"I Asked For Wonder"

“Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me.”  -Abraham Joshua Heschel

I tend to overthink most things. I like facts and data and stories--which, according to Brene Brown, are just "data with a pulse." When I have a question and someone can offer a rational, well-researched answer, it scratches me right where I itch.

I like facts and research so much that I recently finished preaching the longest, most research-intensive sermon series I have ever done. It was a series on the book of Revelation, and my hope was that people could find a grounded story of real people in real places in a book that is way too weird and confusing for most people. So I attempted to use historical research and archaeological discovery as a way to give people a new sense of comfort with such a strange book.

But this coming Sunday (October 2), I'm going to start a series that is very different, and it's something that challenges me as much as it may challenge anybody else. The series is called I Asked For Wonder, which is a phrase that was borrowed from Abraham Joshua Heschel (the quote at the top of this post). 

So what is this sermon series going to be?

It will be an exploration of the things that we cannot explain or fully understand. This series will be an acknowledgment that, for all of the things that we can know and control, there are some things that are completely out of our grasp. The human intellect can only take us so far, and it is at that borderline between what we can know and what we could never know that we often encounter God.

It is at this place where our rational understanding begins to lose ground and all we have left is wonder.

It is wonder that makes us fully alive--that tunes us into the activity of the divine within the tangible world.

It is wonder that causes our eyes to go wide and remind us that we can still be amazed in this life and that God might still be able to surprise us in all kinds of unexpected ways.

So this series will be about the intangibles. It will be a sermon series about wonder.

Because sometimes we need answers and data and understanding because it helps us make sense of something that has troubled us for too long.

But sometimes we need to allow space for the unknown and the unknowable--we need to open ourselves up in ways that leave space for the divine surprises in this life.

In short, we are talking about wonder.

Why Lots of Church Staffers Secretly Hate Easter

If you’ve never worked for a church, you may not know the level of tension and stress that comes with Easter Sunday. Among church staffers, Easter is often referred to as “the Super Bowl of church services.” I have been working in churches—in one capacity or another—for fifteen years, and this mentality has been present every single year.

I woke up this morning with an extra degree of anxiety because today is Monday and Easter Sunday is six days away. I barely slept last night. I have hardly shaken off the “pastor hangover” from yesterday, and I am already completely consumed with stress over how Easter Sunday will go.

(“Pastor hangover,” by the way, is when a pastor wakes up on Monday tired with a headache and can’t completely remember everything he or she said the day before).

But then—just now, actually—I had a realization, and it calmed me down. I realized that I don’t have to live like that. Part of what makes Collective Church so wonderful and special is that we get to make our own rules and set our own standards for what makes a successful Easter (or any other Sunday, for that matter).

I’ve been part of churches that crank everything all the way up to eleven on Easter. They pull out all of the bells and whistles—fog machines (for real), concession stands, gift bags, top-notch video production, popular cover songs (well, church popular, which means they are roughly three to five years past the point of being popular to the rest of the world), and everything else they can fit in there with the kitchen sink. Everybody is on high alert like an Emergency Room staff during a full moon. It’s crazy.

As a result, Easter for me has never been joyful or celebratory or fun. Instead, it’s been stressful and exhausting.

But like I said, I don’t have to live like that, and I don’t have to make my staff and volunteers live like that, either.

So here’s what we’re going to do at Collective Church for Easter: We’re going to have a church service just like we do every week. We will do everything we can do in order to make the experience good and interesting and creative, because that’s what we do every week. We will also have an Easter Egg Hunt for the kids, because it’s fun.

But we will do all of these things as ourselves. I’m not renting a sound system or a video projector or setting up a giant inflatable waving thing outside the hotel where we have our services because that’s not who we are.

I think Easter is often treated by churches as if they are going on a first date, and they want to make sure they show up in a super impressive way. We preach sermons about being yourself, and then we do everything we can to make ourselves seem cooler than we really are.

And we don’t have to live like that.

Do I want people to attend our church on Easter? Of course I do. And I would be thrilled if they decided to come back again. But if they do come back, I want them to recognize us when they get there. That’s why we will be doing our Easter services as ourselves.

Easter is a time when we celebrate resurrection and renewal—when we remind ourselves that there is a better story that we are invited to participate in. Should that really be loaded down with unreasonable expectations and undue anxiety?

So I’m letting us all off the hook. We will not treat Easter like the Super Bowl of church services. We will treat Easter like a normal Sunday in which we try our best to give people a meaningful experience.

(You should know that I'm writing this for myself as much as anyone else. I plan to revisit this post several times this week as the anxiety rises and falls.)

If we are to be the kind of church that offers grace and peace to our people, we need to be open to receive that same grace and peace when we feel the greatest pressure to perform.

So Happy Easter, everybody.

Grace and peace be with you.

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)

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.

Welcome to Church. We Will Disappoint You.

Since starting Collective, I have encountered lots of wounded people who feel that their wounds are the result of a former church experience. I have lost count on the number of times I have heard people say,

“I was burned by a church,” or

 “After that happened, I never wanted to go back to a church again,”  or

“I can’t believe a church could treat someone that way!”

Or some variation on these statements.

There are lots of people who left (or were forced to leave) a church under dark, negative circumstances.

And I sympathize. In my life, I have been involved in a handful of churches—sometimes as staff and sometimes as layperson—and I have experienced the dark side of church just like lots of other people. When I left my last church job—before deciding to start Collective Church—I thought I was done working in churches for good.

(There’s a whole other conversation about what working for a church can do to a pastor or staff person, and I’m sure we’ll get to that at some point here on the blog.)

Whenever I hear someone’s story of mistreatment or unfairness within a church, my first emotional response is to get angry and silently promise myself that I would never allow something like that to happen in a church where I was the pastor. I listen as people grieve their past experiences, and I feel superior because I tell myself that Collective Church is above that kind of behavior.

But we aren’t.

After that first rush of self-congratulatory piety, my feet return to the ground, and I remind myself that I—along with every other person who attends my church—am fully capable of infliction pain on other people. Going to seminary didn’t immunize me from being short-sighted, and a decade and-a-half spent working in churches hasn’t protected me from waking up in the morning as a deeply flawed human being.

A few years ago, I randomly started thinking about a conversation I had with a high school student when I was a youth pastor. She came to me seeking counsel, and--as I remembered the conversation--I knew that I had given her bad advice. My heart was in the right place, but I didn’t know what I was doing. So—as I relived this event in my memory—I sent this young woman (now a full grown adult, graduated from college), and I told her that I was sorry and that I hoped she could forgive me for giving her poor counsel. She replied and was very gracious; she clearly remembered our conversation from years before, and she recalled with a great deal of accuracy what I had said to her. She said she knew that I had meant well, and she appreciated that I reached out to say I was sorry.

Here’s something most pastors don’t want you to know: we frequently have no idea what we are doing. We might pretend we do, but we don’t. Most of us went to school and learned a lot about Greek and Hebrew and Martin Luther and how to preach a sermon, but almost none of us have any great insight on how to help people in exactly the way they need to be helped all the time. Sometimes we get it right; but we get it wrong just as often.

When we first started Collective Church, I secretly agonized over the fear of making a mistake and making our church the object of someone’s “I-was-burned-by-a-church” story.

If you think about it, it’s pretty inevitable. Everyone has expectations over what their church should do and what people should say in a given circumstance, and when we don’t meet those expectations, people get upset. If a person misses church for three weeks in a row and they don’t receive a phone call, that person might complain that “I was gone for three whole weeks, and nobody cared enough to even pick up the phone!” But then someone else could be absent for three weeks, receive a phone call from a church staff person, and then complain that “I was only gone for three weeks, and then they started badgering me!” Believe it or not, I have heard both of these complaints, almost verbatim, from different people about the same church.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that a church—any church—is made up of human beings who are certain to make mistakes along the way. If you are part of a church for any length of time, there will come a day when you feel frustrated with that church. I guarantee it.

Nadia Bolz-Weber—a pastor in Denver—writes this in her book Pastrix:

Every human community will disappoint us, regardless of how well-intentioned or inclusive. But I am totally idealistic about God’s redeeming work in my life and in the world…. I wanted [the people in my church] to hear me: This community will disappoint them. It’s a matter of when, not if. We will let them down or I’ll say something stupid and hurt their feelings. I then invite them on this side of their inevitable disappointment to decide if they’ll stick around after it happens…. Welcome to [our church]. We will disappoint you.

Don't get me wrong: There are times when leaving is the right choice. I know of pastors who preach sermons or write blog posts about how it’s wrong or selfish to leave a church, even if you’re miserable. I won’t say that. Sometimes you need to go. If there has been abuse or chronic, systematic mistreatment of people, there comes a point when you may feel that your very presence in that place is a way of condoning the behavior—as if continuing your participation in that church somehow makes you complicit in the dark patterns. If you need to leave because of an injustice or because the situation cannot be redeemed, then you should go.

However, if you have been disappointed because of a misunderstanding or because of a personal conflict or because of some other inevitable side-effect of being in community with a bunch of other flawed, broken people, then can I invite you to look for reconciliation? Most churches are filled with people who insist that there is resurrection in the world, and sometimes we need to be agents of that resurrection. Sometimes we need to be the ones who allow for the possibility that redemption is still possible in this place.

Like Nadia Bolz-Weber says, I am idealistic about God’s redeeming work, and sometimes that means allowing a church to heal from the inside and hoping for some kind of renewal. Maybe the most honest experience of church some of us will have will be in the moments when we forgive and are forgiven.

As I said before, sometimes you need to leave. If you are in a toxic, destructive environment, you owe it to yourself to get out of there.

But if the conflict can be resolved—if an apology, a cup of coffee, a hug, or a handshake can somehow bring healing to a situation—then I hope you will keep trying. You owe that to yourself, too.

The church can be a beautiful place, even if it is filled with screw-ups like me.