BibleWorm

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...

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 1:1-17, seventeen juicy verses of genealogy to get us started in this gospel. This origin story seems to be framed a little bit like a new Genesis, giving us all the raw materials, all the ancestors, that went into the creation of this new baby, Jesus. His lineage does offer “legitimacy” insofar as he is in the line of David. But it has both heroes and folks who a...

In this replay of our 2020 Christmas eve special episode, BibleWorm reads Luke 2:1-20. We imagine ourselves with the shepherds in the field, taking in the mindblowing magnitude of their theophany in the field, and wondering who are the proverbial shepherds in our society today. We see not only the theological but the political revolution bubbling up in the story. And we wonder -- though the text i...

This week BibleWorm concludes our Advent series with the less famous version of the Christmas story as told in Matthew 1:18-25. This quieter version of the Christmas story focuses on Joseph, who marries his betrothed Mary despite her unplanned pregnancy, gives Jesus his name, and adopts Jesus into the family line of David, credentialing him as the Jewish messiah. Joseph’s role is mostly to keep hi...

On this special episode in our series about biblical women, BibleWorm discusses Bathsheba. We met her first in II 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 old age. At this awkward moment whe...

This week BibleWorm continues on in the third week of our Advent series, reading Isaiah 42:1-9, one of the well-known Servant Songs of Isaiah. We talk about traditional interpretations of the servant, some which view the servant as the Messiah but others which view the servant as the people of Israel—or by extension, the people of faith. In typical BibleWorm fashion, we try to read it as both—a vi...

This week BibleWorm reads Esther chapter 4, the story of a woman who didn’t know the power that she had … until suddenly she did. Her story makes us think of what it is to have a fate that is tied to the most vulnerable people – arguably a fate we all have. It made us wonder about the breadth of details in a person’s life story that prepare them in some way for the biggest challenges they will fac...

This week BibleWorm enters into the Christian season of Advent by reading from the prophet Habakkuk. We marvel at the way Habakkuk moves us from the articulation of profound suffering to the casting of a hopeful vision and then to expectant rejoicing in a restoration that has not yet come. We discuss the urgency of being honest about suffering and despair, not just in Habakkuk’s day but in ours as...

This week BibleWorm reads Isaiah 36:1-3, 13-20; 37:1-7; and then 2:1-4 - a set of texts that calls us to sit with questions about the power of rhetoric to confuse, mislead, and exhaust us in times of fear and conflict. How can we preserve our energy for the proverbial moment of birth, when the stakes could not be higher? What would the world be like if political struggle and violence could be take...

This week BibleWorm moves into the prophetic literature with Micah 1:1-5; 5:2-5a; and 6:6-8, one of the most famous passages in all of the Hebrew Bible. We talk about the prophet Micah, who prophesied to the Jerusalem elites reminding them that the economic and military decisions of the centralized authority have profound effects on people living far away from the centers of power. Micah envisions...