Stembler Scholar at FPC Atlanta

Devotional- May 13th, 2020 by Chris Holmes
Scripture for the Day: John 8:31-38
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I know we’re not supposed to play favorites, especially with Holy Scripture, but the Gospel of John is not my favorite gospel. It hasn’t been for a while. And some of this, admittedly, is a matter of comparison. I prefer Mark’s mysterious, even enigmatic, portrait of Jesus to John’s in your face, isn’t-it-so-obvious account of his life and divinity. I find Matthew’s recounting of Jesus’s teaching to be more instructive, and certainly more straightforward, than the way in which John’s Jesus speaks in long discourses filled with metaphorical and symbolic language. In Luke, Jesus’s invitation to table fellowship is surprisingly wide, and it includes both the rich and the poor, those who have power and those on the margins; in John, the invitation seems far more narrow and exclusive.

But it’s not just about comparison or preference. Some of John just seems more problematic. John deals in strict binaries: good and bad, light and darkness, salvation and destruction, sight and blindness, freedom and slavery. There is little ambiguity, little room, it seems, for the complexity of lived experience. John seems to reduce discipleship to a matter of belief; you’re “in” if you can mentally affirm certain things about Jesus, and you’re “out” if you can’t.

And then there’s John’s portrait of the “Jews.” The Greek word for Jews (Ioudaios) occurs seventy times in John’s Gospel, a huge number in comparison to the five occurrences each in the gospels of Matthew and Luke and the seven occurrences in the Gospel of Mark. In John, the Jews are more than Jesus’s intellectual sparring partners. They are portrayed as a threat to him and to his disciples, and ultimately John places responsibility for Jesus’s death squarely on their shoulders. The depiction of the Jews in the Gospel of John has been used to justify unthinkable violence against our Jewish brothers and sisters.

In short, I find that John’s gospel often requires a lot more interpretive work. While the Greek of John is relatively simple, discerning exactly what a passage means is more difficult. And that is true of our passage for today.

The passage moves from good to bad to really bad quite quickly. The passage opens on a positive note: Jesus is speaking with some Jews who had come to believe in him. This is a big deal. Jesus’s opponents seem to be moving in the right direction. But before you know it, they show that they don’t actually understand Jesus or his teaching. By the end of the chapter, they are picking up stones to try to kill Jesus.

As I have wrestled with this passage over the last few days, I have asked God to show me how this passage can lead to our transformation. I am not satisfied with a surface-level reading of the text that demonizes the Jewish people while giving Christians a sense of pious self-assurance because we’ve checked the right boxes in the belief column. So, how can we read ourselves into this text more effectively?

I think this passage asks one fundamental question of us: how are we bound? To what are we slaves? In the passage, Jesus’s conversation partners deny the possibility of their own bo***ge. Ignoring God’s great work in delivering the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt, they assert that they’ve never been slaves to anyone. And we too may assert our own autonomy and independence. We might point to how boldly we exercise our rights or boast in our financial independence. In the age of Covid-19, some celebrate their freedom from fear or government overreach. We are not slaves to anything or anyone. We live in the land of the free, after all.

But like the characters in our passage, we deceive ourselves if we do not think we are bound. Bo***ge today can take many forms. Some are bound to their schedules. Others are bound by the expectations of others. Emotional pain or trauma from the past entrap. The narratives that we tell ourselves about our worth or our potential limit how we engage the world and those around us. We can be slaves to our smartphones and our bank accounts. Counting calories and watching our weight can be just as unforgiving a master as our overindulgence with alcohol or food.

Jesus’s words in John 8 invite us to tell the truth about ourselves and those things to which we are bound. Jesus tells us that such truth-telling is liberating: “You will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” This is one of the reasons I have always loved the Prayer of Confession in the Reformed worship tradition. It invites us to an honest assessment of ourselves and our ways of being in the world. We practice telling the truth about ourselves, not to earn God’s forgiveness or because God does not already know these truths, but because we are prone to deception, and deception leads to our bo***ge. The good news of this passage is found in verse 36: “So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” Jesus…

Friends, my friends and colleagues at First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta created a helpful video for parents and children about COVID-19. Check out the description here and the link below:
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Q&A for Kids: Community Helpers Talk About COVID-19
Why is everything closing? Can kids have playdates? How are the elderly in the congregation? Watch as First Presbyterian community helpers – pastors, physicians, counselors – answer questions that kids and parents have about the Coronavirus. Join us to find words of faith for these tough times.

Q&A for KidsCommunity Helpers Talk About COVID-19 Why is everything closing? Can kids have playdates? How are the elderly in the congregation? Watch as First Presbyterian community helpers – pastors, physici...

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Muslims and Islam Email Mini-course | Pew Research Center Alan Cooperman has been writing about religion for decades, first as a journalist and now as the director of religion research at Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan, nonadvocacy fact tank. He and his team have distilled a large body of research on Muslims and Islam into four short email lessons, del...

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February Discipleship Newsletter

My heart is full after a great night last night at First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta for the January gathering of Dinner and Dialogue. Iyabo did amazingly as my co-facilitator and co-conspirator. Those gathered began to unpack inadequate understandings of race and racism thanks to the sage advice of Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes's new book, I Bring the Voices of My People. We made space for ourselves and for one another. I am so looking forward to our next gathering in February.

What’s Your Epiphany? Come learn more about FPC’s social entrepreneurship initiative, connect with others, and share your gifts as we kick off Epiphany 2020 during a combined adult Sunday school on Epiphany Sunday.
Hope to see you on January 5, 2019, 9:50–10:50 a.m. in the Wirth Room. Everyone is welcome!

“Also Sophie could do was paint graffiti and send paper leaflets out into the dark world. I can almost hear the question she asked before she died, ‘How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up to a righteous cause?’ How can I attempt any less than to knock just one chip out of the wall? I know that I must be more than a healer of the Word. I must step forward and make a start.” That’s the final chapter in a great book. Highly recommend it. @ Ormewood Park, Atlanta

Come explore Scotland with me!!!

Explore the history of the Reformation in Scotland and the origins of the Presbyterian Church. Travel in the footsteps of the great reformer John Knox. Visit Edinburgh, Glasgow, Stirling, St. Andrews, Rosslyn Chapel, and one of the initial sparks of Christianity in Europe, the Isle of Iona. This study tour has been customized for the Stembler Center at First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta by Academy International Travel Services, Inc.

The ten-day study tour departs Atlanta on September 12, 2020, and returns on September 22. The price of the tour will be approximately $4,600 per person, which includes airfare, lodging, most meals, and admission to museums and other sites. Scholarships are available. Space is limited.

There will be an informational meeting on February. Contact Chris Holmes for more information.

Beautiful start to the Christmas Oratorio concert.