first Godly play story: the great banquet

When The Boy realized I was gathering supplies to tell a story, he kept asking, "Can we tell the story now? Can we tell the story now?" I did not know he would be so fascinated.

The Girl was mostly silly. She listened, she responded, but she was also silly and irreverent. That's OK. She's a girl who craves silliness and drama. I want her to know that God/dess laughs. But I may need to set more clear expectations next time..."this is a sacred space, and for a moment we will be still and quiet"...something like that.

I told the parable of the Great Banquet even though in the Godly Play curriculum, it is not a Lenten story. It was the story, though, that the kids had heard in Sunday School this week.

Now I have a question for all of you:
The kids' Sunday School curriculum referred to the Matthew version of this story, and because The Girl's class actually read the story from the Bible (and not just the curriculum), she heard the part where a guest without wedding clothes (who I guess tried to sneak in) gets bound and tossed "into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth" (v. 13), and Matthew concludes with "for many are invited, but few are chosen." Luke mercifully leaves out this whole section of the story, and I think I'm with Luke...I'd edit it out. But Matthew seems to like weeping and gnashing of teeth, and that's the version My Girl heard. And of course, that's the part she focuses on. Now here's my question...How do you explain this to a 7-year-old?

But back to Godly play: I used the script from Young Children and Worship (no weeping and gnashing of teeth), and stuck to it pretty faithfully though not exactly. I made a banquet table out of cardboard, used patterns from the book for food and the host, and then just used various people figures we had around the house for the guests. Our Great Banquet was quite diverse! It even included a horse, at The Boy's insistence. Here's a (bad) picture:

You can see that our Great Banquet isn't very pretty. It's not lovely like a wooden set would be, but the story was still shared. And after I shared the story, each kid told the story him/herself. It was sweet to see how they each did it differently, but still appropriately. In a full Godly Play session, the story should be followed by a creative expression time which allows the children to respond to the story (by drawing, or painting, or playing with figures...lots of different options), but we didn't do this at home. Maybe if this becomes a more regular practice, we'll work our way up to that.

In the meantime, I'm happy our our initial foray into Lent and Godly Play. And just for fun, here's a picture of from our Lent table right now:

The Boy picked up a rock on our walk the other day and added it to our wilderness. He also laid all the people down because they're "camping." Poor Jesus...looks like The Girl is sleeping on his head!