Click HERE for youtube video. It's 6:00 minutes.
1. On a sheet of newsprint write responses to the following questions:
a. One phrase I often use with children on the streets is, “this is not a life.”
What are the reasons this life on the streets is not a life.
b. What are these kids missing in life?
2. Have someone read Genesis 1: 1-27.
What does the text suggest about the character of God? What is God doing, saying, intending? Contrast life in verse 2 with life in verse 27.
3. Contrasting the Genesis story with the story of life on the streets.
Notice, for example, the darkness in many of the images of street life compared to the creation of light in Genesis. Notice, also, the image of life as “teeming” in the land, sea and sky compared with the images of children doing nothing on the streets. Make a list of the contrasts.
If humanity is made in the image of God, what does this text suggest about the intended character of humankind. What are we called to do?
What are the ways God may be calling your church to bring life and light to places of darkness, places where “it’s not a life.” Use your imagination and creativity! Remember you were made in the image of God!
List these ideas also on newsprint.
4. (At the end of this lesson read aloud to the class)
Read Genesis one, and you feel the movement toward life. In the void, God states, let there be. Let there be… and it is so… day by day all things are created. And the refrain, “It is good.” Or as Johanna Bos who teaches Old Testament at Louisville Theological Seminary, suggests … “It is Beautiful!” Imagine God moving in the darkness; in the void; spinning out light, crossing the face of the deep, giving, making, creating life, the sea teeming, swarming with creatures, insects creeping, birds flying, animals running, stampeding, plants yielding seeds of every kind, shooting up out of the earth. LIFE! “We carry in ourselves,” Johanna Bos says, “this special responsibility, to be God’s image and likeness, male and female, to make God present on earth.”
Creation is what we do… It is what we are designed to do… It is our calling to bring life to where there’s no life at all. It’s what we do on the streets of Odessa, Ukraine, as we move in that void, beneath streets and apartment buildings. We bring light into that darkness.
It doesn’t have to be in Ukraine. It is what you do , shining in the image of God. It is what you do with a kid in a classroom in high school or Sunday school, for friends, with all those you care about, whenever something is dying… faith… hope… love. You bring light into that darkness; you bring life to where there’s no life at all. It is what a church does in every way that a church gives life to the community in which it lives. And when that happens, it is good. It is beautiful.
