When I get back from writing leave, I want to do a sermon series on “Strange Places in the Bible.” I want to take a tour through those parts of the Bible most Christians pretend aren’t there because they are so strange and ugly. How do we honestly deal with calls to slavery or genocide? What do we make of pre-scientific claims about our world that are clearly false? I’m hoping to collect the suggestions and then maybe have a panel choose the hardest and strangest verses. I’ve asked my church to come up with verses, but I thought it might be fun to open it up to a wider audience. What verses do you find hardest to deal with? My hope in this series is to consider what it means to take the Bible seriously after we realize we can’t take it literally.