BibleWorm

This week we read three sections from the book of Micah: 1:1-5, 5:2-5a, and perhaps most famous among them, 6:6-8. These texts start us with image of God’s presence that is virtually liquifying in its power and its anger. How did we get here? When Micah’s hopes seem to refer to Davidic lineage – is he imagining a leader for the near future, for an eschatological future, or ... is he wishing he cou...

This week we’re reading the story of Elisha and Naaman as told in 2 Kings 5:1-19a. We meet Naaman, a mighty Aramean general afflicted with a skin disease that he cannot cure. At the suggestion of an Israelite girl he has enslaved, Naaman makes his way to the prophet Elisha and ultimately to healing in the river Jordan. We notice that in this story truth is conveyed by the marginal characters—by a...

This week we read about Solomon’s wisdom in 1 Kings 3:4-28. In a dream, King Solomon confesses to God that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, and asks God for the one tool he feels he most needs to do the work of a king well – for wisdom – or, in Hebrew, a listening heart. Almost immediately, an impossible case comes before him. We wonder: in a case like this, with no evidence, what does it look lik...

This week we’re reading the story of David, Bathsheba, and Nathan as told in 2 Samuel 11:1-11, 14-18, 26-27; 12:1-10; and Psalm 51:1-12. David, once a man of the people, has become a self-satisfied king, feeling entitled to whatever he wants. This leads him first to taking Bathsheba by force and then murdering her husband Uriah to cover it up. We wrestle with what it is in David that makes him do...

This week, we're reading Joshua 24: 1-27 – a chapter that challenged us to think about how we tell our own story – our biblical story, our national story, our family story --  and what the impact of that telling can be. What do we highlight, what do we leave out, and why? How do we tell the story of our people and our beliefs in a way that another generation can claim it as their own? And once we...

This week we’re reading the story of Israel receiving the Ten Commandments at Sinai in Exodus 19:1-8 and 20:1-21. We discover that these commandments, which have become a political lightning rod, in fact envision a radically countercultural world in which God refuses to be allied with any political agenda. Rather, God demands a radical resistance to the ways of Pharaoh and all human empires, casti...

Try a free month of our Patreon for FREE with no obligation! Click here to claim your free month ! This week we read Exodus 14:5-14 and 19-29 -- the paradigmatic story of freedom, the crossing of the sea. We are right at the boundary of creation and uncreation. The flood is right there again, forming walls on either side of us. The angel who has been leading us is behind us now – for good reason –...

Try a free month of our Patreon for FREE with no obligation!  Click here to claim your free month ! This week we’re reading the story of Joseph in Potiphar’s house, as told in Genesis 39:1-23. Joseph finds himself enslaved in Egypt in the household of an Egyptian official named Potiphar. While God prospers Potiphar, and all those around Joseph, Joseph’s own life seems to be on a downward trajector...

Try a free month of our Patreon for FREE with no obligation! Click here to claim your free month ! This week, we are reading one of our favorite Bible stories, and the source of some great power ballads in the Jewish world – Gen 12:1-9, the story of Avram being called to leave his land, his home, and go to the place God will show him.  Our eyes were drawn this year to the proverbial “division of r...

Try a free month of our Patreon for FREE with no obligation! Click here to claim your free month ! In this first episode of the new Narrative Lectionary year, we’re reading the story of God flooding the world as told in Genesis 6:5-22; 8:6-12; and 9:8-17. We struggle a bit with the fact that this year begins not with creation, as in other years, but with the destruction of creation. But as we read...

This week we conclude our series on Revelation and Resistance with John’s vision of New Jerusalem in Revelation 21:1-7, 22-27, and 22:1-5. The text presents a moving depiction of God come to earth, dwelling among the people and wiping every tear from their eyes. In a renewed world with no death or suffering, humanity thrives beside the river of living water, eating from the tree of life, relieved...

This week we are reading Revelation chapter 7, a vision that unfolds in the midst of the unsealing of seals and undoing of worlds as we have known them. It’s a vision that seems anchored in the past and the future simultaneously, a vision that evoked for us Ezekiel and Isaiah and Genesis and Kohelet and Exodus and also a also future time when whatever suffering the faithful have endured, they can...

This week we’re continuing our series on Revelation and Resistance with the letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2:1-7 and 3:1-22. We note that most of the churches receive both praise and admonition from Jesus, celebrating what they have done well but warning them against their shortcomings. But we also notice that in these letters appearances can be deceiving. Those churches that appear p...

This week we are reading Revelation 5 – the whole thing, which is only 14 powerful verses long. We encounter the image of a scroll covered with words that might change the world as we know it -  but it has been sealed tight, with nobody to open it. We encounter the Lamb, in a series of images that just make no sense – this lamb who is the lion, this lamb who stands as if slaughtered. This slaughte...

This week we’re continuing our series on Revelation and Resistance series with Revelation 13:1-18 and 17:1-6. We examine the grotesque images of the Beasts rising from land and sea as images of the Roman Empire, a misshapen, deceptive, and violent creature trapping people unknowingly in the worship of Satan. Then we turn our attention to Woman Babylon, the beautiful seductress whose goblet is fill...

Welcome to our summer series, Revelation and Resistance. This week we begin at the beginning, with Revelation 1:1-20, which sets the stage so beautifully for us and especially for me, who has never read Revelation before. We contemplate the “is-ness” of God – one that is beyond time as we know it – and hold all of the evocative images and sound metaphors like complex treasures. We relate to the pa...

This week we conclude our special series on Disputing with God with the story of Jesus praying with his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane as told in Mark 14:32-42. We notice at least two disputes in this text, the first between Jesus, who is praying in anguish, and his disciples, who keep falling asleep. We ponder the human propensity toward avoidance in moments of impending crisis, whether by...

This week we’re continuing our summer series on “Disputing with God” with the story of Jesus’s encounter with a Syro-Phoenician woman as told in Matthew 15:21-28. This story makes us comfortable in a lot of ways, as Jesus appears to ignore the pleas of a foreign woman, who Matthew refers to as a Canaanite, whose daughter is possessed by a demon. Jesus refuses to help, first saying that his mission...

This week we continue with our summer series “Disputing with God” with Psalm 88, the Bible’s most unrelenting lament psalm. The speaker cries out to God from the depths of the pit, lamenting about the pain, suffering, and isolation that makes their life seem like a walking death, even accusing God of being the one who has caused them to suffer. And yet in this dispute, there is no response from Go...

This week we continue with our summer series “Disputing with God” with the story of the prophet Jonah in Nineveh as told in Jonah 3:1–4:11. While we have often read Jonah as a comedic parody of Israelite prophecy, this time we explore what happens if we take Jonah’s concerns about God’s mercy seriously. The Ninevites are, after all, the very people who will destroy the northern kingdom of Israel s...

This week we are reading one of the Bible’s most famous disputes with God – Abraham's insistence that God should have mercy on Sodom for the sake of its righteous, found in Genesis 18:16-33. Now, we love mercy as much as the next guy, but this time around we wrestled with the profound entanglement of the righteous and the wicked in this story. There is no discussion here about simply stopping the...

This week we continue with our summer series “Disputing with God,” picking up where we left off last time with the story of the repair of the relationship between God and Israel after the incident of the Golden Calf, as told in Exodus 33:1–23 and 34:1–9. God is at first so angry about the Golden Calf that God seems to be finished with Israel, sending the messenger with them to the Promised Land bu...

In this first episode of our summer series on Disputing with God, we are reading the story of the Golden Calf, Exodus 32:1-20 and 30-35. We’ve read it together before, but the regular lectionary stops us pretty early in its unfolding ... and we found that moving farther into the story directed our eyes not to the Israelites or to God, but to the space between them–their relationship, still fairly...

This week we’re reading the texts for Pentecost with Acts 2:1-21 and Philippians 4:4-7. We ponder the connections between Christian Pentecost and Jewish Shavuot, both commemorating the establishment of a new relationship with God following an act of dramatic liberation. We notice the democratization of the Holy Spirit in this text, which pours out on all people, so that everyone—young and old, mal...

This week we are reading Philippians 2:1-13, which contain within them the beautiful Christ Hymn, and this passage made us think a lot about the role of community in any given person’s ability to live the kind of life Jesus is asking people to live. What does it really mean to be of one mind, in the way that Paul might mean it here? How can we really, actually, realistically fill our minds with co...