"Jesus is the can."

[velvetpage]

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.

Comments

[failstoexist.livejournal.com]

i don't know...i think that if someone was telling MY four year old child that she was an egg and god's "hammer of death" was going to strike her down, i'd be pretty pissed off, jesus-can or not. but maybe that's the not-christian part of me not really understanding this whole idea.

[catarzyna.livejournal.com]

For some reason this makes me think of "Sinners in the hands of an angry God" but it could be the sickness that is starting to take over my body.

"They deserve to be cast into hell; so that divine justice never stands in the way, it makes no objection against God's using his power at any moment to destroy them. Yea, on the contrary, justice calls aloud for an infinite punishment of their sins. Divine justice says of the tree that brings forth such grapes of Sodom, "Cut it down, why cumbereth it the ground?" Luke 13:7. The sword of divine justice is every moment brandished over their heads, and it is nothing but the hand of arbitrary mercy, and God's mere will, that holds it back." ~Jonathan Edwards~ July 8, 1741

There are many varying theological interpretations on God's justice and/or benevalence but I am no theologian, let a lone a Christian. It is more into the 19th and 20th Centuries that the concept of God becomes more warm and fuzzy.

[paka.livejournal.com]

I have major major quibbles with this, but ya know, there's nothing I could say you haven't already thought of. Up to and including wanting to quote "Enlightenment can pierce even the helm of iron."