Today's free download of quotes feels especially timely and needed. The authors remind me of the most important aspect of Lent: that we, like Christ, are to die to self for the sake of others, out of love. I pray these quote offer you similar comfort, wisdom, and guidance this Lent and throughout 2024.
Discover how to create a theme for a preaching season. Having done the hardest work of all in finding a message for the season, you’ll narrow your focus from the start. There will be far less decision-making and time spent looking for that germ of an idea. Plus, your exegesis time will be shortened because you’ll head into it with the theme mind, allowing you to focus on just the resources you need, decreasing the time spent on fruitless rabbit trails.
Do we really need Lent this year? Do we need—yet another—season of withdrawal, discipline, and abstention? Haven’t we been living in such a season for the last two years? Since the global pandemic began, we have been deprived of birthday meals, wedding gatherings, and the comfort we receive from expressing our collective grief at funerals. We’ve missed out on meals at restaurants, concerts and plays, hugging our friends, sitting at our favorite coffee shops, and receiving consecrated bread and wine. What does Lent have to teach us that the last two years haven’t?
Lent is the time when we face our sin unflinchingly because God yearns for us to be re-integrated into our original wholeness, so that we love completely. For your inspiration or adaptation, I’ve crafted a Lenten sermon series that focuses on the ways we dis-integrate ourselves from the body of Christ, and God’s corresponding call to be re-integrated as One. Each sermon offers a focus text, a point of disintegration, and God’s corresponding call to re-integrate us.
In our shrunken worlds with fewer distractions, we can be re-membered by God, reminded that it doesn’t matter what the project is, because all there is is what’s in front of us. Whether we serve in that moment to stitch together a prayer or an alternate-reality Ash Wednesday service or a humble email to confirm an appointment, there is only one thing: to serve.
We preachers often wonder whether our words have any effect. The people we preach to and the world around us pretty much look the same week after week. It doesn’t often look like the Good News has caught fire in people’s hearts. It doesn’t look like the reign of God is being built. For all our efforts to preach the Good News, how come it looks like nothing much is changing?
Let’s be honest: The observation of Lent is often reduced to artificially somber and ritualistic practices of self-denial without an honest, whole-hearted attempt to genuinely experience the flow and meaning of the season. The “practices” undertaken involve simply giving up chocolate or wine. That’s suffering for Jesus, for sure, but what does it accomplish if we’re not focused meaningfully on what we should be? So I’d like to suggest that in our preaching, we shake things up a bit. Let’s preach a countercultural Lent.
