13th Sunday after Pentecost

Year 4: August 19, 2018

Preaching Text: Matthew 6:19-34

Pandora by Victoria Turnbull

(Written for ages 4-8)

Comment: This text highlights the trouble with materialism and how it connects to our worries about life. Many people acquire more and more stuff in an attempt to fill a void in life. Loneliness and emptiness is a real worry for children and adults alike. Turnball’s tale helps us consider how relationships bring the truest cure to our loneliness. Pandora lives in a world filled with mountains of earthly treasures that have been discarded, broken, consumed by moth and rust. In the midst of all this stuff, she is lonely. After she helps nurse a wounded bird, he brings her gifts of flowers and seedpods from distant places. The bird’s gifts transform Pandora’s homeland from lifeless mountains of stuff into a world overflowing with light and life. This text and story encourage us not to get lost in the lonely mountains of stuff; instead we are invited to focus on God’s relationship with the world and each of us, as well as our relationships with one another.

**For this three-week series, be sure to check out our stewardship bibliography for many additional books that work well with these texts.**

Thanks to regular contributor Noell Rathbun for writing the Year 4 Lectionary Links.

Lectionary Links (NL): August 19, 2018 by Storypath is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.