BibleWorm

On this Good Friday special episode, BibleWorm reads John 20:23-42, the account of the crucifixion. The intermingling here of cruelty and love, of care and humiliation, creates such a rich and complicated story - and mostly, we just try to hold it all. We raise up the way that even on the cross, Jesus is helping his people find new ways to love each other. We hold tenderly the fact that after he h...

This week BibleWorm is pairing the Palm Sunday story in John 12:12-19 with the continuation of the crucifixion story in John 19:16b-22. We wrestle with the image of kingship in John’s Gospel, with the crowds hailing Jesus as “king of the Jews” even as Pilate sneeringly executes him as king of the Jews. We contrast Rome’s militant view of kingship with Zechariah’s vision of an anti-militarist king...

This week BibleWorm reads John 19:1-16a, a continuation of Jesus’s trial, if one can even call it that. Despite the fact that Pilate repeatedly says he finds no charge against Jesus, the machinery of this human penal system is now in motion, and Pilate seems unwilling to stop it. We pull out our hair watching the web of forces that seem to hold sway over the characters – both the religious authori...

This week BibleWorm reads the story of Jesus’s trial before the Roman governor Pilate as told in John 18:28-40. We talk about the complex interaction of religious authority and political authority and the ways they often operate to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. We discuss the concept of truth and what truth even means in an age of misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. An...

This week BibleWorm reads John 18:12-27, the story of Jesus being taken into custody by the religious authorities. We try to climb into the character of Paul - the one disciple who defends Jesus with the sword, one of only 2 who chooses to follow him into the next dangerous place, who then unravels in his loyalty and denies him. We think about this in light of Jesus’s attempt to send the disciples...

This week we’re reading the story of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet as told in John 13:1-17. We talk about the profound way Jesus’s actions destabilize the social hierarchy, envisioning a community in which everyone honors and lifts up the other regardless of social status. We marvel at the idea that the incarnation seems to have made God’s relationship with humans more intimate—from God loving...

This week we read John 11:1-44, the story of Lazarus being resurrected from the dead. We see the fully human Jesus unfold and bloom in this story – a Jesus who must hold back from healing someone for whom he holds a particular love, a Jesus who weeps for a man’s death before he calls him back to life. We hear this Jesus say “I am the resurrection” – the light, the word, and now even the resurrecti...

On this special Ash Wednesday episode we’re discussing the image of Jesus as both the shepherd and the gate in John 10:1-18. We talk about what it means to be gathered into the sheep pen and why, according to this text, you can’t simply stay there. Somebody is going to lead you back out into a dangerous world—what matters is who you follow. We think about Jesus as the gate, who keeps out the thiev...

This week we read John 9:1-41, the story of a man whose blindness is healed by Jesus. We watch the incremental changes in the way the man seems to understand what has happened. We wonder about the different beliefs that may lie behind the statement that God’s work could be revealed through this person in particular, precisely because he is blind. And we think a lot about the things that garner our...

This week we’re reading the story of Jesus’s offer of living water as told in John 7:37-52. We talk about the significance of the Holy Spirit as living water, and wonder about what it means when Jesus says that living water will flow out from the heart of believers? Is it possible that we can be sources of living water? We notice that the religious leaders reject the idea of Jesus as the messiah s...

This week BibleWorm reads John 6:35-69--which is 10 verses beyond the narrative lectionary, because we just couldn’t help ourselves. Why does Jesus lean so hard into the shocking language that his followers ought to eat his flesh and drink his blood? What is it about food – as a universal human need, and also as an appetite that can go way beyond need - that opens up what Jesus is asking of his fo...

This week BibleWorm reads two miracle stories told in John 4:46-5:18. In the first story, Jesus saves the child of a royal official, who believes Jesus’s word even before he sees evidence of the healing. In the second story, Jesus heals a man who has been sitting by the healing waters of Beth Zatha for 38 years with no one to help him into the pool. We wonder how a community could allow someone to...

On this special episode, we are joined by Laura Kahn, board chair of an organization called Jewish Interest Free Loans of Atlanta, to read from the Jewish lectionary parshah Mishpatim (Exodus 22:21-28). We discuss the ways that JIFLA enacts and embodies the teachings of Exodus 22 when it comes to their lending practices.

This week, BibleWorm reads John 4:1-42, a story of Jesus’s encounter with a Samaritan woman. What starts off as an almost comical “Who’s on first” kind of scene, where the woman and Jesus seem to be speaking right past each other, ends with a gorgeous and profound and HUGE statement from this woman – that Jesus may be not just the messiah as the biblical tradition has understood that, but the savi...

This week BibleWorm reads the story of Jesus’s nighttime visit from the Pharisee Nicodemus in John 3:1-21. We talk about what it means to be born again from above, giving up one’s life as a child of the Empire to be reborn into a life of reconciliation with both God and neighbor, We wrestle with the idea that those who love the darkness are already condemned, and we wonder what that means for our...

This week we read John 2:13-25, this gospel’s version of Jesus’s spectacular scene in the Temple at Passover. Unlike the synoptic gospels, John does not suggest any corruption or dishonesty at play in the Temple system - so what is bothering Jesus? We have an honest, interfaith conversation about what happens when one person stands up for what they think is right, in a way that ensures that many o...

This week BibleWorm reads the story of Jesus turning water into wine at a wedding in Cana in John 2:1-11. We talk about the improvisational nature of Jesus’s first miraculous sign, which he does at the urging of his mother even though it is not yet his time. And we wonder whether we, too, might be improvisational when it comes to fulfilling our own callings. We also ponder the subtlety of Jesus’s...

This week BibleWorm reads the story of John the Baptist as told in John 1:19-34. We ponder John’s declaration of who he is not as well as who he is and we think about what it would mean to confess our own identity in the world. We talk about John’s acknowledgment that he himself would not have would not have recognized Jesus if it hadn’t been for the dove descending on him, and we wonder if recogn...

This week BibleWorm reads the story of John the Baptist as told in John 1:19-34. We ponder John’s declaration of who he is not as well as who he is and we think about what it would mean to confess our own identity in the world. We talk about John’s acknowledgment that he himself would not have would not have recognized Jesus if it hadn’t been for the dove descending on him, and we wonder if recogn...

In this special Christmas eve episode from 2020, we read Luke 2:1-20. We imagine ourselves with the shepherds in the field, taking in the mindblowing magnitude of their theophany in the field, and wondering who are the proverbial shepherds in our society today. We see not only the theological but the political revolution bubbling up in the story. And we wonder -- though the text is silent on this...

This week BibleWorm begins the Gospel of John - chapter 1: 1-18. We slide between John’s images of Word and Light and Life, and Grace and Truth, and try to hold all of them in our hearts, if not in our minds, at once. We try to place ourselves historically as we read, recognizing in this poetic, mystical, and awfully complex bit of text the peak of the period of differentiation between the Jewish...

This week BibleWorm reads Isaiah 55:1-13, a gorgeous poem of hope, persuasion, urgency and witness. Set either right near the end of the exile or right afterwards, it paints the picture of a limited window of time when God is ready to be sought and found, preserving a sense of God’s freedom, saying it is time, right now, to make a move toward God. But while this divine unpredictability might sound...

This week we read Ezekiel 37:1-14, another text set in the time of the exile. In a book known for  bizarre visions and sign-acts, this chapter shows us the valley of dry bones. We dive into the great chasm between hopeless and hopeful, and find Ezekiel somewhere in the middle, willing to prophesy to scattered bones in a field as he's been told, but honestly unsure what will happen when he does. We...

For this first week of advent, BibleWorm reads Jeremiah 29:1-14, a text of in-between times, historically set between the first exile from Jerusalem and the full devastation of the second exile. We imagine the grief and confusion of the people in exile, and try to take to heart Jeremiah’s call to them -- live your life. Even here, even now, right where you are. How do we accept the wildly imperfec...

On this special edition of the podcast we talk with Dr. Cameron Howard, Associate Professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, about her latest book, The Old Testament for a Complex World: How the Bible’s Dynamic Testimony Points to New Life for the Church. We talk about biblical interpretation as being less like digging for buried treasure and more like an atomic reaction that gener...