I think, I want to warm you up even more with a really simple question.

Sure.

Well, you know, I told you that my concern is for the intersection of theology and then life the way it really is.

And so I know that on this subject, in particular, you have lots, you have a range of life experience.

Yes, I do.

That monk and being a married man and a father of seven.

So just as we get into this, before we really get into what the Bible says about this subject, you know, talk to me, you know, tell me, tell my listeners, you know, how you've learned in the long course of your life, both studying and living with scripture, you know, why we should even look to these ancient texts that were written in a completely different society for guidance on how we should live, you know, family and marriage.

Today in modern times when the whole thing clearly has changed.

It certainly has changed.

And that's one of the challenges to reading the ancient texts.

I was talking to students yesterday about a passage in Paul's letter to the Corinthians, first letter to the Corinthians about the Vailing of Women.

And all of the scholarly discussions about what's going on there.

And simply getting across those cultural hurdles of what it meant to be family and antiquity.

And above all, gender construction in antiquity and the linkages between gender construction and sexuality are very, very complex.

So it's not a simple matter to be reading these ancient texts as normative and as guiding our lives.

It's relatively simple, though involved, to read the mess historical sources or as cultural texts.

That's fun and interesting because it's other.

But when we try to bring them home and to think about how do our lives correspond to them, how can we imagine our own lives while imagining scripture simultaneously or convergingly?

It's difficult. Why do we do it?

The same texts that confuse us are also the ones that give us life.

The same texts that provide inadequate partial and sometimes distorted witnesses on how we are actually to carry out our lives are also witnesses to the realities that have brought us together in the first place.

So Christians gather as church because of convictions which are written in these texts but are also above all convictions that are confirmed by their own experience that Jesus is Lord, that were caught up in a new creation, that something has changed, that transformation is possible.

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