Lectionary Links (NL): December 8, 2019
2nd Sunday of Advent
Year 2: December 8, 2019
Monkey Not Ready for Kindergarten by Marc Brown
(Written for ages 3 to 7)
Comment: Advent is a time when we try to follow the call to “prepare the way of the Lord” as we anticipate Jesus’ return to the world. This passage from Isaiah begins with a word of comfort, acknowledging all that the people have gone through and their fears about what might happen in the future. In Marc Brown’s book, Monkey has a lot of fears about what will happen in the future, when he goes to kindergarten: he might get on the wrong bus, he might have to eat peas for snack, he might not make new friends! The future can be scary for children (and adults!), especially when they don’t know exactly what to expect. You might ask children how they felt when they had a big change in their lives (moving to a new house, going to a new school, having a new baby in the family). Were they scared like Monkey? Were they excited? How can we prepare for God to come into the world? In Brown’s book, Monkey practices what things will be like at school. In a similar way, we can practice what things will be like in God’s kingdom: sharing with each other, respecting other people, reading stories from the Bible, helping those less fortunate, welcoming new people (even when they are different from us). It is important to note that we are not trying to be “good enough” to make God come; we are trying to feel what it will be like when God comes, just like Monkey was trying to feel what it would be like to go to school.
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): December 8, 2019 by Storypath is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
