When Sunday School Becomes a Horror Show
Kids love a good story. Sometimes they notice things.
Like this past Sunday morning, when I shared the story of the flood and the ark with our first and second graders. It’d been a while since I’d talked about God with kids at church, and I was so excited. They say the most profound things!
It started out great.
“OOH!” they said when I brought the materials to the rug. The wooden ark, the basket of animals, the tiny perfect dove, Mr. and Mrs. Noah, and the prism that brings a rainbow to our classroom. They’ve been hearing the story for years now, so they know the words we say. How we start by remembering the part of the creation story, when God made the earth and said it was very good.
“But people began to do bad things,” I said. “So, God decided to send a great flood of water to wash everything clean and make it new again.”
I know. It was definitely a white-washed, sanitized version. Good thing. It’s a dark story.
Anyway, I told them how Noah finished the ark, and I hopped the bunnies right inside it. Next came the giraffes—at which, an observant child reminded me that giraffes don’t hop and that I’d forgotten the gangplank. Once all the animals crawled and slithered and trotted inside, I continued the story, rocking the ark higher and higher above my head.
You know how the story goes. It rains for forty days and forty nights, God sends the wind to dry up all the rain, (at which point a certain grandson started singing about the itsy-bitsy spider, which confused me at first.) Eventually our dove flew off to make a new nest, signaling to Noah that it was time to come out.
Once the story was over, I asked the kids the wondering questions we always use in Godly Play: what was your favorite part, what was the most important part, what part was about you, etc. Their answers were lovely. They were glad God stayed close to them on the ark. They liked the ending, when everybody came down the gangplank to the shiny new world and thanked God.
We sat down at the tables to make some rainbows.
That’s when they brought up the bones.
“I bet when they got off the ark, there were bones everywhere,” my grandson said, adding some crunching sound effects.
“Actually,” a little girl said, squirting a blob of glue onto her half paper plate, “if they were just on the boat for forty days and nights, the bodies were probably still lying around.”
“Yeah,” a child added. “What if people tried to climb into the boat?”
I looked at my co-teacher Beatriz. “Wow,” I said. “Y’all sure go straight to the gruesome parts!”
At that point I had to decide what to do.
Now, I’m not a person who takes this story literally, but I didn’t want to go there with them. What’s your goal here? I asked myself.
It’s always been the same thing: to help them see God’s unconditional love for them, to help them get to know Jesus, so they can see the world and others (and scripture) through his eyes, and to help the kids wonder and ask questions about God.
They were wondering! So yay for bone talk, I guess.
“You know what I like about this story?” I said. “I like the part where God changes God’s mind.”
“Yeah!” a child said. “He promised to never send a flood again!”
“Like Helene!” said another child. Poor kids. We all remembered Helene.
“God didn’t send Helene, right?” I asked.
“RIGHT!” They laughed, like I was telling a joke.
“What about when people do bad things?” I asked. “God hates it when people hurt people. Right?”
“RIGHT!”
“God wants them to change,” a child said. “Like he changed!”
Wow.
I’d say that’s mic-drop wisdom, right there!
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