BibleWorm

This week BibleWorm meets Queen Esther, winner of some biblical version of The Bachelor. We learn about the blood feud between the people of Haman and the people of Mordecai, and see the all too familiar trope that Jews - or anyone deemed an “outsider,” really - is a danger to the kingdom. We see loyalty without uniformity in action. And we see all kinds of different models for standing up to the...

This week BibleWorm continues our summer series on the Forgotten Books of the Bible with a look at Esther 1:1-22, the story of the Persian Queen Vashti and her refusal to appear before the king. We discuss the fragile egos of the king and his courtiers who fear the capacity of women to say no. We talk about the power of the patriarchy and the lengths it will go to to suppress voices of dissent. We...

This week BibleWorm explores Ruth chapters 1 and 3, trying to imagine Ruth’s own perspective and calling out some of the ways that the book portrays painful parts of the immigrant experience. We see how the scene at the threshing floor plays on the worst stereotypes of Moabite women, and how Ruth’s beautiful statement of loyalty to Naomi also carries with it an erasure of her own heritage. We try...

This week BibleWorm continues our summer series on the Forgotten Books of the Bible, with a look at the book of Ruth 2:1-20 and 4:9-17. We look at the way the book of Ruth challenges anti-immigrant sentiment in the time of Ezra-Nehemiah and in our own day. We discuss how the book lifts up the foundational contributions of Ruth the Moabite, whose persistence saves the family line of King David, wit...

This week 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 about our relationship w...

This week 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 sex. We think about how th...

This week 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 is the better on to adopt....

This week BibleWorm 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 but not experienced it, a...

This week BibleWorm continues our look at Ecclesiastes, aka Qohelet, 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 our time.

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...