16th Sunday After Pentecost

Year 1:  September 9th, 2018

Preaching Text: Genesis 6:5-22; 8:6-12; 9:8-17

La La La: A Story of Hope by Kate DiCamillo

(Written for ages 4-8)

Comment: In the story of Noah and the ark, after the ordeal of the waters rising and covering the earth, they slowly start to subside. Eventually Noah can see the tops of the mountains. He knows soon he’ll be able to go outside, but he has to make sure. He first sends out a raven, who flies to and fro over the face of the earth, but can’t find anywhere to land. The same thing happens again, with a dove this time. But finally, Noah sends the dove out one more time, and this time it returns with an olive branch in its beak. The olive branch tells Noah that the waters have subsided. In the passage, Noah makes attempt after attempt to find out if the waters have drained, and he has to wait and wait for a response, but finally, he gets one. The same is true in Kate DiCamillo’s book, La La La: A Story of Hope. In the story, a little girl is singing her simple song, “La La La”, hoping for a response. But over and over she sings, and over and over, there is no reply. She starts to give up, even goes to sleep, but wakes up when a response finally comes back to her after all that time. The little girl and Noah both made attempts and both had to wait to get responses, but in the end, they both received responses. As people of faith, we may go through deep waters, and there may be a long wait for those waters to subside. And as we wait, we’ll have to make different attempts to see where the Lord wants us to go next, but not every attempt will be answered immediately, in our time. But although there will be a wait, we can, as people of faith, trust that the Lord remembers us as the Lord remembered Noah, and that there will, indeed, be a response for us as well.

We welcome Sara Anne Berger, Union Presbyterian Seminary alumna and pastor of the First Presbyterian Chuch, Nachitoches, LA, as our Year 1 Narrative Lectionary Links writer. We’ll hear from Sara Anne each week for this year in the four year cycle and look forward to her contributions.

Lectionary Links (NL): September 9, 2018 by Storypath is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.