Tuesday, July 5, 2011

OF PICTURE BOOKS AND STAINED GLASS WINDOWS

My six year old son was looking through a book the other day entitled 100 Bible stories. It’s a book put out by Concordia Publishing House that in short form tells 100 of the most important Bible stories from both the Old and New Testaments. It usually has the story on one page and then on the next page is a picture of what is going on in the story. My son can’t read yet but he seems to understand the stories by simply looking at the picture, so kudos to CPH for the great artwork. The other day he came up to me and showed me the story of the fall in the Garden of Eden. He said to me, “God is mad.” I asked him how he knew. He said because Adam and Eve had sinned. He had gotten the whole story from the simple picture. He then proceeded to show me other pictures and tell me the stories that went along with them. I have to say I was pretty amazed. I guess I shouldn’t be that amazed though, telling stories by pictures is part of church history that gets largely ignored today. All you have to do is look at some stained glass windows to see it. Or I guess I should say you have to look at some old stained glass windows to see it. Most stained glass windows today are just some coloring and maybe some flowers or butterflies mixed in. They basically serve the purpose of changing the lighting in the church and making some feel like they are, well, in church. Old stained glass on the other hand told stories. They contained pictures of the Biblical stories that were very vivid. There was a reason for this most of people hundreds of years ago couldn’t read. They received the Word of God two ways, one through hearing it read and preached to them and two through the stained glass windows that they looked at during the church service. In those ancient stained glass windows they saw both the law of God and most importantly the Gospel of God. They saw their salvation in pictures every time they were in the church. It seems that people in the church never got tired of that, stained glass was a constant thing in just about every church that was built for hundreds of years. People were comforted looking at those pictures Sunday after Sunday. I don’t know for certain what lead to stain glass’s demise or the change of it into just different colors with worthless symbols in it, but I would venture to say it had to do with more and more people learning to read. It wasn’t needed as much anymore. Thankfully we still have picture books for kids.
Picture books for non-readers serve the same purpose. My son can’t read so he gets the Word of God one of two ways. He hears it read to him either in church or at home and he has books with pictures which he carries around with him. Like the people with their stained glass he never gets tired of it. One of the stories my son always goes to in his book is the death of Jesus on the cross. The cross is very important to him. He asks me all the time why Jesus died on the cross. I tell him a few different things. Number one I tell him because we are sinners Jesus had to die to pay for our sins. He struggles with that a little, so sometimes I just tell him because Jesus loves him, but still he continues to ask me. Like most people, I don’t like being asked the same question over and over again, so at first it bothered me that he asked me the cross question so much but then I began to slowly realize he likes hearing that Jesus loves him. He takes comfort in that fact that Jesus went to the cross for him. He likes looking at the picture, he likes hearing me tell him the same story of God’s love over and over again. Really he is like all of us. We like hearing that same story over and over again. It is why we read our Bibles; it is why we come to church. We need to hear that we are sinners in need of forgiveness, but more than that we need to hear that we are forgiven and loved by God. We need to hear that story of the cross and of the resurrection over and over again. It just never gets old. It never gets old because it is so important to us as people who one day are going to die and see our God. We like the story, because it’s a good story and it has a happy ending. Thank God for old stained glass and picture books.

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