BibleWorm

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.

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 25:31-46, which feels like a culminating text for our weeks studying parables. The text seems to locate us in the future, at the time of the final judgment – but it’s not just a different place on the timeline. The nature of the cosmos has shifted, and maybe something in the nature of Jesus, too, after the resurrection. All of the overlapping groups that have been present in the parables – the wheat and the weeds, if you will - will be sorted into two distinct fates. On a quick read, the grounds for this sorting may not seem too high a bar - we must offer generous, loving care for the bodies and spirits and the dignity of our co-travellers on this earth. But how do we keep this care from becoming primarily an act of self-interest, given the presence of those hell fires - would that kind of motivation ruin it? And wait, did this text just say that we need to do this in every single instance, without exception? The words of this text may feel familiar to you, but boy are they a radical reorientation.

BibleWorm recently passed something of a podcasting milestone with our 100,000 download. To celebrate, we are re-releasing our very first podcast episode, from September of 2019—back when we were still NL;DR. First Bobby and Amy reminisce about our experience of creating BibleWorm, and then we share that first episode. It’s not great, y’all—but at least we can celebrate how far we’ve come!

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 25:1–13, the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Bridesmaids who go out to meet the bridegroom but fall asleep when he is delayed. The five wise bridesmaids have enough oil to make it to the wedding, but the five foolish ones neglect to bring extra oil and so are shut outside. Once again, this parable warns us that the kingdom of heaven will be delayed and then come all at once, so we must always be prepared. We wrestle with the individuality of this parable. Why can’t the five prepared bridesmaids just share their lamps with the unprepared ones? But ultimately we conclude that there are just some things we have to do for ourselves—and keeping oil in our metaphorical lamps is one of them. Like it or not, no one can live a righteous life for us. It’s up to us to be prepared.

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 22:1-14, a parable of a wedding banquet that a king plans for his son … but it doesn’t go quite as expected.  We love thinking about the combination of obligation and joy and grandeur and intimacy baked into this story. We REALLY loved the idea of a last minute invitation to a mixed multitude of seemingly random people to come witness these nuptials when the first group of invitees didn’t quite work out. And I’ll be honest, we struggled with how to make sense of the fact that one person from the latter group is found unprepared. How could he have been prepared when there was no time between the invitation and the party! Moving from the register of the story into what we think it is trying to teach about the kingdom being described, maybe that’s exactly the question this text wants us to sit with–  if there’s not going to be time later, how can humans best prepare, each of us, right now?