It was a very busy day on Sunday for the WCUC Youth! In just a little over two hours, they packed up for kitchen in preparation for the renovation, painted gratitude prayer flags which will become part of a larger church-wide project happening next Sunday, and hosted a bake sale that raised $276.00 for Greater Lowell’s Habitat for Humanity. Many hands do indeed make work lighter and we are so grateful to have such a helpful and committed group of young people at our church!
At dawn on the first day of the week, some women went to Jesus’ tomb. The earth shook and a dazzling angel rolled the stone from the tomb. Roman tomb guards fainted from fear. The angel told the women that Jesus had been raised from the dead and invited them to see the empty tomb. As the women ran to tell the joyful news, they met the risen Christ and worshipped him.
The children’s eyes were wide as they watched this mysterious and amazing story played out with the help of our wooden story figures and props. Afterwards we invited them to approach the story: I wonder how the women felt when they saw that the tomb was empty. “Scared.” “Shocked.” “Confused.” I wonder why an angel came to meet the women. “?????” I wonder what happened when the women saw Jesus standing before them. “They recognized his voice.” “They remembered what he looked like.” “Why do his hands have holes in them?” I wonder what the women will do next. “They will go to Galilee!” “They will tell the disciples!” Which character would you like to be in this story? (Mostly Marys, one guard, one Jesus, and one angel).
Ask your child about Hot Cross Easter Buns and Pysanky (Ukrainian Easter Eggs). Download the free song “Alive, Alive, Alive Forevermore” at www.ShineCurriculum.com/extras.
As always, I was honored to be a learner with your children this morning!
Peace,
Ruth (*thanks so much to Ruth Sedlock for subbing for Lisa Frisby while she was away last Sunday!)
The youth got busy this week helping out some neighbors in need and tackling a couple of church clean up projects. Several of our teenagers met at Polly and Keith Jenkins Man home to help wth some packing and other preparations for their upcoming move. Others joined Candy Carr at the church to clean out the deacon’s kitchen and do some yard work in the Welcome Garden. In celebration of their efforts. we joyfully ended the evening in town with pizza and ice cream and then returned to church for a few rounds of the hide and seek game called Sardines which has become our youth group favorite. A fun night with some of the most thoughtful and playful teens I know!
*A note of thanks from Polly and Keith:
We are very grateful to all the youth who helped us out on Tuesday. It was a pleasure to get to know them and, as two of the more senior members of WCUC, we thank them for their generous gift of young muscles and energy.
On Sunday, Melissa and I decided to combine our Multiage and Middler classes (we even included the Preschool for a bit!) to share in the dynamic activities planned for our lesson. Following the incredible lesson from last week about Jesus raising his friend Lazarus from the dead, we continued the story this week as we recreated, in dramatic style, the celebratory dinner that Lazarus and his sisters, Mary and Martha, held for Jesus and his disciples. We assumed it was a thank you dinner for bringing their brother back to life! All the children gathered on the stage while sister Mary (Melissa donned a fabulous disguise for this) invited them to a special supper. Sitting in the middle was Jesus (thanks to Carlin for playing this role!). Instead of serving food to her guests, Mary surprised everyone by pouring out an entire bottle of perfumed anointing oil on Jesus’ feet, then wiping them with her hair! This special oil would have been valued at about $15,000 in today’s terms – so this was a VERY generous gesture! Judas reprimanded Mary for wasting such a resource on Jesus, but Jesus disagreed, reminding his disciples that he will not always be there with them (perhaps a foreshadow of the near future?). Later in our dramatic story, Jesus entered the city of Jerusalem on the back of a donkey with the crowds shouting “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” Our lesson ended with Jesus’ triumphant entrance into Jerusalem. When we meet again on Palm Sunday, we will continue teaching the dramatic events of Holy Week.
Lots of activities and explorations populated North Hall on Sunday after our drama was complete, focusing mostly on scents (the perfumed oil that Mary used on Jesus was said to permeate the entire room with its scent!) and special words. The children were invited to scratch away the black surface of letters to reveal a special message that Jesus said; they created their own scented lotion with a variety of essential oils; they participated in a blind scent challenge where they had to guess the items hidden in the boxes using only their sense of smell (vanilla, mint, and onion were the hardest to guess); and they worked with Melissa on the stage to create letters using their bodies to spell out different words in our lesson. It proved to be a fun but challenging task, so we only spelled out “king” and “Jesus,” but we had a great time! Thanks to the preschool for joining us for this part!
On Sunday, March 5th, three of our third graders were honored at our worship service and received the gift of their own bible from WCUC. Following worship, the children and their families joined together for an intimate forum to get to know their new bibles better. A discussion about what the bible is and what it is for (they were blown away that our bible is not one book, but a collection of many books written by different authors!), a bible scavenger hunt, bookmark decorating, and yummy snacks rounded out our time together. It is always special to have parents and children together during these important moments of faith formation. And it is always an honor for me to be a part of them!
On the evening of Wednesday, March 1st, children, families, and adults came together to celebrate Ash Wednesday with a soup supper and a variety of prayer stations designed to help usher in the season of Lent. After sharing a meal together, children gathered on the stage to help plant marigold seeds in a variety of vases to be displayed on our alter table during the entire season of Lent (the seeds were already sprouting on Sunday, March 5th! So cool to see!). Then all ages enjoyed visiting our prayer stations set up in North Hall and in our nursery: layering colored sand, praying with Band-aids and Post-Its, decorating an Alleluia banner, stringing 40 beads to count the days of Lent, and creating personal marigold planters to bring home. In addition, our nursery was open to all for a candlelit indoor labyrinth walk, stone washing, and imposition of ashes. It was a beautiful evening enjoyed by all ages and abilities. Please enjoy the pictures!
The youth have been exploring these timely and relevant themes in scripture, in reflection conversations, and in action over the course of the “Love Month”, otherwise known as February. We began with the Exodus story and subsequent passages in Leviticus and Deuteronomy that explicitly reference how we are to treat people who are searching for a sense of belonging (“exiles, foreigners, strangers in a far away land”) with compassion and generosity, and then moved on to explore comparable exhortations in some of Paul’s letters to the early Christians and several Gospel passages, most notably Jesus’ clear and explicit teaching in Matthew 25 about the importance of “welcoming the stranger” and taking care of the most vulnerable in society.
During February vacation, we got busy! We sponsored 10 Sweet Bags from the organization “Together We Rise (www.togetherwerise.org) which provides hand decorated duffle bags filled with comfort items and practical supplies to foster care agencies for children who are in the process of moving from home to home, often in the midst of a crisis situation. Luckily, we have some very talented artists in our group and we enjoyed a fun night together decorating and filling the bags, which have now been delivered to an agency in Waltham.
One Sunday in February, during our morning class, the youth used their artistic talents again by making birthday cards for people in WCUC’s Sunday Fellowship community.
Later in the week, the youth packed and delivered donated household goods and personal hygiene products to the Refugee and Immigration Ministry (RIM), an interfaith action agency in Malden, MA. Members and friends of WCUC donated enough items to completely fill one minivan and a second relatively large car. Thank you all for your generosity!
As we embark on 2017, the youth have been exploring themes of renewal, resistance, and refreshment. In class, we used the story of Epiphany to talk about having courage to follow the “light” of God’s love and we wondered together about what gifts we might offer to one another and to our world as we work together for justice and peace.
The story of Jesus’ baptism is also a good reminder of God’s unconditional love and the gift of new beginnings. Using our annual “Sink a Worry, Float a Hope” ritual, the youth were encouraged to drop their burdens into the living water and witness their hopes and dreams rising to the top.
This group of fun young people also know how to play together. We enjoyed a night out at the Altitude Trampoline Park in Billerica. Jumping, flipping, climbing, and falling are all good for the body – and for the mind and soul too!
Last Sunday the Multiagers had a very ACTIVE class, beginning with a dramatic performance of Jesus’ temptation in the desert, adapted from Matthew 4. Directly after Jesus was baptized, the Holy Spirit guided him into the desert where he prayed and fasted for 40 days (the children, frankly, thought this was unbelievable. They could simply not imagine not eating for that long. Neither can I!). At the end of the 40 days, Satan appeared to Jesus and tempted him three times, but each time Jesus refused the temptation. We wondered how hard it would be to refuse bread after not eating for 40 days! We then discussed the word “temptation” and thought about ways that we are tempted (pretty much all versions of video games, ice cream, cake, and candy dominated here). Because God has given us free will, we are allowed to give in to our temptations, but we are also allowed to make different choices, just like Jesus did. We continued our lesson in the Middler classroom (the Middlers were setting up a surprise for us in North Hall!) with a fantastic experiment with dissolving paper. Children wrote their personal temptations on dissolving paper (although they didn’t know it would dissolve) and then wrote a “better choice” on regular paper. We put all the paper in a large bowl, and then the children took turns pouring water into the bowl. Surprise! Their temptations melted away, leaving only the better choices. We then regrouped in North Hall with the Middlers and got introduced to a fabulous Temptation Obstacle Course, which the Middlers had set up for us. Balancing candy bars, jumping through hoops with a DVD between your legs, scooting with a comic book on your head, tossing beanbags at pictures of screens, crawling though money (don’t touch it!), and bowling over pictures of toys rounded out our obstacles. I can confidently say that every child had a ridiculously fun time avoiding all of our temptations. And not one child asked for a bite of the candy bars! Temptation win! – Jessica
If you are anything like me, you have the tiniest problem with perfectionism and control sometimes. Rightly or wrongly, you care about things a lot and you’re more comfortable giving the orders than you are taking them. But deep down you know that perfectionism is exhausting and lonely and, let’s face it, a bit of a problem relationships. It really should only be reserved for things like building spaceships, surgery or cleaning the kitchen (thanks Mom!).
Thankfully, God is an expert at helping us deal with these tendencies. She’s given us wonderfully unpredictable things like children and bodies and PAGEANTS to help us remember that some things are not meant to be controlled. They’re just meant to be received in all their chaotic glory. In fact, it’s usually the things we can’t control or predict that end up meaning the most like God coming in human form or becoming a parent or moments in church like the picture below.
Thank God for this year’s Epiphany Pageant and for all the people who showed up on a New Year’s Day morning to make it possible! May God bless you with unpredictability this year! -Melissa
