This past weekend I attended a really good production of Hairspray at the dinner theatre Circa '21 here in Rock Island, and left the show most impressed not with the portrayal of the lead character, Tracy Turnblad, but with the performance of the actor playing the non-major character Penny Pingleton. She stole the show every time she walked on the stage. This, combined with thinking on Ali's last post, produced a reflection surrounding this past weekend's reading: that Sunday School stories often confused "spectacular" with "more important" and overlooked unspectacular stories that are to be found in the very same texts as their more spectacular counterparts. The take home message, intentionally or unintentionally, was that God always works in spectacular ways, and that if we are true followers, our lives ought to be spectacular too.
Take for instance the story of Elijah's confrontation with the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel. Remember that story from Sunday School? Yet just ahead of that story, in the first 15 verses of 1 Kings 18, we meet Obadiah, whose faithfulness to God did not at all resemble Elijah's and whose story I do not recall hearing in Sunday School. His faithfulness did not involve a spectacular public showdown with evil, but rather quiet civil disobedience, and is given to us in the narrative in a parenthetical comment: "(Now Obadiah feared the LORD greatly. For it was so, when Jezebel cut off the prophets of the LORD, that Obadiah took an hundred prophets, and hid them by fifty in a cave, and fed them with bread and water.)"
Or hearken back to that most difficult book of Judges. Chapter 3 tells the exciting story of Ehud the Benjamite judge who defeated the evil King Eglon of Moab. It reads like a James Bond synopsis. But the very last verse of chapter 3 is dedicated to the judge who succeeded Ehud, just one verse: "And after him was Shamgar the son of Anath, which slew of the Philistines six hundred men with an ox goad: and he also delivered Israel." Our imaginations are left to fill in mostly blanks about Shamgar. Did he work as a cattle herder and pick the Philistines off one unsuspecting victim at a time, unspectacularly, secretly? Seems plausible to me, and in its own way amazing, but easily overlooked. There are many other such contrasts both in scripture and in history it seems to me. I feel this tension in different aspects of my own vocation.
One must acknowledge that in the scriptural narrative, as in all complex narratives, a sense of importance is rightly given to major characters by how much we are told about them. Fair and good. One could say that in the grand arc of scripture, Elijah plays a more prominent role than does Obadiah. But Obadiah was not less faithful or pleasing to God. And in the final analysis neither they nor any others are going to care two bits about whether they were minor or major characters in God's story. This is an important context for Sunday School teachers in their relaying of Biblical stories and selecting curriculum. 1. It's God's story they are telling, the story of God in the world, and 2. Their students may be "major" or "minor" characters in God's story, but that is not half as important as whether they are found faithful.
Amen! I'm completely with you on this. I wonder if the impulse toward focusing on the flashy, dramatic stories has to do with the belief that this is necessary to keep kids' attention. We might be buying into the idea that the stories we tell them in Sunday School need to compete with the fairy tales the super heroes. And certainly, as you point out, the Bible has those dramatic stories in abundance. But then there are the quieter stories that are more important than perhaps they get credit for. And what's more, I think they help us have a more rounded out perspective on the Christian life. I might be an underachiever, but I have never had a show down with false prophets. I like the full picture of how God acts in both cases and gives his people both kinds of work. And both are important. Thanks, friend.
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