For Advent, my goal was to find a new way to reach my story with the familiar messages from the Christmas Story. I feel it’s important to keep engaging youngsters by making familiar lessons fresh.

My Internet browsing brought me to a set of five Advent vignettes written by Steve Case. In them, a real or imaginary character from the Christmas story is communicating via email. What a great way to engage youngsters in a format they are familiar with.

I want to briefly touch upon the first two of these vignettes. Though they are meant to be used during candle lighting services, I’m using them as Sunday school lessons after our Church body has already lit the weekly Advent candle and the children are dismissed to go upstairs.

The first vignette, is an email from Mary to her cousin Elizabeth. It shares the conflicting emotions Mary must have felt after the angel’s announcement that she would bring the Messiah into the world. And while some might feel it’s a bit odd to hear Mary calling her older cousin, Elizabeth, Lizzie (which got a chuckle from some of my students), they could experience the excitement along with Mary and tried to understand some of her fears regarding the future.

In the second vignette, we find an email from King Herod to his army commander, Cornelius Baruri. This imagined email between Herod and the fictional commander, allows young people to get inside Herod’s head and see how he might have felt and acted after the Wise Men visited him. This is ingenious. While we often discuss what Mary might have been going through, never before have I or my students dug into the Christmas Story from Herod’s POV. And as I read it through with my students, I was able to make more modern connections that they were familiar with.

Herod’s fear of a new king not from his line moved into a tiny conversation about the Pilgrims and America’s independence and succession to the throne in Britain. As we read through Herod’s decision to jail and then murder the preachers who were convincing the people that a Savior would be born, in addition to the great lengths he was willing to go in order to prevent the people from rising up against the current laws–claiming the people have never had it so good–one girl’s mind went immediately to the Peacekeepers from the Capitol who keep the people from all the districts in line from The Hunger Games books.

Perhaps this sounds unrelated to Sunday school, but part of what Christian parents and Sunday school teachers do is help children learn to see the world through a Christian worldview. I’m actually reading a book right now on the topic of how we can apply our faith to every area of our life.

I hope you’ll consider sharing your thoughts on this topic. I’ll be back on Friday to share more of these vignettes.