BibleWorm

Happy summer, y’all, and welcome to our summer series! We’ll spend the next six weeks looking at stories of women in the Hebrew Bible.And we start with doozy – the stories of Sarah and Hagar, which we find in Genesis chapters 16 and 21. It’s so tempting to read these as stories of two individuals – or 3 if you add Abraham in there - but what are the social forces at work here? How much agency do these women really have? As the power dynamics become increasingly twisted and the possibility of a peaceable ending for this family becomes ever smaller, we wonder - why doesn’t God just subvert the whole social structure and tell a different story? Well, that’s not what happens. BUT - through the pain and plain awfulness of these stories, we see clearly that blessing can be intermingled with injustice – and that it is a powerful thing and empowering thing to have a witness to our sufferings.

This week BibleWorm concludes the regular Narrative Lectionary season with the Pentecost texts: Acts 2:1-4 and Romans 8:14-39. We talk about God’s desire for the redemption of all creation, which has suffered under human neglect since the time of Adam. Paul envisions the day we humans wake up and realize that we were created not to serve sin but to tend creation in order to restore the world around us. Until then creation, and we ourselves, groan with labor pains, Paul says, as we await redemption the redemption of our bodies. We can see the new life that is possible, but the pain and danger we are experiencing in the meantime is all too real. And so we live with hope for a world that we know is possible but one that we cannot yet see.

Today BibleWorm reads Romans 6:1-14, a complicated text whose beauty took both of us for surprise in the end. What does it mean, really, to be dead to sin – to be dead to the world as you have always known it, and live into a different reality? How do we do the work of retraining the habits of our bodies and our spirits to move toward alignment - toward allegiance - to this newly discovered path? We have lots of ideas, surely none of them complete. 

This week BibleWorm continues our study of Paul with Romans 3:28-30 and 5:1-11 in which Paul develops the idea that God loves us and justifies us even when we haven’t done anything to merit God’s love. We explore the possibility that Paul is critiquing the Empire’s merit system, in which we are asked to give up our lives for the people above us. But Christ is not like that. While we were yet sinners, Paul says, Christ died for us. Simply put: You are enough.

This week BibleWorm reads Romans 1:1-17 - Paul’s letter to a relatively small group of Jesus followers within the very large city of Rome. What does it take to carry out this work of spreading the gospel day after day? What do the people there need – and what does Paul need – and how can they support one another? Again and again, this text centered us in mutuality – and not only in the human community, but in our lives with God as well.

This week BibleWorm reads the story of Paul and Barnabas in Lystra as told in Acts 13:1-3 and 14:8-18. We talk about Paul’s public healing of a man who cannot walk and think about the mutual faith that is required between the man and Paul, to trust each other enough for a healing to take place. We discuss the confusion of the townspeople, who want to worship Paul and Barnabas as gods, and recognize the tendency of all humans, including ourselves, to confuse the power of holiness with the physical forms in which we experience it. And we notice Paul’s observation that God is constantly working miracles in subtler ways. If we’re impressed by a healing, how much more so should we be impressed that God gives us rain, harvest, food, and happiness. The miraculous is all around us, if only we have the faith to see it.

This week BibleWorm moves on from the Gospel of Matthew to the Book of Acts, reading Acts 10:1-17 and 34-48. It’s the story of a God-fearing Roman solider and his welcome into the community of Jesus-followers. It raises up for us all kinds of questions about the complex interaction between our identities, ethnic and otherwise, and our faith, including this big one: What if God works outside of human categories altogether? What if God doesn’t use categories at all? 

This week BibleWorm finishes our exploration of Matthew’s Gospel with the Great Commission Jesus gives to his disciples in Matthew 28:16-20. We discuss the role of doubt in the life of faith, noticing that Jesus addresses both those who worship him and those who hesitate, seeming to make no distinction between them. We talk about the disciple’s commission to baptize and teach the nations, inaugurating people into an alternative way of life to that on offer from the Empire as given by God in the Torah and by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. And we wrestle with the concept of Jesus’s authority over the earth, which sounds an awful lot like the claims the Empire makes to justify its power over the people. What might it look like to envision an alternative form of authority grounded not in power over others but in  the liberating power of life for all?

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 28:1-10, Matthew’s account of the resurrection - or, really, what happens right after the resurrection. It holds so many important questions for us. We ask: What is the role of evidence - of our senses - in our lives of faith? What is the role of fear in our human experience? What does it mean to act with both fear and great joy? And finally, how do we balance the need to go to the tomb - to honor what was and grieve its loss – and the call to leave it behind, and move forward to the next thing? The women manage to do both, and it’s an awfully good thing they did.

This week is Palm Sunday in the Christian tradition, and BibleWorm is reading the story of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem as told in Matthew 21:1-17. While the text is a familiar one for many, Matthew’s version has some intriguing surprises along the way. Jesus seems to ride on two animals at the same time in this text—both a donkey and a colt, and Jesus seems to take these animals from the owner without permission. What is Matthew up to in telling the story in this dramatic way?

What’s more, Matthew combines the story of Jesus’ entry with the story of Jesus overturning the money changers in the temple and then of Jesus healing the blind and lame in the temple while the children proclaim “Hosanna to the Son of David!” In our reading, this text invites us to examine the ways our own communities are going about business as usual while excluding the most vulnerable members of society. It invites us to acts of disruption that shake us out of comfortable modes of operation to make our communities houses of prayer for all people.