, and resurrection.

In the words that we read at this end of ordinary time, we hear Scripture naming the great gap between God's goodness and our human failures. We read of God pulling us into relationship while we, at the same moment, deny our relationship with God, with one another, and with the earth. We hear simultaneously of our sins and God's blessings. We are God's grumbling people who nonetheless daily receive bread. We have lost our saltiness, our distinction as God's people. We have lost our connection to the earth, from which we have been formed, and yet God re-forms us daily. We refuse to hear the words of the prophets and are yet blessed by their vision come real. The ones we love die, we ourselves die, and yet there is a promise of life that is stronger.

As we will read in Hebrews 4:12, "the word is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword." The readings throughout this end of ordinary time reflect the living and active word of God, naming our human frailty and failure and, more important, God's tremendous forgiveness, vision, and promise. This is a great gift and challenge for us as preachers. It would be easy to spend these weeks with our swords drawn and swinging toward all that our communities fail to be and do. We might be tempted to allow these texts to lead us to cut our people off, like the hand that causes us to stumble, because they grumble and divorce and ignore the poor and seek their own glory. While these things are true, of our people and of us, the challenge of preaching these pericopes is to create an event in which we name our very failures and yet more strongly proclaim God through Christ from whom "we receive mercy and find grace in a time of need" (Hebrews 4:16). For these texts, while laying us bare before God, give to us the mercy, promise, joy, and nourishment that we need in our transitions and in our service to the world, as we return to and enter into the story of our faith in the new church year. SKO 

Cold days, dying leaves, squirrels running to and fro. In these months of harvest, I invite you to join me in considering how to give creation a voice in our preaching. How do we speak to and for the world God made and loves? Perhaps we will find some clues in the pages that follow.

Craig A. Satterlee, Editor