Exploring My Strange Bible

In this first teaching, I explore the biblical word and concept of holiness: God’s holiness, people’s holiness, the story underneath it all, and more. This is an extremely important idea for understanding what followers of Jesus believe about God and themselves.

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In this episode, we explore the final pages of the bible (Revelation chs. 21-22) and how they describe the resurrection and the new creation. In this poetic visions, John shows how the new creation is both similar and dissimilar to the world as we currently experience. What does that mean? Why is that important?

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In this teaching we are going to explore the apostle Paul’s most in-depth conversation about the resurrection in 1 Corinthians It one the most important discussions of resurrection hope in the whole New Testament. Here he ponders the nature of the kind of physical body that Jesus after his resurrection, and what that means for his followers. He's very concerned to show how the new creation will be continuous with our current experience of the world, but also really different at the same time. There are a ton of metaphors in this text that help us wrap our imaginations around the unimaginable. .

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This episode dives into one of the most beautiful chapters of Paul’s writings- Romans Ch. 8. We watch him retell the story from Genesis to Revelation with the images drawn from the Old Testament book of the Exodus. It’s a story about slavery and God’s liberation and moving into freedom and the promised land. For Paul, the resurrection of Jesus opens up a whole new future and hope for humanity, and for the universe itself.

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In this episode we'll explore the nature of Christian hope from 1 Peter ch.1. We'll learn the story of a Holocaust survivor named Victor Frankel and what he learned about human psychology and hope. This story gives us a profound insight into the important role that hope based on the resurrection of Jesus can play in our lives.

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This episode explores a story about the appearance of the resurrected Jesus in the Gospel of Luke Ch. 24. Two disciples who spent a lot of time with Jesus are suddenly blind to his true identity; they can't recognize him! What's up with that? This beautifully told story shows how Jesus' own followers can become blind to who he really is, because of the pre-loaded assumptions about him. Truly seeing Jesus means surrendering our most cherished beliefs about the world, God, and ourselves and allowing the cross and the resurrection to redefine reality for us.

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In this teaching, we'll continue exploring the portrait of the first "church" community in Acts ch.2, specifically how they committed to sharing their resources with each other. This shows us a core habit of the church from the beginning, crossing over the boundary lines between ourselves and other people, and releasing our time and resources into their lives. Why is it so hard to share our stuff? Why does church play such a critical part in helping us learn this habit? We explore these questions in this episode.

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In this teaching we'll explore the first depiction of "the church" in Acts ch. 2. What we discover may surprise you! We see a group of people committing to each other and to Jesus so they can learn new ideas and form new habits of living and thinking together, all centered around Jesus. Being open to new ideas is not the first thing that comes to people’s minds when they think of Christians. That's because we've lost a key part of the mindset of a "disciple," a word that means "learner." So let's change that, and learn how to become learners all over again, Jesus-style.

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This episode draws together all the ideas of the previous three lectures. We explore the images of eternal death and what these images mean, and the images used by Jesus in his teachings about God’s final justice.

In the second half, we talk about the images of new creation, resurrection, and eternal life. We explore what Jesus and the Apostles have to say about this. Then, we focus on the last two pages of the Bible and ponder the beautiful hope of heaven and earth reunited in the renewed creation.

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The definitions of human life and death on pages 1-3 of the bible are based on the idea that humans can live in a state of death. The goal of God’s rescue mission is to take people out of “living death” and transfer them into a mode of “eternal life” here in the present. According to the biblical story, these are the two ways to be human being - to be among the living dead or to be among the truly living.

Keeping this in mind, in this episode we move onto a new part of the story which is the Old Testament vision of final justice. Why does God have to bring divine justice into human history? What does the Old Testament say about what comes after God’s final justice? This is where the ideas of new creation and resurrection come in.

Listen in as we talk about all of this and the origins of eternal life and resurrections in the Old Testament.

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