Ponder Anew Podcast

If there ever was a book of the Bible not to cover in a single podcast, it would be Job.  The story of unjust suffering deserves — demands! — reflection.  The podcast this week, which includes hearing God speak from the whirlwind (Job 41:1-11), hopefully serves as a guidebook rather than abridged version. As we […]

Beauty pageants, palace intrigues, genocide and a courageous strong woman!  What a story!! As we work through #TheBibleInAYear, we look at the book of Esther.  This book tells the (likely known) story of Esther, a woman first known for her beauty, then her bravery and then finally her cunning. Beyond serving as a great story […]

As we continue reading #TheBibleInAYear, we turn to Nehemiah. This book is very accessible — it is a memoir of Nehemiah, who took it upon himself to rebuild the walls (and city) of Jerusalem.  While the historical person of Nehemiah — the cupbearer of emperor of Persia who chose to return to his people’s native […]

Homecoming! The people begin to return to Jerusalem, thanks to Cyrus of Persia defeating the Babylonians and ending the exile of the Jewish leaders from Jerusalem.  As we work through #TheBibleInAYear, we look at the book of Ezra, which focuses on the efforts of the priest Ezra (and others) who lead the rebuilding of the […]

Who got the story right? As we continue reading through #TheBibleInAYear, we turn to 2 Chronicles and King Hezekiah.   Most of us don’t know Hezekiah that well, but it turns out that his story is told in not one, not two, but three different books!  So which is right? Today’s theme though isn’t really simply […]

As we continue reading through #TheBibleInAYear, we turn to 1 Chronicles and … (wait for it) … ancient Israelite genealogies! This particular one is from 1 Chronicles 4:1-10.  (If you do fast forward, pay attention to the last twenty or so seconds of it!) Yet in these genealogies, I suggest, we discover a surprising answer […]

Flaming chariots, blinded armies and a meal of mercy.  What is going on here! As we continue reading through #TheBibleInAYear, we turn to 2 Kings and the work of the prophet Elisha.  As a whole, 2 Kings is a “sad” part of Scripture in which things generally go from bad to worse.  However, there are […]

This story is a bit like the red pill in the movie the Matrix.  Reading it challenges our conceptions of free will and how God works in our world. Get ready for some fun! As we continue reading through #TheBibleInAYear, we turn to 1 Kings and the less well known prophet Micaiah (1 Kings 22).  […]

This story is a bit like the red pill in the movie the Matrix.  Reading it challenges our conceptions of free will and how God works in our world. Get ready for some fun! As we continue reading through #TheBibleInAYear, we turn to 1 Kings and the less well known prophet Micaiah (1 Kings 22).  […]

This week, we look at another R rated part of scripture: King David’s affair with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband.   As we continue reading through #TheBibleInAYear, we focus on David’s moral collapse, as recorded in 2nd Samuel (chapter 11-12).  My sense is that most of us, even if we attended Sunday School, didn’t study […]

Did you have a sense of wonder about life and about God as a child? Many humans do…but this doesn’t always endure. The book of 1 Samuel allows us to follow a number of people from their childhood until their death.  Like us, they go through life’s ups and downs, both inspired and dejected at […]

Do conservatives care about the poor?  Do liberals care about family values at all?  The book of Ruth provides us a glimpse at how God calls us to love BOTH our family and the stranger in need.   As we continue reading through #TheBibleInAYear, we look at the moving story of Ruth.  Although it is a […]

Welcome to the book of Judges.  R-rated at best, this is an intense book of violence, societal breakdown and strong women.  The book, which slows the moral collapse of a people, ironically ends up also highlighting the importance of leadership.  As we continue reading through #TheBibleInAYear, we focus on Deborah and the book of the Judges.

The heroine of this story is Not a jew Willing to lie to authorities A prostitute All of the above Welcome to the book of Joshua, the book in which the ancient Israelites get their act together, and with a little help from their “friends”, take over the promised land… As we continue reading through […]

February 2, 2025 Love is patient and love is kind. Yet the people want to throw Jesus off a cliff (Luke 4:18-30)!  Where is the love?  Pastor Rob offers that the people in Jesus’ hometown do have love, it is just misguided and blinding.  We struggle with this today as well as our love can […]

“Hear O Israel, the LORD your God is one.”   Boom! These are the most important words Moses says in the Bible, if not the most important words in the whole Old Testament. As we continue reading through #TheBibleInAYear, we look at the book of Deuteronomy.  We will focus specifically on the words of Moses in […]

We continue working through the #BibleInAYear, looking at the book of Numbers.  This book isn’t about numbers though, it is about the wilderness!  Crazy, big and wild — both God and life! Some come aboard for some adventure.  We will look at Numbers 22, sometimes referred to as “Balaam’s talking Ass.” Note:  This podcast is […]

We continue working through the #BibleInAYear.   This week we focus on Leviticus, probably one of the harder books of the Bible to read.  Fear not, we will get through this book together — and discover it still speaks to us!  To get us into Leviticus, we look at some of the laws laid out in […]

We continue with our reading of the Bible in one year by looking at Exodus.  The focus story is the call of Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3). The first part of the podcast is about “exodus” – the liberation of the ancient Israelites.  This is the theme, but we need to make sure […]

With this podcast, we launch our reading through of the Bible.  We will start in the garden of Eden, reminded of how God intends for the world to work. In 2025, we will look at a different book of the Bible each week, focusing on one story that embodies the whole of that book. Also, […]

We wrap up our Advent warm-up with a look at Matthew’s Gospel.  The writer Matthew has lots of Old Testament connections.  A reminder that the stories in the Bible draw on each other.  They reinforce but also reinterpret each other.  Hopefully this stitching together gives us permission to see how the stories of Scripture stitch […]

Miracles of miracles! What do we do with the miracles in the Bible?  For many in modern (Western) culture miracles don’t quite make sense given how we understand how the universe works. This is the third in our Advent 2024 season of the Ponder Anew Podcast.  We are looking at the Christmas story to tackle […]

We continue our Advent 2025 series.  We are looking at the Christmas story to prime the pump on reading through the Bible in 2025. This week we consider the fact that the Gospel stories have different accounts of the same story.  How do we handle the fact that the Bible itself presents different versions of […]

In 2025, we are going to work through the whole Old Testament together, taking one book each week. To get us ready for that, we need to address a few “How to read the Bible” matters.  In the last weeks of 2024 (the weeks of Advent!), we will look at the Christmas stories in Scripture […]

If Jesus is the ransom (Mark 10:45), then who got paid off?  Pastor Rob looks at another Greek word this week, λυτρον, one that leads to quite a mystery (mystery is also a Greek word, but not the focus of this week!)

“Have you been saved?”  Christians use the word “save” all the time.  But what do we really mean by this?  Does Jesus’ salvation mean entrance into heaven?  Or at least mostly mean that?  To reflect on σωζω – ” I save”, we focus on a conversation in which Jesus and disciples reflect on the rich […]

This week is a two for one special — two words, both translated into English as “divorce.” In the middle of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus goes on a long road trip with his disciples.  This week (Mark 10:2-9) we hear Jesus offer some striking words on divorce, which is, was and will be a complex topic, […]

Nothing to do with Hell, the demonic and the forces of evil is ever easy.  Including translating words that have to do with “hell”!  We look at γεεννα, a word that can be translated, well, as hell, but also a lot of other things too!  (Mark 9:42-48 is where this word is found, among other places […]

This might be the easiest word of all to translate this fall.  It means “child”.  But what “child” meant than and what “child” means today are very different things. Note:  I intended this to be a mini-podcast.  But then the word got interesting.

For fall 2024, we will do a shorter podcast, focusing on one Greek word per week.  This word will come from the week’s Gospel reading (in the Revised Common Lectionary). This week we start off with Χριστός, a word found in Peter’s confession of faith (found in Mark, Matthew and Luke!)

Is freedom a good thing? We wrap up the book of Judges with a story that seems a punishing indictment of freedom, especially freedom that has descended into lawlessness (Judges 20-21)/ First, we look at how the book of Judges frames the final stories.  It is clear that the book of Judges is making an […]

One of my childhood heroes — Samson!  (middle chapters of Judges) Alas, the story doesn’t read well for me as an adult.  A reflection on the malformed character of Samson and what me might do to avoid this happening to us.

How do you measure the spiritual health of a nation?  Of a person?  As we look at Judges 6, we see how the book’s writers subtly argue that spiritual malaise leads to political collapse leads to economic downturn leads to environmental destruction.  Do we still think this way 3,000 years later?  Likely more so than […]

Deborah (Judges 4-5) was just too cool for one episode; there is more in her leadership to explore and learn from.  But this isn’t just Deborah part II, we also include an another strong (?!) woman, Jael.

Finally we get a break from the tough stories of the book of Judges.  We get Deborah!  What an amazing woman.  She is bold and wise.  You can read about her in Judges 4 and 5. After a reflecting on how she might actually have written part of THE book, I ponder about the book […]

The story for this week’s podcast is not exactly Sunday School material:  deceit, murder and poop!  (Judges 3, Ehud’s story) Have fun!  (If I could do the podcast over, I might have mentioned how I think part of this story is simply the story teller having fun around the camp fire!)

We continue with episode 2 of looking at the book of Judges, this week moving ahead to chapter 2.  The core issue in chapter 2 is the challenge the Israelites face in passing on their faith to the next generation, who grow up with different experiences than they had.   3,000 years later we wrestle with […]

For Summer 2024, we look at…the book of Judges.  That’s right, that Old Testament book that is SO, well, Old Testamentish.  One might argue it is the worst book in the Bible. This week we start off with chapter 1, which is highly problematic for most modern (Western) readers.  Can we glean anything from this […]

“It is finished” (John 19:30)  With this word from the cross, we finish our series on the last words of Jesus. To get at the significance of what Jesus says, we consider the words of other famous people, especially religious luminaries.

Jesus in the cross cries out in existential suffering:  “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?”  Does God suffer?  Can you love someone and not suffer?  Does God suffer with you on the cross? The podcast begins with a reflection on the marriage metaphor in Scripture (and in Luther’s thinking); then delves into […]

“Into your hands I commend my Spirit.”  Jesus was a spiritual person.  A spiritual guru. What does it mean for us as humans to be spiritual?  A reflection on what we’ve lost in terms of spirituality over time and what we can recover.

“Woman, behold your son; behold your mother.” America has many crises; one of them is loneliness.  A reflection on why we are a lonely people and what Christ (and Christ alone!) is doing about it.

“Today you will be with my in paradise”  With these words, we interrupt this Lenten series on the cross to talk about paradise and heaven!  Turns out the Bible describes heaven as paradise, but a “whole” lot more beautiful and mind-blowing than we can imagine.

We continue with our seven words, this week picking up with “I Thirst” With these words, Jesus reveals he is human.  In this podcast, we consider Jesus humanity. A)  What is the difference between gods and humans — what would the divine lose by become human? B)  What might the divine gain by becoming human?  […]

We begin a new series for Lent 2024.  We will focus on the 7 last words of Christ from the cross.  This week we start with “Father, Forgive Them, they know not what they do.” Two foci this podcast season The Words of the Cross as an invitation to prayer The Words of the Cross […]

We wrap up our pieces for peace series with the most unlikely piece of the nativity, Quirinius the Governor of Syria.   Did he exist?  When did he rule?  When was Jesus born?  Why does Luke include him? But first, what does it mean for Luke to understand himself as doing history? And lastly, what does […]

What piece of the manger scene do you imagine is there…but probably isn’t in most (store bought) nativity scenes. Who is the missing piece that is a part of your imagined nativity?  An invitation to some holy pondering, including a reflection on the incarnation and inevitability of inculturation of the Gospel.

For this week’s podcast, we take up THE holiday question:  Mary, did you know?!

We continue with our Pieces for Peace theme this Advent, focusing on the angels.  They appears lots in the first fear chapters of Luke.  And they keep telling people “Do not be afraid.”  Why is this?  What peace of Christ do they offer us?

This Advent we will focus on “Pieces for Peace” how the different pieces of the manger scene can invite us to come into the peace of Jesus.  We start off with the animals in the manger.   Of course we get to Jesus and the restoration of all things.  Plus a coda on the question – […]

“Render unto Caesar the things of Caesar and to God the things of God.”  These are words of Jesus that have shaped the course of human history! In the first half of the podcast, we consider the story behind the quote, which focuses on money and idolatry.   In this part of the podcast, we focus […]