The Centurion’s Pais. Oh this is a hard story, given all that we now know about enslavement, about sex between slaveowner and enslaved person, about power differentials… Does Jesus know these things? Is it a lovely story about queer love, or a painful story about Jesus’s tacit endorsement of a caste system? How do we recover a story like this from under layers of new understanding? What does it mean for us now? Could a sermon be a teaching opportunity for critical thinking/reading that is still faithfully exploring Jesus’s identity? Like, “Here is reading #1… here is reading #2… here is reading #3… here is what it means to receive the complications and confusion without losing your mind or your faith…”

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