Fourth Sunday in Lent
Matthew 19:13-15
This Sunday, March 15, Pastor Eric preaches the fourth sermon in the series Tell Me Something Good with a sermon titled "The Good News Emerges from the Margins," drawing from Matthew 19:13-15.
Parents are bringing their children to Jesus. The disciples turn them away.
It seems like a minor interruption — children pressing into the crowd, parents hoping for a moment of blessing, disciples doing crowd control. But in Jesus' world, this is not a minor moment. Children occupied one of the lowest rungs of the social order. They were, in the most literal sense, marginal. And the disciples, following the logic of their world, push them right back to the margins where they belong.
Jesus rebukes the disciples and opens his arms.
"Let the little children come to me," he says, "for the reign of the heavens belongs to such as these."
The margins he is talking about are not only far away. They are the margins of war and displacement — the refugee children in our prayers, the families caught in conflicts most of us only glimpse in headlines. But they are also closer: the margins of loneliness, of not belonging, of wondering whether you still matter. The margins that many of us carry quietly into the sanctuary on a Sunday morning.
Which raises a question worth sitting with: what if worship on Sunday morning is itself a margin? What if our church — an in-between space, where the world's metrics of power and performance lose their grip — is exactly where Jesus already is?
The good news doesn't emerge despite the margins. It emerges from them. It always has.
Additional scripture reading: Deuteronomy 24:17-22