Book Review: The Gospel of John

Information about the book

The Gospel of John by Amy-Jill Levine.  Published by Abingdon Press, Nashville, 2024.  (Amazon / Cokesbury).

Summary

From Amazon: John’s Gospel offers readers a new language―of being born anew, of living water, of wind and spirit, of the “I am”―that enhances how we understand the divine, how we experience the world, and how we participate in the mystery of faith.

With her characteristic wit and charm, Amy-Jill Levine introduces readers to the world of the Gospel of John by unpacking the stories in their original context, along with examining how the text is read today. This book considers the Gospel of John in its entirety, moving through the Gospel and exploring the prologue, the wedding at Cana, the Samaritan woman at the well and the woman caught in adultery, the healing of the man at the pool and the man born blind, foot washing, Mary Magdalene and Doubting Thomas, and the Lamb of God.

Components available to use this book in a small group study include a leader guide and video available on DVD.

Impressions

This book takes a journey through the complicated Gospel of John in a way that will feed the open mind and provide new insights. The chapters often look at a pair of stories instead of just one - that pairing provides greater clarity than just one story by itself.

I always grow and enhance my understanding when I read a book by Amy-Jill Levine. This is an excellent look at the Gospel and I highly recommend it.

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Perspectives: Sprocket, King of the blankets

 

May your labor day be a day of relaxation and enjoyment.

Repentance as a Human Action

I visited a church I don't normally attend a few weeks ago. The minister's sermon was centered on repentance. His thesis was that repentance is an decision, not an emotion. He stated that God cannot save a person who is not repentant.

I was uncomfortable (and disagreed with) the belief that God is powerless to reach us if we are not repentant - if we are unable or unwilling to turn back to God. It seems to me that all of us ARE unable or unwilling to repent without the intercession of God. This is what grace is about. This is what mercy is about. The pastor's thesis, to me, makes God powerless, and negates not only the need for grace but the action of grace, motivated by God's mercy.

Today, the day after I heard that sermon, I read the following in Jon Meacham's book, The Hope of Glory:

Today you will be with Me in Paradise: God is all-powerful and far beyond our control and our comprehension. His mercy is available to all, even if the ways and means of grace remain mysterious, veiled from our eyes and our understandings.

To  me, the pastor I heard preach on Sunday not only negates the power of God, but also, without humility, fails to understand that he himself (and those to whom he is preaching) are unable to repent without God. It seems like he is assuming that he (and those to whom he is preaching) have accomplished repentance and therefore opened themselves up to God, all on their own, and now they exist without sin, and no more in need of repentance.

Perspectives: Stairway

 

I just read in Amy-Jill Levine's book, Genesis: A Beginner's Guide to the Beginning, that Jacob's ladder wasn't a ladder, it was a stairway.  

Book review: Sacraments and Discipleship

Information about the book

Sacraments & Discipleship: Understanding Baptism and the Lord's Supper in a United Methodist Context by Mark W. Stamm. Published by OSL Publications, 2001.  The book can be purchased from Amazon or Cokesbury (and probably other places).

Summary

From Amazon: The primary task of the Christian life is to respond to God’s gracious initiative by loving God and our neighbor, that is, the people God puts in our path. The sacraments help us do that. They hold up a vision of new life, and they make that life possible. This book discusses how such sacramental grace comes to us and how we might open ourselves to it in a more complete way. It emphasizes the work of God’s grace, yet insists that there is a human side of the covenant, the work of receiving grace. Dr. Stamm helps us discover once again that to talk about the sacraments is to talk about the entirety of human life and Christian discipleship.

Impressions

I have such mixed feelings about this book. I picked it because I wanted to enhance my understanding of the sacraments as I lead the Conference CLM class. I always bring in elders (actually, the Bishop, if she is available) to talk to the class about the Sacraments, but I wanted to grow my own understanding, too.

At first, I really liked the book, but the more I read, the less I liked it, so that after the first couple of chapters, I DNFed (marked the book "did not finish").  A couple of months later, I picked it up again and did complete it.

There are enlightening portions of this book, but there are also portions that felt - I don't even know how to explain my experience of reading it. Parts felt less than grace-filled and legalistic.

I'm not sure if I would recommend it or not.

Perspectives: Balance

Here is one more from Lakeside - it makes me think about balance.

Lakeside Chautauqua Ohio images

Last week, Steve and I attended a conference at Lakeside Chautauqua in Ohio.  It's a beautiful place; here are some images from our walk on Monday:

Complexity and Growth

Take a look at these quotes from Jon Meachem's book, The Hope of Glory:

• Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it (Blaise Pascal).
• There are more things in heaven and earth ... than are dreamt of in your philosophy (Shakespeare in Hamlet).
• For now, we can only "see through a glass, darkly" (Paul from 1 Corinthians)

Meachem provides these quotes, and then says, "For the thoughtful believer, then, there is nothing more certain that the reality of uncertainty, nothing more natural that doubt, which  perhaps thirty seconds younger than faith itself."

I was teaching a Sunday school class once, and I asked them about doubt. I was hoping to have a good discussion on the role of doubt in faith. One of the students said that doubt was from the devil. That kind of stopped the conversation.

Sometimes, I think, we come to faith with a closed mind, grown through countless people telling us how to believe, that "the Bible says it, and that's the way it is." I think the problem with that kind of faith is multifaceted. 

• We talking about faith in God - a God we cannot hope to understand. We can certainly know something, but we cannot know all. To pretend that we do is folly.
• We believe God created us, and that grand, divine design includes a brain. We are meant to apply reason to faith, and in fact, doubt and exploration, questioning, can lead to a strong, more robust, and dare I say more complete, faith. Blind faith does not do that and can prevent our growth through sanctifying grace.
• Meachem says, "Light can neither emanate from, nor enter into , a closed mind. Literalism not only stops our growth but it also prevents us from sharing light with others.

I especially like this quote, "Without reason, we cannot appreciate complexity; without appreciating complexity, we cannot rightly appreciate the majesty and mystery of God; and without rightly appreciating the majesty and mystery of God, we foreclose the possibility of the miraculous and the redemptive."

 

Perspectives: Color Temperature

This is something that annoys my husband to no end - different color temperatures in light fixtures.  What is your pet peeve?

Afraid of Loss

I was in a meeting the other day.  Our new pastor asked us what we like about our church, what we want from our church, and what we wish for.

What I wrote in response to the "want for" questions was that I wanted our church to not be afraid and to stop acting out of fear of death. We value our church, and we are afraid it is dying. Therefore, many of our actions seem motivated through that fear. Does that even make sense as a thought?

In Tod Bolsinger's book, Invest in Transformation, he writes, "People don't resist change, they resist loss."  What happens when we see opposition to change in that light? I think when we realize that people are afraid, and that they are resisting loss, we can act differently towards them. We are more graceful and helpful. There may be things we can do as leaders in the face of fear of loss that we would not realize were solutions if we were just mad about their resistance to change.

In a later paragraph, Bolsinger quotes Ronald Heifetz, "Most real change is not about the change. It's about identifying what cultural DNA is worth conserving, is precious and essential, and that indeed makes it worth suffering the losses so that you can find a way to bring the best of your traditions and history and values into the future."

How do we help people make that identification without sinking into the quagmire of "how we used to be?"

One more quote from Bolsinger: "So, when an organization feels stress, the default behavior of most organizational leaders is to solve the problems for our organizations rather than change our organizations for meeting the needs of the world. The result is that instead of undergoing transformation to be more effective in our mission to the serve the world, organizations unconsciously reinforce the very status quo that is no longer working." Have you seen that?

Father, Forgive them

I read Jon Meacham's book, The Hope of Glory.  It is a study of the last seven words/phrases of Christ.

The first chapter is a look at "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." His thesis is that while we often use these words as evidence of not only Jesus's forgiveness of those who are executing him, but of all of us - evidence of the forgiving nature of Jesus and therefore God, he (Meacham) doesn't see it that way.

Meacham proposes that "Jesus's death was essential to Christian hope."  He says, "So why does Luke have Jesus seem to be forgiving his tormentors for playing the critical and necessary role in bringing about the salvation few the world and the coming of a kingdom of justice?" I other words (as I see what Meacham is saying), the idea that the death of Christ is essential for God's plan of salvation means that those who perpetrated it are not in need of forgiveness. Does it seem to you that he is proposing that because the death of essential, those who executed Jesus were working in God's plan?

I'm going to leave aside the idea that Jesus's death is essential to Christian hope for just a moment (I think we could have a discussion around that idea, too. I'm troubled by the idea that the executioners do not need forgiveness (because of a lack of sin in this instance) because the death of Jesus was part of God's plan. They didn't kill him because they were motivating by bringing about God's kingdom. They killed him because they were threatened and were seeking to continue their power.  They executed an innocent man - not for any kingdom-bringing purposes. It certainly seems to me that forgiveness was necessary.

In fact, the very idea of their actions demonstrates not a motivation to bring about the kingdom, but evidence of our need (and their need) for grace and forgiveness. If God needed the execution of his son to bring about the salvation of the world (which I have my doubts about), then could it be because we are a people who would commit these acts? I don't think we can ignore the sin when the sin is the reason God needs to intervene.

 

Perspectives: A church sign

 A church sign...

Book Review: Invest in Transformation

 

Information about the book

Invest in Transformation: Quite Relying on Trust by Tod Bolsinger.  Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, Illinois, 2024.  Available from Amazon and Cokesbury.  This is part of the Practicing Change series by Bolsinger.

Summary

From Amazon: In a world where skepticism often clouds judgment, communities need leaders who can reignite the spirit of unity and continuity. Trust is a delicate currency—it can be hoarded or squandered, but only when wisely invested can it truly fuel transformation. Bestselling author Tod Bolsinger offers leaders a compelling guide for transformation and trust with Invest in Transformation.

Impressions

This was the fourth Practicing Change books that I have read, completing the series. It's my least favorite one. I wrote in my book journal, "This is one of a series of books on leadership through challenging times. It speaks of trust as a resource, although is is not transformation on its own. It is another short and easily digestible book with insights for leaders, but it is not as engaging as the others."

Posts about book

Here is the link to all four books, plus Tempered Resilience, another Bolsinger book.

Unlikely Relationships

This past spring, I read the book An Unlikely Lent (Rachel Billups).  One of the chapters was about Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. The name of the chapter was "Unlikely Allies."

Billups starts the chapter by telling the story of Daryl Davis, a black man. He is a "R&B and blues musician and activist."  At the age of 10, he encountered racism for the first time (but not for the last time). An encounter with a member of the KKK when he was an adult, performing, started him on a path to create unlikely relationships.

He would befriend members of the KKK and have conversations with them. According to Billups, nearly 200 members of the Klan committed to Davis to give up their racism because of his work in creating relationships with them.  (Here is a TED talk that he gave called Klan we Talk?)

I think about those people around me who have vastly different political beliefs systems than me. Those who "spout off" about how stupid everyone else is.  Could I form a relationship with a person who believes that women should not be ordained? That LGBTQ+ people should be excluded from the church? With the person who is a white supremist? Or a person who seems to vocally hate what I would say is truth?  Where are your unlikely relationships? Could you work to create bridges?

Can love transform enemies into friends?

 

Perspectives: Windows