For my children’s theatre class, we read a play this weekend that brought up some thoughts I wanted to put out there.

The play was two parallel stories about runaway slaves in 1839 and Jews escaping Nazi Germany in 1939. In my class, we raised questions about some of the morality that was justified and the presence of “religion” and prayer in the play.  In the end it was basically boiled down to a good starting point for talking to children about slavery and the Holocaust and a message of hope.

Here are some of the questions that were brought to my mind.

• Does persecution justify sin, ever? Do two wrong ever make a right?
  In the play the children talk about the boat the slave children stole and the fact that the Jew are going to lie about their names to escape. And my thought is this: If a Christian trusts God even in the hard things, that means that we should tell the truth. Even if it means our lives. I am by no means saying that I am better or holier then the Christians who hid Jews from Nazis in WWII, but it’s a thought, isn’t it? I mean, just because someone else does something wrong, like killing people simply because of their background or faith, or enslaving them because of the color of their skin, does that justify our lies? God did tell us not to lie. How does this work?
• The people in my class said the play was “a message of hope” and my question is, how do you define “hope.” (I fully blame and thank Pastor James for this train of thought.) I looked up “hope” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary and this is what it said:

  1:to cherish a desire with anticipation
  2:trust, to desire with expectation of obtainment, to expect with confidence:trust
  Synonyms: Expect

  At the end of the play, we don’t know if the Jews escaped. We desire that they did, but can we really say that we desire it “with an expectation of obtainment” or is it merely wishful thinking? I looked up hope on urbandictionary.com and most of the answers had something to do with believing in a better future. Now, to be honest, for a non-christian, life here on earth is as good as it’s ever gonna get, so the belief that it’s gonna get better is ungrounded and unfounded. But for a Christian, we do have a confident expectation that things will get better, and that hope is grounded and founded in the Truth of Christ and his love.

These are just a couple of thoughts before I do some homework, and aren’t fully formed, but here they are. If anyone has anything to add or contradict, please please do.