Lectionary Links (NL): July 5, 2020
5th Sunday After Pentecost
Year 2: July 5, 2020
When God Was a Little Girl by David Weiss
(Written for ages 4-8)
Comment: Last week’s passage focused on God’s power in creation, whole this week centers on God’s creativity. The passage, in contrast to the Genesis accounts of creation, focuses on non-human components of the world God has made – the Leviathan takes center stage. The Leviathan, in particular, is an example of God’s joy in the aspects of creation that humankind cannot possibly imagine containing or controlling. Leviathan is a force of nature – contained by the sovereignty we discussed yesterday – but as inexplicable to Job as his suffering is. In Weiss’s book, Susanna asks her father to “tell me a story about when God was a little girl.” The book is expertly illustrated, depicting God in a variety of ages and ethnicities, but always as a girl. It focuses on God as a joyfully creative force, much like a child doing art projects. If we take seriously the idea that humans are created in the image of God, that means seeing the divine in all ages of humanity. A child’s curiosity and imagination are just the things that might come up with a monstrous (but playful) sea creature. It’s helpful to remind children that there are things in the world we can’t control and don’t understand because God is so powerfully creative.
Thanks to Joshua Andrzejewski, Union Presbyterian Seminary alumnus and chaplain for the pediatric and women’s health units in the VCU Medical Center, for writing the Year 2 Narrative Lectionary Links.
Lectionary Links (NL): July 5, 2020 by Storypath is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
