Hey folks, I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend. There’s plenty to be thankful for, even in these peculiar times. I’m not sure if your family does this, but every Thanksgiving my family goes around the table, and everyone names a few things they’re grateful for. Beyond the usual answers, I know one of my own will be you: the Nexus community. I’m truly thankful for you. If you’re around this Sunday, I hope you’ll join us as we continue exploring the art of learning to read the Bible well. This week, we’ll look at two biblical stories that shape how we understand salvation: the Day of Atonement and the Exodus. Reading them together invites us to see more than God as judge. Instead, taken together, these stories open up a richer picture of God as merciful and as the one who leads people toward freedom. We’ll begin with some different theological worlds before launching into the strange and memorable story of The Great Pear Tree Theft.

Comedian Ricky Gervais poses a pointed challenge to people of faith: If God wants to prevent evil and suffering but can’t, what does that say about God? If God can prevent them but won’t, what does that say about God? And if God is able and willing to end them, why do they remain? These are tough questions, and they deserve a response. If you’ve been following along this fall, you know we’re learning the art of reading the Bible well. Genesis begins with a world God calls good, but just three chapters in, things take a sharp turn. So, inquiring minds want to know: how did the snake get into this good world? The Bible’s response is conspicuously silent, like a politician at a press scrum saying, “No comment.” For me, the problem of evil and suffering is the Bible’s weakest link. It’s also my spiritual obsessio, the question that haunts me most, and the one I keep returning to when I read the Bible and look at the world. I don’t have a tidy answer, and I’m not sure the Bible offers one. But I do think its story has something compelling to say about facing a broken world.

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.