Tell Me Something Good Fourth Sunday in Lent | Matthew 19:13-15 & Deuteronomy 24:17-22 Talmadge Hill Community Church | March 15, 2026

Jesus stops everything for the children. His disciples want to wave them away. Matthew is not telling a sweet story — he is making a radical theological claim. The children are a metaphor for everyone whom polite, powerful society finds inconvenient.

This sermon wrestles with what it means to live in a world that treats certain lives as expendable — and what the gospel demands of us in response. Drawing on Karl Barth's theology of crisis, Martin Luther King Jr.'s triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarism, and the costly witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, it traces a thread from Deuteronomy's ancient command to care for the stranger, through the radical welcome of Jesus, all the way to the torn veil and the open arms of the cross.

We are not primarily sinners stumbling toward grace. We are image-bearers — every one of us made in the imago Dei. When that truth is forgotten, the consequences are never abstract. They are measured in human lives.

This sermon is part of the Lenten series Tell Me Something Good, inspired by Sanctified Art's creative worship resources for Lent and Easter.