When you DO need to "sanitise" the Bible.

Normally, I'm against taking the tough stuff out of the Bible when you tell stories to kids.  I will happily talk to the children about the fact that Jesus was crucified, that he did actually die, and it was hard, because if you tell only the happy stuff there's no dramatic tension.  I will happily talk to the children about the second half of Jonah, when Jonah acts like a complete selfish brat outside Ninevah and has to have a talking-to from God.  I will include the fact that Pharaoh ordered that every male child born to the Hebrews be thrown into the river, when I'm telling the story of Moses.  The suffering of God's people is part of the story, and without that part, all we have is a namby-pamby "God loves you and everything is always happy and wonderful," which kids know is a lie.

There are, however, some edits I will make.  And it's often a difficult tightrope, and I don't think I always get it right.  But I try to ask the questions: is this part crucial to the purpose of the story?  If so, I include it.  If it is, but it's still difficult (e.g. Potiphar's wife is crucial to the Joseph story, the rape of Tamar is crucial to the story of David and Absalom), then I will gloss over the age-inappropriate details.

For example, when telling the story of Joseph, I will say, "Potiphar's wife told lies about Joseph, and he was thrown in jail."  This accomplishes the same purpose as the original narrative - she was treacherous, and jealous, and had him thrown unjustly in prison, as is crucial to the story - without finding myself in the awkward position of explaining to children what "filing a false report of rape" means.

And for David and Absalom, I will tell the children that "after Amnon hurt Tamar, Absalom became angry, and he killed Amnon."  This still gets you to the narrative place you need to me - Absalom was in the right, Amnon in the wrong, but his response was possibly excessive, and, either way, the death of a son grieved David, leading to Absalom's exile and growing resentment.

In the story of Noah, I use the Beulah Land script, which includes the line "Noah and his family and all the animals" - the "two of each kind" in the original can be considered synecdoche, in which a part of something stands in for the whole.  The style is clearly that of a folktale.  If a child asks "what happened to all the other people who weren't in the ark?" I will say, "what do you think happened?" and they'll generally come up with an answer that's satisfactory to them.  But it doesn't usually come up.  The people who weren't on the ark stand in for "evil" - not "evil people," but "evil in the world" in the story, and children are usually fine with that.  I do avoid dwelling on the sufferings of the drowned - that's not the point of the story, the Biblical writer doesn't even mention them, and it takes away from the purpose of the narrative, which is one of salvation and covenant, not punishment.  Children may decide that God had another way of saving all the other people who were good, or they may decide that all those people were bad and it's okay for them to die, just like it's okay for the witch in Hansel and Gretel to be shoved into the oven.  The Noah story is full of archetypes and folktale elements; it's not a modern realistic novel, and shouldn't be read as such.

So don't shy away from a story just because there are elements that are difficult - the Bible is full of sex and violence, and there are ways of telling these stories that keep the dramatic tension of the story to children without leading to questions like "Daddy, what's incest?" after the Sunday service!

The sacrifice of Isaac.

We're doing the story of the sacrifice of Isaac in Sunday School this week.  It raises the difficult question many Sunday School leaders struggle with - which scary parts of the Bible to present to children, and which to hide.  I have the impulse to present only the stories that are easy to understand, only the ones that present God as loving and kind, the ones in which no anti-Semitism could be implied, the ones which have not been seized upon by the Religious Right as their property and theirs alone.  And I know that I can't give in to that impulse.

Because to take out the scary stuff and the hard stuff means that we're left with a story that has no power, but rather a pre-digested piece of feel-good mush, which our kids will rightly reject.  I know this, theoretically, and am comfortable with it around the stories of the crucifixion, the prophesies of the Coming Kingdom, and the story of the Exodus.  But with some of the lesser-known stories, I debate whether to include them at all, and if so, which details to include (is it enough that Esther saves her people, or should Haman be hung on the gallows he built for Mordecai?  Usually I go with the latter, but I always look at the most sensitive child in my group and wonder if I'm doing the right thing).

We have a window in our church of the sacrifice of Isaac.  For Christians, it prefigures the passion of Christ - God spared Abraham's son but did not flinch from offering his own.  It has a potent place in our cultural imagination, and to leave it out would deprive children of a crucial part of the story of the patriarchs.

But it's fraught with difficulties.  How far do you go?  Do you give five-year-old children the image of a parent standing over a beloved child, wielding a knife?  Will they process it in the safe, healthy way they process gruesome images from fairy tales (wolf swallows granny) or in the possibly terrifying way they process news stories that scare them?  Which details am I editing out for the sake of the children, and which am I editing out in my squeamishness?  Am I scared of offending parents if I don't sanitise all the scary bits out of the Bible, and do I give into that desire to the detriment of the kids?

I don't have the answers.  My general rule of thumb is to ask, "what does this story contribute to the story of salvation, the overall arc of the Bible?" and then use that to decide a) whether to include it in our curriculum this year, and b) which parts of it are most important.  But I'd be interested to hear from others how you handle this issue.