Worship This Week

This Week in Worship:

The Good News Emerges from the Margins

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 kin-dom of heaven belongs to such as these."

Jesus isn't simply being kind. He is reorienting the entire hierarchy. The ones being pushed aside — the ones the world has decided don't matter — are precisely the ones God's kin-dom belongs to. The margin, it turns out, is not where God reluctantly visits. The margin is where God lives.

The good news emerges not from the centers of power, but from the edges. Not from the ones who have it all together, but from the ones who know what it means to be small, vulnerable, and entirely dependent on the grace of others. Which is, if we're honest, all of us — at least once, and perhaps more often than we admit.

Additional scripture reading: Deuteronomy 24:17-22

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