BibleWorm

This week BibleWorm begins our summer series on the Hebrew Festival scrolls with a look at Ecclesiastes 1:1-3 and 8:16-9:10. We discuss Qohelet’s idea that everything is mere breath and ask what it means to live in a world where nothing adds up to much of anything. We talk about the inscrutability of God and why good people often suffer while the wicked get all the rewards. We ask whether it is po...

This week we read Acts 2 and 1 Corinthians 12, the story of Pentecost and the body of Christ. We visit the first moments of the birth of the church, rich with imagery familiar from creation and the exodus from Egypt. We try to embrace what it means for a group of people to function like a body, each part precisely designed and wholly dependent on the others.

This week BibleWorm looks at 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul reprimands the church in Corinth for not believing in bodily resurrection. We wonder whether believing in resurrection is a way of trying to escape the reality of death or an authentic means of coming to terms with the persistence of evil in the world. We wonder why Paul opposes the concept of a spiritual resurrection and ask why it is that...

This week BibleWorm reads 1 Corinthians 13, Paul’s famous passage on love as a sort of diagnostic check of our motivations in our attempts to live lives of faith. We talk about love—or lack of love—across the political aisle and about the limits of loves’s patience in the face of injustice. We talk about the importance of doing a serious gut check about where we ourselves are drawn with real love,...

This week BibleWorm follows Paul to Corinth by readings Acts 18:1-4 and 1 Corinthians 1:10-18. We talk about factionalism in our communities and the importance not of uniformity but of commitment to the core principles that hold us together. We think about the human tendency to attach ourselves to our leaders and Paul’s insistence that the Christian community should attach itself only to Christ. A...

  This Week BibleWorm reads from Acts 17 and 1 Thessalonians 1, where we get to see Paul in action as an evangelist and pen-pal pastor. We consider how our communities might respond if a new guy began attending services and arguing that we had misinterpreted our own texts. We appreciate Paul’s ability to see God moving and working beyond the boundaries of the community he grew up in. We sit with t...

This week we’re reading from Acts 3:1-16, in which Peter and James meet a crippled man and restore him to health. We think about evangelism that begins with acts of mercy and turns to preaching the faith only belatedly, once people have responded to compassion. We discuss the power of looking one another in the eye and ponder the miracles that can occur when we move beyond treating one another as...

BibleWorm begins our study of Acts with the story of Jesus's ascension in Acts 1:1-14. We talk about the huge transition from disciple to apostle, from learners to teachers of Jesus’s message, and that moment of fear when your charismatic teacher departs on a cloud. We notice that humans both then and now are quite taken by the question of when, regardless of our teachers’ constant redirection. An...

This week we read the Easter story as told in Mark 16:1-8—a story in which there is no resurrected Jesus and the women run from the tomb in fear. We talk about how the sparseness of this Easter tale resonates with the reality of lived experience, in which the evidence for faith is often hard to come by. We think about the women’s experience at the tomb with its mixture of awe and fear, and wrestle...

On this special Good Friday episode, BibleWorm explores the story of Jesus's crucifixion in Mark 15:16-41. We talk about the humiliation and abandonment that so often accompanies and exacerbates our suffering, about vessels of God’s holiness breaking open into the world, and about what it means to have supporters out there that you may never know about.

BibleWorm reads the Palm Sunday text, Mark 11:1-11 with the story of Jesus overturning tables in the Temple added in for good measure. We talk about the symbolism of Jesus riding a donkey and how the shouts of Hosanna mingle praise and desperation. We wonder why Jesus curses a fig tree instead of commanding it to produce figs and wrestle with Jesus’s anger toward the money changers. We also read t...

BibleWorm reads Mark 13:1-37, the Markan apocalypse. We sit with the ways the text anticipates an unveiling of fault lines in our society that were already there and see how that applies to us today. We see the imperative to speak and act with integrity even in the face of fear and suffering. We insist upon the Gospel’s promise of good news. And we fondly remember Clippy, the little paperclip in M...

This week the Narrative Lectionary finds us in Mark 12:28-44, where Jesus gives the great commandment and a widow gives her last penny. We discuss the twin commandments to love God and love neighbor and whether they can really be separated. We wrestle with the story of the widow’s mite and whether she is being commended or exploited. And we struggle with how to make sense of this text in the middl...

This week BibleWorm looks at Mark 12:1-17. We look at the ways the power structures of the biblical day are baked into the scriptures and what that means for us as modern readers. We see Jesus do the ultimate mic-drop when asked about everyone’s favorite topic—taxes. And Amy shares the legend of BibleWorm!

BibleWorm continues our Narrative Lectionary series with Mark 10:32-52, the third and final time Jesus predicts his death and resurrection, the request of James and John to sit at Jesus’s right and left hand when he comes in glory, and the story of a blind man named Bartimaeus, who asks Jesus for mercy. We talk about the human struggle to imagine power structures different from those of the empire...

BibleWorm continues our Narrative Lectionary series with Mark 10:17-31, the story of a man seeking eternal life but unable to give up his possessions. We talk about the communal nature of the coming age as a community of mutual vulnerability and interdependence, the challenges of giving up our reliance on wealth and other modes of independence, and the unfathomable grace of God, who covers over th...

This week BibleWorm continues our Narrative Lectionary series with Mark 9:30-37, in which the disciples argue about who is the greatest and Jesus welcomes a little child. We talk about the urgency Jesus faces in getting his disciples to understand his mission in the short time he has left with them, the challenge of giving up power to welcome the most vulnerable and marginal in society, and the da...

This week in our Narrative Lectionary Series, BibleWorm looks at Mark 8:22-9:8, the stories of the double-healing of a blind man, Peter's confession of Jesus as messiah, and the Mount of transfiguration. We witness Peter's very human struggle to understand what Jesus is saying to him, think about what it means to live lives of integrity and the risks that may pose to our physical comfort and safet...

BibleWorm continues our Narrative Lectionary Series with Mark 7:1-23, the story of Jesus arguing with the Pharisees over proper ritual observance. We talk about what it means that nothing from outside us can make us unclean, how to disagree constructively with people who have different sources of authority, and how the only thing that really matters is what we put out into the world.

Dr. Amy Robertson and Dr. Robert Williamson explore Mark 6:1-29, the stories of Jesus returning his hometown and sending out the twelve as well as John's beheading by King Herod. They discuss the relationship between human faith and God's power, the challenge of seeing people in our communities as they are and not as they were, and the transfer of God's power to human communities. Also, they invok...

Dr. Amy Robertson and Dr. Robert Williamson discuss Mark 5:21-43, the story of a synagogue leader’s daughter and a woman with a twelve-year flow of blood. They wrestle with Jesus countering the expectation that a privileged person’s needs should be addressed first, what it means that a woman receives healing from Jesus without him knowing it, and whether faith is really enough in a world marked by...

Dr. Amy Robertson and Dr. Robert Williamson discuss Mark 5:1-20, the story of Jesus casting out unclean spirits from a man in Gerasa. They consider the theological and political implications of the story, ask who might be considered outcast from our own societies, and discuss why the townspeople ask Jesus to leave them alone. Also, a BIG ANNOUNCEMENT! 

Dr. Amy Robertson and Dr. Robert Williamson interpret Mark 4:1-34 in which Jesus teaches about the kingdom of heaven in a series of parables. They discuss the promise and problems of interpreting parables, what it means that Jesus says he teaches in parables so that people will not understand, and how the seed parables depict the kingdom of heaven taking root in the world in unexpected and uncontr...

Dr. Amy Robertson and Dr. Robert Williamson discuss Mark 2:1-22, the healing of a paralytic, eating with tax collectors and sinners, and picking grain on the sabbath. They talk about sin and forgiveness, Jesus's mission to those excluded from community, and the painful rending that sometimes happens when we try to do something new within old institutional structures.

Dr. Amy Robertson and Dr. Robert Williamson discuss Jesus’s first public teaching, his first public healing, and his first exorcism of an unclean spirit. They talk about what it means to teach with authority, how preaching sometimes takes precedence over healing both in Jesus’s ministry and in our own, and the comforting knowledge that even Jesus sometimes became exhausted by the demands of his mi...