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Gracious God, for this new day, which You did not promise us, but with which You grace us, we give You thanks. For this institution, which is laced throughout the bone mara of each one of us here, we give You thanks. For the joy and privilege of Service in your church, we give you thanks.

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And now for this opportunity to come and listen and participate in the stewardship of the mind, remembering that next to the life of love, the most beautiful thing in the world is a human mind dedicated to the glory of God. We give you thanks. Be with us and companion us the whole day through, through Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Please be seated. It is my honor to introduce the first lecture of three Curry Lectures given by the Reverend Dr. E. Elizabeth Johnson.

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Dr. Johnson is the J. Davidson Phillips Professor of New Testament at Columbia Seminary. Before that, was on the faculty of the New Brunswick Theological Seminary, graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary M.Div.

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and Ph.D., and is an accomplished biblical scholar. Beth Johnson is also a dear friend and is with a certain proprietary sense that I introduce her today. A person who is not only a fine scholar and academician, but also a dedicated church person. And it was as a parishioner that I knew Beth Johnson well when she and her family came to Atlanta and joined the Central Presbyterian Church.

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Beth's husband, Pete, is also a minister in the Reformed Church of America. In fact, for a period of time, he was a synod exec here in the Texas area. Beth and Pete have two daughters, Sarah and Grace. And as a family, they are a great example of what it means to be committed in all sorts of ways.

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to the Church of Jesus Christ in general and in particular. You will enjoy Beth because of her wonderful mind, which will be in evidence soon, and also because of her wit and her sense of delight. And I hope that you will have an opportunity before these lectures are over to further engage Beth in conversation. But as for now,

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I just want to say, Beth, on behalf of Austin Seminary, a warm welcome to you. We look forward to what you have to say to us today in your lecture series concerning the life together in the household of God. Thank you. Welcome.

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Do you all have the handout that... Yeah, that's it. Would you... Thank you.

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Meanwhile, you do me a great honor to invite me to Austin Seminary and to these Thomas White Curry lectures. I feel very privileged and not a little daunted to follow such scholars as H. Richard Niebuhr and Christa Stendahl, John Bright, David Kelsey, Most recently, my friend Carol Newsome.

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And it is only the comfort of something that Christopher Standall said once, that I have the gall to stand here. And when somebody introduced him, he said, oh, I'm just a humble student of the Bible. And I'm a lot more humble student of the Bible than Christopher Standall is. But I am thrilled to be here, and I thank you for your invitation.

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I bring you greetings from your brothers and sisters at Columbia Theological Seminary, where even as we speak, our new semester is getting underway. I bring you greetings from our president, Laura Mendenhall, who served the Westminster Church here in Austin before she came to be our president in Georgia, and who is very seriously jealous that I have been to the broken spoke more recently than she has. I bring you greetings from Scott Black Johnston, late of this great seminary and now of the great Trinity Church in Atlanta. And finally, I bring you greetings from the Central Presbyterian Church, where Ted Wardlaw and Kay Bryant are still sorely missed, even though we have forgiven you.

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for luring them to Austin. Well, I was initially convinced that this back and forth between Atlanta and Austin was evidence of the providence of God and the interrelatedness of the body of Christ. Last night at dinner, Ellen Bobinski said she thought it was about time for somebody else to go on that path and it was our turn to send back somebody to you. And so, I don't know if it's providence or not.

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But thank you for what you've given us so far, and don't take any more. I'm really grateful for the opportunity, finally, to think with you about my work under the auspices of the Curry Lectureship, because Tom Curry embodied one of the great strengths of the reformed tradition, I think. He had one foot in the congregation and one foot in the academy, and he never lost his balance. And I find that a model worth emulating, not just for me, but for all of us.

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I have left more room for you to have conversation at the end of the second and third lectures, but I'll try to leave room for this morning too. When Ted Wardley used to babysit, babysit, baptize, it's kind of like babysitting, baptize an infant at Central Church, He did what many of you or maybe your pastors probably do. He invited the other children of the congregation to come up so they could watch the baptism.

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And one of them would ask the others some questions like, will you be a friend to Mary Jane? Will you tell Mary Jane about Jesus? She gets lost, will you show her the way? If she falls down, will you help her stand up?

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Then an elder would ask us our questions, and we would make promises in the covenant to which God had called us. Then Ted would take the baby from the parents and baptize her with those words that we all know that are so ancient. Mary Jane, child of the covenant, I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. But then before he gave the baby back to the parents, he would introduce her to the children and to the congregation with words that were not quite so familiar, at least not to me.

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He'd say, these parents brought Mary Jane to church this morning as their daughter, and they take her home as their sister in Christ. Now those words still give me pause, even though I heard them dozens of times in church. While we reflect a lot on the ways that baptism fundamentally alters our relationship to God and to the church, we don't often think about what baptism does to our identities as members of a family. We bring our babies to the sacrament as our children and we take them home as our brothers and sisters.

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We come to the font as children of our parents and go away from it, their siblings. Now, I don't know about you, but I take a lot of this, or I used to take a lot of this sibling language for granted because it has become so habitual. I grew up in a church where the preacher called everybody, Brother Boz and Sister Dottie. It's easy to forget how unusual that language was and is.

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We are so accustomed to referring to each other as brothers and sisters in the Lord that the words no longer surprise us. unless perhaps we hear them the way I did at a baptism in church. So I want to explore with you today and tomorrow some of the ways that the early church used kinship language to make some remarkable, even revolutionary claims about God, about themselves, and about their life together in the world. I think that old saw about blood being thicker than water

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gets turned on its head in the church. At least when it's the water of baptism, water is, in fact, thicker than blood. And that is because baptism is fundamentally an apocalyptic act. Now, that's a phrase that deserves unpacking, particularly since we are so accustomed to thinking of the word apocalyptic as synonymous with eschatological.

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Now, the word apocalyptic means revealed or revelatory. Eschatological refers to things that have to do with the end, with the end of human history, the day of God's redemption, the day of the Lord. Many Jews and Christians of the 1st century write apocalypses, books that are revelations. They disclose revelations from heavenly beings.

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And those books, in fact, include often eschatology. visions of God's plan to rescue the covenant people and bring justice and healing to a fallen world. Christian writers like Paul are profoundly influenced by those apocalyptic texts, but the apocalyptic worldview of the early church has a significant difference. Paul does not look forward

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to the day of the Lord alone, but claims that the new age of God's redemption has already begun in the day, in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Now this new age is not complete by any means because the church and the world continue to struggle against the power of sin and under the burden of death, but the new age has surely begun. The resurrection of Jesus and to God's justification of sinners and the Holy Spirit's empowerment of the church provide a present foretaste of the glory that is yet to come. Granted, Paul anticipates the return of the risen Lord in his own very near future.

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We are, he says to the Corinthians, those upon whom the end of the ages has come. And he assures them that the appointed time has grown short. But the revelation that changed Paul's life has comparatively little to do with turning the pages on the heavenly calendar or watching the hand spin on the cosmic clock. The apocalypse that defines Paul's gospel is instead the cross of Jesus Christ, the revelation of what Paul calls God's new creation.

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This new creation, unlike the old one, the creation portrayed in Genesis, is not a matter of God's planting a garden and inviting human beings into it and then out of it. Paul's language is a great deal more radical. The new creation is the invasion of God's righteousness that sweeps away the old world and replaces it with the new. The new creation is marked

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not by power, but by weakness, not by human wisdom, but by divine foolishness. It's a new world that finds life in the midst of death and glory in the midst of suffering. It is disoriented and disorienting, this new creation, because it turns upside down the most treasured of human values and replaces them with the cross of Jesus Christ. In Flannery O'Connor's short story, A Good Man, is hard to find.

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There's an escaped prison convict called the Misfit who comes upon a family who's just had an automobile accident in an isolated Rd. in rural Georgia. The Misfit's accomplices murder the father and children of the family, or one of the children, in cold blood.

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And they're about to shoot the mother and her other two children as well when the grandmother engages the misfit in conversation, trying vainly to stem the tide of his violence. O'Connor writes, finally she found herself saying, Jesus, Jesus, meaning Jesus will help you. But the way she was saying it, sounded as if she might be cursing. Yes, and the misfit said as if he agreed, Jesus thrown everything off balance.

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It was the same case with him as with me, except he hadn't committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one. I call myself the misfit, he said, because I can't make what all I'd done wrong fit what all I'd gone through in punishment. Jesus thrown everything off balance. says O'Connor's misfit, and so does Paul.

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God's revelation of Jesus' cross throws off balance all the tidy ordering of human responsibility, of crime and punishment, of guilt and innocence, and it justifies not the godly but the ungodly. God's new creation invades the old one and sets aside all the neat human accounting that shows who's who and what's what, that prizes honor and scorns shame, the old creation that thanks God for the differences between insiders and outsiders, between rich and poor, or Jew and Greek, or slave and free, or male and female, because everybody needs to be somewhere. And everybody knows it's better to be on top of the heap than on the bottom.

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Paul says that baptism is the apocalyptic act, the revelatory act that invades the old creation and ushers believers into the new creation. In 2 Corinthians, he says, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. Not as so many contemporary liturgies translate that, anyone who is in Christ is a new creation. No, Paul says there is a new creation when someone is in Christ.

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In Galatians, he says, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything, but new creation is everything. And then in the language taken for a liturgy for baptism that he quotes in Galatians 3, 28, and that I've listed there in the handout for you. In that language from Galatians 3:28, he says, As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.

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There is no longer Jew or Greek. There is no longer slave or free. There is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. Now the first two phrases, Jew or Greek, slave or free, are parallel.

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but the third one is slightly different, male and female. The language alludes to Genesis 1.27 and turns that text upside down. Genesis says, God created humankind male and female. But Paul says, in Christ, there is no longer male and female.

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The dichotomy of gender is one of the most fundamental ways we have of identifying ourselves and Paul says God sets it aside in baptism. He doesn't say that those old hierarchies that structure human life are somehow replaced by equality between male and female, Jew and Greek, slave and free. Instead, there is a whole new humanity, a unity in Christ that lives in the midst of those old dichotomies and hierarchies.

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Paul's words directly challenge prevailing moral values about home and family. First century people in the Greco-Roman world care very deeply about family values. You can see that from Jewish preachers and interpreters of scripture, from pagan moralists, novelists, and playwrights, and a really surprising amount of imperial legislation and propaganda. During the reign of Augustus, the virtue of eusebia, piety, it's often translated piety or religion.

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Eusebia came to be understood not only as the practice of duty and devotion to the gods, but something more like what we would call family values. That is, the religious obligation to order household life properly. with the Potter Familius on the top of a very steep pyramid, his wife and sons reverently below him, his business associates and clients, and then his slaves, freed persons, and other hangers-on at the bottom. That pyramidal household order reflects the empire, surprise, where the emperor is the ultimate Potter Familius.

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His provincial authorities are below him, and the citizenship below that, and at the bottom, at the great huge bottom of the pyramid, are all the aliens and others of the empire. Not surprisingly, the economic pyramid is another match to the first two. There is a tiny, tiny percentage of fabulously wealthy people in the empire, a tiny little section of what we might call a middle class, and the vast huge majority, perhaps 90% of the empire, that ekes out a subsistence level living at the bottom.

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Now, none of those pyramids is really quite equilateral in the geometric sense. Some people have said the pyramids, social and economic and political pyramids of the Roman Empire, look more like Hershey kisses than pyramids because the bottom is so much larger than the top. But the order of the empire and its inhabitants is designed to reflect the order of heaven, of creation itself, where the one God reigns supreme and a bit remote over the Roman pantheon and the national deities of other people absorbed into the empire, and they reign over the spirits and forces and powers and angels and whatnot who really control the destinies of human beings at the bottom.

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The notion that all persons are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights is a construct of the modern enlightenment and thoroughly alien to the ancient world. There, the notion is instead that human beings are born by nature unequal, and that this unalterable inequality in the language of John Eliot is evident all around us. Physically, you can see that there are dominant males and inferior and submissive females.

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There are Greeks and everybody else, barbarians. There are Romans and the nations, Israelites and the Goyim. The notion that unequal social statuses and roles are allotted by nature and by the gods, made those allotments permanent.

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And the household is by creation, by nature, to reflect the world. So it's focused on the interests of the patron, the Padre Familius at the top. Even house buildings are designed to be public. They're spatial demonstrations of the patron's social status.

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Homes are decorated with urban and formal features, like ritual spaces. They're designed to make people think they're in temples and to encourage reverence for corporate values. Paintings on the wall of a Greco-Roman home are often paintings of windows, so that at the same time you can look out, as it were, on a scene, say, of the courtyard of the house or the street that runs alongside it, and at the same time see pictures of the city, especially the city, Rome, even though there's no window there at all.

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The house is built with floor layers that are successively larger toward the center of the house, so you can look in the open door. The door of a Roman house is shut only when the head of the family dies. The rest of the time, it's open to the street, so you can look in and see what's going on, especially as the master transacts business and entertains his guests. Now, I think that is a great deal more difficult for Western people to get our minds around, because the difference between public and private is so permeable.

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The line is so blurry. The ancients just plain don't leave home to go to work. They don't go home. They don't leave home to worship.

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They don't leave home to conduct business. They don't leave home to conduct politics. And Hellenistic household is also larger than ours. This bears repeating because of what comes in the next part of this lecture.

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A household contains the master, his wife or wives, children, slaves, or slave class persons. Perhaps as much as a third of the empire was enslaved or had slave status. And then other retainers and clients and business associates. That's a big household, a lot of people in a space that we generally reserve for mom and dad and 2.3 kids and a minivan and the dog.

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Think a bit about how we consider identity in the West. We consider ourselves, first of all, individuals, and largely in this country, consumers. That's how we understand identity. Gracoram in antiquity instead defines identity in terms of relationships and households.

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Honor and shame. Justice in our context means equal access to goods and services, to rights and responsibilities. Justice in antiquity means everyone plays his or her role appropriately. Now, in a place like that, in a place where cities have a density, a population density, that's roughly that equivalent to Madrid or Mexico City,

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In a place where life is nasty, mean, and brutish, where the dirty and dangerous life of an ancient city is designed, among other things, to highlight and perpetuate the discrepancies between people at the top of the pyramid and the people at the bottom, in a place where women suffer even more than men, because of infant mortality and maternal mortality, chronic infections from childbirth, abortion, female infanticide and exposure, the brutality of slavery and sexual violence, where there are probably somewhere around 140 men for every 100 women, where the inscriptions at Delphi suggest that of 600 families, only six of them raised more than one daughter. to adulthood. In a world like that, what does it suggest for someone to come along and say that real life is oriented not around the honor of the head of the household, the lord of the manor or the emperor, or even the deity on Olympus who looks a lot like the emperor?

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What does it mean to say that life is instead oriented around a crucified peasant from Galilee. What does it mean to say that God is revealed in humiliation and that this revelation of Jesus' cross has itself redefined honor and shame? Well, I think it's not simply a matter of religious ideas or individual affiliation

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for these people to become Christians. It means that Paul's understanding of baptism, if it's to be anything more than wishful thinking or pious idealism, takes on flesh and blood in the lives of those who are baptized, and more specifically, the community that baptism creates. In Romans, we watch Paul struggle to hold together communities in which Jew and Greek welcome one another as Christ has welcomed them. In Philemon, we see him call a slave owner to welcome a slave as a brother in direct violation of common sense and common decency.

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And in 1 Corinthians, we see him work out some of the implications of that phrase, no longer male and female. Paul agrees with the Corinthians. This also is on your handout. Paul agrees with the Corinthians who say that it's well for a man not to touch a woman.

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He agrees with those who have the charismatic gift of slavery. He wishes they were all celibate as he is, and he affirms the choice of married couples to refrain from sex for a season to devote themselves to prayer. He even deems permanently celibate partnerships preferable to sexually active marriages. Very bizarre.

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Now, although he twice refrains from forbidding believers to marry, he three times reiterates the superiority of celibacy. In 1 Thessalonians 4, he reminds that community of what he's already told them in person, that each of them should know how to acquire his own vessel in holiness and honor. Now there's fierce debate about how we are to understand this strange metaphor about acquiring one's own vessel.

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For some, acquire a vessel means marry a wife, although that's a rather crude way to refer to a woman or her husband's relationship to her, particularly from someone who in 1 Corinthians said that men and women owe each other a measure of mutuality that is unprecedented in the ancient world. For others, that phrase in 1 Thessalonians about acquiring one's own vessel means instead to acquire one's own body or acquire control over one's body. and thus avoid immorality.

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But here also it's difficult to see how acquiring one's own body is possible since we're born with them. The word comes from the realm of commerce. It's like buy your own body. And it's hard to know how that means acquire control, especially when he doesn't use the language of self-control, very common moral concern in the 1st century.

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So both traditional choices for translating raise questions about what is going on, and both fail in some serious way to explain what Paul says. So it seems to me most likely with Joette Basler that the vessel Paul speaks of is neither a wife nor a body, but a celibate partnership, like the ones that he talks about at the end of 1 Corinthians 7. What he tells the Thessalonians is that each of them should know how to acquire a celibate partner in this new creation in which there is no longer male and female.

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He doesn't require celibacy here any more than he does in 1 Corinthians 7, but he clearly prefers it for Christians who've been called not for uncleanness, but in holiness. Now, I myself think it's not a little bit surprising that he follows up these ascetic ideals with a warning. The one who disregards this, disregards not a human being, but the God who gives you his Holy Spirit. Because I assure you my husband and I would find such an arrangement persuasive only by the action of the Holy Spirit.

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And apparently some people did. Because in 1 Peter, It comes next. A letter that comes within the Pauline orbit, I believe.

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It's curious that there, too, Christian husbands and wives are called vessels. Vessels, it would seem, of holiness devoted to God. Just as Paul commends married partners who abstain from sex to devote themselves to prayer, so 1 Peter tells Christian couples to make a home together according to knowledge. It's a really strange phrase.

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The NRSV translate, show consideration in your life together. He wants them to make a home together according to knowledge so that nothing may hinder their prayers. Well, the strange notion of celibacy that's preferable to marriage or the option of celibate seasons within otherwise ordinary marriages might be stranger still if Paul were the only person to advocate them. In fact, there are a lot of people in the ancient world who are sexually abstinent that way.

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Philosophers and physicians counsel all but the most limited sexual activity for those wise persons who would preserve their pneuma, a word that's often translated spirit, but that frequently means life force. Other religious people, Jews and pagans both, also refrain from sex in order to participate in the holiness of God or the gods. And particularly Jews and Christians of apocalyptic persuasion are known to embrace continence as preparation for the life of the new age.

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Even this is not so new. The Bible itself talks about people who refrain from sex to prepare themselves for battle. Remember the bitter irony of Uriah's faithful observance of holy war regulation in the face of David's faithlessness. It's very possible, therefore, that apocalyptic Jews like Paul or the sectarians at Qumran consider themselves to be, in some sense, called into God's ultimate holy war.

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and so under the injunction to purify themselves from all sexual activity before battle. Well, surely, we think, surely this is some kind of Pauline aberration and he and the people at Qumran can have it. And you know what happened to the people at Qumran. Surely Jesus favors normal family life, doesn't he?

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I mean, the gospels show him welcoming children and expanding the definition of adultery to include lust and forbidding divorce. Surely Jesus is pro-family, right? But again, things are perhaps not quite so simple. Jesus calls people to leave their families and join his family instead.

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Rather than collecting disciples the way other rabbis do so that those disciples might themselves become rabbis, Jesus instead calls disciples into relationships of permanent discipleship with himself. Relationships that take precedence over all other relationships. In Mark 1, for example, it's on the back of the first page. In Mark 1,

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Jesus has established something of a reputation in the Galilee as a preacher. Then when he calls James and John from their fishing business to join him, Mark makes no mention whatsoever of how the family will survive without their labor. And he never says how Simon's mother-in-law, whom Jesus later cures of a fever, never says how Simon's mother-in-law is going to put food on the table, when Simon abandons the family to wander the countryside with Jesus.

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Paul says that Simon Peter and his wife eventually travel together as a missionary couple around the cities of the Mediterranean, and one cannot help but wonder who keeps the home fires burning in their absence. When James and John leave their father and boat to join Jesus movement, at least they leave Zebedee with some hired hands, Mark calls them, to help. But in a culture where work is incredibly labor intensive and fishing in particular provides, at best, a marginal income because it is so repeatedly and heavily taxed by the empire. In a world like this, sons who leave home

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impoverish their families both economically and socially. The story is even more shocking in Matthew's version, which I put side by side for you with Mark's. In Matthew, when Jesus arrives at the Sea of Galilee, he's established no prior reputation in that region, and Matthew deletes the reference to Zebedee's hired hands. In Matthew, the old man is left all by himself,

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to provide for himself and the rest of his household, on no notice, and with no replacements for his sons. There's no social security, no 401 . And these are not ancient traditional values any more than they are modern traditional values. In the Gospels, the call of Jesus repeatedly Trump's all other calls, even those to hearth and home.

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In Mark 3, Jesus himself does what his disciples are called to do when he rejects his family and replaces it with the real mother and brothers and sisters who do God's will. Then, three chapters after that, when the neighbors in Nazareth reject him, it's because he has no legitimate claim to some kind of religious greatness when his paternity is open to question, when somebody calls you your mother's son instead of your father's son, it's a deliberate slur. And Jesus has left his sisters back home with us, they say, to gallivant around the countryside.

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Jesus appears to the people to have very little family honor and a good deal of shame. in a society that measures everything in terms of those. those values. Now, when Jesus forbids divorce and remarriage in Matthew 19, the disciples respond, well, if that's so, then it's better not to marry at all.

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And Jesus agrees. Like Paul, he says that becoming a eunuch is only for those who can accept it, not like the church father Origen, who thought it was his responsibility to take on the identity of a eunuch. But Jesus says it's clearly preferable to marriage because the new age will see no more marrying or giving in marriage. John of Patmos calls those 144,000 redeemed the ones who have not defiled themselves with women, for they are virgins.

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Still other gospel texts issue this radical call to abandon family because Christian discipleship creates conflict due to divided loyalties. Here there is no summons to evangelize one's household, but instead a warning to anticipate its division. Siblings will betray each other, and parents, their children, and in-laws will be at each other's throats because of the gospel. You answer either the call of Jesus or the call of family, apparently.

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And it's most telling to me that Mark puts that warning about divided families in the context of his eschatological discourse, chapter 13, where Jesus talks about the end times, while Matthew places that same saying in his mission discourse. Chapter 10, which suggests that Matthew sees the disruption of households as part of the church's ongoing life between now and the end times. Now, many scholars think this focus on apocalyptic family disorientation is created by the early church to help believers compensate for the loss of family that they experience when they convert to Christianity.

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You can see why. Antiquity abounds with stories of people like the Egyptian Asenet, who is disowned by her family when she marries the patriarch, Joseph. We know of scores of Christians who are rejected by their households when they become believers. From the ways Paul and Mark and Matthew talk, though, it seems to me that becoming part of Jesus' family does not compensate for the loss of a family of origin, but instead causes the loss in the first place.

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Even if becoming God's children and Jesus' brothers and sisters doesn't destroy somebody's biological and legal kinship, because after all, we do see some whole families who become Christian together. Even if your relationship with your family of origin is not destroyed, it is certainly disoriented. Its priorities are changed.

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in the church, and that, those values central to Greco-Roman culture, that offends against traditional family values. I think there is no simple replacement of traditional households with the new household of faith. Some people have tried to portray the Jesus movement, for instance, as an egalitarian society created in the face of and in defiance of a rigidly patriarchal one, they say that Jesus, or maybe the church, considers traditional households to be oppressive.

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And of course, we've seen that in some ways they are. Anybody who's not the Patre Familius is, by definition, oppressed in some way. But this theory goes that Jesus or the church looked at traditional households as oppressive and replaced them traditional households, with a household of equals.

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There's far too much from my reading that remains messy in the New Testament for such a tidy replacement theory. Many, many early Christian family relationships seem to stay intact so long as they do not compete with believers' relationships with Jesus. I've already mentioned Peter's mother-in-law, the fact that James and John continue to be called the sons of Zebedee. Jesus' ministry seems to take place just as much in households, in homes, as it does in public.

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Paul's congregations are termed house churches because they meet in real homes under the sponsorship of real patrons. Jesus does affirm the abiding value of the commandments to honor parents. and to avoid adultery, even intensifies the commandment to forbid lust as well as lust's consummation. This is no dismissal, no wholesale dismissal of traditional family life.

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It is nevertheless A profound disorientation of it. The disorientation that baptism affects is no simple one-to-one replacement of one kind of family for another. Instead, it destabilizes prevailing moral values with the overwhelming force of God's new creation.

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Nothing, absolutely nothing is ultimate in this new creation except the love of God. And that means that family love, family honor, family identity, family life, while they do not go away altogether for these early Christians, are nevertheless profoundly relativized. Now, I want to end this hour on a note that I struck in passing earlier, when I said that Jesus, in fact, welcomes children. Jesus welcomes and indeed seeks after children in the Gospels.

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And we habitually think of those episodes through 19th century Victorian lenses rather than first century Greco-Roman lenses. We tend to think of children as unspoiled, innocent, or naive. our best selves before we are corrupted by the world. Parenthetically, as a parent of teenagers, I find this picture utterly incomprehensible.

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But it has a lot of currency in the church, you know. Jesus, though, does not speak from a Victorian perspective on children. Jesus is an ancient for whom children Although they are a gift from God and to be welcomed as the family's legacy, children are nevertheless not thought of as human at all, yet.

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And girl children never get to be fully human. Only boy children get to be fully human when they become men. Children are not emblems in the ancient world of innocence or purity, but of powerlessness. Jesus places children at the center of his household

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to make a radical claim about the character of power and powerlessness. It is the least, not the greatest, who have the strongest claim on the Christian community. In this regard, Jesus inverts the conventional social pyramid. Instead of making everyone in the family equal, Jesus says the most important are the weakest.

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And those who want to be great must themselves become children and slaves. This, rather than ascetic preferences for celibacy, this alone, I would wager, is the most disorienting thing that happens at baptism. I have left you.