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Hello kids, we’re coming at you with some inside baseball pertaining to our brand new sermon series for Lent!  This past Sunday at Liberti Collingswood, we kicked off a five part sequence of messages that will focus on the topic of lament.  As part of this series, I’m loosely basing my preaching on the framework set out in Mark Vroegopp’s excellent Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy.  Here’s the skinny on how such an audacious plan came to pass.

Months ago, I went to our team of elders, who jointly oversee the preaching ministry at Liberti Collingswood along with me, and said, “Lent is coming down the pike; what should we preach for this season?”  In past years at church, we’ve treated the Sundays in Lent as a discreet period that lends itself well to a short blast of teaching on a specific subject, book of the Bible, etc.  As with previous Lents, the elders were game to do something for Lent once again.  (2024, for example, saw us tackle the proverbial “seven deadly sins,” and maybe it was 2021 when we spent some Sundays wrestling with racism in society and in churches.) 

In a big picture way, our elder team is eager to utilize and leverage various liturgical seasons in the life of the church, the two biggies being Lent and Advent.  By plugging into the annual rhythms of the liturgical calendar, we’re reminded that all time is, in fact, God’s time.  The unfolding of days isn’t a free agent or its own thing, and it’s a process that’s certainly not owned and directed by the secular world.  Instead, if Jesus is Lord of all, he is likewise Lord of time, which means more pointedly that he’s Lord of your time and my time.  It’s for this reason that we look to punch up the distinctiveness of liturgical seasons, and this includes Lent.

More specifically for this particular turning of the liturgical calendar, Lent has traditionally been a period set apart for spiritual seriousness, whether that means that Christians take on additional spiritual disciplines, refraining from otherwise good and permissible behaviors for the sake of centering the Lord in our lives, or to give special effort to seek and destroy patterns of sin in our lives.  It’s an appropriately solemn and weighty time of year.

As a further ingredient for this Lenten gumbo, my pastoral spidey sense has been picking up a fair amount of sadness and anxiety in people both within Liberti Collingswood and more broadly.  Some of this state of mind and heart stems from continued processing of last fall’s elections, no matter what side of the political aisle people fall within, but even apart from politics, we are getting worn down by what feels to be deep instability in our lives and in the world.  In other words, at the present time we have much to lament.

Lament!, I thought to myself.  My next step was to open the Old Testament book of Lamentations with an eye toward making it a sermon series, but no dice: Lamentations is a book that I dearly love, but I struggled to envision it as the basis for a week-after-week sermon series.  It’s of course the case that Lamentations is full of, well, lament, but the whole book really is only lamenting one specific thing––the fall of Jerusalem.  I didn’t feel confident in my ability to map out five or six sermons in a row on this one subject.

Meanwhile, however, my wife Emily had picked up on a tip from a friend Vroegopp’s Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy: Discovering the Grace of Lament, and there in the subtitle was what was already on my sermonic mind: a book about laments.  Perfect!  I read through the volume, and a sermon series came together in my mind.

The other elders––talking here about Scott, Clint, Harry, and David––agreed with this plan and added two caveats along the way, both for which I was in agreement.  For one, we want to make sure that even when we do a run of sermons based on a non-Bible book, every sermon at Liberti Collingswood will nevertheless feature a central text from the Scriptures that will be exposited.  Secondly, there was a good discussion on the elder team that yielded the feeling that we should treat lament carefully.  I’ve been increasingly wary of how in this cultural moment, people are heavily influenced by therapeutic/wellness language and tactics––the whole “wellness industrial complex” that I’ll mention in sermons.  While there is overlap between a biblical vision for human wholeness and also contemporary wellness, they’re not the same thing, and Christians need to be careful not to substitute the latter for the former.  The upshot of that observation for our lament sermons is that while lament should be something that’s heard, it shouldn’t necessarily be something that’s indulged.  I feel like when left to their own devices, the strategies embedded within wellness culture too often leave us stuck and amount to little more than increased self-permission.  There’s more to grappling with lament, and to trying to work through lament, than merely taking more personal days. 

And speaking of working through lament: within the biblical worldview, lament is a state of soul both that we are encouraged to walk in but also to walk through.  The good news of the resurrection of Jesus, in the language of last Sunday’s message from Psalm 10, is that the Lord in his resurrection grace and glory will turn all of our mourning into dancing.  Lament will tarry through the night, but an eternal sunshine of joy will dawn upon us when Christ returns.  Furthermore, even in the present, with the help of Spirit, we’re able to fight for, and find, thanksgiving and gratefulness in the midst of our sad world.

Lord, use this sermon series for the blessing of many.

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