BibleWorm

This week BibleWorm continues our series on Economic Justice in the Bible with Luke 4:16-21 and 18:18-30. Why does Jesus tell this man that he needs to sell everything he owns? That’s an awfully high bar. And why is that even harder to do when you are wealthy? We consider the sense of safety and independence that money and material resources offer us, and the ways in which that can block us from ever really, truly needing to trust God or each other. We see the Kingdom of God envisioned here as a life of complete interdependence and mutual responsibility. But boy, do we live in the tension of what this text calls us to do and what we are ready and able to do today.

This week BibleWorm continues our series on the Bible and Economic Justice with Micah 6:6-15 and 7:1-7. Here God brings a lawsuit against the people for treating each other unjustly. They cheat each other with false measures. They bribe judges and officials to render false judgments. They pervert justice to favor the wealthy and the powerful. So what can they do to set things right? Nothing but this: do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. It sounded so simple when we sang it in youth group, but in fact Micah calls us to radical obedience to the Torah, creating a just world for the widow, the orphan and the stranger—for the most vulnerable among us. That is what the Lord require of us.

This week we continue our summer series on economic justice in the Bible with Leviticus 19:9-18 and 33:37– a text that asks us to reflect and embody and channel God’s holiness through the economy we create in the everyday world. What if our means of production – our land, our time – isn’t absolutely “ours” in the way we owners imagine? We all know the commandment thou shalt not steal, but what is fairly ours to begin with, and what constitutes stealing? And furthermore, what if this command is not just incumbent upon each individual – How do we create communities where theft doesn’t happen, thereby enacting God’s vision of a holy people? Spoiler alert - it’s not an alarm system.

This week BibleWorm begins our summer series on biblical views of economic justice with Deuteronomy 15:1-11 and 24:10-15.  We begin with the radical command of Deuteronomy 15:1 to forgive the debts of the entire community every seventh year, resetting the debt economy and ensuring that no one either falls into generational poverty or accrues generational wealth at the expense of others. We highlight the tension between a worldly economics of scarcity, which views others as competitors for limited resources, and Deuteronomy’s theology of God’s blessing, which insists that there is enough for everyone, if only we would learn to distribute it properly, looking out for the community’s well-being before our own. And we talk about just economic practices that respect the dignity of the poor and insist that poverty should never confine a person to a life of shame or suffering.

This week BibleWorm reads the Christ Hymn in Philippians 2:1-13. We talk about Paul’s invitation to have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus, who gave up equality with God to be born in human form and die on the cross. We ask what it might mean to give up our own privileges, to divest ourselves of those things that give us higher status in order to be present with the disinherited and the marginalized. We wrestle with what it means to look to the interests of others before our own and how that can be both a wonderful and dangerous idea. And we reflect on Christ’s ultimate exaltation and the promise of salvation. Is it really being humble if you only do it to gain a heavenly reward? Or is there more to it than that?

This week BibleWorm reads Philippians 1:1-18a, where Paul begins the most loving and encouraging letter we can fathom to the people of Phillipi. We imagine the intersection of longing and compassion that Paul describes, and locate that feeling somewhere deep in your gut. We spend a long time turning over the idea of overflowing love that is rich with knowledge and insight, and wonder about the inverse – pursuing knowledge and insight with the express intention of becoming ever more capable of love through our learning. This is not the express goal of most learning ventures … but maybe it should be?

This week we’re reading Acts 17:16-34, the story of Paul’s visit to the Greek cultural center of Athens. We marvel at the way Paul engages with the people of Athens, appreciating their history and culture while also standing firm in his own beliefs. He admires Greek religiosity, quotes Greek poetry, and engages Greek philosophy, yet he does not hesitate when it comes time to express his own contrary beliefs in judgment and resurrection. We wonder why it often seems so difficult for us to do the same—whether by failing to recognize the value of other belief systems or by faltering when it comes time to state the essential claims of our own. Paul makes it look so simple! We wonder if we can do the same.

This week BibleWorm reads Acts 16:16-40, a story of Paul and Silas being thrown into prison in Phillipi. It’s a rich and complex story about power and faith and imprisonment and freedom, and it raises the ever-present question - how do we overturn harmful systems of power, while also protecting the vulnerable people who are bound up in those systems? We are amazed at the transformation that happens while Paul and Silas are in prison, where they sing and the others listen; where nobody bothers to run away once the shackles that bind their bodies are opened. And we are only more amazed at the care that Paul and Silas have taken to protect the prison guard. But there is someone else in this story whose fate they seem to overlook, whose story seems primarily to set up the main story. So we wonder, what ever happened to the slave girl?

This week BibleWorm reads the story of Saul’s encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus as told in Acts 9:1-19a. We reflect on Saul, the Greek-speaking Jew from Tarsus who is also known as Paul, a Roman citizen from Asia minor. We talk about how his hybrid identities—both Jew and Roman—may motivate both his persecution of others and ultimately his embrace of difference within the Christian faith. We wrestle with this story as a conversion story, concluding that Paul is ultimately converted not from Judaism to Christianity but from the way of violence to the way of openness and embrace. And we reflect on the disciple Ananias, who overcomes his fear and suspicion of Saul in order to welcome him as a brother in Christ.