A verse that puts the brakes on

It's only in the last few years that I've felt free to resist a biblical text, free to accept that such resistance is "allowed." It still isn't something that comes easily for me, given my particular seminary training--not to mention my fundamentalist upbringing.

I suppose my attempt to find some good news in the text, rather than simply dismissing it out of hand, comes in part from that old baggage. While I'm as prone as the next person to picking and choosing my good news, I do have a high regard for the canon--even those bits of it that I don't like, or that seem weird or impossible to defend. It's the book I've been given, and I figure I need to make the best of it.

Verses like 1 Peter 2:18, which sets up this week's assigned reading but is omitted from it, reveal the strangeness of the Bible: