Ashes to Ashes, Mush to Mush

(This homily is interactive with the congregation of adults and children and teens.  Some of these questions did receive answers! )

Yesterday the President offered the speech known as the State of the Union.  I am sure that its scheduling was an accident; I don’t expect that anyone consulted the church calendar.   Yet, Lent is certainly about the state of our union.  Not the nation, instead our union with God and his people.  What does union mean?  It comes from the same root as the Spanish word for one: uno.  It is the idea of one, but it is a verb-like active one-ness, it is becoming one even though we are also hundreds and hundreds. What are we doing to form a more perfect community of Christian disciples?  What are we doing to love our neighbors, all our neighbors, as much as God loves all of us? The work of the church is to strive for union with God and one another in Christ.  In baptism we are brought into this work…we to commit to being one with Jesus, one with his mission of setting us free from our love of things that do no good at all.

(A young friend is building up a tower of cardboard bricks, and I continue to knock them down…and she starts over again.)

These bricks could be all the things we do and ideas we have and ways we feel that make us one with Christ and one with each other.  However, they keep falling down.  What if these bricks are not our foundation, but instead are the things we put between us and our union with God and his mission for us?  For example: the joy I feel every time I knock these bricks down.  Anyone else think that looked fun?  Anyone else want to do it?  

She is working so hard…and I keep tearing it down.  It is a little bit of being mean,  a little bit of using my power for my own jollies, a little bit of destructiveness.  I am putting my own selfish silly joy ahead of everything else, and that is sin. Maybe this one (holding a brick) is the fact that I can be mean to people in my life, being mean about them.  For the ways I tear them down in my mind, notice all their wrongs without looking at my own.  Maybe these bricks are greed. Maybe these bricks are achieving rather than loving. Maybe they are obsessing rather than caring. Maybe they are a calendar so full that God and Sabbath take a back seat. What are your bricks…what builds up walls that keep you from being one with your neighbors and one with God?

I need the children with paper and pencils to get up and share them.  I also need the teens with pitchers of water to bring them up and pour them in this bowl.  Take a moment and write or draw on these sheets of paper whatever is on your bricks.  What keeps you from union with God and union with his people in Christ? Maybe you can use a brick for a surface to write on.  When you are ready come and place them in this water.  Watch what happens. 

(The paper is dissolving paper…they all turn to mush.)

All of these sins, all of this stuff that wrecks the state of our union with God is ultimately nothing…mush.  They are no good for anything now…except going back to God.  Ashes to ashes, mush to mush.  You see…for even when we resist….ultimately we will have union with God.  So why waste the time we have been given, why waste the life that is lived between dust and dust?  God made us and loves us and calls us to union with him and with his people.  The Holy Trinity works with us when we strive for his way. Give yourself to a holy Lent.  Seek to turn bricks that keep us apart into bricks that make union with Christ and his people.

Jane Alice Gober
Family Ash Wednesday Service, 2013

Cathedral of St. John, ABQ

Lenten Pin A Day

Lent is approaching.  Late, almost as late as possible, but even though the buds are sprouting from the limbs of the tree out my window...Lent is due to begin.  The church invites you to a Holy Lent.

What makes a holy Lent for you?  What reconsideration, what devotion, what prayer, what project?  Furthermore, how do you invite the young people in your life into this formational practice?  The interwebs are full of interesting ideas and directions and patterns.  There are a multitude of devotionals, free and for a fee...some are available here.

So this is my Lenten project, LENTEN PIN A DAY and I am inviting you to join in the journey with me.  To your left is a list of words, some from hymns, some from prayers, some from the Five Marks of Mission.  What if each day you did something with this word?

• Respond in poetry or musical composition or Legos or clay or crayon.  
• Perhaps you like surfing the web and you discover an online image to go with the word.  
• Bookish?  Then what about a quote with the word. 
• School age children can be challenged to look up definitions of words..and then to do something with the new knowledge.  
• Or maybe, just maybe, you can use this word to craft an action statement for yourself and your community.  

The response possibilities are endless. The goal is to lead you into a more creative, imaginative and impactful Lenten devotion.  One that draws you closer to union with God in Christ and closer to his mission for his people.

If you want to join in, save the list.  Save it as your device wall paper.  Print it out and put it in your wallet.  Or constantly visit this blogpage.  :)

I invite you to find some way to gather these on a wall at home, online or within a journal.  If your children join the journey then be sure to save and share their responses.  Save them on your device and post regularly, or share your pin a day journey as one complete series on Holy Saturday (April 19).  If you do pin or tumble or tweet or instagram...let us try the marker of : #lentenpinaday .  I will if you will.

My responses will go on my pinterest page.  

Let us find for ourselves a holy Lent.

For Good

‘For edification but not doctrine’ is an interesting phrase.  It is precisely the historical and official phrase for how we approach the Apocrypha.  If you pick up the best-selling Bible in the world, you will not find today’s Old Testament lesson.  Sirach’s wisdom is a collection of proverbs that can move us deeply, it can inspire insight, however it isn’t supposed to set rules for Christian living.  It is an interesting standard to apply to a specific segment of scriptures.  Yet apocryphal texts are important because they give us an important picture of the anxieties and interpretations of late ancient near east Jewish society.

These apocryphal texts are from a time when the Diaspora, the people of Israel being spread out across West Asia and the Mediterranean sea, a time when this had become the norm.  It is a time when the texts we know as the Hebrew bible are in collections of scrolls which had evolved into fairly normative shapes and authority: but the it wasn’t a firm set yet.  In some ways the experience of Diaspora motivates this process of deciding what stories form the people, of choosing which stories to tell one's children.  In our texts as they have been handed down to us, in the Biblical story, we know of a world that was began in glory and love, and made to be wholly good and blessed.  Yet in that time and place, in the empire of Alexander the Great and beyond the reign of Caesar Augustus, a beloved and good creation was a very different concept of how the beginning began.

Back then the eastern Mediterranean was a fervent soup of religions and philosophies.  Most of which taught that the creation is at root, rotten, vile and evil.  It is the scrapping of the bottom of the compost bin; that then has been chewed and spit out.  For most of these schemes goodness is the apparition, good is in a battle with evil that it is not assured to win.  In parts of Sirach we find a worldly Jewish sage wrestling with the differences between the story that was taught to him and the story he taught to his children.  He is hearing all these other stories, and wondering, wondering aloud if the world is good, and created good, where and when and why and how does evil begin.  Before us today from Sirach we have a concise summary of the teaching of the Hebrew bible regarding the problem of good and wickedness.  God set the boundaries and they are good.  Created humanity with freedom and creativity, the ability to know how to choose to live for the common good.  We know the boundaries, but we run outside of them, and this is exactly the root of evil.  The rip of darkness and decay is our misuse of good gifts.

But still….our translation hides some of Sirach’s pondering.  Choice isn't quite the right word.   A word like inclination is closer.  We can choose to follow an inclination.  But the leaning, the desire is there.  What is that? "Are people born Wicked? Or do they have Wickedness thrust upon them?" This is the musing of Glinda ‘the good witch’ in the opening scene of the musical Wicked,  which is generously based on a novel of the same name.  And Wicked is an alternate version and a prequel of sorts to the Oz we are offered in the famous movies.  A story where the so called ‘wicked witch of the west’ is a pastors kid of shirked nobility. A woman raised in the shadow of family dysfunction and a time of imperial destruction.  This girl, Elphaba, was born green.  Cabbage like, a case of verdigris.  The book is a dense tale of philosophy and theology and politics and sociology, which I love.  But it isn't for everybody.  The musical takes a lighter tone, focusing on the years when Elphaba and the pampered and popular Glinda were boarding school roommates.

The four stories, the original books, the movies, the new book and the musical do not mesh perfectly, and some are fans of one and not the other story. For me however, the two newer stories mingle powerfully.  (I actually have little interest in the original stories and movies where the Witch is not a misunderstood heroine.)  In the book Elphie is a fierce intellectual, an experimental scientist trying to explore the origins of good and evil.  As much as I am attached to this version of her story, I can also see that this Elphaba, she is stuck in childish thinking and living.  She, like our Corinthian friends gets lost in quarreling and divisiveness.  Cloaked in self-righteousness it is her brilliant childishness that labels her as wicked.  She never learns how to use her gifts and passions for the common good.  The question goes beyond where does evil begin, but was she even wicked at all?

There has been quite the hub-ub over the last few weeks.  Let’s call it a continuing of the attempt to reenact Inherit the Wind.   If you don’t know what I am referring to let me offer the word, Creation museum (look it up if you don't know).  We live in a diverse soup of stories and philosophies and theories about who we are and how we began.   Some of the quarrelsome factions are well intentioned,  worried that there can be no explanation for a good God, for sin, for evil or for morality without one version of our story.  Yet the whole of Corinthians tells us that Christians are called to carefully listen, to not be childish, to hear and discern.  To consider the ‘other’ stories that come into our lives.  Corinth wasn’t that big a town and it had at least 12 different temples for different religions telling different stories about who we are and where we began. 

In our day and age we have our own multiple ‘temples’, and contemporary science tells stories, desires to know where we came from, and it offers theories for questions,  that the ancients never thought to ask.  What sort of a special moment would it have been for a sage to have uttered the words, ‘You see these birds here.  Well… ages ago in the cretaceous era great beasts called brontosaurus’ roamed the earth for millions of years, and then God chose to do something new and now we know them as birds.”  Please.  I presume that such an utterance would be considered less than inspired and generally ignored.  Mental gymnastics to try and duct tape material evidence to some of scripture,   this is contrary to the practice of the church  from its earliest roots. 

The sacred texts show that we have journeyed in our discernment and understanding.  We have been enlightened by the ‘other’ stories of our neighbors who have always been present.  Neighbors and new insights bring lessons we must learn, and we are led to those which help us the most to grow. To grow in knowledge of God, his creation and our responsibility to each other.  Yet rather than celebrate the brilliance of the human mind, some very loud cousins in faith demean the virtues of creativity and imagination, such gifts are slandered as wicked.  And since I am pretty much calling them names, it seems that the contentious, carping and fractious Corinthian church seems to be alive and well in me, and I need to pray on that.  

However this  hub-ub over the last few weeks, and decades,  it frustrates me deeply.  I cannot tell you how many people I have met over the years who say something like: “I was raised in the church, but now I am a scientist so, well, you know.”   Yes and well no.   In my heart of hearts I actually I don't know.  I am truly flabbergasted and I mourn for how we have failed to proclaim good news in this confluence of story.  We are people of both/and,  I stand in the reformation tradition that stuck with Apocryphal texts for ‘edification but not doctrine’ when the continent chose to set them aside. 

Maybe we need to live out loud a little more, because keeping our heads down doesn’t seem to be helping.  Maybe we need to live out loud with the truth that living with diverse stories is ancient and orthodox and not requiring of the suspension of reality.  It is orthodox because the Church has a long tradition of letting a variety of truthful stories mingle, blend and dwell together.  Three Easter stories frequently told as one, two differing offerings on the birth of Christ and two mingled versions of the Great Flood.  We tell these as one story, despite the contradictions, we tell them as one all the time and it is for good.  

The number one problem with Christians trying to deny the possibility of the theory of evolution is that our core experience is Easter.  Our core experience is resurrection.  Every moment of our life as church should proclaim that God makes life out of death and darkness and even makes good out of evil.   God makes possible out of impossible.  God is a God of creativity and re-creativity and recycling (which speaking of green things and recycling, what can this church do to help the situation in Walla Walla?).   And evolution is precisely new life rising out of death, letting old forms that no longer serve, letting them rest and putting the material to new use.

Let us be Easter people who can listen to neighbors and strangers and science and even cousins in faith with whom we disagree. We are about evolution, defying gravity, telling stories, hearing stories, and making friends with those we disagree with.  Lets rise and live, lets live multiple stories a little louder, and let us always embrace that God is always doing something new.  And it is, for good.

Jane Alice Gober St. Paul’s Episcopal Church Walla Walla, Washington Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

Year A, RCL

Deuteronomy 30:15-20
or Ecclesiasticus 15:15-20
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
Matthew 5:21-37
Psalm 119:1-8

Everywhere that Sound Goes

There is a moment when you decide to ring a bell. (Many children and young people have been given bells and choose to ring them.) A moment when you reach for the bell, you move your wrist and let it ring.  There is a moment when you move from imagining a sound to making a sound.  When you ring a bell the air changes, things unseen change shape.   Ears cannot help but turn.  

Before there is motion there is imagination.  That is the moment when the ring begins to take shape.  Tradition tells us that there is not a moment when Christ was not with God.  From before the beginning began, the Logos, God's holy Wisdom has always been One with God.  To paraphrase the ancient theologian, there is NO when the Christ was not.  

Yet there might have been a moment, when God’s imagination ran wild, when God had a new idea.  An idea so extra-ordinary that maybe, it surprised God.  It could have been a jolt or maybe it was a rising hum.  Did continents split or solar flares erupt?  Maybe this moment was in the second second after the big bang, or maybe it was eons later, much closer to now than then.  What is it like for God to feel such a new idea?

CS Lewis offers that God is nothing but love and he had to create the universe, create us, so that as love he could be love in action.  The idea of becoming one with the creation he loves,  must have felt explosive.  Like a loud clanging cymbal.  I wonder if even God was amazed by the boldness of his love.   Did he utter a nervous chuckle?  Was he both tickled and scared at the same time?  Whenever it was, the  chuckle, the clang,  the notion of Christ being born on earth, that was the moment our beginning began.  

When you hear the word childhood, do you imagine a multitude of things cute and cuddly and precious?  Then you were clearly not born and raised in the same era and region as Jesus.  The ancient world into which Jesus was born was not one with Sesame Street or child protective services.  When Jesus was born the children didn’t have much social value, like the toys we used to form our Nativity scene today. (Children and congregants were invited to bring toys and figurines to make a Nativity during the Gospel.) Being born was dangerous, infancy and toddlerhood were tenuous, with only one out of two surviving to age 5.  Children were regarded more like these toys.  At best, something you have invested in, something you have affection for, but something that you know can be easily lost.  Yet it is into this cultural reality That God was born.

God became a tender sleeping infant and a goofy toddler in this nowhere’s ville place; he was given the most common name in the neighborhood: and yet THIS changes everything.  If God is born of a woman, if God can be the child of Mary (which is also an incredibly ordinary name), then any child, born anywhere, could be the incarnate Lord.  Just as how Jesus' death as an innocent victim changes how we see all scapegoats, so to does Jesus’ vulnerable birth change our perception of the  preciousness of the whole creation.  

This holy night demands that we hear the grown Savior’s words: how you treat the least of these IS how you treat me.  The writings of the early church make a sudden turn from the cultural norms of not valuing children or anything resembling the concept of childhood.  Children became people.  And maybe, just maybe, we are beginning to show that we know what it means to live as God’s children. 

Jesus’s birth, life, death and resurrection should change how we see everything,  ALL material, all moments of despair and lostness.  Jesus’ incarnation calls us to live in a universe that is holy, through and through, everywhere that sound can go.  And a universe that is redeemable, through and through, everywhere that sound goes.  This is the good news: that the least likely and most average material can bear the holy, even you and me. Does it make you feel tickled and scared at the same time?  

So where are you in this Nativity story?  Are you an action figure guarding the door?  Or a learned sage still on your way?  How will you make room for God,  now that he has moved into our neighborhood?  Told us his love story with the most ordinary and undervalued things?  

There is a moment when you move from imagining a sound to making a sound.  (ring ring)

O' Come to us, Abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel.

Amen.

Christmas Eve 2013

RCL A (Christmas 1)

St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Walla Walla, Washington

USA

Unexpected Rescue

His small rental car was stuck in a deep mound of sand and dirt.  Frustrated and alone on what can only generously be called ‘a road’.  Printed maps do not go there.  Cell service was not found there.  It was a sweltering summer day in the high desert of a country not his own.  I wonder sometimes, what he thought when the dark SUV pulled up beside him.

From today’s prophetic lesson we hear that “A highway will be there. It will be called The Holy Way….Even fools won't get lost on it.”  It can be hard to dig this text out of two and a half millennia of reference and allusion.  The prophetic collection of Isaiah is ours and not ours.  There were the ancient people who suffered through the confusion of exile, and there were human hands that bound these texts together, and holy backs that carried these texts through endless conflict.  The debris is deep, but we should try, we should try not to see OUR maps of this terrain, but the landscape itself…the landscape of Isaiah with all its layers and lives and textures.  

Isaiah is an elaborate craft of unity and disunity, voices and visions spanning centuries;  holding steadfast to an imagined future where terror and strife are put to rest, yet still seeing the consistent failure of God’s people to live in his ways.   It is especially important to take an honest view of Isaiah in this 35th chapter, which some scholars believe is like a map for the whole of Isaiah and perhaps the map for the entire Old Testament.  In the texts as we have received them, there is one lens, one experience to tell.  Exile.   Exile and RELEASE.   

The holy hands that shape the Hebrew Scriptures are telling many stories at one time.  They are telling a sacred story out the past as a way to describe their reality, and they are crafting an experience wherein people they never dreamed of can find hope and direction.   The prophetic works of the book of Isaiah declare how even in the face of disaster, God will make all things new.  The terror of subjection and expulsion, the confusion of being scattered across the Mediterranean is mixed with the strange paradox that life goes on, sometimes beautifully,   and God is still with us.   The one true God who we may have thought was limited,  This one true God turns out to be unbounded by anything. 

You and me and our ancient friends, we work quite hard at being blind and deaf.  Blindness and deafness in the Hebrew scriptures is usually metaphor.  We are being called ignorant and stubborn, but we are being judged ignorant and stubborn…poetically.  The heart of the Old Testament may be the Shema,  yet it also may be this theme: you have a map, but you don't use it, this is why you keep getting lost!  Theologian Stanley Hauerwas puts it something like this:  Life is a journey where God goes before us as guide and example; God accompanies us as our companion and instructor, and it turns out in the end, that he is himself the route.  Yet we, are blind and deaf and think we might know better.  We saw our road turn to dirt and we just kept going anyways. 

I have to wonder about that tourist.  He kept driving for miles along a barely drivable road that is not on any published map.   Did he believe that if he just kept driving it would get better?  Sometimes the right way, Is to know when to turn around, to open your eyes and ears to something wholly unexpected.  There he was.  Stuck in the sand.  Was he confident of rescue?  If you were stuck in the sand, on the Navajo reservation, far from home...would you expect rescue?  

Isaiah tells us that only the redeemed and ransomed will walk on the Holy Way.   The Hebrew here is from family law.  It refers to releasing someone from slavery.  This rescue is commonly used in Exodus and Exile traditions, which are perhaps best viewed as the same story, told in two ways.  The release, the new life, the flowering is God’s will and action, he draws us into blossom when we believed we were dead seeds buried in the sand.  Exile is Exodus and Exodus is Exile and all of it leads into the way we are told the story of God’s incarnation.  

We should see and hear the overwhelming texture of the experience of Exile and return in the Hebrew Scriptures because it is the soil in which Jesus played, It is the library from which the Gospel writers understood and framed their sacred stories.   It is its own landscape which we may need to inhabit to follow him.  We live in God’s story, but he does not travel by our roads.   God chooses to become fully human, to be born of a vulnerable young woman, in a war-torn corner of a brutal empire.  This is our unexpected rescue.  The child of Mary.  The willingness of this young woman to say yes and be the God Bearer.  Gloria, Mary, Rose.  Our rescue isn't elaborate, it is dirt strewn and it is unexpected. 

I had spent several summers on the Navajo reservation, and each previous year I had wondered how necessary our large rental SUV’s were.  Experienced hands assured me they were necessary, and that summer I found out why.  In the Oljeto valley of the Navajo nation there are few paved roads.   There in far SE Utah many of the roads I know by heart, are not what most of you would consider roads.  But that summer, even the usually passable 'main drag' was awash with thick drifts of sand  (An experience rather like driving in snow and ice).  After a long week of Vacation Bible School we were almost done with our journey, and I decided that I could risk trying the shortcut. 

A shortcut path that  I suspected to be more arroyo than road, and which I knew to sometimes be troublesome in other years.  We were going along fine, but then, there he was.  We pulled up beside the isolated German tourist He was standing ankle deep in sand beside his tiny white car.   And we asked if he would like some help.  I wonder if the young Caucasian woman (myself) in the driver’s seat was a surprise.  I wonder about the unusualness of the people that came pouring out of the SUV.  6 or 7 people, mostly female, and several teenagers.  Did he wonder if we could be any help at all?

We went back to the church (which was not very far) and found shovels and boards.  But it wasn’t enough.  The good news is that we knew the neighborhood,  we knew who to ask for help.    Have you ever been stuck in the sand…for real or metaphorically?  What drew you out, what set you on a safer path?  Maybe it was a new map, maybe it was a shovel.  Maybe it was unexpected.  Or maybe, it was a daring young woman, who chose to help.  Her soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, For he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.  Thanks be to God.   Amen.

Advent 3, RCL.A 

St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Walla Walla, Washington

Printable Holy Advent - Christmas - Epiphany Resources

How do prepare the way through Advent?  How do you take this time of awe and amazement home? And how do you find a place for faith on the road? Make it printable and foldable!

Here is the link to a lovely downloadable, printable and colorable Holy Family.  You may need to add some shepherds (the artist is adding them for the future!).    Then using a deck of cards and this handy 'game' you can help reimagine the journey through Epiphany.  Put it all in an envelope and take it with you wherever you go.

For more plans that are portable and interactive...here is a PDF of a downloadable, printable and cut-able non-candy Advent - Epiphany 'calendar'.

Advent Candle Prayers for families and adults (to go with your Advent wreath) are available here.

Bibles For Children: My Short Guide

The stories we share with our children can shape their imaginations for a lifetime.  The folks who bring together these books make choices, and these choices have changed over time.  Differences are readily apparent in what stories are shared, and how much to tell. 

It is almost impossible to distill scripture into child accessible language without the influence of mature interpretative issues.  These books are also shaped by the demands of publishing houses (and the theological stream of the publishers).  While almost any version is a worthy place to start, there are some that are my favorite recommendations.   As a professional religious educator I look at a few details.  

 Illustrations

• Is there a sense of deep love for God’s word?
• Do the illustrations reflect the West Asian setting of the Bible? 
• Are there any good and bad characters with lighter skin for the good and darker for the bad?  

Text

•  Which stories are included and which are not?
•  How are passages with doctrinal or sociological importance handled?
• Does it draw a reader/listener in?
• Most have sidebars or leading questions.  Do these fit within reasonable standards of interpretation?  

For Young Children 
My top recommendation is always the Lion Bible for Children.  Lion is the name of the English publisher of this tried, true and regularly updated children’s bible.  

• The illustrations are elegant and intriguing; 
• The story interpretations are well done, and 
• It has a considerably high volume of Bible stories.  
• Rarely available in local American bookstores, it is easy to find online.  
• They also have a Storyteller’s version which has a smaller selection and is aimed at younger readers and listeners.   Publisher: Lion Hudson Plc (February 1, 2008) ISBN-10: 0745960952

My second recommendation is the Spark Story Bible.  Sparkhouse is producing some of the best contemporary curriculum materials right now.  After several years with this Story Bible, I can tell you that:

•  The illustrations are engaging and thought provoking.  
• They can  seem silly to adult eyes, yet this is usually attached to the meaning of the story and truly helps bring a child into the text.  
• The storytelling is mostly accurate, if occasionally reflecting its Lutheran origins.  
• The publishers state that they tried to incorporate many of the Revised Common Lectionary lessons (OT and Gospel it seems).  Publisher: Augsburg Fortress (April 2009)

An easy to find suggestion is the Children’s Illustrated Bible from DK Publishing.  Actually all of their children and family Bibles seem to be quite good; so to their information book on Christianity.  I love the factoid sidebars that incorporate contemporary information about the Biblical regions, and it’s people.  These are widely available at large and small bookstores, as well as online.  Publisher: DK CHILDREN (February 21, 2005)  ISBN-10: 0756609356

If you are still looking for something else, take a look at the CHILDREN OF GOD STORYBOOK BIBLE by Desmond Tutu (yes you read that right).  There is a version available with a CD of the Archbishop telling the stories!  A careful selection told with his special love and intentions, this is a nice gift to a young person.  

You could also search for an out-of-print version: Catherine Marshall’s Story Bible.  It is certainly a storytelling version; and it has lovely illustrations made by children.

For older children 

First is another Spark text: THE SPARK BIBLE.   

• This is a straightforward NRSV Bible, without the Apocyrpha.  
• NRSV is what we use for Sunday Lessons and is at a high reading level.  
• However, the text is printed in a manner good for young eye. 
• Furthermore the sidebars are helpful for learning how to dialogue and reflect with Scripture. 
• It has nifty marking tabs and is a good complete Bible for an older school age child. 

Second option is a Common English Bible.  

• This is one of the newest and most well regarded translations.  
• It has been celebrated for both its translation accuracy and readability.  
• A version crafted for older children is this one.  
• I have only been able to look at the sidebars online; but they seem good.

If you haven't added at least one Bible to your children's bookshelf and bedtime reading then it is time to start.  Find a good Bible, spend time with it, and don't be afraid to meet questions with 'I don't know..who can we ask to learn more?'