BibleWorm

This week BibleWorm concludes the regular Narrative Lectionary season with the Pentecost texts: Acts 2:1-4 and Romans 8:14-39. We talk about God’s desire for the redemption of all creation, which has suffered under human neglect since the time of Adam. Paul envisions the day we humans wake up and realize that we were created not to serve sin but to tend creation in order to restore the world aroun...

Today BibleWorm reads Romans 6:1-14, a complicated text whose beauty took both of us for surprise in the end. What does it mean, really, to be dead to sin – to be dead to the world as you have always known it, and live into a different reality? How do we do the work of retraining the habits of our bodies and our spirits to move toward alignment - toward allegiance - to this newly discovered path?...

This week BibleWorm continues our study of Paul with Romans 3:28-30 and 5:1-11 in which Paul develops the idea that God loves us and justifies us even when we haven’t done anything to merit God’s love. We explore the possibility that Paul is critiquing the Empire’s merit system, in which we are asked to give up our lives for the people above us. But Christ is not like that. While we were yet sinne...

This week BibleWorm reads Romans 1:1-17 - Paul’s letter to a relatively small group of Jesus followers within the very large city of Rome. What does it take to carry out this work of spreading the gospel day after day? What do the people there need – and what does Paul need – and how can they support one another? Again and again, this text centered us in mutuality – and not only in the human commu...

This week BibleWorm reads the story of Paul and Barnabas in Lystra as told in Acts 13:1-3 and 14:8-18. We talk about Paul’s public healing of a man who cannot walk and think about the mutual faith that is required between the man and Paul, to trust each other enough for a healing to take place. We discuss the confusion of the townspeople, who want to worship Paul and Barnabas as gods, and recogniz...

This week BibleWorm moves on from the Gospel of Matthew to the Book of Acts, reading Acts 10:1-17 and 34-48. It’s the story of a God-fearing Roman solider and his welcome into the community of Jesus-followers. It raises up for us all kinds of questions about the complex interaction between our identities, ethnic and otherwise, and our faith, including this big one: What if God works outside of hum...

This week BibleWorm finishes our exploration of Matthew’s Gospel with the Great Commission Jesus gives to his disciples in Matthew 28:16-20. We discuss the role of doubt in the life of faith, noticing that Jesus addresses both those who worship him and those who hesitate, seeming to make no distinction between them. We talk about the disciple’s commission to baptize and teach the nations, inaugura...

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 28:1-10, Matthew’s account of the resurrection - or, really, what happens right after the resurrection. It holds so many important questions for us. We ask: What is the role of evidence - of our senses - in our lives of faith? What is the role of fear in our human experience? What does it mean to act with both fear and great joy? And finally, how do we balance the...

This week is Palm Sunday in the Christian tradition, and BibleWorm is reading the story of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem as told in Matthew 21:1-17. While the text is a familiar one for many, Matthew’s version has some intriguing surprises along the way. Jesus seems to ride on two animals at the same time in this text—both a donkey and a colt, and Jesus seems to take these animals from the owner wi...

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 25:31-46, which feels like a culminating text for our weeks studying parables. The text seems to locate us in the future, at the time of the final judgment – but it’s not just a different place on the timeline. The nature of the cosmos has shifted, and maybe something in the nature of Jesus, too, after the resurrection. All of the overlapping groups that have been...

BibleWorm recently passed something of a podcasting milestone with our 100,000 download. To celebrate, we are re-releasing our very first podcast episode, from September of 2019—back when we were still NL;DR. First Bobby and Amy reminisce about our experience of creating BibleWorm, and then we share that first episode. It’s not great, y’all—but at least we can celebrate how far we’ve come!

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 25:1–13, the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Bridesmaids who go out to meet the bridegroom but fall asleep when he is delayed. The five wise bridesmaids have enough oil to make it to the wedding, but the five foolish ones neglect to bring extra oil and so are shut outside. Once again, this parable warns us that the kingdom of heaven will be delayed and then come a...

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 22:1-14, a parable of a wedding banquet that a king plans for his son … but it doesn’t go quite as expected.  We love thinking about the combination of obligation and joy and grandeur and intimacy baked into this story. We REALLY loved the idea of a last minute invitation to a mixed multitude of seemingly random people to come witness these nuptials when the first...

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 20:1–16, often called the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, in which the kingdom of heaven is said to be like a landowner who pays the laborers a full day’s wage no matter how long they’ve worked. We wrestle with the abject unfairness of this wage system and empathize with the workers who have labored a long day in the hot sun. Yet we also marvel at the gen...

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 18:15-35 – important and challenging texts about what happens on the ground, in the real and messy world of human community, when something has gone wrong. How can we hold each other accountable with a loving spirit - and when do we need to ask someone to step back from the community because of their behaviors? What is the relationship between compassion, fairness...

On this special Ash Wednesday episode of BibleWorm we’re reading Matthew 18:1-14 in which the disciples ask Jesus who is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Jesus not only refuses to answer the question but insists that one must become like a little child in order to even enter the kingdom of heaven in the first place. It is only the empire that thinks in terms of status and greatness. The kingdom...

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 16:24-17:8, the story of the transfiguration. We think about symbolic moments like this one, the ones that overflow with meaning, that fill your cup to overflowing, and how difficult it is for us humans to just co-exist with them without trying to grasp onto them somehow. We pull apart the different ways that the word life is used in this passage – preserving life...

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 13:24-43, Jesus’s parables of the kingdom. We talk about how to read parables and why we think Jesus uses parables to declare what has been hidden since the beginning of the world. And we discuss three of Jesus parables, which compare the kingdom of heaven to a field of wheat overplanted with weeds, to yeast leavening bread, and to a mustard seed that grows into a...

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 7:1-14 and 24-29, a section that includes the golden rule, but also comes at its central idea - what is hateful to you do not do to others - from so many different angles. How does it not only help our community, but our own selves when we steer clear of judgment, focusing instead on our own behaviors, where we actually have some power to change things? We love ho...

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 6:25-34, Jesus’s well-known instruction not to worry about tomorrow. We talk about anxiety and the difficulty of living in the present moment, entrusting the future into the hands of a loving God. But once we observe that the passage begins with the word “Therefore,” connecting it to the previous verse, things take a turn. “You cannot serve both God and money,” sa...

This week BibleWorm returns to our series on the Bible and Economic Justice with a look at 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 nei...

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew chapter 5:1-20, the Beatitudes. We dive into some nuances of translation that make a big difference to our understanding of this beautiful and well-known text: what world of meaning is being conjured up with the word “blessed,” or “mercy,” or “meek”? We try to sketch, more and more fully, what this text imagines the proverbial kingdom looks like, and what it would...

This week we’re reading Matthew 4:1-17, the story of the devil tempting Jesus in the wilderness. We wrestle with the very concept of the devil, which often strikes modern people as an antiquated idea. But once we recognize the ways that the ways that Jesus is tempted, we begin to recognize the work of the devil all around us—in the economic, political, and prestige systems that that tempt us to tu...

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew chapter 3, the story of Jesus’s baptism. What does baptism even mean for someone like Jesus – what kind of transition does this mark for him? And what does it mean for someone else to baptize him – can you even imagine the imposter syndrome John must feel? We see in this story a call to action – to do the hard work of turning our hearts and minds. We also get to s...

On this special episode of BibleWorm we’re reading the story of Herod and the magi as told in Matthew 2:1-23. This text tells a side of Christmas that we may not want to talk about, as it narrates the story of a fearful King Herod who kills all the babies of Bethlehem in his quest to destroy the baby Jesus, whom he perceives as a threat to his political power. We talk about the arrival of the magi...