Story-in-progress: The Stranger's Gift

I'm working on a new story, one that I'm telling as a Time for All Ages to the whole congregation tomorrow, but that I'd like to reinforce by bringing into the Spirit Play classroom. I like this flow a lot, either starting with a story downstairs and bringing it up, or vice versa. Reinforcement of good ideas with repetition, telling the same story in multiple forms, and presenting the same material to adults and children are all good ways to build cohesion and community.

This story is sometimes called "The Stranger's Gift." It's a traditional wisdom tale with no known source. In it, a stranger comes to a troubled, angry, quarrelsome town and shares the information that the messiah is one of them. The people are intrigued and excited by this news, and on the off chance that anyone they meet might be the messiah, they begin to treat each other with reverence, love, and respect. The stranger moves on, and no one ever finds out who the messiah is--or if the rumor the stranger started was even true--but the miracle is that the people themselves were able to transform their town with the way they shared the common purpose of spreading kindness.

For my story, I'm changing messiah to "an enlightened one," but otherwise keeping many of the details the same. I'm sharing it for the first of two sermons preached by the ministerial candidate, hoping that the congregation finds lots to work with in the ideas above.

Here are the story elements-in-the-works: