velvetpage: (Default)
velvetpage ([personal profile] velvetpage) wrote2007-03-18 02:30 pm
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"Jesus is the can."

The service today was run by the teens and pre-teens of the church. One of them, an older boy, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, did the children's story.

He had his brother hold up an egg. "This egg is like us. We're humans, and we're sinful." The brother held up a hammer. "God says that the wages of sin is death. Death today is represented by the hammer. This is God's Hammer of Death." At this point, I'm having visions of D&D and St. Cuthbert, while most of the adults in the sanctuary are having visions of these two teens smashing an egg in the middle of church. "God's hammer is going to smash the egg," he said, and the brother raised the hammer.

Just before the brother started to swing it, the kid put a coffee can upside-down over the egg. The hammer dented it, but that was all. "Jesus is the can," he said, as the adults breathed a sigh of relief and I convulsed in silent mirth. "He protects us from God's wrath. See? The egg is perfectly safe." He lifted up the can.

The brother was just fast enough to catch the egg before it rolled off the table.

It was far and away the most effective children's story I've seen in a long time. But I'm having trouble getting the image of Jesus as a tin man, or worse, out of my head.

[identity profile] velvetpage.livejournal.com 2007-03-18 11:35 pm (UTC)(link)
It's definitely a blunt image, and not necessarily the one I want my daughter to have as her first image of God. But then, I just barely qualify as a Christian by most definitions.

The funny thing is, it didn't occur to me to be upset at the lesson until [livejournal.com profile] failstoexist pointed it out. This is not the central image of God that I grew up with, but it's among the images that I have, and it didn't really occur to me not to introduce that idea to my children.

[identity profile] catarzyna.livejournal.com 2007-03-19 02:27 am (UTC)(link)
Does this change anything for you?

[identity profile] velvetpage.livejournal.com 2007-03-19 09:40 am (UTC)(link)
Nothing I wasn't already considering.