Jonathan LeMaster-Smith

I’m pretty sure I post something during Holy Week each year. When I think about this week, I am often just tired. I think we do too much. The pomp and circumstance keep building and the payout is the same.

Regardless, this Holy Week Holy Week, I’m reflecting on things that are happening in my life and the worlds I occupy. Since May of last year, Shannon and I have experienced a lot of changes. A mix of health issues, job changes, the loss of one of our dogs (he was 16 and had lived a good life) have led me to think more about how I spend my time.

In doing so, I’ve made some personal and professional choices to help provide some creative opportunities, focusing on particular jobs, and narrowing down how I understand my vocation. Amid these changes, I put together my sermons for Lent.

Like last year, I let the scriptures lead to country songs that spoke to the meaning I was hearing in the text. Emily Scott Robinson, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Reba McEntire, Gabe Lee, Natalie Hemby, The Highwomen, Ashley McBryde, and Kacey Musgraves settled in as the singers that would help bring these scriptures to life. I realized today, as I only have four songs left, I had selected songs, that brought out a tenant of the scriptures I was not expecting.

The common theme was community. That is, not just community, but community that gives meaning in the face of tragedy. Not every song is overtly about community, but they all deal with relationships. Whether relationships with lovers, friends, community, self, or place, they all speak to relationships.

I don’t know if it’s the Holy Spirit trying to show me what these people need to hear, what I need to hear, or something else, but I was struck by this. That’s not to say community is a novel thing or sermons on relationships have not been preached before. Instead, I think it’s that people needed to be reminded about the purpose about community.

I’ve consistently been thinking about community for years. My dissertation is partially on the beauty and power of community. My fear, though, is that Christianity, at least American Christianity (even my beloved United Methodism) is failing at digging into the value of community. I still think Jean-Luc Nancy is the most right about community. Community is how we experience death.

But more than that, community is how we can face death. It’s how we can survive the agonizing pain of loss. And how we can deal with the finality of life. In the first three months of 2024 my churches have experienced 6 deaths (some members, some closely connected). Since I’ve been here, I’ve participated in or been to over 20 funerals in this community. And those are just the one’s I knew well enough and was able to attend.

My sermons have often been about grief, experiencing death, and the memories that still follow us around. That’s not by coincidence. I know people need these sermons in order to process and transform their grief into hope.

As I move toward Good Friday, I realized I picked a song that doesn’t feel very good Friday. I picked “Lindeville” by Ashley McBryde. It’s a song from the perspective of the clock tower in a rural small town. It’s a beautiful song that is also has some melancholic tones. A song that speaks reality that death does happen, but that in death, we find our way, find who we are, and what matters.

I think maybe why I picked these songs, especially this one, is because we don’t need another set of sermons telling us we’re flawed sinners. We don’t need more judgment, more self-flagellation. We also don’t need an everything’s going to be okay set of sermons. Easter, as much it is about new life, does not negate the real pain of life, yet, we get too otherworldly pietistic or the resurrection gives us rose colored glasses.

What we need, at least from where I sit, is to be reminded that if as long as we don’t give up on each other, on community, we can experience the resurrection of knowing that though we may die, we will not die alone. And in that knowledge, we can begin to transform the grief of death and loss into the hope that can change the world.