Both Susan and I wrote curricula for faith formation over a period of many years on several different projects. Part of the process in at least two of those projects was following the lectionary and writing lessons for each week around texts that had been chosen by planners of the project. On one project, I wrote half of a year - 26 lessons - for each of the three years of the lectionary cycle. In the process we became familiar with some of the texts of the lectionary. The Revised Common lectionary has four readings for each week and the developers of the curricula projects chose a single text for each week. They tried to come up with a balance of Psalm, Hebrew, Gospel, and Epistle, but the pattern of readings and the choice of texts wasn’t always clear to us as writers who had not been engaged in the planning phase of the project. Nonetheless, our job was to develop a teaching and learning plan for the week’s lesson. We were writing both the teacher or leader’s guide and the resources that were distributed to learners.

We quickly learned to be grateful for narrative texts. Although poetic texts are beautiful and can be meaningful they are a challenge to use as the core of a teaching and learning lesson. Long sermons might be meaningful to adults, but often are hard for children to follow. Making connections between a theological argument and the real lives of teens can be difficult. So when we were presented with stories with characters who could be identified, plot themes, and a discernible beginning and ending, we were eager to get to the task. Writing those lessons was decidedly easier than writing for some other weeks. Some narrative stories present readily usable scripts for role playing.

This week’s reading from Acts, the seventh Sunday of Easter in year C of the lectionary, is one that brings to mind lessons we had created. There are two parts to the story. In the first part, a young girl is held as a slave and makes money for her owners by fortune telling. When she encounters Paul and Silas, she calls out to them until Paul finally orders the spirt to come out of her. Once she is healed, she is no longer something that will make money for her owners, so they become angry and have Paul and Silas arrested. The crowd and magistrates turn against Paul and Silas and they are stripped and beaten before being thrown into jail with their feet in stocks. That is the end of the first part of the story.

In the next scene, Paul and Silas are in jail at midnight. They are praying and singing hymns when an earthquake shakes the prison, causing walls to fall down, doors to open and chains to break. The jailer, seeing the destruction of his jail is overcome with fear and threatens to kill himself. Paul calls out to him and he discovers that Paul and Silas have not run from the jail, but remained inside. They succeed in convincing him to belief in the resurrection of Jesus. He washes their wounds. They baptize the jailer and his family. Everyone enjoys a meal and is happy.

There is plenty of action and drama for telling the story with children: jail cells, an earthquake, chains being broken, a death averted, a midnight baptism of an entire family, and a feast to rejoice. The text doesn’t deal with what happens to the slave girl, her owners, the magistrates, the jailer and his family, or even how Paul and Silas leave the community before going on. It just tells of a dramatic change of events.

It was easy to write lessons around this text. We could describe learning activities with puppets, dramas with costumes, craft projects of making jail cells out of popsicle sticks, and dozens of other things for leaders and learners to do together around the theme of trusting God, and lives being transformed.

There is a fun musical entitled “Paul and Company” by my friends Mary Nelson Keithahn and John Horman that we produced at our summer camp in the Black Hills. The songs are catchy and easy to learn.

Looking back, however, although I can tell the story from memory and I suspect that a lot of the children and youth with whom we worked over the years know the outlines of the story as well, I am not sure that I fully understand the meaning of the text. I’m sure that I’ve preached on that text a half dozen or more times. There is a pretty big attraction to preaching from Acts in Eastertide because the Lectionary uses readings from Acts for the first lesson, in place of the readings from the Hebrew Scripture that are part of the lectionary for the rest of the year.

As a teacher and writer of resources for faith formation, however, I wonder if it is enough to learn the story. Most of us are not going to find ourselves confronted by a fortune-telling slave girl. We will never experience an earthquake that opens the doors of a jail in which we are incarcerated. It is hard to make connections between our everyday lives and the events of the story.

We are unlikely to encounter a person at just the right moment to avert a suicide, but that scenario did occur to me once and it was as miraculous as walls falling down in an earthquake. I did preach on this text once using it as an opportunity to speak with the congregation about suicide and practical steps that everyday people can take to help prevent suicide.

So we encounter the story once again. Today the numbers of children in church will be very small. Memorial day weekend is a time for families to head out camping. Today is the day of Ski to Sea, a big relay race that involves cross country skiing, downhill skiing or snowboarding, a foot race, a segment on road bikes, a canoe race, mountain biking and sea kayaking across the bay. The town will be filled with people who aren’t planning to attend church.

We’ll tell the story once again and we’ll have some crafts for the children who do come. We’ll come home at the end of the day, however, knowing that there is still much more that could be learned from this familiar story.