Get out your beach towel, pull up your lawn chair, hang up your hammock – summer is a great time for reading! In worship this summer we’ll look at books that appeal to readers of all ages and hold them up to the lens of our faith tradition.
In literature we find powerful stories of the human experience that can form us and shape us like no other art form. Whether authors intended it or not, evidence of the Divine can be found throughout the pages of their stories. Jesus’ parables were often based on well known stories that people would recognize as soon as they heard them. Literature offers modern day parables that are relevant in our time.
We have free copies of the books available in the Commons to borrow and read at your convenience. Read these great books for the first time or read them again!
June 3 | June 10 | June 17 | July 1 | July 8
June 3 – Guess How Much I Love You
Sam McBratney and Anita Jeram
It is said that God is an invisible parent, and parents are the visible God. We learn attachment from an early age, and before we can even speak, we understand love. We tell our children stories illustrating our love, in hopes that we can articulate the mystery of this profound emotion. Little Nutbrown Hare and Big Nutbrown Hare help us explain the phenomenon of God’s love as a parent loves a child.
BOOK OVERVIEW
“Guess how much I love you,” says Little Nutbrown Hare. Little Nutbrown Hare shows his daddy how much he loves him: as wide as he can reach and as far as he can hop. But Big Nutbrown Hare, who can reach farther and hop higher, loves him back just as much. Well then, Little Nutbrown Hare loves him right up to the moon, but that’s just halfway to Big Nutbrown Hare’s love for him.
June 10 – The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
It is fundamental to the Christian view of humanity that we are made in God’s image and likeness. It can be tempting to conflate that analogy with a worldview that prizes physical and material allure over spiritual truth, the way Jay Gatsby does in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby.
It can also be tempting to interpret Christ’s command that we be perfect using the world’s, and Gatsby’s definition of perfection, dealing in earthly success alone. But The Great Gatsby dwells on the falsehood of this material “American dream” in much the way that Christ shunned earthly cares. Whether you’re reading Gatsby for the first time or the one hundredth time – we all have something to learn about the ways we ourselves confuse earthly and heavenly perfection.
BOOK OVERVIEW
On its first publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby was largely dismissed as a light satire on Jazz Age follies. Today, it is acknowledged as a masterpiece: a love story, an exploration of the American dream and arguably the greatest American novel of the 20th century. Narrator Nick Carraway tells the story of his neighbour Jay Gatsby, whose parties at his Long Island mansion are as lavish as his past is mysterious. Yet Gatsby cares only for one of his guests: his lost love Daisy Buchanan, now married and living across the bay. In Fitzgerald’s hands, this deceptively simple story becomes a near-perfect work of art, told in hauntingly beautiful prose.
June 17 – A Crack in the Sea
Heather M Bouwman
A Crack in the Sea is a magical journey through three tales of separation and reunion, family and friendship. The story weaves together the adventures of three sibling sets. Venus and Swimmer are captured in Africa and are thrown off the slave ship into the ocean when sickness spreads. Thanh and Sang are escaping Vietnam as boat people, and Kinchen takes care of Pip, who is face-blind but can talk to fishes.
For us as Christians, storytelling helps us understand who we are and who we are called to be. Our story is one of liberation, over and over again. Similarly, these three stories intertwine and share a common narrative of freedom and escape. God’s dream for us is to have abundant life, and the human journey is about overcoming the struggles that impede our ability to fully live and love. Through this mystical adventure, we see ourselves in the character’s pursuit of the basic human desires for family and security.
BOOK OVERVIEW
No one comes to the Second World on purpose. The doorway between worlds opens only when least expected. The Raft King is desperate to change that by finding the doorway that will finally take him and the people of Raftworld back home. To do it, he needs Pip, a young boy with an incredible gift—he can speak to fish; and the Raft King is not above kidnapping to get what he wants. Pip’s sister Kinchen, though, is determined to rescue her brother and foil the Raft King’s plans.
This is but the first of three extraordinary stories that collide on the high seas of the Second World. The second story takes us back to the beginning: Venus and Swimmer are twins captured aboard a slave ship bound for Jamaica in 1781. They save themselves and others from a life of enslavement with a risky, magical plan—one that leads them from the shark-infested waters of the first world to the second. Pip and Kinchen will hear all about them before their own story is said and done. So will Thanh and his sister Sang, who we meet in 1978 on a small boat as they try to escape post-war Vietnam. But after a storm and a pirate attack, they’re not sure they’ll ever see shore again. What brings these three sets of siblings together on an adventure of a lifetime is a little magic, helpful sea monsters and that very special portal, A Crack in the Sea.
July 1 – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings conveys the diminished sense of herself that pervaded much of her childhood. Overtime she learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, and her own strong spirit will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned. Her story reminds us that there is hope for all of us. When we have lost our way and lost our voice, we can find it again.
Maya writes of the impact some people had on the composition of her life’s song. When love, caring and concern are offered to us it changes the composition of the song of our life. Who has changed your song? How does God call us to contribute to the composition of other people’s songs?
BOOK OVERVIEW
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age—and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. And for almost a decade didn’t speak. She spent years of almost complete silence. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare”) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned. When she finally found her voice again this former dancer, singer, director and television scriptwriter, author, poet, professor has touched the lives of millions with her powerful words.
July 8 – Sulfur Springs
William Kent Krueger
“In the balance of who we are and what we do, the weight of history is immeasurable.”
Sulfur Springs continues in William Kent Krueger’s series following Cork O’Connor the former sheriff of Tamarack County, Minnesota. Readers familiar with the series have enjoyed Krueger’s explorations of the northern United States border with Canada and his mixture of homicide investigation and Ojibwe traditionalism.
Now Cork finds himself in Arizona in a completely foreign geography, climate, and culture. He is immersed in the issues facing the southern border including immigration, border security, and human trafficking. These issues ring true with a timeless question of our faith – How does our fundamental belief that we are all of sacred worth because we are created in the image of God impact how we care for the stranger among us? In the face of systemic injustice of our times, we, along with Cork, are challenged to see the impact on the individual human beings whose lives are at stake. Of course the mystery novel elements of plot, intrigue and suspense add an extra twist!
BOOK OVERVIEW
In William Kent Krueger’s latest pulse-pounding thriller, Cork O’Connor’s search for a missing man in the Arizona desert puts him at the center of a violent power struggle along the Mexican border, a struggle that might cost Cork everything and everyone he holds most dear.
On the Fourth of July, just as fireworks are about to go off in Aurora, Minnesota, Cork O’Connor and his new bride Rainy Bisonette listen to a desperate voicemail left by Rainy’s son, Peter. The message is garbled and full of static, but they hear Peter confess to the murder of someone named Rodriguez. When they try to contact him, they discover that his phone has gone dead.
The following morning, Cork and Rainy fly to Coronado County in southern Arizona, where Peter has been working as a counselor in a well-known drug rehab center. When they arrive, they learn that Peter was fired six months earlier and hasn’t been heard from since. So they head to the little desert town of Sulfur Springs where Peter has been receiving his mail. But no one in Sulfur Springs seems to know him. They do, however, recognize the name Rodriguez. Carlos Rodriguez is the head of a cartel that controls everything illegal crossing the border from Mexico into Coronado County.
As they gather scraps of information about Peter, Cork and Rainy are warned that there is a war going on along the border. “Trust no one in Coronado County,” is a refrain they hear again and again. And to Cork, Arizona is alien country. The relentless heat and absence of water, tall trees, and cool forests feel nightmarish to him, as does his growing sense that Rainy might know more about what’s going on than she’s willing to admit. And if he can’t trust Rainy, who can he trust?
In our sacred scriptures, the prophets speak to a world gone very wrong and to people in deep pain. They point to a hope found in God, who will come. The prophets tell us that God’s natural disposition is not anger but chesed [Hebrew for steadfast lovingkindness].
So many people claim to have “the truth” for which we are all searching; and yet, even those who claim to worship the same God often disagree on the details of who God is, how God acts in the world, and what that means for our lives. In this sermon series, we explore the essential beliefs of Christian faith and why these beliefs matter. We peel away the unnecessary, dismiss the extraneous and examine the truths that give meaning and purpose to life.
August 5: On the Road to Jerusalem