34^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Christ the King Sunday

Year B:  November 22, 2015

First Reading:  2 Samuel 23:1-7

The Night Eater by Ana Juan

(Written for ages 4-8)

Comment: Samuel compares the king of Israel to the light of a sunrise. There is something special about the light at sunrise. After hours of darkness and stillness, light begins to break in. The world begins to wake up. The promises of a new day are lived out. There is a sense of starting over. The night eater has one job In The Night Eater, and it is to eat the night. He does an exceptional job, until one night the moon makes a comment about his weight and he decides he will never eat the night again. Without the night eater eating the night, the world stays in perpetual night. What is typically a time of rest and renewal begins to cause heartache and troubles. The world begins to shut down from the way it is suppose to work. The night eater sits back and watches everything, until children call out to him. As he opens his mouth to answer them, he tastes the night and begins to eat again.  As he begins to eat, the world order begins to fall back into place, and that first sunrise burst forth full of promise and potential. God is our night eater. God will continue to bring us a new day. The sunrise, after a prolonged night, is filled with even more joy and promise.

Second Reading: Revelation 1:4b-8

The Missing Piece By Shel Silverstein  

(Written for ages 1-8)

Comment: As I read through this passage, the language pointing towards completeness struck me. Jesus introduces himself as the one who is, the one who was, and the one who is to come. From the outset, we have covered past, present, and future.  We know what the past was like, and we are experiencing the present, but we have no idea what the future will be. We have to trust in the God for the future. As we live into the future, we live into the completeness God has planned for the world.  Shel Silverstien explores the idea of being complete in The Missing Piece. The text follows the journey of a circle, who is missing a pie shaped piece, to find the missing piece.  The circle finds the missing piece, and all seems well, but it turns out the circle was complete all along. We can choose to trust that with God we are complete or we can choose to seek out what we believe to be missing.

Gospel Reading:  John 18:33-37

Seven Blind Mice by  Ed Young

(Written for ages 3-7)

Comment: The mice come in contact with something new by their pond. Over the course of the week, the mice investigate this new thing. Each day, one mouse encounters a different part of the unknown visitor and returns to the others naming what it is. It is not until the final day when the mouse takes the time to explore the whole of the visitor, that we learn what the visitor is. This mouse is able to put all the information together from the other mice, in order to determine the visitor to the pond is an elephant.  In the gospel reading for Christ the King Sunday, we find Jesus before Pilate while Pilate seeks to understand who Jesus is. Through questions based on the information given to him by the Jewish leaders, Pilate ask questions of Jesus for clarification. No matter the answer given, it is unlikely that Pilate will be able to understand Jesus because he is only looking at him from one angle. In order to completely understand Jesus and his kingship, we have to look at Jesus from many different angles. Like the mice who needed the final mouse to organize all the information and help them to see the visitor in a new way, we need someone to help us see the whole picture. God is the one that will allow us to understand Jesus and what it means to call him King.

Thank you to Union Presbyterian Seminary alumna Elizabeth Boulware Landes for writing the Lectionary Links this week. We’re still pretty much in awe that she is writing these with a weeks old baby and a toddler!

Lectionary Links: Sunday, November 22, 2015 by Storypath is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.