BibleWorm

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 how Jesus’s teachings seem to alternate between admonitions against certain behaviors and a call to value what is holy within ourselves. And we contemplate the metaphor of God as a rock and foundation – not a shelter from the storm, and not something of spectacular beauty, but a rock. And boy, will you be glad if you built your house there when the storm comes.

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,” says Jesus, “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow.” As it turns out, this passage is about economic anxiety and the fundamental importance of trusting that God will provide enough for tomorrow so that we can tend to the needs of our community today. We talk about spiritual practices that can quell our anxiety and help us trust in God’s capacity to provide. And we discuss the urgency of forming communities of radical trust, in which we place the needs of the widow, the orphan, and the stranger ahead of our own desires for economic security.

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 neighbors, we ask to kept away from the temptation of plenty. In this way, Jesus says, God’s name is made holy. In this way God’s kingdom will come to earth—here and now, among us. We don’t need to ask for more, Jesus says, because God already knows this is all we need.

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 mean to live into it right now. In this text that seems both to sit in its present moment and to extend into the future, the question of what we can do right now – and what we can expect when we do it – is at the front of our minds.

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 turn our own lives away from the kingdom of heaven and toward the ways of the Empire. Jesus is first tempted by his own physical need for bread and water, then by his need to demonstrate to others that he is worthy of love, and finally by the possibility of conforming the whole world to his will—temptations that, in one way or another, come to us all. The devil may tempt you to skip this podcast—but don’t do it! This is urgent stuff!

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 see the gorgeous and abounding delight that God takes in Jesus at this transitional moment.

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 from the East, who discern from the stars that the world is changing, and the religious authorities of Judea, who derive from the text where the child is to be born. We marvel at the power of dreams as a means of God communicating urgent messages that bypass rational thought. And we wrestle with the ways that religious knowledge—and yes, even Christmas— can be coopted by fearful people of power in service to death, asking how people of faith might instead be faithful witnesses to the God of life, who is coming into the world.

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 are not remembered so favorably. And it goes out of its way to name at least a couple of women, all of whom had to abandon social expectations at some point in order to wield the singular power of their life in the way that only they knew was right.  It makes us wonder - how do we tell our own stories, our community’s story? Who do we highlight, and who do we leave out? All of it makes us who we are.

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 is silent on this point -- was there a donkey in the manger? We are willing to bank our reputations on it. 

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 his male ego out of the way, and he ultimately does so without hesitation. We also discuss the two names given to Jesus in this text and what they tell us about both Jesus and God. The name Jesus, or Joshua in Hebrew, indicates God’s power to save humankind from the powers of sin and death, while the name Emmanuel, or “God with us,” gestures to the intimate presence of that God here among us in quiet and unassuming ways. In this baby Jesus, God’s saving power is present among us. What a beautiful image.