Geocaching Scripture

There were eight levels of slave in the ancient world, from the slave who was a therapist to the aristocracy to the galley slave whose life was short and brutal. It was this slave – the "below decks" – slave that Paul chose to label himself as for the cause of Christ. We aren't slaves, we are the lowest of slaves, but that doesn't matter because we know our true identity. We dig into this linguistic detail, and our lackluster employment history in the factories and fast food restaurants of America.

Elisha was apparently very sensitive about his receding hairline. In this passage, he appears to call a battalion of she-bears to do some mauling when some errant youths call him "baldy." Josh discusses his own emotional baggage as a hairless American, and we discover there may be a little bit more to this she-bear mauling story than we thought. Isn't that always the case?

When the world was young, Moses made a bronze serpent that the people looked on to be healed. Centuries later, the image appears again, only this time the poison is more pervasive and the healing is eternal. Tune in to our latest episode where we talk about snakes and the fear thereof, briefly about polar bears, and a whole lot about motifs in the Old Testament. Mazel tov.

A woman kneading a lump of dough as big as a steamer trunk. A shifty fraud re-burying a treasure and then buying the field he found it in. Jesus’ parables weren’t just theological constructs or teaching tools, they were jokes in which the punchline was grace. The joy of a son come home, the joy of finding money you thought was lost – Jesus knows how outsized

After a week off, the geocachers return to put a Sunday School myth under scrutiny. You may have grown up with the story of the “needle gate” – a small gate in Jerusalem that camels had to get on their knees to enter. The homiletic fall out from this story is a lot of metaphors about wealth, putting off worldly baggage, etc. The issue being – there’s no such thing as a needle gate and never was. We discuss the historical context, the difficulty of camels crawling, and another of Rick’s trips to the Holy Land where he had firsthand camel experience.

That's not a threat, that's a promise—a line from every action movie since ever. In this episode, we look at a popular “threat” or “judgment” passage and find out instead that it's a promise. "If my people, who are called by my name" – it all happened on a very strange afternoon in 957 BC.

Jesus gets up to read at synagogue and reads the passage of his choice, then interprets it radically, to say the least. Just when everybody’s admiring Him, he ticks off the whole room and sends the crowd into a riot. All in a day’s work. Meanwhile, Josh tries to buy fish bait at a bar and Rick crashes a party at a private club in Bangladesh. Turn your phasers to listen.

We look in detail at the well-worn story of the woman with the issue of blood. The hem of His robe she touched was probably the tzittzit, a religious ornament worn on the bottom of a garment. The ornamentation was deeply tied to identity and has Old Testament precedent in a story of Samuel and then of Saul. The unnamed woman, then, didn't just tug on His sleeve, she touched on His identity. We also talk about Mr. T and the time Billy Graham stopped a press conference. Cheers.  

We look at the ancient, culturally-binding role of the patriarch. This kinsman redeemer role helps us understand the OT narrative and was a foreshadow of the great Redeemer. From paying debts to settling disputes, the patriarch was much more than a landowner or grandfather figure. He funded, employed, defended and avenged his family—he loved them