BibleWorm

This week BibleWorm reads the story of Jesus’s nighttime visit from the Pharisee Nicodemus in John 3:1-21. We talk about what it means to be born again from above, giving up one’s life as a child of the Empire to be reborn into a life of reconciliation with both God and neighbor, We wrestle with the idea that those who love the darkness are already condemned, and we wonder what that means for our own denials of past and present injustices that prevent us from receiving the new life promised by God. And we marvel at that most famous claim that in Jesus God moves toward the world not in condemnation but in reconciling love—and we wonder if we might be able to do the same.

This week we read John 2:13-25, this gospel’s version of Jesus’s spectacular scene in the Temple at Passover. Unlike the synoptic gospels, John does not suggest any corruption or dishonesty at play in the Temple system - so what is bothering Jesus? We have an honest, interfaith conversation about what happens when one person stands up for what they think is right, in a way that ensures that many others cannot do what they think is right. We wonder how lonely it might have been for Jesus to walk through the world knowing already the pitfalls of human nature; knowing that he couldn’t really entrust himself to anyone. And we recognize again and again the abiding patience of the disciples, who couldn’t possibly understand the import of what Jesus said as he said it, but held onto the memory of it to unlock it later. 

This week BibleWorm reads the story of Jesus turning water into wine at a wedding in Cana in John 2:1-11. We talk about the improvisational nature of Jesus’s first miraculous sign, which he does at the urging of his mother even though it is not yet his time. And we wonder whether we, too, might be improvisational when it comes to fulfilling our own callings. We also ponder the subtlety of Jesus’s first miracle, which almost no one seems to notice, and which the bridegroom ultimately gets credit for, and we wonder what else God might be up to in the world that nobody seems to notice. And we talk about abundant wine as a sign of the arrival of the messianic age and imagine the hospitality of God’s coming kingdom, which has plenty of merriment to go around.

This week BibleWorm reads the story of John the Baptist as told in John 1:19-34. We ponder John’s declaration of who he is not as well as who he is and we think about what it would mean to confess our own identity in the world. We talk about John’s acknowledgment that he himself would not have would not have recognized Jesus if it hadn’t been for the dove descending on him, and we wonder if recognizing Jesus today might be a little more more complicated than we sometimes think. And we discuss the idea of Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, wrestling with what it means to call Jesus a Lamb and what that has to do with the brokenness of both ourselves and the world.

This week BibleWorm reads the story of John the Baptist as told in John 1:19-34. We ponder John’s declaration of who he is not as well as who he is and we think about what it would mean to confess our own identity in the world. We talk about John’s acknowledgment that he himself would not have would not have recognized Jesus if it hadn’t been for the dove descending on him, and we wonder if recognizing Jesus today might be a little more more complicated than we sometimes think. And we discuss the idea of Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, wrestling with what it means to call Jesus a Lamb and what that has to do with the brokenness of both ourselves and the world.

In this special Christmas eve episode from 2020, we read 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 begins the Gospel of John - chapter 1: 1-18. We slide between John’s images of Word and Light and Life, and Grace and Truth, and try to hold all of them in our hearts, if not in our minds, at once. We try to place ourselves historically as we read, recognizing in this poetic, mystical, and awfully complex bit of text the peak of the period of differentiation between the Jewish community and this budding Christian one - and we grapple with the best way to read and understand these in our very different historical context.

This week BibleWorm reads Isaiah 55:1-13, a gorgeous poem of hope, persuasion, urgency and witness. Set either right near the end of the exile or right afterwards, it paints the picture of a limited window of time when God is ready to be sought and found, preserving a sense of God’s freedom, saying it is time, right now, to make a move toward God. But while this divine unpredictability might sound a little frightening, it also underscores the vastly forgiving nature of God. And finally, it elevates the natural world as a witness -- to God’s power, and to our lives – offering yet another connection between us and the divine. 

This week we read Ezekiel 37:1-14, another text set in the time of the exile. In a book known for  bizarre visions and sign-acts, this chapter shows us the valley of dry bones. We dive into the great chasm between hopeless and hopeful, and find Ezekiel somewhere in the middle, willing to prophesy to scattered bones in a field as he's been told, but honestly unsure what will happen when he does. We discuss the role of stories that feel scary in our lives of faith, and how the concrete images of bodies and of death in this chapter force us to go all the way to our most frightening thoughts before it pulls us back. And we see the sort of alchemy between God’s power and Ezekiel’s willingness to speak God’s words into the world, even when he’s not entirely sure what will happen.

For this first week of advent, BibleWorm reads Jeremiah 29:1-14, a text of in-between times, historically set between the first exile from Jerusalem and the full devastation of the second exile. We imagine the grief and confusion of the people in exile, and try to take to heart Jeremiah’s call to them -- live your life. Even here, even now, right where you are. How do we accept the wildly imperfect present and use the fullness of our heart and our limited power in this moment, without getting so comfortable in the present that we forget the greater, underlying hope for the future? How can we exist in both worlds? This question resonates through traumatic moments that are societal and personal, past and present, and Jeremiah holds us in that tension.