BibleWorm

This week BibleWorm enters the Christian season of Advent with a reading from Jeremiah 33. The text given to us by the Narrative Lectionary is Jeremiah 33:14–18, a lovely text about a righteous king from the house of David who will restore Jerusalem. But the hope offered by that short text seems naïve in the context of the rest of Jeremiah 33, which takes place against the backdrop of the Babyloni...

This week, BibleWorm reads 2 Kings 22:1-20 and 23:1-3– the story of King Josiah finding the scroll of the Teaching that seems to have been lost for a good while now. After a string of really disastrous kingships, we finally get a good egg in Josiah, and he is heartbroken to see all the ways that even he has not been living up to this teaching that was buried in a Temple storage room somewhere. Of...

This week BibleWorm reads two texts from Isaiah that are not normally read together: the song of the vineyard in Isaiah 5:1-7 and the description of the ideal king in Isaiah 11:1-9. In the first text, we find God making an accusation against Israel and Judah, the vineyard that God planted to produce justice and righteousness but which has instead produced violence and oppression. As a result, God...

This week, BibleWorm reads Hosea 11:1-9, and we dive deep into the metaphor the text gives us: the rich, complex, sometimes beautiful and sometimes painful world of parenting. We encounter here a God who is pouring out the biggest of feelings – a mix of love, jealousy, nostalgia, compassion, and suffering that can seem impossible to hold together. Feelings that are not unfamiliar to the experience...

This week BibleWorm reads the story of the contest between Elijah and the prophets of Baal as told in 1 Kings 18:17-39. We find Elijah demanding that the people make a choice between God and Baal, insisting that they cannot serve both. Elijah then engages in an elaborate contest with the prophets of Baal, calling down fire from heaven to demonstrate that the God of Israel is truly God. Only after...

This week BibleWorm reads I Kings 12:1-17 and 25-29. We are just a couple of generations after King David, and boy howdy, kingship in Israel is not going great. As David’s grandson Reheboam steps to the throne, we see parallels with the stories of Pharaoh in Egypt: a king who uses forced labor to control people, and who seeks power and dominance above all else, even when that is politically imprac...

This week BibleWorm reads a selection of texts about David’s praise of God in 2 Samuel 5:1-5 and 6:1-15 as well as Psalm 150. We talk about what it means for everything that has breath to praise the Lord and ponder the unification of all creatures that is possible when we recognize the breath within us that wishes to return to God in praise. We also pay attention to the ways David approaches prais...

This week BibleWorm reads Ruth 1:1-17 and 4:13-17 – just the opening and closing of a book that turns all kinds of social norms on their head. That famous line “your people shall be my people, and your God shall be my God” – the one that so many people use today in weddings, is not from a wedding at all – but from the mouth of Ruth, who is refusing Naomi’s plea to go find herself a husband, and co...

This week BibleWorm reads two of the foundational texts of the Hebrew Bible—the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy 5:1-21 and the text known as the Shema in the Jewish tradition in Deuteronomy 6:4-9. We discuss the way that the Shema cuts across the cacophony of voices vying for our attention with a resounding “Listen, O Israel!,” calling us away from the voice of Pharaoh and focusing us on the one G...

This week BibleWorm reads Exodus 1:8-2:10 and 3:1-15, a text that seemed to ask us again and again – what is capturing your attention? We see just how little it takes for the situation to turn bad for the Israelites in Egypt. And in this newly roaring sea of people and power that are bent against them, we read stories of individual people who manage to incline their attention somewhere else – who...

This week BibleWorm reads the story of Jacob’s midnight wrestle as told in Genesis 32:9-13 and 22-30. We talk about the way Jacob pauses to pray for God’s protection as he prepares to face his brother Esau, first reminding God of God’s past promises, and then asking for God to save him. We discuss the mysterious figure who appears to wrestle Jacob in the night, whom Jacob ultimately understands to...

This week BibleWorm reads Genesis 18:1-15 and Genesis 21:1-7 – texts that tell us of baby Isaac’s imminent, and then actual, arrival. When the three men come to Abraham and tell him that this baby will indeed be born to these two nonagenarians, Sarah famously laughs.  We wonder what is going through Sarah’s mind and heart at this moment, and what’s in there when she denies it, and again, when that...

This week we begin the new season of the Narrative Lectionary with a look at the story of creation as told in Genesis 2:4b–25. We marvel at the description of an artisan God forming creation from the clay of the earth in an act of artistic improvisation. We reflect on the fundamentally relational nature of the created world in which humans are meant to be in deep relationship not only with God and...

This week we conclude our summer series on The Bible and Economic Justice with a text from John 12:1-8 – not such an obvious text for economic justice, but a really important and challenging one.  How do we hold together Mary’s extravagance toward Jesus with  our moral and practical obligation to use our resources to care for the poor? This text invites us to explore the human need to express a se...

This week BibleWorm continues our series on the Bible and Economic Justice with Matthew 6:7-15, a text known in the Christian tradition as the Lord’s prayer. As we read the prayer through the lens of economic justice, we begin to realize that that Jesus is calling his followers toward a life of simple trust in God. We ask enough food for today, we promise to forgive the debts of our neighbors, we...

This week BibleWorm continues our series on Economic Justice in the Bible with Luke 4:16-21 and 18:18-30. Why does Jesus tell this man that he needs to sell everything he owns? That’s an awfully high bar. And why is that even harder to do when you are wealthy? We consider the sense of safety and independence that money and material resources offer us, and the ways in which that can block us from e...

This week BibleWorm continues our series on the Bible and Economic Justice with Micah 6:6-15 and 7:1-7. Here God brings a lawsuit against the people for treating each other unjustly. They cheat each other with false measures. They bribe judges and officials to render false judgments. They pervert justice to favor the wealthy and the powerful. So what can they do to set things right? Nothing but th...

This week we continue our summer series on economic justice in the Bible with Leviticus 19:9-18 and 33:37– a text that asks us to reflect and embody and channel God’s holiness through the economy we create in the everyday world. What if our means of production – our land, our time – isn’t absolutely “ours” in the way we owners imagine? We all know the commandment thou shalt not steal, but what is...

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...

BibleWorm concludes our summer series on women of the Hebrew Bible with the story of Bathsheba as told in 1 Kings 1:1-40. We met Bathsheba first in 2 Samuel 11, but she was more acted upon than an actor herself in that story. This week we meet her again in I Kings 1, when David has gone from a model of virility, power, and traditional (sometimes toxic) masculinity to a fairly pitiable state in his...

  BibleWorm continues our summer series on women in the Hebrew Bible with the story of Rahav in Joshua 2 -- she is a harlot living in the walls of the city of Jericho who is at the very core of Israel's success as they move into the promised land. How are we to understand this character who has so little power in any official sense, but who seems to know more than anyone else among the people of J...

This week BibleWorm continues our special summer series on the Women of the Hebrew Bible with the story of the daughters of Zelophehad as told in Numbers 27:1-11 and 36:1-12. We marvel at these five young women who stand before Moses and the whole people of Israel to advocate for their right to inherit property after their father died without any sons. When Moses takes their claim to God, God resp...

This week BibleWorm continues our special summer series on the Women of the Hebrew Bible with a look at the story of Moses’ sister Miriam as told in Exodus 2:1-10 and Numbers 12:1-16. First we talk about the story of Miriam as a young girl, saving her baby brother Moses by convincing the Pharaoh’s daughter to hire their own mother as her wet nurse. We talk about Miriam’s prophetic foresight and he...

BibleWorm continues our summer series on women in the Hebrew Bible with the story of Tamar in Genesis 38. We bristle immediately at the hypocrisy of the men in the story who only pretend to hold to the societal norms they impose on her, and in doing so leave Tamar stuck in a holding pattern after the death of her husband. We draw out the profoundly different experiences of the man and the woman wh...

Happy summer, y’all, and welcome to our summer series! We’ll spend the next six weeks looking at stories of women in the Hebrew Bible. And we start with doozy – the stories of Sarah and Hagar, which we find in Genesis chapters 16 and 21. It’s so tempting to read these as stories of two individuals – or 3 if you add Abraham in there - but what are the social forces at work here? How much agency do...