Following a different guide through Lent and Easter.

Ash Wednesday--Seventh Sunday of Easter, Series B

Once again we journey from ashes to alleluias, from "... you are dust" to "Christ is risen indeed!" In many places and among many peoples, we make this pilgrimage in the context of personal, congregational, national, and global crises. How does the journey of Lent and Easter speak to these crises? Pieces of Mark's account of Christ's crucifixion seem to spring from the page. For example, "At three o'clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, 'Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?' which means, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'" (15:34). The journey from feeling forsaken by God to being confronted with new life in Christ might be a way to frame Lent and Easter this year. But am I bringing my own agenda to the season? Am I simply seeing what I want or need to see? And will the result be preaching that is tame, expected, and predictable?

Joseph R. Jeter Jr. invites preachers to reflect on crises as a pilgrimage, which calls the congregation out of its everyday life in quest for God (Crisis Preaching: Personal and Public [Nashville: Abingdon, 1998], 38-39). According to Jeter, faced with crisis we must learn both the patterns of pilgrimage and the customs and rules of the road. We must discover and differentiate between what is stable and what is subject to change, what is essential and what is necessary to leave behind. Pilgrims negotiate roadblocks, see a familiar landscape change, and even change it themselves. They uncover and discover what they initially overlooked. Pilgrims watch for signs of danger and listen to guides who both warn and recommend. Most important, pilgrims reflect upon the goal of their journey, where they are headed, and why they are setting out.

As we seek to be pilgrims, a problem that many preachers face is that we know the trip through Lent to the paschal mystery to the seven-week celebration of Christ's resurrection just a little too well. Yes, scripture and lectionary provide us with different guides--Luke and John, Matthew and Mark. Yet, over the years, even these guides become familiar friends. We know their agendas, their perspectives, the things they would have us see and remember.

Dennis R. Bolton, who offers this series of Preaching Helps, contends that we would benefit from making the Lenten-Easter journey under the direction of a different guide. Pastor Bolton invites us to follow the psalmist through Lent and Easter. He uses the appointed psalm as the primary text for each Sunday. He assumes that most pastors do not usually preach on the psalms and that we and our hearers would be blessed by doing so. He bases his reflections on the images of a "cupped ear" and an "open mouth"--the first an image for listening to the psalm text in conversation with biblical scholarship for discoveries that might enhance our "hearing" these psalms, and the second an image for how we can speak about the psalm, what we can preach about it. Bolton reports that he discovered "a vast new knowledge and joy in this process of psalm preaching--a deeper connection between the Old and New Testaments, between Israel and the new Israel (church), and the deep connection of Jesus and Judaism."

Bolton is pastor of St. Stephen Lutheran Church in Lexington, South Carolina. A graduate of the University of South Carolina and Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, he earned a Doctor of Ministry degree from Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, and completed additional graduate study at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. He is a member of the Association of Clinical Pastoral Educators. Dr. Bolton served parishes throughout North Carolina and South Carolina and was Interim Director of Continuing Education at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary. He has written for publications including Currents, Preaching, Biblical Preaching Journal, Lectionary Homiletics, The Word in Season, and Light for Today. He is married to Angela, and they have two daughters: Jessica and Brittany. He is a Tae Kwon Do black belt and an avid reader, and he loves the beach.

I confess that I feel a certain uneasiness about abandoning familiar guides to follow a stranger through Lent and Easter. It is frightening, risky, even dangerous. The way Mark tells it, that's how the journey was for our Christ. While I may not abandon Mark for the psalmist, if spending time in the psalmist's company leavens my Lenten preaching with a bit more uncertainty and my Easter preaching with a bit more joy, a "cupped ear" as I listen to the psalmist and an "open mouth" as I join the psalmist in speaking to God can only enrich my preaching and my--and my hearers'--pilgrimage through Lent and Easter.

Have a blessed trip!

Craig A. Satterlee, Editor

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