Year 4: April 22, 2018
Preaching Text: Acts 16:16-31
What Happens Next by Susan Hughes
(Written for ages 5-9)
Comment: In her commentary on this text, Professor Mitzi J. Smith focuses on the first few verses, not likely where we’d tend to pause and consider preaching. “Sometimes,” Smith says, “we have to preach against the grain and in between the lines because that is where our people live; it is where life happens, where we struggle with and against oppression.” Smith encourages preachers to remember that Paul wasn’t perfect, and we don’t need to preach as if he were. Neither Paul, nor her owners saw the slave girl for her humanity, as a valued person created by God. They saw her as an annoyance, a way of making money, an object to be manipulated. Something similar occurs in What Happens Next. With the help of mom, the narrator realizes that “Bully B. hurts me because it makes her feel in charge of me, and in charge of how she feels about me.” There is no reconciliation or hopeful end to the slave girl’s story in Acts, but we do see one in Hughes’ tale. These readings invite us to consider how we see and experience other people. Rather than responding to others in ways that are dismissive and objectifying, may we honor the goodness God creates within them.
Thanks to regular contributor and Union Presbyterian Seminary alumna Noell Rathbun for writing the Year 4 Narrative Lectionary Links.