Guest commentary by George Love
“Serial.” One story told week by week. It was a phenomenon. As with most sensations, I came late to the party.
Last winter, my wife and I were driving – first to Springfield, Missouri, where our daughter played in a holiday basketball tournament (they finished in second place) and then home on New Year’s Eve. That’s about 16 hours of driving, round trip. This turned out to be the perfect setting for binge listening to all 12 episodes of the “Serial” podcast from the folks at “This American Life.” It passed the time and it was interesting. And it’s one of those things that you find yourself thinking about after the fact and applying in a variety of situations.
The church is observing its version of the new year – the liturgical calendar concluded with Christ the King Sunday and brought the dawn of a new liturgical year with the beginning of Advent. As a new calendar year brings thoughts of fresh possibilities and perhaps resolutions of changed behaviors and disciplines, the new liturgical year may stretch out before pastors as a fresh slate of opportunity about the way we will prepare for worship, explore the texts and hammer out well-planned sermon series that are both relevant and interesting. I find myself comparing my feelings about the arrival of the new liturgical year with my learnings from listening to “Serial.”
Serial begins with a lot of energy. There’s this guy who is in prison. Maybe he shouldn’t be. He was convicted for murder, but there seems to be a lot of holes in the full story. Enter intrepid radio reporter with a curiosity to uncover what actually happened. Her approach is straightforward: arrange the facts, check the timeline, review the accounts of the participants. Early on, there is close attention paid to the timeline. If a certain window of time can be accounted for in some way, then the whole case goes away. Or so it seems. Until it just gets more (rather than less) confusing. By the time “Serial” hits its homestretch – its final three or four episodes – it becomes clear that the facts are negotiable, that the timeline may not help all that much at all and that we may be no closer to having any idea who to believe than we did when we began this project.
As the weeks wind down, the focal point of the show, Adnan Syed (who has been convicted for the murder the show explores), asks narrator Sarah Koenig if her show will have an end. How will this tie up? Will it just be finished, or will there be some sort of outcome, conclusion or point made? She answers that it will have an end. And it does. But it’s not clean and there is much left in the balance. Which is not a criticism – just a reality.
A reality that brings me back to the early days of a new liturgical year. That first Sundays of Advent are like the early days of “Serial.” As summer turned into fall, as Christian education programs hit their stride with the new school year, as stewardship season arrives and Christmas looms – yes, looms – as all of this happens, our good intentions about doing better with our preparation and planning can seem a distant dream. And as Advent approaches we begin the dance anew. If we can just examine the process of our practices closely and get a good look at them, we can fix the place where our timeline ran off the rails. We can get everything in order so the new year will look dramatically different than all that has come before.
It is worthwhile to make the effort. There are always places where we can work out new approaches and add depth and meaning to our approach to preaching and to worship. This should be done gently, however, understanding that some of the most important elements of our preaching and worship – those that are formed in the living of our days in the midst of people who do unpredictable things and are together participants in an endlessly complex and surprising life – have yet to unfold.
Our worship is God’s story: one story, told week by week. Formed from the raw materials of that one story lived daily, hourly, minute by minute. What to say, how to prepare and plan should surely be manageable and doable. Except when it is not. Always. Except when it is not.
GEORGE LOVE is the pastor of Hebron Presbyterian Church in Shepherdsville, Kentucky. He is a husband, father, sports fan, comic book collector and enjoyer of pop culture who loves discovering God in all of it.
