Lectionary Links (NL): September 6, 2020
14th Sunday After Pentecost
Year 2: September 6, 2020
Luke 11:2-4 (Our Needs)
We All Need Forgiveness by Mercer Mayer
(Written for ages 4-7)
Comment: The Lord’s Prayer is profound in that it highlights the connections not just between us and God, but between us and our neighbors. Whenever we enter into relationships, this prayer acknowledges, there are going to be times when things go awry. This is a great message to look at with children, and it subverts the “happily ever after” message of most fairytales. We mess up; we hurt people, people hurt us, we fall short of God’s glory – it happens! The fact that it happens doesn’t mean that we’re bad people. It does mean that we have some work to do, to repair the relationship – or to offer forgiveness. Mayer’s book about Little Critter is a great collection of examples of both giving and receiving forgiveness. Little Critter has his feelings hurt, but he also hurts others. His mother points out that we all need forgiveness, and ties that message explicitly to Christian themes. You might ask children how Little Critter is feeling in each of the scenes. This is a safer question than asking them about times when their feelings were hurt. The Lord’s Prayer is a multidimensional process that guides us in reconciling our relationships with one another and with God.
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. This marks the last Narrative Lectionary Post on Storypath, but we have the complete 4 year cycle available here and you can find the books we have associated with each year of the Narrative Lectionary by the Scripture Index or by going to the Lectionary Links menu at the top of the main page, right under the image header. We began with Year 3 in 2016 and finished Year 2 in 2020.
Lectionary Links (NL): September 6, 2020 by Storypath is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
