Lesson 9: The Feast of Unleavened Bread

For our lesson on the Passover, we brought food. Food is a good idea. We should bring food more often. It keeps their bloodsugar normalized, keeps their mouths full, and gives them something to do with their hands. Also, these kids at least have good table manners, so they didn't pick off each other's plates or anything. In fact, they passed everything from one to the next very nicely. That was nice to see.

We brought: lamb, charoset (appley-raisin stuff), horseradish, matzoh, parsley, grape juice, and salt water. We took them through the whole Passover Seder, even having them ask the questions from the haggadah. It was a lot of fun, and they were absolutely amazed when we took them to the New Testament and read the account of Jesus' Last Supper. "Jesus had a Passover Seder?" one of them asked, surprised. It didn't take much for them to see the connection with Communion, either.
I found their curiosity about Communion fascinating. In our church, no one takes Communion until he or she is baptized, usually no younger than twelve years old. They all felt that this was unfair--why did the adults get a mid-service snack?--but, once they sampled the matzoh, they decided they weren't missing much. We told them, also, that at the Passover Seder, people drink wine rather than grape juice, but we didn't want to get in trouble with their parents. Joshua asked, "At Communion, is it wine or grape juice?" That was an intelligent question, and we told him that, in our church, it's grape juice, but at other churches, they use wine. There was even a Lutheran church I visited with a friend where they had red wine and white grape juice, and you could choose which to drink. The kids had a lot of questions about Communion, which I hadn't anticipated. They are eager to become part of the Body, though, as David says, "We can't get baptized yet, because we don't really understand it." I get the feeling that he's quoting a parent.