BibleWorm

This week we conclude our summer series on The Bible and Economic Justice with a text from John 12:1-8 – not such an obvious text for economic justice, but a really important and challenging one.  How do we hold together Mary’s extravagance toward Jesus with  our moral and practical obligation to use our resources to care for the poor? This text invites us to explore the human need to express a sense of awe and transcendence, and to ask – if we humans could stop amassing resources to ourselves, could we create this beautiful reality of abundance instead of scarcity, where we could give to God and give to each other?

This week BibleWorm continues our series on the Bible and Economic Justice with 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 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.