BibleWorm

On this episode from July 5, 2020, BibleWorm continues our study of the Song of Songs, learning more about the awesome and fearsome passion of our young lovers, and seeing the jarring ways in which the world around them - well, to be more specific, the men around them - seeks to control that passion. And in case you weren’t sufficiently challenged to read this as both erotic poetry and an allegory...

On this episode from June 28, 2020, BibleWorm continues our summer series on the Forgotten Books of the Bible, turning our attention to Song of Songs 1:12-2:6 and 7:1-13. We wonder at the presence of erotic love poetry in the biblical canon and wrestle what it means for our understanding of bodies, sexuality, and God. We explore themes of sexual empowerment, invitation and consent, and the joy of...

On this episode from June 21, 2020, BibleWorm continues our study of Lamentations, meeting an individual survivor in chapter 3 and hearing the voice of the community in chapter 5. We raise up the differences between this individual man’s relationship to his suffering compared to what we heard from Daughter Zion last episode, and look expectantly to the communal voice to tell us which perspective i...

On this episode from June 14, 2020, ibleWorm continues our summer series on the Forgotten Books of the Bible with Lamentations 1:8-22 and 2:10-22. Written in the wake of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, Lamentations presents the community’s response to trauma given in multiple voices. This week we look at the voice of the funeral singer, a bystander who has witnessed the trauma...

On this episode from June 7, 2020, BibleWorm continues our look at Ecclesiastes, focusing on 1:4-11 and 3:1-11. We ask ourselves—is it really true there is nothing new under the sun? We look at that most famous poem “To everything there is a season,” and see exactly why you’d best not look at only the net total of life’s experiences. And we wonder what Qohelet might say about issues of justice in...

In this episode from May 31, 2020, we return to 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...

On this last week of the narrative lectionary season, we read Acts 2:1-4 and Galatians 5:16-26. We appreciate the way that Paul draws out and builds upon imagery and tradition from the Hebrew Bible at this moment of new community formation -- the winds, the fire, the role of language, all on the Jewish holiday that marks the giving of Torah at Sinai. We continue to wrestle a bit with the balance i...

This week we continue our foray into Paul’s understanding of faith and Torah with Galatians 3:1-9 and 23-29. We discuss the relative roles of faith and practice in the drama of salvation and wonder whether finding God is like waiting at the bus stop hoping the God buss will roll by. We notice Paul’s appeal to the faith of Abraham and ask whether others can be faithful to God without knowing Jesus....

This week, we read Galatians chapter 1:13-17 and 2:11-21. It’s a challenging set of texts for an interfaith podcast, and a set of texts with a troubled history in the Jewish-Christian relationship. As we read, we wondered - what is the role of faith and of action in our relationship to God? When is the uniqueness of each person important, and when should we look past difference to similarity?

This week BibleWorm reads the story of the Council in Jerusalem in Acts 15:1-21 in which Peter, Paul, and Barnabas debate with the Jerusalem church over whether Gentiles must follow the rules of the Torah. We discuss the need for boundaries and commonly-held practices that bind a community together. We wonder at Peter’s insistence that God works outside those boundaries and wrestle with the balanc...

This week BibleWorm reads Acts 8:26-39, a story of an Ethiopian Eunuch. We discuss the ways in which he would have been pressed to the margins of the Israelite temple community or other communities like it, and share the joy in his realization that there is nothing to prevent him from diving right square into this community of Jesus followers.  We see Phillip’s beautiful example of responsive, res...

This week we read the story of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, as told in Acts 6 and 7. We observe the struggles of the early Christian church as it grows from a small and homogenous movement to a large community of both Judean and Hellenistic disciples. We discuss the apostles’ neglect of the Greek-speaking widows and the community’s efforts to care for its own. And we discuss the trial and...

This week BibleWorm reads Luke chapter 24:13-35. We try to put down what we know as readers and step into the moment of this text -- the grief, the swirling confusion, the sadness of Jesus’s followers. We wonder why Jesus disappears just at the moment of recognition and begin to see a faith that will always be a little bit beyond what any individual can grasp hold of. We connect this unfolding, mu...

This week BibleWorm reads the Easter story as told in Luke 24:1-12. We ponder the witness of the women, dismissed by the male apostles as an idle tale, and wonder whose testimonies we may dismiss today. We wrestle with the angels’ question, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” realizing that the Easter story itself would never have unfolded if the women had not gone to the grave to attend...

On this special Good Friday episode, BibleWorm discusses Luke’s telling of the crucifixion in chapter 23:32-49. We notice the haziness around the question of culpability for what has happened - what people or forces are responsible, and did they ever realize they had this power? We see a lot of compassion from Jesus even as he suffers. And we wonder whether the second criminal is really any more h...

This week BibleWorm reads the story of Palm Sunday in Luke 19:29-44—except in this version there are no palms and no one shouts “Hosanna!” Can we even call it Palm Sunday?  We talk about Jesus orchestrating a donkey-jacking and the implicit claim that Jesus is lord of all. We comment on the tenderness of the people in the midst of a tragic story, as they lift Jesus up on a colt and spread their cl...

This week, BibleWorm reads Luke 18:31- 19:10. We imagine the awkward silence after Jesus’s followers once again cannot grasp the increasingly detailed prediction of Jesus’s imminent suffering. We pause to think about the faith of the blind man who cries out to Jesus, and wonder about the life experiences that gave him the faith and courage to ask for what he needed. And we meet Zacchaeus - either...

This week BibleWorm reads Luke 16:19-31, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. We discuss the lavish lifestyle of the rich man, who uses his gated home as an excuse to avoid responsibility for the needy man outside his gate. And we talk about poor Lazarus, who suffers at the gate in life and yet would cross a great chasm to show the rich man compassion in death. And we wrestle with our own priv...

This week, BibleWorm reads Luke 15:1-32-- three parables of things that were lost and have been found. Somewhat in spite of ourselves, we can’t help but melt into the sheer joy of the finder. We wonder about the experience of those who were never lost. And Amy manages to embarrass herself so thoroughly that this episode is 1 minute too long because we couldn’t bear to cut the story out. It has to...

This week BibleWorm reads Luke 13:1-9 and 31-35, which includes Jesus’s discussion of the causes of suffering, the parable of the fig tree, and Jesus’s lament over the city of Jerusalem. We wrestle with the popular theology that bad things happen to the worst sinners and with Jesus’s apparent counterclaim that all of us, in fact, are sinners who deserve punishment. We ponder Jesus’s parable of the...

This week BibleWorm reads Luke 10:25-42 -- the story of the Samaritan who is sometimes called good, and the story of Jesus’s visit with Mary and Martha. We watch Jesus skillfully reframe the lawyer’s questions, from “how to attain eternal life” to “how to live”, and from “whom  must I love,” to what love of neighbor looks like.  We see ourselves in the very human desire to make and carry out plans...

On this special Ash Wednesday episode BibleWorm discusses Jesus’s journey through Samaria in Luke 9:51-62. We talk about what it means that Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem, and what it means in our own time to find resoluteness in our own journeys toward the fulfillment of justice. We ponder the story of the disciples wanting to call down fire on the Samaritans and Jesus’s rebuke of their inc...

This week, BibleWorm reads Luke 9:28-45. As the gospel begins to speak of Jesus’s departure, we climb deep into his connection with the folks he meets up on the mountain -- not only to their shared mountain theophanies, but also to the unexpected ways that each of their days on earth came to an end. We feel for the disciples, who just can’t manage to really take in the world-changing things they a...

This week BibleWorm discusses the two healing stories in Luke 7:1-17. We struggle with the story of Jesus healing a man enslaved by a Roman Centurion. If Jesus is supposed to let the oppressed go free, why does he restore this man to his enslaver? Shouldn’t we expect more than that from Jesus? And we ponder Jesus’s resurrection of a widow’s son, recognizing here the Jesus who acts out of mercy and...

This week, BibleWorm reads Luke 6:1-16. We draw out the connections between King David and Jesus early in their careers, both walking through the world as God’s anointed before anyone really knows it. We think of the debates between Jesus and this group of Pharisees as akin to the debates that encircle our public health crisis. And we wonder, for a moment, what it was like for the man who was mind...