Hear who you are!

Proper 6--Proper 17, Series C

We begin the long, green season. It's the time of the church. Some refer to these Sundays after Pentecost as Kingdomtide. We discover who we are and how we live as the community joined to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Put another way, this season tells us what is in store for us as the ones on whom God pours out the Holy Spirit through the waters of baptism. These Sundays attempt to stake out some of the parameters of God's kin'dom.

The woven stole I wear in this season flows from lighter to darker shades of green. It's meant to communicate the deepening, thickening, growing life of faith that we experience as God's gathered people. The movement from light to dark green reminds me that faith is a journey. It is dying and rising, starting over, and trying again. I have a hard enough time remembering this for myself. I confess that I am even slower to remember this for the church. Regardless of the expression--holy, catholic, and apostolic, ELCA, LSTC, or the congregation where I worship--I tend to forget that the church's faith is also a journey. Rather than dying and rising, starting over, and trying again, I want the church to improve, to progress, to get better over time. I want the church, at least, to be what God calls it to be, even if I cannot.

But when I pause to consider what God calls the church to be, I am overwhelmed. Melinda Quivik, who graciously contributed this series of Preaching Helps, approaches the lections for this season as stories that God's people hear that show us the way to be the church. I like the notion of scripture as heard events. These are family stories that hold history and identity, meaning and direction. Approaching scripture as family stories we hear in worship reminds us that how the text is read, in terms of both quality and emphasis, is itself an act of exegesis. It reminds us that we study texts in order to tell the story.

What do these stories tell us about how we are to be church? Reading through Mindy's reflections, I compiled quite a list! Consider these:

* The church confesses and forgives.

* The church celebrates baptismal freedom in acts of healing and new life.

* The church honors peoples' gifts, calls, and vocations with huge gestures.

* The church discerns the ways that the normal and necessary work of making a living is part of God's greater context and done for its best use.

* The church shows gratitude to God by serving those in need, making keeping Sabbath inseparable from doing justice.

* The church seeks new ways of extending hospitality in order to invite all people to God's table, even going out in order to gather back.

* The church seeks to experience rather than to define faith.

* The church is content with and even grateful for what it has.

The saving grace in all this, of course, is God's saving grace. Mindy makes this grace clear. Not only is everything the church is called to do and be a response to the grace of God revealed and experienced in Jesus Christ, the church's best life is empowered by this same grace. That's what happens in worship, where we do more than hear God's call. Through the church's liturgy, the people of God are shown how to respond and rehearse this new behavior until it becomes second nature. More than a dress rehearsal for the future, worship becomes the first act of the church's life and witness in the world.

Melinda Quivik currently serves as visitation pastor to Christ Church Lutheran in Minneapolis. Her Ph.D. in liturgical studies and homiletics is from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She previously served two congregations in Northeastern Montana. She worked with the ELCA Renewing Worship project as a member of the Principles for Preaching advisory group, on several development panels reviewing liturgical drafts, and as a presenter with the Renewing Worship Events around the country. I am delighted that she is leading us on this faithful journey, because she points out where we are heading and has suggestions for how we can get there. Most important, under Mindy's direction we will be nourished with the gospel and therefore strengthened for the journey.

I rejoice with you in deepening shades of green!

Craig A. Satterlee

Editor of Preaching Helps

Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago 

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