BibleWorm

This week BibleWorm begins our summer series on biblical views of economic justice with Deuteronomy 15:1-11 and 24:10-15.  We begin with the radical command of Deuteronomy 15:1 to forgive the debts of the entire community every seventh year, resetting the debt economy and ensuring that no one either falls into generational poverty or accrues generational wealth at the expense of others. We highlig...

This week's episode begins with the story of Pentecost in Acts 2:1-21. What a powerful first act of the spirit, to enable people to speak and understand across difference, offering a kind of repair to the Tower of Babel fiasco. We lift up the diversity of the community being called in here – not only in their languages, but also to different genders and ages, and to different modes of communicatin...

This week BibleWorm reads the Christ Hymn in Philippians 2:1-13. We talk about Paul’s invitation to have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus, who gave up equality with God to be born in human form and die on the cross. We ask what it might mean to give up our own privileges, to divest ourselves of those things that give us higher status in order to be present with the disinherited and the margi...

This week BibleWorm reads Philippians 1:1-18a, where Paul begins the most loving and encouraging letter we can fathom to the people of Phillipi. We imagine the intersection of longing and compassion that Paul describes, and locate that feeling somewhere deep in your gut. We spend a long time turning over the idea of overflowing love that is rich with knowledge and insight, and wonder about the inv...

This week we’re reading Acts 17:16-34, the story of Paul’s visit to the Greek cultural center of Athens. We marvel at the way Paul engages with the people of Athens, appreciating their history and culture while also standing firm in his own beliefs. He admires Greek religiosity, quotes Greek poetry, and engages Greek philosophy, yet he does not hesitate when it comes time to express his own contra...

This week BibleWorm reads Acts 16:16-40, a story of Paul and Silas being thrown into prison in Phillipi. It’s a rich and complex story about power and faith and imprisonment and freedom, and it raises the ever-present question - how do we overturn harmful systems of power, while also protecting the vulnerable people who are bound up in those systems? We are amazed at the transformation that happen...

This week BibleWorm reads the story of Saul’s encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus as told in Acts 9:1-19a. We reflect on Saul, the Greek-speaking Jew from Tarsus who is also known as Paul, a Roman citizen from Asia minor. We talk about how his hybrid identities—both Jew and Roman—may motivate both his persecution of others and ultimately his embrace of difference within the Christian fait...

This week BibleWorm reads John 20:19-31, the last text we will read together in the book of John. We sit for a long while with the question - what does it mean for the disciples to be sent into the world by Jesus in the way that Jesus was sent into the world by the Father? We give doubting Thomas some love, lifting up his bravery … and really seeing the bravery it takes to hang in there through mo...

This week BibleWorm reads the story of Easter resurrection as told in John 20:1-18. We compare Mary’s mournful lingering at the tomb to Peter’s footrace with the Beloved Disciple, and we notice how the story unfolds a little more for each of them: Peter sees the clothes, the Beloved Disciple believes, Mary encounters the risen Lord. And we think, however you come to the tomb it is enough, whether...

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...