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The early church's first neighbors responded to it in various ways, very few of them friendly. One recurring criticism of Christians in the first three centuries is that they are anti-family. They jeopardize the common good not only by dishonoring the gods in their defiant preference for the God of Israel, but also by flaunting moral values. They allow women and men to share leadership of their assemblies.

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They encourage fraternization between slaves. and masters. And they allow women and slaves to join their membership without their husbands and masters. So this is why, perhaps, in addition to texts that manifest the radical apocalyptic disorientation of family values that we looked at this morning, we find also in the New Testament some modified pictures of Christian kinship.

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a response that I call theological reorientation. And here I really want you to look at the passages that I laid out for you in the handout. There's a headline that says theological reorientation on the third page. And I want to look at a story that we already considered once this morning.

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In Luke 5, we return to the episode of the fishermen who leave home in response to Jesus' call to become fishermen for people. Jesus' call of the first disciples is vastly less offensive in Luke than it was in Mark. Jesus approaches the fishermen first as a preacher that they already know.

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I mean, he's been preaching and teaching in the area ever since the middle of chapter 3, casting out demons, healing hordes of people, and supplying the pulpits of half the synagogues in the Galilee. He is known to these fishermen, the fishermen of Zebedee and Sons, Incorporated, and he's been known to them long enough and well enough to heal Simon's mother-in-law and have dinner in their house. Remember, that episode follows the call of the disciples in Mark. In Luke, it precedes it.

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When Jesus arrives at Lake Gennesaret, he's already amassed such a large following that he borrows a boat to use as a pulpit from which to preach. When I was a kid, sometimes people would get in a boat on Lake Susan at night for vespers. Remember that? They don't do that anymore.

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After Jesus pronounces the benediction in this watery, from this watery pulpit, and the crowd goes home, he tells Simon to start fishing again. Despite A fruitless night of work before this, Simon obeys, and the result is an enormous catch of fish, so large that the nets are nearly breaking and the boats almost sink. Now this superabundance of fish is not merely another of Jesus' miracles.

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It signals the inbreaking of the new age of God's blessing and salvation. This astonishing catch of fish is a foretaste of the eschatological banquet, the dawning day of the Lord's favor that Jesus announced in his sermon in Nazareth back in chapter 4. Now by adding this episode to Mark's account, I think Luke says that God's power to restore and renew life has come in unprecedented fullness in the ministry of Jesus.

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And he also says that Zebedee and his family will be cared for when the boys leave home to follow Jesus. The abundance of fish is assurance that there will be enough for everybody in this new age. And notice that Luke also adds a comment that James and John are Simon's fishing partners, suggesting that this fishing enterprise is a little bit larger than it was in Mark, maybe even large enough to survive the departure of the sons of the owner without imperiling it. Furthermore, I think that foreshadows the communal character of the church the way Luke portrays it in Acts.

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Even though the new age of God's redemptive realm places serious demands on disciples. And after all, Jesus' call of the disciples in Luke is just as absolute as it was in Mark. Nevertheless, the new age also makes available the riches of the Jubilee. Now, Luke knows that Christian discipleship reorders domestic priorities.

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Luke's Jesus says, whoever does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, cannot be my disciple. Same as in Mark. In fact, in some ways, it's more harsh than in Mark. Jesus hails celibacy as a hallmark of the redeemed life.

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He says, in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage. And he honors some celibate characters like Anna, the prophetess, or those prophetic daughters of Philip. But Luke's vision of early Christianity is not particularly ascetic. It's people who have specific prophetic roles, people like those daughters of Philip and Anna who are celibate, not the rest of the Christian community.

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The communal life of the church in Acts, where all the believers share everything in common and, as Luke says, there is not a needy person among them, shows that for Luke, the church is the real family to which Christians belong, even while his story also abounds with pictures of conventional households. It seems a bit of a stretch, But almost true to say that poor people in Luke's story band together in the communal household formed by the church, while rich people who have their own households, old Christian households, become patrons for the rest of the church, particularly for its itinerant missionaries. Now, these households of wealthy patrons who convert to Christianity and are baptized all with their whole households,

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reflect an important Greco-Roman family value that Luke embraces rather than opposing it. The chief responsibility of the pater familius as he increases the family honor and maintains its wealth and protects it from assault and from shame, the main job of the pater familius is to order the religious observance and preserve the religious loyalties of those committed to his care. The Roman satirist Juvenal makes merciless fun of men who let their wives have a little too much religious freedom. Juvenal's fun to read even on other subjects.

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Juvenal says an unsupervised wife is apt to do just about anything in the name of religion, especially a foreign religion. So he warns a husband to keep close watch on the checkbook once his wife gets religion. Before long, you know, she will allow some big old fat eunuch into her house to teach her about religion and lead her in religious rites. And before the husband knows it, the eunuch and his followers are camped out in the living room.

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Worst of all, says juvenile, a wife might even abstain from sex if religion should call for it. So husbands had better watch out. Now, the point is that the management of the family's religious matters is the master's chief obligation under the gods. And you can tell how well a man manages his household by how well he keeps tabs on its cultic activities.

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Curiously, I find that a wonderful idea that gets inverted in the pastoral epistles, where you can tell how well a man's going to be a bishop by how well he manages his household. anyway, so here in Acts we have these stories about a handful of families whose heads of household respond favorably to the apostolic proclamation, and they come to believe in Jesus. In each case, the head of the household is baptized, and so are all the other people in his house. We never learn the names of Cornelius's wife and children, much less his clients and slaves and everybody else who lives with him, but we are told that they are God-fearers.

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That is, they're non-Jews who are attracted to the God of Israel and who worship either with or alongside Jews in the synagogue. Cornelius summons all his friends and relations to hear Peter preach, and Peter's sermon is so compelling that the Holy Spirit falls on the whole group en masse, even before they're baptized. Then Peter commands that everybody should be baptized to catch up with the Holy Spirit. And then the apostles, Luke says, stay for several days in this Gentile house that only a day earlier they would never have dreamed to enter.

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That's in chapter 10. In 16, we encounter Lydia. Lydia is another God-fearer who's worshiping at the synagogue with some of her friends when Paul and Silas come to Philippi. Lydia's a merchant, and she's either widowed or divorced since Luke identifies her as the head of her family.

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And when God opens Lydia's heart to the gospel message, she is baptized with her. her household. And again, the newly baptized Gentile Christian tells the Jewish Christians, the preachers, to put their ethical money where their theological mouths are and to accept her invitation of hospitality. This time, though, Luke says Lydia faces a harder sell with Paul and Silas than Peter did with Cornelius.

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because he adds, and she prevailed upon us. Meanwhile, though, notice the utter silence of Lydia's household. Lydia confesses Christian faith, the apostles find her to be faithful to the Lord, and there's no session on earth that would forbid her baptism. What about the members of the household who are not at the synagogue with Lydia, though?

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Have they also become Christians? Have they even heard the sermon? Did the Spirit fall on them the way it did on Cornelius' family? Luke doesn't say, doesn't even mention it.

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Likely, I think, because he assumes that Lydia has both the responsibility for her family's religious loyalties and the power to enforce them. Now that may offend against our modern sense of individual freedom or our devotion to religious liberty, but bear in mind the communal character of Greco-Roman identity. What is true of the Patre Familius, even when she is his ex-wife or widow, is by definition true of the whole household. The Philippian jailer is the third of Paul and Silas's encounters in Philippi,

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They get in trouble and are thrown in jail because they have exorcised a young girl whose demonic possession has been netting her masters a good income. And they get thrown into the inner part of the prison, Luke says, and they carry on one of their very best tent revivals with the prisoners. And it's so good a revival that God shakes the very foundations of the prison to set them all free. The warden is just about to kill himself rather than be shamed by having all his prisoners escape when Peter assures him that everything is well and everyone is present and accounted for.

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Well, the jailer then asks this kind of ambiguous question that can be read both on the surface and with the eyes of faith. What must I do to be saved? he asks Peter. Now, he might be asking,

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what he can do to save his job and his hide in the wake of the earthquake, or he might be asking Peter that question of all questions, the one that elicits from Peter the word of the Lord. Whichever one the jailer intends, Peter's preaching provokes the man to care for his prisoners. He dresses their wounds, and they, in turn, baptize him and his whole household, whereupon he invites him upstairs to supper.

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Now, with these episodes of people who embrace Christianity and bring their households with them into the church, I think Luke envisions a pragmatic accommodation to the radical disorientation of Mark's views of family life. And this is what I mean by a theological reorientation of conventional domestic virtue. Luke repeatedly portrays the Christian movement in ways that do not offend prevailing Roman sensibilities. And he shows one household after another responding to the Christian message even as he maintains the good news of Jesus' resurrection and God's restoration of the world in a way that says he thinks it replaces the foundational cultural myth of Greco-Roman supremacy.

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as Mary Ann Palmer Bonds has shown, I think, very well. All right, another different voice in the New Testament, but with a similar perspective, is First Peter. Even though First Peter comes from and is addressed to people at the other end of the Roman social spectrum, First Peter, as we heard last night, speaks to Christian gatherings in Asia Minor whose members belong to predominantly non-Christian households.

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Although 1 Peter 2.13-3.9 is in many ways a traditional pagan code of household responsibilities, it urges wives and slaves to submit to their husbands and masters. There's at the beginning of it an initial imperative that Stephen Bechler has shown to set the whole thing in a different context. Honor everyone, 1 Peter says. Honor everyone, love the family of believers, fear God, and honor the emperor.

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Now, I think that those initial imperatives subtly and subversively resist the hierarchical values of pagan domestic morality. Honor the emperor, says First Peter, the same as you honor everyone else. Fear, or religious awe, we might say, belongs probably not to the emperor, nor to household patriarchs, but to God alone.

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And the community's primary obligation is none of those things but is love. Love for the brother and sisterhood, we could translate it, or the family of believers. Now there don't seem to be any Christian masters in these little Christian groups because none are addressed. But there are apparently some Christian couples, married couples,

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who, as we saw earlier, may practice a Pauline sort of temporary or permanent celibacy. Christian women married to non-Christian men, though, are like Christian slaves owned by unbelievers, at the mercy of the men who dominate their lives. And 1 Peter urges a kind of subversive accommodation to the inevitable. that obeys the letter of the cultural law, even though it holds fast to the assurances that Christ Himself suffered unjustly and His saving death redefines reality.

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In a context where these powerless people are scorned by their families and friends simply for being Christian, when any of you suffers as a Christian, do not count it as a disgrace. but glorify God because you bear this name. In such a context, 1 Peter encourages Christians to hold on to their alternative Christian lifestyles, and that is, after all, the real alternative lifestyle, and bear one another up under the burden of a hostile environment, an environment they're powerless to change or control. Now,

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The voices of ecclesiastical domestication come from a church that's beginning to see itself as an institution in society that must find ways to get along with its non-Christian neighbors. These passages from Ephesians and Colossians and 1 Timothy and Titus also respond to Roman imperial moral propaganda. with what Mary Rose D'Angelo calls a combination of accommodation and resistance. These texts, I think, have had the most significant impact on Christian family life of any of the voices in scripture.

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Although we seldom hear them read at wedding services anymore, their influence in the church and the culture is pervasive. They have been used and abused. by husbands, fathers, and slave owners to brutalize women, children, and people in bondage. Howard Thurman, 20th century theologian, used to tell this story about his grandmother.

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Two or three times a week, I read the Bible aloud to her. I was deeply impressed by the fact that she was most particular about the choice of scripture. For instance, I might read many of the more devotional psalms, some of Isaiah, the gospels again and again, but the Pauline epistles never, except at long intervals, the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians. With a feeling of great temerity, I asked her one day why it was that she would not let me read any of the Pauline letters.

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What she told me I shall never forget. During the days of slavery, she said, the master's minister would occasionally hold services for the slaves. Old Man McGee was so mean that he would not let a Negro minister preach to his slaves. Always, the white minister used as his text something from Paul.

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At least three or four times a year, he used as a text, slaves be obedient to them that are your master as unto Christ. Then he would go on to show how it was God's will that we were slaves and how if we were good and happy slaves, God would bless us. And I promised my maker that if I ever learned to read and if freedom ever came, I would never read that part of the Bible. These are dangerous texts.

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And despite the damage done by people who abused them, They continue to hold before some people in the church ideals of family life. I hope to suggest that some of those ideals come more from Greco-Roman pagan morality than they do from the gospel, however much these particular voices have been Christianized. These stereotyped lists of household order, Martin

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Luther called them Haustafelm, or tables of household responsibility, are ubiquitous among ethicists of the 1st century, pagan and Jewish alike. Moralists use them to reflect on strategies for maintaining order in the household that will reflect and reinforce order in the empire, and of course, the order of the universe. And Hellenistic Jews who interpret the commandments assume that the 5th commandment and the 7th commandment are intended to structure domestic life so as to assure proper worship of God and domestic tranquility and decency.

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Honoring parents and avoiding adultery are not revelations from the God of Israel alone, but are built into the fabric of creation, witness, good household order in the empire. The structure of the patriarchal household that is, one in which the patriarch or the father reigns supreme, is modified in these Christian household codes. And for all that they have been abused, I think it's vital to bear in mind the modifications, because they clearly intend to produce households that differ from prevailing Roman social norms.

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Ephesians, for instance, prefaces its household code with a call to mutual submission out of reverence for Christ. It says a wife's obedience or submission to her husband is analogous to the church's obedience to Christ. And it exhorts husbands to love their wives as Christ himself loved the church.

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Now, that scarcely takes the sting out of the emphatic command that wives obey their husbands in everything. We've seen how the domestic code in First Peter neglects to address masters. But in this third-generation Pauline context from which Ephesians arises, there are apparently Christian slave owners as well as slaves. And a husband, father, and master addressed here as the same man who holds all three roles as patriarch.

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In 1 Timothy and Titus, we encounter the church bracing itself for and clenching its fists against the onslaught of cultural hostility and the threat of theological chaos. It's a dual danger. This is a context in which Christians encounter contempt and scorn from their non-Christian family and friends. And it's also a situation in which massive struggles within the church for control of the Christian tradition sorely try the church's leaders.

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Outsiders see the church as a threat to public virtue and civic order. while insiders jockey for the right to say what is or is not really Christian. Well, it seems that one of the most threatening, or perhaps most successful, of these claimants to orthodoxy is a group that claims for its inspiration the Apostle Paul. Particularly, Paul's preference for celibacy over marriage

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and his apocalyptic worldview that makes room for women's leadership in the church and a blurring of the boundaries between slaves and masters, poor and rich. Now that's the part of this group that is most recognizably Pauline, at least to us. What sounds a good bit less like the 1st century Paul is these teachers' fascination with religious myths and genealogies.

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And they're summarizing of the gospel in terms of resurrection rather than the cross of Christ. Now, who these people are, we do not know, because the pastor never names them or quotes them directly. Instead, he just dismisses them as silly or immoral or badly motivated. But what we can piece together resembles varieties of Christianity

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that, in retrospect, inhabit the fringes of the church rather than its center. Now, I say in retrospect advisedly because it is not until there are clergy and creeds and councils that the church is in any position to decide what is orthodoxy and what is heresy. Before that time, there's simply a huge diversity of voices. Now, this is likely a perceptive glimpse into the obvious, but it bears underscoring that the many voices we hear in the New Testament are only a few of those that preached the Christian message or some form of it during the first three centuries of the common era.

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It's inevitable that we hear them from our own perspective, shaped as it is by a fixed canon of scripture and two millennia of biblical interpretation. At the time of first. Timothy and Titus, however, that kind of lofty and secure position from which to view diversity would have been a lot harder to come by for the pastor. This church leader, whom we call the pastor, finds himself confronting the dual threats to the church of heresy within and hostility without, and he responds with a theological and even exegetical move

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that appears to have worked, although it has had, at the very least, some unintended consequences. In 1 Timothy 2.8, the pastor says he desires that men should pray without anger and argument, and women should dress modestly, refrain from teaching, and have babies. It's an odd pairing of concerns. unless you consider them in the context of the whole letter.

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To urge men to pray without anger or argument suggests that there may be some angry arguments that have found their ways into the community's worship. The pastor's opponents, those other teachers whose understandings of Christianity are in opposition to the pastors, those other teachers are at the very heart of the church. They're not simply lurking around in the parking lot.

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Now the placement of the second desire about women dressing modestly and learning in silence and having children, so close to the first, it's in the same sentence even. That betrays the likelihood that what these men are fighting about is how women dress, what they wear, how they behave, and whether or not they marry and have children. The outside teachers seem to have made some of their strongest inroads among the wealthy women of the congregation.

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Now, you don't really have to tell poor women not to wear pearls and gold and expensive clothing. Only wealthy women have that kind of temptation. And it would seem that they are the access that the other teachers have had to the pastor's congregation. They may even be becoming downright Pauline.

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They're ascetic, at least in some ways regarding sex. They're empowered. They're not confined by the domestic virtue of quiet submission to men. Many women in the early church are attached

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and attracted to the celibate life because it affords them unprecedented opportunities for service and leadership, and because it shelters them from the dangers to health and welfare that they face as wives and mothers in conventional households. So the pastor responds to this problem, as many other early Christians do, and come to think of it, modern Christians also, with the Bible. The story in Genesis 2 and 3 of Adam, Eve, and the serpent provides the pastor just what he needs to protect his church from both heretical teachers and damaging public relations. Women are to learn in silence, he says, because God created Eve after Adam.

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And that signals from the very moment of creation that women are not to precede men nor to have authority over them. Furthermore, it was Eve whom the serpent deceived, just as the other teachers have deceived the women in the pastor's church. So the church should not be led astray the way Eve led Adam astray. Now, verse 15 begins with a but.

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A but that surprisingly reverses the punishment imposed on Eve in Genesis with the redemption offered in Christ. Eve is punished with pain in childbirth. But Christian women, so long as they heed the pastor's exhortation, will be saved through childbirth, provided they remain in faith, love, holiness, and modesty. And he says that those conventional moral virtues of faith, love, holiness, and modesty will lead to a quiet and peaceable life

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in all godliness for the church. Godliness is eusebia, the piety or moral family values that we thought about earlier this morning. The pastor thus combats the message of his ascetic opponents by attaching women's salvation to marriage and childbearing. Not only is it not necessary to be celibate, he says, it's a threat to your salvation.

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And then he shores up the Christian Church's reputation among its neighbors, who are scandalized by unmarried women running around. without the protection and authority of men. The letter to Titus seems to address a similar environment, and it uses the language, and this time, to a certain extent, the form of a traditional household code to do so. The pastor describes what sound doctrine looks like in that passage from chapter two that I've copied for you.

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Older men are to cultivate the virtues of temperance, seriousness, prudence, sound faith, love, and endurance. Old women are to be reverent, sober, and most critically, good teachers of young women. Young women must love their husbands, love their children, be good managers of their households and submissive to their husbands,

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quote, so that the word of God may not be discredited, close quote. The self-control, good works, and sound speech that are virtues for young men also have a public relations function, so that any opponent will be put to shame, having nothing evil to say of us. Finally, slaves also are to be models of domestic tranquility, obedient and faithful, again that they might adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.

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Now the question may be rightly raised, or at least I may rightly raise it because I'm asking, why do old women need to teach young women to love their husbands and children? Isn't that the way it's always been? First Timothy 5.14 tells young widows to do very much the same things. Could it be that these young women are tempted to opt out of marriage and parenthood to join, say, the circle of widows?

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Maybe that they might find satisfaction in a ministry of prayer and teaching and pastoral care? At the end of 1st Timothy, there are instructions about widows. I'm deeply indebted, by the way, to Joette Bassler for this. Widows who for all the world sound like they've got some young women who are in such a hurry to become widows that they don't even get married first.

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It's a strange thing. How can you be a widow if you've not been married? Well, The pastor responds to whatever is attractive about this by imposing incredibly impossible limitations on it.

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He says, you can be a widow only if you've been married to a single husband. Well, these days that's not so strange, but when you think about the time when women died fairly regularly because of childbirth and its injuries and dangers, and Men went through a few wives until they got old and then themselves died, and then somebody else married them. There's a whole lot of reason to wonder how many women ever, their whole lives are married to just one man, especially if they have to live to the age of 60.

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Remember when I said earlier this morning, not that many people lived even past 50. So here's a woman, she can only be married to one man in her whole life, she has to be more than 60, and she has to have no children. Now that narrows the pool of nominations rather severely. And we have to ask, why would somebody want to sign up to be a widow anyway?

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Unless there is some really attractive role in the church for the widow, who has a ministry of prayer, of visitation, we might call it. One of the things the pastor is most angry about is women who run around, he says, spreading old wives' tales. One of the best translations of the NRSV. They say silly things.

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He calls them old wives' tales. They upset whole households, the pastor says. Well, maybe this is the ministry that these celibate women are given, and it is expensive because they don't live in a conventional household, and therefore the food gets put on their table by somebody else. So the pastor puts limits.

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on the number of widows his household or his church can support. So here also is a response that is designed, first of all, to stave off the infection of the church with offensive teaching by limiting women's ability to spread that teaching, and two, to present to the world outside the church a portrait of Christian family values that do not offend moral sensibilities. Now, the Christianized picture of the Greco-Roman household that we find in Ephesians and Colossians. and the pastoral epistles, with its boundaries very clear, its hierarchical structure reinforced, and the power of the patriarch infused with religious value, with Christian religious value, has been the most influential biblical voice in this conversation for much of Christian history.

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and apocalyptic preference for celibacy and the vision of the Christian community as alternative household have had much less impact, with the notable exception of Roman Catholic and Orthodox attitudes toward clergy. Not even the reorientation of family values that we find in Luke and 1 Peter has so shaped Christian domestic ethics. As wives, be subject to your husbands, and slaves, obey your masters. Now, this time, I left you more time to talk.

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Oh, good. I thought, my gosh. Okay, so my question, and it's not a small one, how do you preach these texts? I'm a last year student here.

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We've talked, I took feminist theology here, and we've studied a lot of these texts. And my question is, how would you treat this text from the pulpit? I am a firm believer in not forcing the Bible to do the church's whole job for it in worship. And I don't believe in preaching against a text.

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But if the Bible lives only in the pulpit and nowhere else in the life of the church, then we're in sorry shape. I don't think that it's necessary to be a slave to the lectionary, but if you are, you're off the hook. The lectionary edits the Bible all over the place. None of the hard things are in there.

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Now, having said that, I think that we are constantly in conversation with people whose lives have been shaped by these texts, both positively and negatively. And not to say anything about them is to ignore the pain as well as the questions that people bring. I'm not sure that

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I would ever preach a household code all by itself. I think to suggest that there's a lot about the pastoral epistles and Ephesians and Colossians that urges the good news in spite of a retreat from Pauline Christianity may be a legitimate use of the text in worship. But no, I'm afraid I don't think that it's good news to say that slaves obey your masters the way Old Man McGee's minister did on the plantation has any defense to it. That's how come God made Sunday school, right, Gordon?

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We talk about these a lot, actually, at my church. We've had a lot of contacts, and I'm not even the only person. We wrestle with hard texts in adult education and in youth group, too.

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And I think that I'm always surprised at how much better people are able to deal with the Bible than their ministers think they are. Yes, sir. How does the verse that leads into the Ephesians text set this up? 521 starts out with be subject to one another.

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Out of reverence, right? In reverence to Christ. Well, I think that the modifications, the Christian modifications of the household codes are real. And they are designed, I think, to reorient, if you will, domestic values.

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These are not pagan codes, they're Christian codes. there's a point at which that particular one in Ephesians kind of falls apart because that's where the mutuality ends. Even then when the writer of Ephesians brings in the analogy of Christ's relationship with the church, he's not consistent. Wives are to obey their husbands the way the church obeys Christ, but then husbands are

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love their wives the way they love their own bodies. And Christ didn't love his own body. He gave himself up for the church. And husbands are not called to give themselves up for their wives.

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So there's a faltering of the logic that I think has something to do with the fact that this is a retreat from part of the author's own tradition in the face of real threat. In Ephesians, I haven't a clue what the threat is. I really don't. The contingent situation in Ephesians is so hidden that I don't know what the threat is.

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But I know that the writer of Ephesians feels that it's a very dangerous threat. And so it bears this reinforcement of household order. Yes, sir. On the one hand, you've laid out a Paul and Jesus anti-family eschatological or apocalyptic celibacy as an option for faithfulness.

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And on the other hand, you've laid out the pastoral epistles not exactly being conformed to the world, but looking an awful lot like the world. Is there some kind of via media that is also present in the New Testament that gives someone clues for, say, a more equalitarian notion of family? My 13-year-old daughter isn't likely to like either of the two options you sketched today. Well, and this is the danger of doing two voices in one lecture.

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The theological reorientation that I see in Luke and 1 Peter is sort of that middle way in which there are some pragmatic accommodations to the drastic changes called by Jesus' radical call to discipleship. So that the communal character of the church in Act, for instance. or the subversion of prevailing values in 1 Peter that says, honor the emperor and honor everybody else. And you may have to live with a non-Christian husband or master, but remember that your access to Jesus in some profound way is through suffering unjustly as he did.

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Yeah, I think the middle way has its own kinds of problems. And one of the things I'm going to suggest tomorrow is that I don't think any one of these three options alone answers the questions we are bringing to it. Any more than any of those voices describes the real families that we live in.

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And the previews of coming attractions says, that's what I want to think with you about in the morning. There are still some more voices. There are these kind of stretched and bent metaphors about kinship that happen also to be in Paul's letters but are themselves instructive of how we might think about families in more holistic ways without absolutizing one or the other.

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And one of the reasons for presenting it this way is to sort of sharpen the edges of each one so that none of them is really the way we live, nor the way we want to live in faithfulness. And I think this morning I said, not even those first Christians did either. Paul refused to impose celibacy on everybody.

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It's a charismatic gift. He wishes everybody had it, but it's a gift. So I don't think that even the most radical is a universalized.

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There are a lot of reasons to think also that the most radical lifestyles were espoused in the first generation by the itinerants rather than by people who lived in cities. I'm not sure I think that that's entirely the case, but there's a lot of evidence to talk about the itinerant missionaries more than people in Paul's churches, except then there's also 1 Corinthians 7, Yes, sir. I'd like to read this to the comment about how do we preach this stuff.

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And I remember sneaking up on a household code once when I was working from the lectionary on the baptismal code in Galatians about there being neither Jew nor Greek. And I suggested, as you did, that there must be some other people in the conversation that the person was speaking against. because you don't have to speak against something unless it's happening. And therefore, it looked like somebody had maybe taken the baptismal code seriously if that was a problem.

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I think one of the things that I approach as an old preacher, having been at it about 30 years, is to wonder what additional challenges there are. And there are some things that I can say as somebody who's been at it for 30 years, that a young woman just graduating from seminary will not be heard in quite the same way. So it seems to me that that could be a way that we could spend some of the trust that has been given us.

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I've been in my church about 14 years now, and they can hear me in a different way than they could the first year I got there. Amen to that. You earn the right to tell the truth. It doesn't come automatically with the job description.

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I've heard several people, after I've thought with them about these texts, come and talk about their own families with a lot of pain and sometimes relief. at having been heard for the first time, that the model of the family that some people present that comes out of, say, Ephesians and Colossians and the pastorals, doesn't describe their life and they have felt inadequate as a consequence. And to think that their kind of experience has also been reflected in scripture comes as good news. I mean, redemptive good news.

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And just saying that is itself the gospel for people. Yes, ma'am. I can say, did you all hear that? What did I mean by saying I don't believe in preaching against a text?

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That doesn't mean I haven't been tempted, and I bet we all have. I think that, in fact, the pulpit is not the place where I get up and tell you that I know better than the Bible does. And though a preacher is always in conversation with Scripture and bringing the congregation into conversation with Scripture, there are other contexts in which the serious wrestling such as this happens. And I don't think that that's worship.

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Because There's a legitimate distinction between kerygma and didakay, between proclamation and formation. And I think that teaching people how to wrestle responsibly with scripture is one of the essential parts of my job as a teaching elder. However, in worship, it's my job to tell the truth, to proclaim the word that doesn't belong to me.

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Is that... Others? Yes, sir. Just a comment and I'd like a response.

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As a pastor and someone who preaches regularly, I'm well aware that probably 70% of my congregation, that's where they not only hear the kerygma, but they also hear the didache, and that we don't have that luxury of separating out the two so easily. Your comment. Yeah, this is one of those times where it shows that I still live in Christendom, where we have adult education classes, plural, in my church.

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And I'm aware of that. And I think that's a real challenge for the church. this time. I'm not willing to relinquish the teaching ministry of the church, however, and fold it into worship.

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There are a lot of kinds of worship around that we can go to, some of which is not proclaiming the gospel at all, but really just teaching. And it's the Lucite pulpit school, you know, where they wander around with their Bibles, because I don't think it's not really preaching, and they know that, and they kind of show it in their body language by wandering around, because it's kind of an exposition of scripture from a certain theological standpoint. It's very much what we would understand the teaching, ministry of the church.

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But it's not proclamation in the same way. It doesn't call people to faith and to renewed discipleship. So I do understand that struggle and I don't mean to be in the least bit naive about it.

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I served for a long time in New Jersey where they can't spell adult education. And I mean, they really, there's no tradition of it. They don't, and I come along and my gift is adult education and they say, well, does that mean you want to teach teenagers? And I think, oh my Lord, I don't even know what to say to teenagers.

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I can talk to grown-ups. And And so there are places in the church where it's already hard to do it all to education. And rather than letting it go, I'd say let's find ways to hold on to it again and do it.

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Do it well. That's why we hire people like Gordon to teach Christian education. This is not your last time to talk. Just last time today.

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Thank you. Oh, that's a wonderful thing. Thank you. Thank you.