"Oh, no!!!! ya mean his father is going to kill him?!?!!???? I don't like where this is going......"

One of my hobbies is complaining about the lectionary and its "cycles." (This is a tangent from my hobby of complaining about the Liturgical Calendar.)
Three years for this book, two for that, so actually a six year mix and match when you get down to it....

Don't get me wrong, I'm all on board with the more generous opening of of the "treasures" of scripture asked for by the Second Vatican Council, and  neither do I know if in the early Church there were OT readings, nor do I care. Liturgical archaeology is not a major consideration for me, and that extra reading is valuable.

Or, could be.

But in their zeal to make the Mass also function as scripture study, the fabricators of the lectionary cycles have crammed in too much, and repeated too little.

Is once every three years often enough to hear, for instance, of God's testing of Abraham, and his near-sacrifice of his son? (You can't count its inclusion in the Paschal Vigil because of the lack of attendance and the fact that it is one of the readings often omitted.)

I have found that the CCD class is far more attentive to a story from scripture with which I wish to illustrate a lesson, if I write it into a little dramatic sketch, with lots of narration, and the characters all speak in about the same voice as the kids themselves. (So yeah, Sarah, at the thought of having a baby at her age says, "Don't make me laugh, buddy." Is that bad?)

Anyway, in one lesson plan, we combined Respect Life Sunday, the 5th Commandment, (the commandments are our focus this year,)  and the story of Isaac's brush with death.
Well, I was totally unprepared for their reaction.
About halfway through, when the kid playing Isaac asked where they were going to get an animal for the sacrifice, the rest started shrieking.

I'm not kidding, they were horrified. They had no idea of the story, (one exception, a boy who, I later found out, had watched a mini-series on TV last year.)

I thought one of them was going to cry at the idea. Another kept shaking his head mournfully and saying, "I don't like where this is going...."

Do children no longer have any exposure to "bible stories" outside of church and Sunday school and the odd musical?