Friends, for the past few weeks, we have been happily hunkered down in the opening chapters of Genesis. At this pace, we should complete our journey through the Bible sometime around 2050. That isn’t going to work, so it is time to pick up the pace. This Sunday, we are going to take a soaring tour across Scripture (with stops in Isaiah, Ezra, Deuteronomy, Job, Joshua, Exodus, and Jonah). What I hope to help us explore is how the Bible is not a flat text that offers one simple answer to every question. Instead, it is a lively conversation across generations. Time and again, one biblical voice speaks, and then another voice complicates it, widens it, unsettles it, challenges it, even deconstructs it. And so, from questions about who belongs, to inter-religious marriage, to purity and justice, to suffering, violence, and the temperament of God, we will discover a Bible that talks back to itself, and, if we are listening, talks back to us. So, I hope you will join us we explore why the Bible is a wily text, clever enough to disrupt our need for quick, tidy answers, and too rich to stay flat.

Friends, last week we stepped behind the plate to make some calls about the Bible’s strike zone. This Sunday, Genesis gets the umpire’s attention. What kind of pitch is its creation story? (I promise to end the baseball metaphors when the Jays finally end my misery). Anywho, beyond many of the science textbook distractions about the book, I am inclined to think Genesis is addressing a much older, and more urgent, question. What kind of world are we living in? As we explore that, we’ll encounter an ancient Babylonian sea monster, a carefully tended bonsai tree, a French existentialist, a couple of summer blockbusters, and one extraordinarily courageous prisoner at Auschwitz. There will be some lighter moments along the way, but also some headier terrain, and a bit of heaviness as we consider the costly love of a man named Maximilian Kolbe. So, what is really at stake in the opening chapters of Genesis? Perhaps much more than how or when the universe began. These ancient words may be making a daring claim about the deepest nature of reality and about the kind of people we are called to become within it.