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Getting to the core of the biblical text.
253 Episodes
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This week we find ourselves in Genesis 27 and 28, the stories of Jacob deceiving Isaac to receive his blessing and Jacob’s late night encounter with God at Bethel. We wonder at the ways of God, who works outside of human systems of privilege, blessing the younger son over the older and prophesying through the mother rather than the father. We struggle with the deception of Rebekah and Jacob and what it means to follow God faithfully when one is excluded from power. And we marvel at God’s gracious appearance to Jacob on the road to Haran, reminding us to be attentive to God, who often shows up in unexpected places.. Hang onto your sheepskins everybody, it’s about to get real.
This week we read Genesis 21:1-3 and 22:1-14, the harrowing account of God’s command that Abraham sacrifice his long awaited and much-beloved son and heir, Isaac. In a text that is so fraught by the very nature of its plot, there is so much left unsaid. We sense deep connection and togetherness between Abraham and Isaac, even as Abraham moves toward fulfilling this terrible thing. We wonder as modern people how this could be and whether, if one is truly sure it is God speaking, there is any other choice. We think we see God changing over the course of this story, leaning farther into the still new territory of a covenanted relationship with one guy. And we see the stories of so many people we know, who deeply love a person who has been rejected by their religious community or doctrine, who are pressed to choose.
This week, we read Galatians chapter 1:13-17 and 2:11-21. It’s a challenging set of texts for an interfaith podcast, and a set of texts with a troubled history in the Jewish-Christian relationship. As we read, we wondered - what is the role of faith and of action in our relationship to God? When is the uniqueness of each person important, and when should we look past difference to similarity?
This week BibleWorm reads the story of the Council in Jerusalem in Acts 15:1-21 in which Peter, Paul, and Barnabas debate with the Jerusalem church over whether Gentiles must follow the rules of the Torah. We discuss the need for boundaries and commonly-held practices that bind a community together. We wonder at Peter’s insistence that God works outside those boundaries and wrestle with the balance of tradition and experience. And we recognize that, no matter what boundaries we set, we must always be prepared that God might be working something new among us as God did among the Christians of the early church.
This week BibleWorm reads the Easter story as told in Luke 24:1-12. We ponder the witness of the women, dismissed by the male apostles as an idle tale, and wonder whose testimonies we may dismiss today. We wrestle with the angels’ question, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” realizing that the Easter story itself would never have unfolded if the women had not gone to the grave to attend to the dead. And we grapple with the significance of remembrance in this resurrection story, which insists that we already have what we need to imagine a new future, even if we just can’t quite recognize it yet.
This week BibleWorm reads the story of Palm Sunday in Luke 19:29-44—except in this version there are no palms and no one shouts “Hosanna!” Can we even call it Palm Sunday? We talk about Jesus orchestrating a donkey-jacking and the implicit claim that Jesus is lord of all. We comment on the tenderness of the people in the midst of a tragic story, as they lift Jesus up on a colt and spread their cloaks in front of him. And we wrestle with our addiction to systems of violence, which prevent us from living in peace if we cannot manage to see God in our midst.
This week, BibleWorm reads Luke 15:1-32-- three parables of things that were lost and have been found. Somewhat in spite of ourselves, we can’t help but melt into the sheer joy of the finder. We wonder about the experience of those who were never lost. And Amy manages to embarrass herself so thoroughly that this episode is 1 minute too long because we couldn’t bear to cut the story out. It has to do with middle school - so you know it’s bad.
This week BibleWorm reads Luke 10:25-42 -- the story of the Samaritan who is sometimes called good, and the story of Jesus’s visit with Mary and Martha. We watch Jesus skillfully reframe the lawyer’s questions, from “how to attain eternal life” to “how to live”, and from “whom must I love,” to what love of neighbor looks like. We see ourselves in the very human desire to make and carry out plans. And we hear the call of these stories to re-focus -- to be present in the moment, to see what emerges, and to respond to the person in front of us, whomever that may be.
On this special Ash Wednesday episode BibleWorm discusses Jesus’s journey through Samaria in Luke 9:51-62. We talk about what it means that Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem, and what it means in our own time to find resoluteness in our own journeys toward the fulfillment of justice. We ponder the story of the disciples wanting to call down fire on the Samaritans and Jesus’s rebuke of their inclination toward violence. And we wrestle with the stories of three would-be disciples who ultimately do not follow Jesus, grappling with the difficulty of leaving relationships behind in the interest of a greater purpose. You are dust, and to dust you shall return.
This week, BibleWorm reads Luke 9:28-45. As the gospel begins to speak of Jesus’s departure, we climb deep into his connection with the folks he meets up on the mountain -- not only to their shared mountain theophanies, but also to the unexpected ways that each of their days on earth came to an end. We feel for the disciples, who just can’t manage to really take in the world-changing things they are seeing and hearing. And we can’t help but picture the mom from The Goldbergs up there with them, bedazzling Jesus’s robe and offering everyone a cheese tray.
This week BibleWorm discusses the two healing stories in Luke 7:1-17. We struggle with the story of Jesus healing a man enslaved by a Roman Centurion. If Jesus is supposed to let the oppressed go free, why does he restore this man to his enslaver? Shouldn’t we expect more than that from Jesus? And we ponder Jesus’s resurrection of a widow’s son, recognizing here the Jesus who acts out of mercy and compassion rather than social expectation. And we wonder: how can we reconcile these two stories of healing, and what do they mean for us today?
This week, BibleWorm reads Luke 6:1-16. We draw out the connections between King David and Jesus early in their careers, both walking through the world as God’s anointed before anyone really knows it. We think of the debates between Jesus and this group of Pharisees as akin to the debates that encircle our public health crisis. And we wonder, for a moment, what it was like for the man who was minding his own business at synagogue one day, when a part of his body -- his withered hand -- became a location for this debate.
This BibleWorm follows Mary and Joseph as they bring the infant Jesus from the pastures of Bethlehem to the Jerusalem temple in Luke 2:21-38. There we encounter the righteous man, Simeon, and the prophet Anna, both of whom have been waiting patiently for the messiah. We marvel at the persistent years of seemingly mundane religious practice that have prepared these two for this moment, wrestle with Simeon’s pronouncement that Jesus will cause the rising and falling of many, and ponder the significance of the prophet Anna, who takes her place along side the great women prophets of the Bible in welcoming the messiah.
Also, we imagine a possible future career for Simeon as the most amazing flower girl ever. You’ll just have to trust us on that one.
This week BibleWorm turns to the prophet Joel 2:12-29. There we find Joel prophesying to a people suffering from a plague of locusts, promising that God is about to restore them if only they will return to God with their whole hearts. We wrestle with Joel’s call to “rend our hearts” and ask what it means to tear open the pain, sorrow, and regret we carry deep inside. We relish Joel’s description of a God gracious, merciful, and abounding in steadfast love and the promises of a land and a people restored. And we ponder God’s promise to pour out the spirit on all flesh, welcoming everyone—young and old, male and female—into the prophetic community of God.
This week BibleWorm reads Daniel 6:1-28, where we revisit the ever-complex power triangle between king, people, and God. How do we make decisions about loyalty when the points of that triangle appear to be in tension? And to put more a finer point on that question, there’s a lion in a pit who is eagerly awaiting your decision.
This week BibleWorm turns to Jeremiah 36 and 31, in which God commands Jeremiah to write a scroll of prophecy and yet promises to write a new covenant directly on the hearts of the people. We think about the king’s attempt to suppress the truth by burning it, and the irrepressible power of the word set free among the people. Also, we talk more than we probably should about the Spice Girls. Zig-azig-ah.
This week BibleWorm turns to the book of Jonah, chapters 1, 3, and 4, where we meet God’s most reluctant prophet. We wrestle with why Jonah runs away from God and why he would seemingly rather die than go to the land of his enemies to prophesy. We think about who counts as “God’s people” and what it means that sometimes the people most responsive to God’s call are the ones we think of as outsiders. And we compare the limits of God’s compassion with the limits of our own, recognizing that sometimes God wants to reconcile the very people we might consider our worst enemies. Also, Amy tells us why she sometimes calls her children “Jonah.”
This week we meet the prophet Elijah. We discuss his increasingly vulnerable existence through a period of drought, and his ultimate reliance on another paradigmatically vulnerable character -- a widow and her child who are already unable to take care of themselves. We talk about the idea of God’s care during the hardest of times, and the pairing in this story of a miraculous healing with the more commonly encountered miracle of having just enough to last you through one more day. And we introduce a strange coping strategy to get through the moments when the internet is out.
This week BibleWorm reads the story of Hannah, expanding the Narrative Lectionary a little bit to I Samuel 1:1-20 and 2:1-10. We step into a scene that reads like the worst Thanksgiving meal ever, complete with taunting, sulking, and refusals of food. We discuss the nature and impact of prayer on God and on ourselves, and connect the experience of triumph over obstacles in our own lives with hope for the larger society.
If you'd like to listen to the extended version of this episode, visit our Patreon at patreon.com/biblewormpodcast.
This week BibleWorm looks at the story of Aaron and the Golden Calf in Exodus 32:1-14. We wonder about the unrealistic expectations that the people could wait in the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights without getting anxious, and struggle with the decisions Aaron makes to keep the people from rebelling. We try to parse the difference between worshiping false gods and worshiping God falsely, and wonder whether there is really a difference. And we wrestle with what it means to worship a God who becomes angry but who also relents of anger when faced with a human interlocutor who insist on covenantal fidelity.
If you'd like to listen to the extended version of this episode, visit our Patreon at patreon.com/biblewormpodcast.
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