Knotting Our Way through a Children's Sermon and Beyond

I had made a variety of plans for God's Work, Our Hands Sunday on September 10, and they all revolved around quilts.  I decided that the easiest approach would be to bring some quilts from the local church near my Lutheridge house, Lutheran Church of the Nativity, and set them up so that people could work on them.  I decided that it might be easiest for me to do the initial part of the knotting, drawing the thread through, and leaving the strands for people to knot.

I was sick with COVID, a mild case but one which needed me to stay away from church on September 10.  For a different God's Work, Our Hands project, the children made cards, and I was touched when one arrived in my mailbox (after first going across the mountains to Knoxville, and then back across the mountains to my house in Arden).

I had the quilts that needed to be knotted in my car, and when I thought of Sunday's Gospel about workers in the vineyard, I had an idea for how to use them in my children's sermon this past Sunday.  I got to church early, and set the quilts up in the front pew where the children sit for the children's sermon.

When they came up, I told them about knotting quilts and about how Lutheran World Relief collects these quilts and sends them around the world.  I invited them to start knotting, and they did.  I rolled out my version of the parable:  if I offer to pay you $20 to sit here and tie knots through the whole service, and I offered you fair wages to make knots starting at the sermon, and I offer you fair wages to make knots after communion, and you show up right at the end of the service and tie a knot--if I give each one of you $20 for your work, is that fair?

They all agreed it wouldn't be fair, and then we talked about how God is generous, not fair.  I invited them to stay and keep tying knots through the service, although I wouldn't be paying them.   And to my surprise, several of them did, and they got both quilts knotted.

What was even more wonderful was that one of our visitors had been to a hospital in Israel where he saw Lutheran World Relief quilts on the beds, quilts like the ones we had been knotting.  He stood up to tell us this during the announcement time that comes at the end of the service before the last hymn, after I had thanked the children for finishing the quilts.

In some ways, stretching God's Work, Our Hands across the month worked well.  Faith Lutheran does a great job of having various service projects, so it wasn't something alien to them.  I was glad to see that the children really got into a rhythm doing the knots.  And sitting in the front, knotting and listening, may have been better than what usually happens, with the children returning to their seats in the back, fussing and fidgeting.