BibleWorm

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...

This week BibleWorm reads the story of the Elisha and Naaman in 2 Kings 5:1-15. The story focuses on the Aramean general Naaman, who is successful in battle but hindered by a case of leprosy that no one can cure. When an Israelite girl tells Naaman to visit the prophet Elisha in Israel, it sets in motion a drama animated by the peculiar expectations of people in power about how the world should wo...

It's time for another special episode! Today we read 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 Jericho or the people...

This week BibleWorm reads 1 Kings 3:4-28, the story of a young King Solomon asking for wisdom – and getting it! He displays his wisdom in a story so famous that Seinfeld based an episode on it – the story of the baby who is claimed by two mothers. But it’s not just a puzzle to solve - this story arises out of genuine tragedy, and the stakes could not be higher. What kind of wisdom, exactly, does S...

This week BibleWorm reads the story of David and Bathsheba as told in 2 Samuel 11:1-5 and 26-27, 2 Samuel 12:1-9 and Psalm 51:1-9. We talk about the complacency of David, who stays at home at the time when kings go out to war, and the ways his loss of a sense of responsibility to the community leads him to violate Bathsheba, Uriah, and the will of God. We discuss the complexity of the biblical por...

This week BibleWorm reads the story of Israel’s covenant renewal ceremony in Joshua 24:1-18. We wrestle with this difficult text, which comes at the conclusion of the conquest of the land, after the Israelites have annihilated the Canaanites from their midst. On the one hand, we talk about the problematics of having a conquest narrative at the core of the biblical tradition, and we wrestle with wh...

BibleWorm begins our special series on women in the biblical text 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 who...

This week BibleWorm reads the story of God giving the 10 commandments to Israel as told in Exodus 19:1-8 and 20:1-21. We draw out the idea that God has been calling these people out of Egypt and through the wilderness in order to make them a treasured possession among all the peoples of the earth. We think about God giving the 10 commandments to the people—and to us—to show the importance of integ...

This week BibleWorm discusses one of the most well-known stories in the entire Bible: the miracle of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea as told in Exodus 14:5-14 and 21-29. We talk about Pharaoh’s relentless pursuit of economic profit through the use of military force, and how that singlemindedness leads to the downfall of empires, both in Pharaoh’s time and in our own. We admire the courage of t...

This week BibleWorm discusses the story of Joseph in the house of Potiphar in Genesis 39:1-23. We talk about the character of Joseph, an Israelite enslaved in the house of an Egyptian, and the profound vulnerability he experiences at the whims of others, no matter what decisions he makes. And we wrestle with the theology of God’s blessing in this text, since Joseph’s life seems to go from bad to w...

This week BibleWorm discusses God’s blessing of Abraham in Genesis 12:1-9. We talk about the way God appears to Abraham when he and his family seem to have gotten stuck in a city named for his dead brother Haran, encouraging Abraham to continue moving to his original goal, the land of Canaan. We think about God’s command to Abraham to “Go for yourself,” and we ponder the ways that following God’s...

This week we’re kicking off Season 4 of BibleWorm with Genesis 6–9, a text that is part children’s story, part post-apocalyptic nightmare: the story of the Great Flood and Noah’s ark. We talk about God’s regret at having made humankind and the challenge of knowing when things have failed and it’s time to start over. We imagine what it must have been like for Noah and those with him to endure many...

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...