Pastor Sarah Buteux wrote this children’s sermon as a means of introducing children to the need to support slave-free chocolate. I think it’s a fantastic resource for helping teach justice and love to children.

Children’s Sermon: Giving Away Your Money to the Poor

Props: Two bowls of chocolate on a table, one full of fair trade chocolate, one full of regular chocolate, both covered with a cloth. I picked up small $.25 candy bars and a bag of gold coins at Ten Thousand villages, but you can go on-line to www.serrv.org or www.globalexchange.org to find fair trade chocolate as well. Cadbury has also recently gone Fair Trade. Oh and many thanks to Julie Clawson and her new book “Everyday Justice” for inspiring and informing this children’s sermon.

Good Morning! So, we are well into the month of October already. Are you having a good Fall? Do you like this month? What are some of the best things about October (leaves changing color, cool air, the first fire in the fireplace). And isn’t there a really fun holiday at the end of October? Halloween! That’s right. Are you already thinking about what you want to be? Great. Well I thought today I’d help you get ready for that holiday by talking to you about one of the most important parts. Can you guess what that might be? Candy, right. (reveal the chocolate)

Now I have two bowls of chocolate here. Can you tell me the difference between them? (one is full of snickers and one is full of other stuff, color of the wrappers, one more familiar). Well let me tell you the most important difference. This bowl here is full of Fair Trade chocolate and this bowl here is not. Do you know what Fair Trade means? It means that the people who worked to grow the cocoa beans to make the chocolate were paid fairly so they have enough money to live on. So if it’s not Fair Trade, do you know what that means? It means that whoever grew the cocoa beans for this bowl of chocolate wasn’t paid fairly at all. In fact I learned something very sad this week. I learned that most of the cocoa beans grown in the world are grown by people who receive little to no money at all, and that many of them are children; children who have been taken out of school and in some cases even taken from their families and they are forced to work all day for no money at all in really horrible conditions. We have a word for that kind of treatment. It’s called slavery. It’s supposed to be illegal, but it still happens all over the world.

But there is something very powerful we can do to help those kids and get the big chocolate companies to start treating them fairly. We can refuse to buy any chocolate that is not Fair Trade and tell every one we know to do the same. I got this chocolate from Ten Thousand Villages over in Northampton, but you can also get Fair Trade chocolate at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, you can order it on line, or you can buy Cadbury chocolates, because they just recently made the commitment to go Fair Trade. It may be a little harder to find, it may mean skipping our favorite brands for the more familiar candy we are used to, and it may mean spending more money, but I think it is worth it to help those kids and their families.

You know in our gospel reading today, a young man comes up to Jesus and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. After they go back and forth a bit, Jesus tells him to give away all of his money to the poor and the young man walks away sad because he was a very rich man, and that meant giving away a lot of money. I think this story scares a lot of people because they don’t want to give away all of their money, but how we use our money really matters and if we can give even some of it away in ways that help others we’re at least on the right track.

I think buying Fair Trade chocolate (or sugar or coffee or bananas) is a great way of giving our money to the poor and helping them. And it’s definitely more expensive. This bowl of Fair Trade cost me $8 and this bowl only cost me $____. Spending three dollars for a little bag of chocolate coins when you could get a whole big bag of mini snickers bars, might seems like giving your money away, and it is, but it’s giving to people Jesus cares about and who we ought to care about too because they are our neighbors and also children of God. So I hope you’ll only give out Fair Trade Chocolate this Halloween at your house and that you’ll encourage all of your friends to do the same. Sound like a good plan? Great. Let’s have a prayer together.

Dear Lord, please help us to help others by using our money lovingly and wisely. And please bring an end to the selfishness and greed that is hurting children around the world. Amen.