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My name is Scott Black Johnston, and I am one of the professors who teaches preaching here at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. It is my pleasure to introduce to you Dorothy C. Bass for her concluding lecture. Over the course of the 2001 Jones Lectures, Dr.

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Bass has treated us to a challenging and perceptive theological analysis of contemporary culture. She's drawn our attention to trends that today's Christians can easily take for granted, for we too are swept up in their currents. Yet through these lectures, we have been led to a still spot in the river, to a place where we can look critically at the shape of our lives,

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and reflect constructively on the ways in which historical Christian practices can renew and transform our journey together in the flow of life. Truly, we have been in the hands of a skillful navigator. Thank you, Dorothy. Dorothy and her husband, Mark, are the parents of twins, John and Martha, who are in the ninth grade.

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No doubt, these relationships provide her with some of the wisdom and humor that seep into the title of her final lecture, Drinking the Cup of Christ, Reflections with the Mother of Zebedee's Sons. Welcome again, Dorothy. Thank you very much, Scott, for that introduction. Are we OK with the sound?

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Well, speaking of sound, I have really-- no, we're not. Can you hear me? It's echoing. All right.

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I'll proceed. It's been wonderful to be among you these three days. I appreciate the hospitality and especially the chances that I've had to speak with some of you outside of these formal contexts.

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And I've appreciated your singing. That was very lovely just now. I often think of the singing we do together in church as a wonderful metaphor for the life of Christian faith. You know, you learn by joining in.

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Some of us are soloists on one practice and some on another. Some of us just sing along some of the time, but then that all together, it adds up to something that gives glory to God. So I appreciate that.

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One night last September, my daughter walked into the kitchen, sat down in the other chair at the small oak table, and waited for me to put down my book and notice the tears in her eyes. When she spoke, her voice was shaky. I want to move, she said. I was stunned.

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Martha had always seemed happy in our old house on the north side of the, I would say, small Midwestern city, large Midwestern town where we live. It had appeared to me that she was enjoying her first month of high school. In fact, I'd always figured that once she and John were in 9th grade, we could forget about moving. In nearly 15 years as a parent, however, I had finally learned not to greet a remark like this by shrieking, What?

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No way! Instead, I tried to listen. This is what she said. I hate this house. We have so much stuff, and most people in the world have hardly anything.

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I hate this town. I want to live where you don't have to use cars to get places, where people care about pollution. I wondered if I should talk about that. Excuse me.

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And all the other things that are wrong in the world. I hate school. All anyone cares about is clothes and boys and having fun. I really want to live a faithful life, but I just don't think that can be done in this town.

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It was a Sunday evening, and for the past 48 hours, Martha and John and I and 16 other teens and 16 other adults had been together in Chicago, where we were working together on a book that we're all writing together, a book that invites teens into a way of life shaped by Christian practices. If you're not Practicing Our Faith, this is kind of practicing our faith for 15-year-olds. We had been with an amazing group of people from all parts of the United States, racially diverse, ecumenical. The adults were taking the teenagers seriously, the teens were taking the adults seriously, and we were exploring very challenging ideas.

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John and Martha and I had spent most of Saturday in a small group discussing our practice, which for now we're calling taking time, a question of how Now you live faithfully in time as a teenager, and it makes you realize how little control of their time they have, even less than we. We've been with three other teams. One team was working on the practice we're calling Managing Our Stuff.

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And this team, of which the senior member is Mark Yaconelli, if you know him, he and his 15-year-old a teen partner, had covenanted with each other to give away one valuable item from among their possessions during each day of Lent. Another team, greeting, sheltering, and welcoming to their practice. The adult member is Joyce Holiday, who lived in the sojourner's community in Washington, D.C.

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for 15 years, and so had lots of experience with the hard truths of being a Christian host. And the other team was writing about seeking justice. That adult partner was Evelyn Parker, who teaches at Perkins School of Theology, an African-American woman who, as a teenager, was involved in the civil rights movement in Louisiana. During our weekend-- they can't hear.

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They can't hear. Shall I move again? No. Thank you for letting us know.

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During our weekend in Chicago, Martha had experienced the world beyond her hometown and the call to the Christian life in an especially vital way. She had already encountered virtually everything that was said and done there before. We talk about these things at home. We traveled.

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We have extended communities that are all so diverse and very interesting. She had already known that the Christian life runs against the grain of life in Valparaiso, Indiana. Though I still don't think she really believes that it also runs against the grain of life in Chicago, Berkeley, Austin, you know, cool places like that. I tried to convince her that it also does there.

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She had already known all these things, but now the stakes are higher, and she was hearing the call in a more personal way. That she was just entering high school was also making her especially reflective about who she was becoming. She wants to live faithfully, but she just doesn't see how that can be done in our comfortable home and in her conventional high school. Maybe somewhere else it would be easy, risk-free.

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For instance, wasn't there a different high school where no one would notice if you refused to wear the most popular brands of clothing, clothing that sends your money to and makes you a walking advertisement for corporations that exploit less fortunate 15-year-old girls? in sweatshops? Wasn't there a high school where kids are not divided by class and race, where one could just move in and already be part of a beloved community without the struggle she already knows accompany efforts to build such community in our town? Well, a long talk followed, one that we're continuing to have, even now, of course.

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I encouraged her questions. I praised her insights. I cried a little also because I could see some of the risks that she also saw. But this is where we live, I said.

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This is where we are called to be faithful. There are people here with whom you can seek ways of living more faithfully, including me. I meant this with all my heart, of course, but I also knew and soon came to see even more clearly my own trepidation about making this promise. Would standing out as someone who questions the dominant values in her high school mean that she had no friends?

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Would it mean that she was denied certain honors? What would be the costs? Of course, I had made this promise before when she was baptized, one of several promises which my husband and I have tried to take seriously over the years. These are the obligations that we promised at the Font to fulfill.

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To faithfully bring her to the services of God's house. Okay, we've done that? To teach her the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments. Yep, she can do all that.

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To place in her hands the holy scriptures. Well, in the hands, like we've gotten that far. I think we're, you know, that one you're working on. To provide for her instruction in the Christian faith.

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More or less, as these things go, there's always more to learn, and there are different stages of learning that will follow. But yes, the final phrase, and this is in the ELCA service, in which she was baptized, that living in the covenant of her baptism and in communion with the church, she may lead a godly life until the day of Jesus Christ. As she and her brother move farther out into the world, this last phrase is beginning to feel dangerous. She's right.

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Living a godly life, even in Valparaiso, but anywhere, is risky. What do I, what do you, what do we all really want for our children, whether they be our children by birth or adoption, or by the kinship of baptism, or both? A few days later, I attended morning prayer at my university. We sang together.

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a lovely setting of Psalm 91, which is a psalm often associated liturgically with bedtime, a psalm that breathes trust and assurance. You who live in the shelter of the Most High, who abide in the shadow of the Almighty, will say to the Lord, My refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust. For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence. He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge.

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His faithfulness is a shield and buckler. You will not fear the terror of the night, or the arrow that flies by day, or the pestilence that stalks in darkness, or the destruction that wastes at noonday. When I look back on the Psalm later, I saw that it doesn't present a smooth and easy path by any means. It may even be set on a battlefield.

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It looks danger in the eye, but it does finally promise honor, long life, and salvation to those who love God. On that morning, what we sang was a paraphrase to lilting music by Marty Haugen, which rendered the assurance even more sweetly than the psalm itself does, perhaps too sweetly. No evil shall befall you, no pain come near, for God's angels stand close by your side. Those who cling to the Lord live secure in God's love, lifted high those who trust in God's name.

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Call on the Lord. God will never forsake you. God will bring you salvation and joy. And I heard that, and I thought, that's it.

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That's what I want for my children. That's what I want for all children. I want them to be secure, to be lifted high, saved, joyous. Then came the gospel reading.

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The good news, good news from Matthew's Gospel, the 20th chapter, and that's where you have the lecture, the title of this lecture. Then the mother of the sons of Zebedee came to him with her sons, and kneeling before him, she asked the favor of him. And he said to her, what do you want? She said to him, declare that these two sons of mine will sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom.

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But Jesus answered, you do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink? They said to him, we are able. He said to them, you will indeed drink my cup, but to sit at my right hand and at my left, this is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared by the Father.

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What do you want? Jesus asks this mother. She says, I want them to be close to you. lifted high, saved, joyous, honored, powerful.

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It's immediately clear in the gospel, of course, that this is not an appropriate request. In fact, Jesus implies that if any of these three members of Zebedee's family understood the way Jesus was about to take to his throne, they would not even ask this question, Can you drink the cup that I drink? In Mark's gospel, the two sons ask the favor on their own behalf. Most commentators suggest that Matthew has inserted the mother so that readers can blame someone other than James and John for this embarrassingly ambitious move.

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The commentators even spotted that before the feminist theologians had come along. Matthew wouldn't want readers to consider them power-hungry and ambitious. But if the insertion was a ploy, it failed. The mother's presence does not protect James and John from the anger of their peers.

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When the ten heard this, Matthew continues, they were angry with the two brothers. Jesus turns to them, to these angry ones, rebuking both the ambition of Jebedee's wife and sons, and I think the jealousy of the ten angry disciples, who were probably thinking that James and John were trying to grab the seats that they deserved. You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.

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It will not be so among you, but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, And whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave, just as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many. This is a saying that Luke places at the Last Supper. Do we know what we are asking when we lead young people into the presence of Jesus?

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I ask again, what do I, what do you, what do we all really want for children? whether they be our children by birth or adoption, or by the kinship of baptism, or both. This is a question that is beginning to attract some theological attention. Two months ago, my colleague at Valparaiso, Marcia Bunge, published a new book entitled The Child and Christian Thought.

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It came from Erdmans. Bunge gathered about 18 scholars from all over the country Excellent, excellent scholars whose research focuses on... significant figures, periods, or movements in the history of Christian thought, and asked them to write a collaborative, historical, theological account of the many ways in which children and adults' obligations to children have been understood in the Christian tradition.

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They found a great deal of variety within this long history. On the whole, they also found a lot more historical sources than they had expected. They also found fewer negative treatments of children than has been rumored in the aftermath of work like that of the historian Philip Grevin, who argues that Christian teachers have always been very repressive towards children. They don't find that to be true, but they do find a lot of what you might call ambiguity.

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But a lot of concern for the well-being of children in the course of the Christian tradition. One of the contributors, Bonnie Miller-Macklemore, a practical theologian at Vanderbilt Divinity School, is now moving beyond describing what has been thought to more constructive theological work on children. Miller-Macklemore contends that Western culture is at a turning point in its view of and care for children. During the pre-modern period, children were seen as imperfectible,

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in an imperfect world. You can hear some of the, there still is a doctrine of original sin that's there. Children were imperfectible, the world was imperfectible. Children were also expected to be involved, however, in the life of the community, in the economic life of the household.

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They led useful lives that overlapped frequently with the lives of adults. They could be apprenticed. Subsequently, in the modern era, children were seen as perfectible in an imperfect world. My children were doing a report on Mozart last week.

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They had pictures of the little child Mozart and his sister painted in perhaps 1770. And then pictures from the subsequent generation. And in the early, before the French Revolution, before the Romantic period, do you know how the art of children was very stiff, and they looked like little tiny adults? And by the time you get into the 1800s, children are now innocent, beautiful, you know, little soft creatures who are seen as innocent.

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and not as having the same kind of complexity that adults have. The shift between those two periods led to massive changes in education and in the life of the church and the home. This might seem to be an advance for children, but in fact, their idealization also contributed to their marginalization from the world of adults. Now, Miller-Macklemore argues, and I think she's right, a shift of similar magnitude and importance is taking place.

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As contemporary culture leaves the modern view behind, a reinvention of childhood is one of the several changes that is occurring. The understanding that may be emerging, Miller-Macklemore calls the imperfect, even potentially volatile child, think Columbine, think child and child crime, in an imperfect, volatile world, in a world that they cannot trust will protect them. Frequent press accounts, I think, of child and child crime would bear her out. It would be a shame if such a reformulation were to proceed, if we were to think that is who young people are, without the benefit of the insights of religious traditions.

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As A Christian, Bonnie Miller-McLemore sees special relevance in the moral complexity of Christian understandings of the human person. And it's going to encourage us to see the unfolding, developing, increasingly more complex, moral complexity of human beings as they mature. A sense of them as simply volatile, I think, is leading to a fear, a repressive fear, which is troubling in terms of how we respond to young people.

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But it's also troubling from a Christian point of view to see the world as fundamentally volatile and unsafe, unpredictable, unable to move in with trust. A romantic modern view of the child as perfectible in an imperfect world has also probably sometimes led those of us who care about the church's children to try to keep them in the nursery as long as possible. probably part of my response to Martha's comment. In my observation, many congregations do indeed treat children as innocents to be shielded, or to be adored, or to be coddled, whatever.

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Even more parents and congregations shepherd teens into youth groups in hopes of keeping them safe. And don't misunderstand me. I believe with all my heart that we need to provide in every way we can for the physical safety and psychological well-being of all children. However, isn't that also true that the kind of safety many parents and congregations hope youth programs will offer is often founded more on desire for shelter from the wrong crowd or

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hope that Christian faith will keep them in the right class position, academically and economically, and reinforcement of the values of earthly success, rather than on the gospel. It's adequate resistance to those aspects of the dominant culture that demean and exploit the poor of the earth built into youth ministries. Several years ago, the Presbyterian educator, William Myers, wrote a very interesting book called Black and White Styles in Youth Ministry.

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He studied a white suburban congregation in depth and concluded that, no, the basic values there for the children, the youth, were to keep them safe and successful in high school. By contrast, a large urban African-American congregation did resist some cultural values. In Miller-Macklemore's terms, it is clear that this congregation was far more aware of imperfection and volatility in teens and more aware of imperfection and volatility in their social context as well, and was persuaded that only the gospel could provide adequate grounds for the cultural resistance and for the economic, political, and spiritual freedom they desired for their youth. Are most of you hearing me okay?

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Thank you. Miller-Macklemore also argues that the romantic modern view of children has kept adults from offering sufficient attention to the complex moral and spiritual lives of children. If they start innocent, all you have to do is keep them that way. This view has enabled us to do less for their formation and faith than they need.

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In contrast, I think my Martha was clearly, she knew that innocence is not the whole story. When she expressed her misgivings about our comfortable home and her conventional school, she was worried about her own complexity, her own complicity, excuse me, her own complicity. The dawning sense of youth's imperfection may help Christians to retrieve, adapt, and create a more complex sense of how we can help them to grow in faith. hope, and love in a world that, yes, is volatile, but that is also understood in faith to be a place where trust in God and one another is possible, and where, therefore, lives of bold mercy and justice are also possible.

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L. Gregory Jones recently pointed to just this possibility. His starting point was a phrase often traded by indulgent parents. I just want my child to be happy.

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Well, of course, Jones thought, when the mother of one of his son's friends made this comment, who would want otherwise? We do want this. But is this hope a worthy one, and I quote, especially in an era when the pursuit of happiness has become such a shallow and commercial enterprise? What if we expected parents to say, I just want my child to be faithful?

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Putting this question on the table, of course, would force adults to look more closely at our own lives as well. And I'm quoting Jones here. Children inevitably both benefit and suffer in complex ways from the character of their parents' lives. The real question is whether they suffer for causes and convictions worthy of that suffering.

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We rightly ought to cry out on behalf of children who suffer because of their parents' oppression or lack of resources. We rightly ought to protest when children suffer because of their parents' selfish and self-absorbed or pursuits, whether of money, sex, drugs, worldly honor and ambition, or even wrongheaded religiosity. But should we not also protest when children suffer because their parents offer them nothing worth living and dying for?

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When children are left with hollow and shallow lives because they have not been invited and required to live for something more significant than themselves? when our children are left to suffer because of our lack of convictions, or corrupt convictions, rather than because of noble and faithful ones. Jones goes on to tell about a South African church leader who was called to take great risks during the long struggle against apartheid. When someone asked him how his wife and children had dealt with this,

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He described how painful it was for him to know that his children often were the ones who received the death threats and epithets over the phone. He described the anxiety of being away from his family for stretches of time and praying that they would be reunited again. Yet, he observed, all four of his children now recognize the family's involvement in the struggle as a gift. Coming to this recognition required some long and painful conversations,

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including the leader's own request to his children that they forgive him for the times he was away. There's brokenness in this. Yet, he reported, the children have commented that even amidst the pain and suffering they endured growing up, they are grateful for the witness the family bore. They see that witness as a gift, for they recognize that their parents taught them the importance of having convictions on which you could stake your life.

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Those children may be indeed happy as adults. But if so, that happiness is a reflection of a deeper and more satisfying flourishing than the more superficial hopes too many of us tend to have for our children. Such happiness as they now experience will be a wonderful byproduct of having learned the more important and more profound lesson of what it means to be faithful. Now perhaps something similar later happened in the family of Zebedee.

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This nameless mother, now she's known only as the mother of these sons, but these sons are never described as her sons, but only as Zebedee's. We wonder where Zebedee is. This woman, this one who didn't get the message Jesus had been trying to teach for two chapters already about why he was going to Jerusalem, does finally get it.

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This woman is one of the three women specifically mentioned within the larger group of women who watched the cross from a distance as Jesus died. They had followed him from Galilee, says Matthew, and ministered to him. And now they remained after all the disciples, including James and John, had fled. These sons would later return, however.

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Presumably the three, mother and sons, would walk Christ's way together for at least a while. We learn in Acts 8 that James did indeed drink the cup of Christ's cup as one, the cup of Christ as one of the first martyrs. Thinking of the Christian life as a way of life that is shared allows us to re-envision the passing on of the faith from one generation to another. Within this way of thinking, the charge is not to pass a package to those who are younger, but rather to live faithfully together with them.

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This would mean, among other things, engaging in Christian practices together in their company, stretching our own involvement in response to the maturing of their own yearnings and capacities. Every Christian practice is large and complex enough that persons can enter it at many points as they are able. Feasting and fasting includes the simple move of bowing the head before a meal, as well as the more complex one of knowing how to phrase a