BibleWorm

This week BibleWorm enters the Christian season of Advent with a reading from Jeremiah 33. The text given to us by the Narrative Lectionary is Jeremiah 33:14–18, a lovely text about a righteous king from the house of David who will restore Jerusalem. But the hope offered by that short text seems naïve in the context of the rest of Jeremiah 33, which takes place against the backdrop of the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem, with Jeremiah in prison, anticipating the destruction of the city yet to come. In that context, the passage speaks a word of hope, but one muted by the pain and suffering that must yet be endured for an unjust world to be dismantled and for a righteous one to take its place. We struggle with this text, to be honest, and for the first time ever one of us has added a postscript to the podcast after mulling over it for a day or two. Welcome to advent y’all. This text is painful, but it is also beautiful.

This week, BibleWorm reads 2 Kings 22:1-20 and 23:1-3– the story of King Josiah finding the scroll of the Teaching that seems to have been lost for a good while now. After a string of really disastrous kingships, we finally get a good egg in Josiah, and he is heartbroken to see all the ways that even he has not been living up to this teaching that was buried in a Temple storage room somewhere. Of course he will change their ways now, but in a system where punishment can come generations after the offending sin, is it too late? What does it mean for Josiah to choose to re-commit himself and his kingdom to God’s teachings, regardless of whether it can impact the fate of his generation?

This week BibleWorm reads two texts from Isaiah that are not normally read together: the song of the vineyard in Isaiah 5:1-7 and the description of the ideal king in Isaiah 11:1-9. In the first text, we find God making an accusation against Israel and Judah, the vineyard that God planted to produce justice and righteousness but which has instead produced violence and oppression. As a result, God removes the hedge around the vineyard, leaving it vulnerable to destruction. Yet in Isaiah 11 we find a description of a sprout emerging from the stump of Jesse, signaling hope for the future. The sprout represents an ideal leader who is not swayed by what he sees and hears but by reverence for God, producing the justice and equity that God seeks. We relate Isaiah 11 to King Hezekiah of Judah, to the hoped-for messiah, and to we ourselves, who are called to live non-violently in a world of predation.

This week, BibleWorm reads Hosea 11:1-9, and we dive deep into the metaphor the text gives us: the rich, complex, sometimes beautiful and sometimes painful world of parenting. We encounter here a God who is pouring out the biggest of feelings – a mix of love, jealousy, nostalgia, compassion, and suffering that can seem impossible to hold together. Feelings that are not unfamiliar to the experience of many parents, actually. And though God plainly states at the end of our reading that there is a difference between Godself and humans, we found here a beautiful and honest depiction of some of the most beloved and fraught relationships in the human realm, and maybe even a model for moving through them.

This week BibleWorm reads the story of the contest between Elijah and the prophets of Baal as told in 1 Kings 18:17-39. We find Elijah demanding that the people make a choice between God and Baal, insisting that they cannot serve both. Elijah then engages in an elaborate contest with the prophets of Baal, calling down fire from heaven to demonstrate that the God of Israel is truly God. Only after seeing the fire do the people finally confess, “The Lord is God! The Lord is God!” We think of the ways that we, too, are called to make a choice between the God of the Bible and the gods of the dominant ideologies of militarism and consumer capitalism. But we must make the choice without the benefit of fire coming down from heaven. We are asked to make the choice on slimmer evidence, given in symbol and ritual and prayer. That must suffice for us to confess “The Lord is God! The Lord is God!”

This week BibleWorm reads I Kings 12:1-17 and 25-29. We are just a couple of generations after King David, and boy howdy, kingship in Israel is not going great. As David’s grandson Reheboam steps to the throne, we see parallels with the stories of Pharaoh in Egypt: a king who uses forced labor to control people, and who seeks power and dominance above all else, even when that is politically impractical. And then we meet Jeroboam, who seems to smartly identify a real vulnerability for his community, but then tries to patch it with a sort of quick fix borrowed from another religious culture - definitely a no-no. Both kings consult advisors, but neither consult God. This is pretty much exactly what the deuteronomistic history warned about.

This week BibleWorm reads a selection of texts about David’s praise of God in 2 Samuel 5:1-5 and 6:1-15 as well as Psalm 150. We talk about what it means for everything that has breath to praise the Lord and ponder the unification of all creatures that is possible when we recognize the breath within us that wishes to return to God in praise. We also pay attention to the ways David approaches praise, sometimes as a genuine reverence for God but sometimes as an apparent manipulation that seeks to coopt God into his own political and military agenda. And we discuss the story of poor Uzza, who is struck dead for trying to steady the ark of the covenant, concluding that God does not need to be protected and will not tolerate being treated carelessly. When we come into God’s presence with praise, we do something that is dangerous and powerful, and that can bring us extraordinary blessing.

This week BibleWorm reads Ruth 1:1-17 and 4:13-17 – just the opening and closing of a book that turns all kinds of social norms on their head. That famous line “your people shall be my people, and your God shall be my God” – the one that so many people use today in weddings, is not from a wedding at all – but from the mouth of Ruth, who is refusing Naomi’s plea to go find herself a husband, and committing herself instead to her deceased husband’s mother. This text asks us – what, really, is family? And what is peoplehood? Following a theme we are seeing a lot this season, Ruth decides to just care for the life in front of her, whatever that may mean for her future. And this act, as it trickles through the generations, means very good things.

This week BibleWorm reads two of the foundational texts of the Hebrew Bible—the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy 5:1-21 and the text known as the Shema in the Jewish tradition in Deuteronomy 6:4-9. We discuss the way that the Shema cuts across the cacophony of voices vying for our attention with a resounding “Listen, O Israel!,” calling us away from the voice of Pharaoh and focusing us on the one God who set us free from bondage in Egypt. We discuss the urgency of the Ten Commandments as the framework for an alternative way of life as God’s people, who love God with heart, mind, and soul and protect the integrity of the community. And we notice the repeated emphasis in this text on sharing the story across multiple generations, paying attention both to those who came before and those who will come after as we remind ourselves of what it means to truly be the people of God in the world.

This week BibleWorm reads Exodus 1:8-2:10 and 3:1-15, a text that seemed to ask us again and again – what is capturing your attention? We see just how little it takes for the situation to turn bad for the Israelites in Egypt. And in this newly roaring sea of people and power that are bent against them, we read stories of individual people who manage to incline their attention somewhere else – who manage to look at the one human being right in front of them and respond in that moment with care. Is it enough, to save that one life when it seems the world is on fire?  We can’t be the judge of that. But we sure do get the sense that what they did was urgently important.