Things My Sunday School Teachers Got Wrong

Kids are impressionable. Someday I would like to write a book about all the wrong impressions I got in Sunday School. The funniest one isn't my wrong impression, but I do remember the class where the teacher said it. It was the five-year-old classroom at the end of the first-floor hallway. The teacher wanted to make Jesus "more real" for us kids so she described his clothes and what he must have looked like. She told us that he probably had brown eyes and an olive complexion, like most kids who were from Nazareth.

Fast Forward seven years and I am in a seventh-grade English class assigned to write about a funny misunderstanding. I don't know what I wrote; it was probably pretty dull. But one of the other boys in the class wrote about what happened when he got home from church that day years ago. He told his mom that the teacher said Jesus was a Martian. He was quite insistent about it. (Do you know where this is going yet?) His mom called the teacher and asked what was going on. They could not figure it out at first. Finally the mom asked her son why he thought the teacher said that Jesus was a Martian. To which Mike replied, "She did, mom. She told us he had green skin." His mom called the teacher back with this new information and they finally figured out that 'olive complexion' got rewired into 'green skin.' Apparently his family had many chuckles over that.

My stories are not as humorous. My book, if it ever gets written, will be mostly about immature interpretations; a fistful of examples of where scripture was "dumbed down" for kids, with results that slid woefully off-course; and a few things that were outright lies.

At least one chapter will be based on Matthew 24:12 – Because lawlessness is increased, the love of many will grow cold.

My Sunday school teachers never passed up a chance to practice behavior modification by an appeal to conscience. According to them, this verse meant that being naughty causes you to lose your love for Jesus. That may be, but it is not the context of this verse. This verse actually merges the verboten mixing of religion and politics. It is speaking of the lawlessness of people who hold authority over others. When anyone in authority, from the beat cop to the President, acts in a lawless manner, most people start wondering, 'If God is so all-fired good, the why does He let them get away with it?" (And if I ever write my book, I'll answer that, but in the meantime I'll stick with the effect of the lawlessness.) The love of most people will grow cold as a result of the unchecked lawlessness they see around them daily.

My Sunday school teachers taught it the opposite way around. Granted, there's a vicious circle of cause and effect that hardens people once the spiral has begun; but this verse justly puts the blame on the lawlessness of corrupt authority. The next verse implies that their victims end up in hell; only those who stand firm to the end will be saved.

So, given crooked leadership, what is your responsibility?