by Lia Scholl
Old Testament Reading: Deuteronomy 6:1-9
For Sunday, November 4, 2012: Year B—Ordinary 31
When I was in high school, I was in a DiscipleNow group. We had a weekend retreat, followed by 12 weeks of Thursday night meetings in a youth leader’s home. I did a quick search of the Internet for DiscipleNow, and saw that it’s now called DNOW (how cool!), and the wiki page says it’s led by “totally rad youth leaders.”
DiscipleHmmm…
DiscipleNow encouraged a daily quiet time, scripture memorization, learning to tell your own spiritual story (and avoiding Christian clichés), and witnessing (we probably learned the Roman Road). We were encouraged to witness to our friends.
Those were pretty formative times for me, even if only providing things to rebel against. All those Bible verses I memorized? Gone! All those quiet times I kept? Blasted! And a few years ago I learned that the “totally rad youth leader” is a fundamentalist preacher at a conservative Southern church.
DiscipleHow?
Which makes me wonder about these words from Deuteronomy: “Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.” But don’t those words carry judgment, fear, and expectation? Is there really a way to influence our children, to bring them up in our traditions, without scaring them away?
No year passes at my little congregation that someone doesn’t ask that same question. With too few children for programming, and too few youth for a group, we just invite them into the life of the church. Which, clearly, bores the crud out of them.
DiscipleWhat?
As a small church committed to peace, though, it feels disingenuous to teach them the stories of the Hebrew Bible, the mythological beginnings in Genesis up to the fall, like God killing the world but leaving Noah and his family on the ark, Joseph’s older brothers selling him into slavery. These are not happy-go-lucky stories, or even stories of how to be in the world. Somehow we teach children as if these things happened, but we don’t even (mostly) believe that they happened like that.
Wouldn’t it be better to teach our children stories like The Giving Tree, or The Velveteen Rabbit? At least we can present them as fiction, and even better, as life-lessons. Where’s the life lesson in having your brothers sell you into slavery?
DiscipleWithCare
So as you recite these words to your children, which ones are you going to recite? Sure, “Love the LORD with all your heart,” is easy. But some of the others? Will you feel okay telling your children the Bible stories?
In some way, I have faith in spite of DiscipleNow. I have faith in spite of the little old man who taught the middle school Sunday school, who highlighted the verses about being unequally yoked, and told us it was about interracial dating. I have faith in spite of the preachers yelling at me that I needed to fear the Lord and fear the hell that has been
The Hardest Question
Looking closely, there’s actually something amazingly spacious and spontaneous about the peripatetic, real life, pedagogy of Deuteronomy 6. My parents and the church of my parents gave me plenty of room to rebel. But will we give that to our children?
Rev. Lia Scholl serves as pastor at the Richmond Mennonite Fellowship in Richmond, Virginia and is a sex work ally, a Board member at the Red Umbrella Project. Her book, I <3 Sex Workers, is forthcoming from Chalice Press. Find out more at www.liascholl.com or you can find her on twitter at http://twitter.com/roguereverend.
