Literary-critical Sunday school, part 6

Reading: The Beginner's Bible, p. 397-426.

Listening: Margot Käßmann, Die Bibel für Kinder, part 2, 21:41-28:15; Karlheinz Koinegg, Moses und die Wüste der Wunder, 0:00-18:41.  

When in the Käßmann audiobook we came to the parable of the sheep and the goats and Jesus said "When the end of the world comes ...", J called out "There is no end of the world!" 

I paused and asked him what he meant, and he said that maybe there would be an end of the world but that it would not come for a long long time, and then he said something about outer space that I can't recall (and that he is now unwilling to repeat). When I told him that many religious people believe the end of the world is coming very soon, he said "Ja, es gibt viele Plappermäuler"  ("Yes, there are a lot of blabbermouths"). 

I also told him that you can see billboards people have put up saying that the end of the world and/or Jesus is coming soon, and that I would show him the next time we drove to Atlanta.  

Billboard on Route 316 in Gwinnett County

Our basic approach to talking to J about things like the end of the world (and evolution) is the following. We told him what most of the scientists say and that we agree with the scientists. We also told him that some, but not all, religious people disagree with the scientists and think that the world will end soon. I pointed out that Jesus and his disciples thought that that the world was going to end soon, and that was 2000 years ago. I also told him that when I was a boy, some religious friends and family members told me that the world was going to end soon, and that was 30-40 years ago. That I myself believed this for awhile when I was young. 

We do not simply tell J that the scientists are right and that the religious people are wrong. We try to give him a dispassionate account of the positions, and also represent their complexity, for example that a religious person can agree with the science and that many good scientists believe in God. But we also leave him in no doubt about the fact that we agree with the scientists on scientific questions. 

The story of Moses is one of J's favorites and he has already experienced many versions of it. He especially likes the episodes with baby Moses in the basket, the burning bush, and the two scenes with the "snake staff" (Schlangenstab). He thinks some of the ten plagues are pretty interesting, but on the whole he doesn't really enjoy this part of the story. Concerning the last of the plagues (death of the first-born sons) he said last year: "Daddy, I don't think the scribes got this one right." 

In the past J has really enjoyed the German version of the movie The Ten Commandmants (2007), not least because here Moses has a donkey that gets a good bit of screen time. 

One of J's favorite scenes is where Moses, helping Zipporah at the well, tells the mean shepherds that they don't want to mix it up with him because he has nothing to lose and also because "my donkey is in a very bad mood today," and you see the glowering donkey shaking his mane and whinnying threateningly (min. 19:00).

I also made a point of telling J that even though you don't hear a lot about Moses's sister Miriam in the bible, she's really a very important person because she thought up the whole plan with the basket and Pharaoh's daughter. 

That if it were not for her, Moses would not have survived. That she has a story of her own and that it's a shame the writers of the bible didn't tell us more about her.

Age 5.1.18