BibleWorm

This week BibleWorm continues our summer series on the Forgotten Books of the Bible, turning our attention to Song of Songs 1:12-2:6 and 7:1-13. We wonder at the presence of erotic love poetry in the biblical canon and wrestle what it means for our understanding of bodies, sexuality, and God. We explore themes of sexual empowerment, invitation and consent, and the joy of sex. We think about how the Song invites us to admire and respect human bodies, challenging a culture that alternately shames and sexualizes bodies for profit. Mostly, we consider how this ancient text, set free in our churches and synagogues, might empower us to speak more authentically about human sexuality.

This week BibleWorm continues our study of Lamentations, meeting an individual survivor in chapter 3 and hearing the voice of the community in chapter 5. We raise up the differences between this individual man’s relationship to his suffering compared to what we heard from Daughter Zion last episode, and look expectantly to the communal voice to tell us which perspective is the better on to adopt. Spoiler Alert: It doesn’t. Instead, in magnificent and strikingly ambiguous poetic language, it creates space in scripture to hold multiple perspectives on suffering.

This week BibleWorm continues our summer series on the Forgotten Books of the Bible with Lamentations 1:8-22 and 2:10-22. Written in the wake of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, Lamentations presents the community’s response to trauma given in multiple voices. This week we look at the voice of the funeral singer, a bystander who has witnessed the trauma but not experienced it, and Daughter Zion, the personified city of Jerusalem, who has experienced trauma and humiliation in her body. We talk about the role of protest in faith, the urgency of speaking truth before power, and the theological imperative to challenge God. We also think about the role of allies, who can recognize the pain of the traumatized, share in their sorrow, and encourage them to use their voices. This, friends, is a text for our time.

This week BibleWorm continues our look at Ecclesiastes, aka Qohelet, focusing on 1:4-11 and 3:1-11. We ask ourselves—is it really true there is nothing new under the sun. We look at that most famous poem “To everything there is a season,” and see exactly why you’d best not look at only the net total of life’s experiences. And we wonder what Qohelet might say about issues of justice in our time.

This week BibleWorm begins our summer series on the Hebrew Festival scrolls with a look at Ecclesiastes 1:1-3 and 8:16-9:10. We discuss Qohelet’s idea that everything is mere breath and ask what it means to live in a world where nothing adds up to much of anything. We talk about the inscrutability of God and why good people often suffer while the wicked get all the rewards. We ask whether it is possible to accomplish anything meaningful in life and, if not, how we might be better off to reorient our goals to enjoy the moments of each day, whether playing with a toddler or listening to the birds sing. Also, Amy asks what kind of person would use Ecclesiastes as a wedding text. Hint: It was not Amy.

This week we read Acts 2 and 1 Corinthians 12, the story of Pentecost and the body of Christ. We visit the first moments of the birth of the church, rich with imagery familiar from creation and the exodus from Egypt. We try to embrace what it means for a group of people to function like a body, each part precisely designed and wholly dependent on the others.

This week BibleWorm looks at 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul reprimands the church in Corinth for not believing in bodily resurrection. We wonder whether believing in resurrection is a way of trying to escape the reality of death or an authentic means of coming to terms with the persistence of evil in the world. We wonder why Paul opposes the concept of a spiritual resurrection and ask why it is that bodies matter even in the time to come. Also, we try to imagine the BibleWorm as a cosmic death eater. But Amy bursts the bubble.

This week BibleWorm reads 1 Corinthians 13, Paul’s famous passage on love as a sort of diagnostic check of our motivations in our attempts to live lives of faith. We talk about love—or lack of love—across the political aisle and about the limits of loves’s patience in the face of injustice. We talk about the importance of doing a serious gut check about where we ourselves are drawn with real love, and the necessity that we lean into that even if our acts of faith may look different than someone else’s. And we wonder what Paul would have to say about social media. Well, actually, we can guess.

This week BibleWorm follows Paul to Corinth by readings Acts 18:1-4 and 1 Corinthians 1:10-18. We talk about factionalism in our communities and the importance not of uniformity but of commitment to the core principles that hold us together. We think about the human tendency to attach ourselves to our leaders and Paul’s insistence that the Christian community should attach itself only to Christ. And we wrestle with Paul’s contrast between eloquent wisdom and the foolishness of the cross, which alone conveys the power of God.