Meeting God at Night

PASTOR ALEXIS (narrated by Stephanie Hsu) is a recent divinity school graduate who has been hand-selected by Pastor William Hoyt (voiced by Bill Irwin) to succeed him at Trinity Grace Church in Ohio. Alexis has been working alongside Will, learning the rhythms and rigors of pastoring a small-town church. She’s young, radical, and fearless. These qualities — the very reasons Will chose her — are exactly what make a significant and influential portion of the congregation certain she’s the wrong choice. Then Will dies by suicide. Alexis is thrust into the role of lead pastor far sooner than she expected, and in apocalyptic conditions. All this is merely the first episode of Six Sermons, a 12-episode fiction podcast written by Asa Merritt (a journalist and author of the 2015 play True Believer about the Arab Spring).

Six Sermons is the story of how Alexis navigates this intense crisis: How will the cause of Will’s death impact the congregation? What should the memorial service entail? How is Alexis caring for her own mental health in the wake of her friend and mentor’s death?

Alexis, in particular, experiences God’s absence acutely. Six Sermons powerfully illustrates the humanity of pastors; both Will and Alexis are raw, vulnerable, and flawed. Early in their mentoring relationship, Will tells Alexis, “You don’t really know God until you meet him at night.” This is a story of meeting God at night.

Alexis struggles not only with grief, but with her own mental health. Rather than hide this from the congregation, she leads with it. In one of the titular six sermons, the one she preached at Will’s funeral, Alexis says, “We’re all sitting next to each other, but we’re also swimming in our own private abyss of grief. ... Your grief is unknowable. Yet you are not alone.” These pastors’ faith buoys them, but it is not a magical panacea, as evidenced by Will’s death.

The show’s weakness arrives with the resolution of Alexis’ crisis of faith. “It’s not about me, is it, Jesus?” she says. “It’s about you.” This enables her to be the pastor the church needs to weather the crisis. Merritt, the lead writer and creator of Six Sermons, is not a person of faith. He wrote Six Sermons in response to the suicide of a close friend, and while he spent a month embedded with a congregation and solicited input from pastors, Alexis’ neat resolution rings hollow.

“It’s really all about Jesus” is the trite sort of statement church leaders often use to silence honest questions of the type raised by tragedies. It doesn’t come across as dishonest in Six Sermons — Alexis is certainly not trying to silence doubt and pain — but it does feel like an inelegant, ham-fisted resolution to what is otherwise a kind, empathetic, and nuanced view of faith in the context of church life.

The voice acting is terrific, and the sound design is immersive without being distracting. Such production tools are typically reserved for sci-fi epics, not intimate church dramas. But the themes Six Sermons centers — mental illness, suicide, dark nights of the soul — can feel as apocalyptic as an invasion of body-snatchers when you’re sitting in the center of them. Ultimately, Six Sermons is an affirmation of the unique ability of the faith community to weather the worst kinds of storms.