Yesterday's Gospel was the Parable of the Talents in Matthew (Matthew 25: 14-30). It's not the best parable for a children's sermon. I've had more luck with parables about seeds or yeast. My spouse came up with a good approach for yesterday's sermon.
It started with inspiration from a fellow seminarian who mentioned the experiment with marshmallows and children, which you may remember from Psychology or Early Childhood Ed classes. Give a child a marshmallow, tell them that they will get another marshmallow if they don't eat it until a deadline in the future, and see who has impulse control.
We had a bag of marshmallows left over from last Sunday's Harvest Festival at the neighborhood lake, so we divided them into bags that held 1 marshmallow, 5 marshmallows, and 10 marshmallows. I gave each child a bag with one marshmallow. I told them that they could keep the one marshmallow--but what if they had a chance to win 5 additional marshmallows if they called a coin toss correctly? If they knew they would chance losing the marshmallow, would they place the bet? Would the chance to win 10 marshmallows make a difference?
I decided not to actually do the coin toss--gambling and church groups don't always go together. I talked about the God of abundance who doesn't require us to give up our marshmallows but does encourage sharing. And even though we might question the wisdom of sharing, because then we'd have even fewer marshmallows, God will multiply abundance in ways we can't even imagine.
It doesn't exactly fit the message of the parable--and I did try to make some connections to the parable--but I think it worked well as a children's sermon.
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