Preparing for Lent (2016)

I’m not preaching a series on Lent this year.

I spent a lot of time wrestling with this, and it wasn’t a decision I came to lightly. In the past two years at Collective Church (which is also the entire life of our church up to this point, by the way) I have preached through the season of Lent, and I’ve really enjoyed it.

In 2014—our first year—I preached about what it means to be WITHOUT. Since Lent is a season in which people fast, I thought it would be interesting to explore the feeling of absence—the absence of God, the absence of normalcy, the absence of comfort, the absence of faith, etc. (If you want to hear this series, you can find it on our podcast feed)

In 2015, I preached through the a series of Bible passages about the Babylonian Exile—one of the darkest periods of time recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures, and a subject about which many pages of the Bible have been written. I spent several weeks of that series exploring the book of Lamentations and how loss is a big part of our faith. (If you want to hear this series, you can find it on our podcast feed, too)

But this year turned out a little different. I usually plan sermon series about six-to-nine months ahead of time, and I had every intention of keeping my Lent tradition alive. However, as I was preparing and researching and exploring my own questions, I realized this year needed to be a bit different. I knew that we would be in the midst of a series about emotional wholeness—which I am currently preaching through and is called I Want to Get Better—and I knew that we needed more time than the six weeks of 2016 leading up to Lent would allow. Also, I knew that I wanted to do a very specific pre-Easter series that would take two or three weeks. So Lent was getting tricky. Ultimately, I decided to engage Lent on my blog (which is what I’m doing right now) while allowing the Sunday services at Collective Church to go where I felt they naturally needed to go this year.

So if you are a member of Collective Church or someone who listens online, I’m sorry if you’re disappointed that we won’t be journeying through Lent together as we’ve done in the past. I’m sure we will return to form in the future, but this year required something else.

That’s one of the beautiful things about our church—our people are very gracious and flexible. Sometimes we dive directly into the tradition, and sometimes we take a side road, looking for something that may not be on the beaten path.

So here’s what I’d like to do right now: I would like give you a bit of encouragement if you are preparing yourself or your family for the season of Lent.

Lent is the time of year when people—millions of people—prepare for Resurrection Sunday (Easter). The most common form of Lenten observation is fasting—to remove something from your everyday life as a way to prepare and anticipate the celebration that Christ is risen and that the tomb is empty.

Maybe you’re about to enter this season, and you don’t really know what you’re looking for or hoping to experience. May I offer a few possibilities?

Maybe you need to turn the volume down.

The act of fasting—the removal of something from your life—is a great way to turn down the volume on your regular routines. This can very naturally give us space to encounter something new. The removal of something can create new space in which you can reflect on something else.

So maybe you feel like every day is the same as the day before. Maybe you have this endless sense that nothing will ever change and that you are out of new insights or ideas. Perhaps you are desperate for a fresh word to be spoken in your life. Maybe you need to clear out the cobwebs and create space for a fresh experience with the Divine. If so, Lent may be a time in which you begin listening in a new way.

Maybe you need a newfound sense of rhythm.

Something that I’ve heard lots of well-meaning Christians say is, “Faith isn’t about religion, it’s about a relationship.” What people typically mean when they say this is that Jesus loves us unconditionally, regardless of our various practices or traditions, which I totally affirm.

However, I think there is something beautiful about religion, when it is engaged in a healthy way. Religion, at its best, calls us to our roots and invites us into a deep, rich story. When we observe Lent—or Easter or Christmas or Advent or any of the other traditions in our story—it reminds us that we are part of something and it reminds us of the rhythms of our own lives and faith.

Maybe things feel chaotic right now, and participating in Lent might give you a renewed sense of balance and consistency. Perhaps Lent is a time when you take a few deep breaths and remind yourself that life is meant to have rhythm.

Maybe you need to feel connected to something bigger than yourself.

To me, this is where Lent has always had its power—that there are millions of other people all over the world who are also participating in this at the same time. To participate in Lent is to remind ourselves that we are not alone and that this whole thing is way bigger than any of us.

Lent is a time of anticipation and hope—it is a time when we find ourselves wrestling with the realities of death and resurrection. People have been doing this for thousands of years, and we come from a long line of participants. We are joining with millions as we all look forward to Resurrection Sunday, when we will celebrate the empty tomb.

Perhaps Lent is a combination of all of these things for you. Perhaps you don’t really know what you’re looking for, but you know you are looking for something. I don’t know. There are lots of people who know a lot more about Lent and the Church Calendar than I do, and they probably have blog posts this week that are way better than mine. I’m still new to all of this.

Here’s what I do know: Every time I have participated in Lent—every time I have fasted and engaged this tradition as best I could—Easter has felt richer to me when it arrived. The anticipation and ultimate experience of Resurrection Sunday is heightened when I participate in Lent.

So I’ll be doing that this year. If you won’t be participating, that’s fine. I don’t do it every year, and maybe it’s not practical for you to do that this year. No problem.

But if you are participating in Lent, I’m with you. I’m cheering you on. I hope you experience something beautiful and transcendent and profound as you anticipate Resurrection Sunday.

May this season be filled with wonder and hope, and may you celebrate when Resurrection Sunday arrives.

Grace and peace.

*ALSO, if you want to see what sermons are coming up at Collective Church, here’s the schedule for the Lent season:

February 14 – I Want to Get Better, Part 7 (Rob Carmack)

February 21 - I Want to Get Better, Part 8 (Rob Carmack)

February 28 – Christina Gibson!

March 6 – The Confusing Terrible, Wonderful Cross, Part 1 (Rob Carmack)

March 13 - The Confusing Terrible, Wonderful Cross, Part 2 (Rob Carmack)

March 20 - The Confusing Terrible, Wonderful Cross, Part 3 (Rob Carmack)

March 27 – Resurrection Sunday (Rob Carmack)

New Podcast - Bruce Springsteen Sings the Alphabet!

Hey, everybody!

I've started a new podcast, and if you're interested, I'd love for you to take a listen.

It's not like something I normally work on--there isn't a lot of history or theology or anything like that. Instead, it's about Bruce Springsteen.

The name of the podcast is Bruce Springsteen Sings the Alphabet, and the concept is simple: In each episode, we talk about one Springsteen song. We're going alphabetically through the entire Bruce Springsteen catalog, one by one. 

The first episode went live today, and it's about the song "30 Days Out." The next episode goes up tomorrow. We've got a long way to go, and if you like, I'd love it if you'd listen in and join us.

Click here to subscribe in iTunes.

Click here to go directly to the podcast feed on the website.

Best of 2015

I do this every year, but I almost forgot this time. So here's all the stuff I thought was great in 2015.

Better late than never, right?

 

Best Books

Searching for Sunday by Rachel Held Evans

So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

Rising Strong by Brene Brown

Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

Out of Sorts by Sarah Bessey

 

Best Albums

All Your Favorite Bands (Dawes)

What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World (The Decemberists)

Something More Than Free (Jason Isbell)

Coming Home (Leon Bridges)

The Waterfall (My Morning Jacket)

Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats (self-titled)

The Phosphorescent Blues (Punch Brothers)

No Cities to Love (Sleater-Kinney)

Star Wars (Wilco)

 

Best Movies

Inside Out

Spotlight

The End of the Tour

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Martian

The Stanford Prison Experiment

While We're Young

Love & Mercy

 

Best Podcasts

Newsworthy with Norsworthy

Note to Self

AlphaBeatical

Invisibilia

You Must Remember This

So there you have it. Thanks for reading.

Have a great 2016!

My Favorite Sermons from 2015

For the past six weeks or so (actually a bit longer), I've been working really hard to prepare sermon content for 2016. I've spent a lot of time looking forward, learning, preparing, writing, and rewriting. 

Since I've preached my final sermon for 2015, I wanted to look back and share a few of my favorites from this year. If you want to listen to any of them--or if you missed any and wanted to catch up--please feel free. These are sermons where I really felt like I had something to say, and when I look back at all of the work that I produced in the past twelve months, these are the ones I feel most proud of. So I wanted to share them with you. Thanks for listening!

High & Dry series, Part 5 - "What Now?" (March 22)

Frequency series, Part 1 - "Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit" (April 26)

Jesus Must Be Crazy series, Part 1 - "I Have Come to Bring the Sword" (June 28)

Paul Must Be Crazy (or "Our Silenced Sisters") (August 2)

"The Brief, Tragic Life of Jephthah's Daughter (October 18)

"The Brief, Tragic Life of Jephthah's Daughter"

A couple years ago, I wrote a few sermons (or rough sketches of sermons, at least) that didn't seem to belong anywhere. I found some of the strangest stories in the Bible, and I tried--as an exercise--to see if I could write something about them. One of the better sermons to come out of that exercise was about a story in Judges 11. It's a story about a man named Jephthah, and it ends quite tragically for his daughter. 

So the sermon sat in a drawer (actually, a file folder in my laptop, but "drawer" sounds more literary). I had no idea if I would ever get an opportunity to preach that sermon since it would be difficult to fit it into most sermon series.

Yesterday, I preached that sermon at Collective Church, and it felt really great to get it out into the world.

There are some sermons that exist simply because Sunday was looming, and the pastor (myself or someone else) has to say something. 

There are other sermons that are begging to be preached--the sermons that occupy space in the corner of your brain, every week asking once again, "Is it time yet?"

In other words, there are some Sundays when you just have to say something, and there are other Sundays when you really have something to say.

I don't often use the blog to draw attention to my sermons. I don't know why exactly; maybe it's because I feel like writing and preaching are two different mediums, and they each deserve their own space. However, I'm going to make an exception today, because this is a sermon that I needed to preach, and I wanted to share it as best I could.

(Also, it's been a while since I blogged, so I felt like this was a good opportunity to add something new here)

So here's the link to the sermon if you want it. If you don't want to listen, that's okay. But if you do, please enjoy.

Grace and peace.

Public Shaming and the Invitation to Be Human

There is something truly terrifying about the idea of public shame. You do something—either intentionally or not—and the public at large decides that you deserve to be destroyed as a result.

Jon Ronson’s latest book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is an exploration of this phenomenon. I just finished the book, and it struck me in a powerful way.

We come from a long line of public shaming rituals—stockades, tar and feathers, shaving someone’s head and parading them down the street, etc. Once, when I was driving through my neighborhood, I saw a father forcing his son to stand on the corner holding a giant sign that read “I AM A LIAR!”

So the Internet didn’t invent public shame, but it has certainly perfected the art.

I've been trying to write a summary of the book or any new thoughts on the subject, but my mind is still processing what I've learned and all of the implications for us as human beings. I've only personally known one or two people who have been publicly shamed by any measurable standard, but I can tell you that it changes people. It breaks them in ways that nothing else can. In order to publicly shame someone--to see a person knocked down and then to relentlessly keep kicking them over and over again--we have dismiss their humanity in our eyes. A person has to become a monster to us in order to inflict that level of pain onto them and still be able to live our lives and sleep at night. There's one case study in which a woman was being shamed on Twitter for an insensitive tweet, and one of her shamers said, "I hope this b---- gets raped by someone with AIDS..."  I'm not sure how a person can say something so violent and dark and then go about his life feeling morally superior to anybody. The answer is that he convinced himself that the woman he was shaming was not a real person with real feelings. (Also, I think it's fascinating that the person who tweeted that received absolutely no public shaming from anyone)

So I'm really saying all of this so you'll watch this TED Talk or, even better, read Ronson's book. I think this a very important commentary on our current culture of posting and sharing and voicing our opinions at full volume all the time. Ronson holds up an important--albeit unpleasant--mirror, and we would be well served to see what he shows us.

I feel like Jon Ronson is giving us an opportunity to become human again.

May we accept the invitation.

(WARNING: Adult Language)

For the longest time Jon Ronson reveled in the fact that Twitter gave a voice to the voiceless ... the social media platform gave us all a chance to speak up and hit back at perceived injustice. But somewhere along the way, things took a turn.