Brewing Through the Bible

Recently our church finished out its series on the book of Lamentations. This poetic dirge is not one to which many run. Yet, I believe it has a clear and pertinent message for us today. I would contend that it is prophetic wisdom into what we are walking through—not only with the pandemic, but speaking even wider into the church.

Today I had my friend Ben Rous on the show. He's pastor of Liberty Christian Church in Lansing, Michigan. We talked through a lot of details regarding race, racism, and black lives matter, trying to bring some semblance of measured discussion to the table.

For the past two weeks, the church has remembered Pentecost Sunday and Holy Trinity Sunday. In light of that, I offered how Pentecost in Acts 2 serves as a model to consider for what we are currently walking through in our time of pandemic and social injustice in our world today.

Birds, sourdough bread, the Bible, and the Coronavirus. These topics and more came up as the BTTB crew discussed more from Scot McKnight's book The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible.

Over the summer, the BTTB team will be reading through and discussing Scot McKnight's The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible. In session 1 we discuss ch.1 from the book. Perhaps the statement, "God said it. I believe it. That settles it." doesn't fully capture the tension and nuance of reading and interpreting the Bible.

This time around the BTTB group spent time talking through this question: Is the Bible simple, complicated, both or neither?

The BTTB group was finally back together at the table discussing important things about the Bible. We spent time mainly discussing two points: 1) the challenges we face in studying the Bible and 2) what it might look for people to truly follow Jesus in our world today.

The church has recently entered the season of Epiphany, which simply means "appearing." In it, the church will spend a good amount of time reading the Gospels, reminding ourselves of who Jesus is, what Jesus did and what Jesus said. In this episode, I consider Jesus's appearing on the scene at the beginning of the Gospel accounts. But, even more, I try and relate some of what was going on in Jesus's day to what is going on in our own current setting.

Brewing Through the Bible met this past Monday, MLK Day. Have a listen to the conversation we had around the table regarding race issues.

In this episode, we take time to consider many points from Genesis 6-9, which is the account of Noah and the flood.

In this new episode, we hit on a few things: 1) Recap our discussion around Genesis 1, 2) discuss some other philosophy & theological ideas, and 3) finally land on discussing Adam in light of Genesis 3 and Romans 5.

As a follow-up to episode one, discussing Genesis 1, in this short episode I offer a few resources connected to the questions that arise around faith and science, creation and evolution.

We've started a podcast related to our occasional gatherings called "Brewing Through the Bible." We're working through challenging passages of Scripture and started where it all began - "In the beginning..." - with Genesis 1. [Note: Apologies for some background noise. We were at a table in a public place, so we picked up a live cellist playing music and other various sounds.]