Sermon Notes — March 15, 2026
“Protection and Care for the Vulnerable”
Deuteronomy 24:17-22
Rev. Dr. Mary Beth Bernheisel
March 15, 2026
Well, let me just tell you about the rabbit hole that I went down this week.
I asked Google a simple question about John Wesley and the origins of Sunday School, and I ended up reading a dissertation – a literal dissertation, like a PhD dissertation – from 1918 called History of the Sunday School Movement in the Methodist Episcopal Church. It was written by a woman named Addie Grace Wardle who was a graduate student at the University of Chicago.
I know it probably sounds like a real snoozefest, and when I realized it was a scholarly paper from 1918 I almost exed it out, but it was actually quite interesting. I won’t bore you with the whole thing, but I will confess that I initiated the Google search because I wanted a simple answer about John Wesley and the origins of Sunday School.
I did not get it.
The answer I was hoping for was that John Wesley singlehandedly invented Sunday School because he wanted to do something about poor children in England who did not have any other means of education. But as it turns out, it was actually laypeople who started Sunday Schools in their individual parishes. It was laypeople who saw a need for children to receive both classical and religious education, and it was the laypeople who decided that it was their responsibility to provide that education. There was no standardized Sunday School program or curriculum – that would come much later. And it wasn’t John Wesley’s idea. In fact, in the Methodist Episcopal Church, it was a woman named Hannah Ball who first shared the idea of Sunday School with Wesley. She wrote him a letter in 1770 in which she said
The children meet twice a week, every Sunday and Monday. They are a wild little company, but seem willing to be instructed. I labor among them, earnestly desiring to promote the interest of the church of Christ.
Laypeople like Hannah Ball followed the movement of the Holy Spirit and Sunday Schools caught on. Often hundreds of children in each parish came to the local church on Sundays to learn to read and write because it was the only day available for them to learn since they were working during the week.
Sunday School started out as exactly that. School. On Sunday. So that the working poor children of working poor parents could learn to read and write, opportunities that they would not have otherwise had.
Because the kingdom of heaven, Jesus said, belongs to people just like these children.
Will you pray with me and for me?
Over the last several months you and I have heard Terry refer frequently to the Common Good – we have heard him remind us that the kingdom of God, the beloved community – is centered on the Common Good. And the Common Good is the foundation of today’s texts.
The Common Good is exactly what it sounds like – it is the commitment to the shared well-being of all of God’s creation. The challenge of the Common Good is that it requires us to move our own personal interests out from the center of our lives and concern ourselves in particular with the well-being of people who are not us – people who lack access to life’s basic necessities. And the idea of moving our own personal interests out from the center of our lives is absurd. It is utterly antithetical to our instincts and our nature, which is to take care of us and ours before taking care of anyone else. And yet, the Hebrew Scriptures are clear that our priority as God’s people is to make sure that everyone has food, clothing, and shelter – especially that the most vulnerable among us have food, clothing, and shelter. In the Hebrew Scriptures the most vulnerable were the foreigner, the widow, and the orphan. Walter Brueggeman is an Old Testament scholar and he calls this the neighbor triad.
The text that we read in Deuteronomy contains God’s specific instructions for God’s people about how they are to live when they reach the Promised Land. God was clear that if they followed these procedures – if they did what God commanded – they would stand apart from all the other people in all of creation – everyone would know that they were God’s people, and then they would be able to spread God’s justice and righteousness to everyone. The prophet Isaiah imagines what that would look like in his words to the people in chapter 60
1 Arise! Shine! Your light has come;
the Lord’s glory has shone upon you.
2 Though darkness covers the earth
and gloom the nations,
the Lord will shine upon you;
God’s glory will appear over you.
3 Nations will come to your light
and kings to your dawning radiance.
Follow God’s laws and the whole world will be drawn to you and drawn to the love of God.
One of the primary characteristics of God’s law was that if the people followed it, they would eliminate economic oppression among their community. And they were to be particularly mindful of those most vulnerable – those whose lives were less stable and less protected. Everything they did should aid others in the community to secure the basic needs of life – food, clothing and shelter. It wasn’t enough just to avoid oppressing others – God’s people were to take steps that ensured that everyone had access to what they needed.
In God’s economy, in the Common Good, the sole purpose of a loan was to help the poor. Loans weren’t used to grow businesses or improve assets. Interest was a form of economic oppression and was not to be taken for a loan. If an individual was in a financial position to provide a loan to another person, then they were expected to do so, but as an act of gratitude that God had given them enough to go around – enough to share – regardless of whether the loan was paid back or not.
In God’s economy, in the Common Good, if you have enough then it’s your responsibility to care for those who don’t. In today’s text you heard specific instructions to families who grew grain, olives, and grapes, but the idea is the same for everyone. Don’t go back and get the sheaves of grain that you missed when you harvested, don’t waste your time going back to get every single olive off the tree, don’t pick every single grape off the vine. That way the folks who don’t have consistent access to food will have a chance to eat, too.
Remember the story of Ruth? Ruth was the daughter-in-law of Noami, who was from Bethlehem. Both Naomi’s husband and Ruth’s husband – who was also Naomi’s son – died while they were all living in a foreign land. Naomi decided to return to Bethlehem. With no son and no husband to care for her, her best bet for survival was returning to her hometown where folks she knew might take pity on her and take care of her. And as soon as they arrive in Bethlehem, Ruth says to her mother-in-law,
“Let me go to the fields and pick up the leftover grain behind anyone in whose eyes I find favor.”
Not only does Ruth follow the grain harvesters for the day, but the man who owns the field – Boaz – invites her to continue going into the field with the harvesters throughout the rest of the season. And that’s how Ruth and Naomi have enough to eat. Of course, Boaz also thinks Ruth is cute and that may have had something to do with it, but his invitation to her to follow the harvesters and glean the leftovers was based on the expectations of all Jewish people to protect the most basic needs of everyone, to uphold the common good.
The basis of God’s command to protect the foreigner, the orphan, and the widow is right here at the beginning of the text. God says, don’t ever forget that you were once slaves in Egypt, and God got you out of there. You were once foreigners in a land that was not your own and while you were there you were oppressed and exploited and mistreated. You remember what that was like, so don’t do it to anyone else. In fact, take care of everyone.
I had a conversation recently with a friend and we were discussing the golden rule. Unfortunately, we agree, the world is such that we’ve ignored the second half of the golden rule. Instead of living by the rule to Do unto others as you would have them to unto you, we seem to just be doing unto others whatever we want.
But God’s command to the people is to remember what it was like when you were vulnerable, when you were exploited, when you were mistreated. It wasn’t just unacceptable to God when it was you it was happening to – it’s not acceptable to God for it to happen to anyone. And for those of us who weren’t ever in bondage in a foreign country, who weren’t ever orphans, who weren’t ever widows, at least we all know the vulnerability of being children. If nothing else, we know that at one time we were dependent on someone else for food, shelter, and clothing. If nothing else, we know that at one time there was nothing that we could do for ourselves.
In Matthew’s gospel, the people bring their children to Jesus, and all they want is for him to just lay his hands on them and offer a blessing, but the disciples of all people try to stop them. They think that Jesus has more important work to do – that these children are distracting Jesus from what really matters. They believe that by scolding the people who are bringing children to Jesus for a blessing, they are doing him a favor. But Jesus corrects the disciples: Let them come to me, he says, because my kingdom belongs to people like these children. The vulnerable, the poor, the dependent.
I think that’s why I really wanted to discover that John Wesley had singlehandedly invented Sunday School. I wanted John Wesley to be the hero of the story and then we United Methodists could smugly pat ourselves on the back because it was our guy who had the great idea to bring the working children to church on Sunday and teach them how to read.
But it’s really more appropriate that it was laypeople in the church who followed the leading of the Holy Spirit to offer good things to the most vulnerable among them. They recognized the good news that is at the heart of our faith – protection and care for the most vulnerable among us.
The late Dean McBride of Union Presbyterian Seminary in Virginia claims that Israel was set apart from the other nations because it made sanctification of life the prime objective of the whole social order.
That’s quite a claim. That the whole goal of the social order – the goal of everything that we do – is to ensure that all life is treated as though it is sacred. Why? Because all life is sacred.
And God gives us – God’s people – the responsibility to pay attention to those who – at best – are most likely to be forgotten and those who – at worst – are most likely to be taken advantage of – those who have no one else to speak for them, to provide for them, to protect them from harm. The sanctification of life is not just a byproduct of the Christian life – it is the goal. It’s not an afterthought – it’s the whole point.
Several years ago I had the opportunity to visit several areas in Tanzania, where the United Methodist Church has a college that not only trains pastors but provides what we would consider high school education to young adults who would not otherwise have the opportunity for that kind of education. The Masai are indigenous peoples living in Tanzania and Kenya. I was reminded this week that the traditional greeting between Masai is “Kasserian ingera,” which literally means “How are the children?”
It is a reminder that more important than the well-being of the individual asking the question or the well-being of the individual answering the question, is the well-being of the children and others among them who are vulnerable – those who are most at risk for being mistreated, oppressed, and taken advantage of. That is what it means to move our own interests out of the center of our lives and center the interests of those who are not us.
And that is at the core of who we are as Christians – the good news is that we who have enough also have the freedom given to us by Jesus to speak up on behalf of those who do not, even when speaking up may not be in our best interest.
I hesitate to give another example because it’s so easy for us to hear an example and fixate on that rather than letting the Holy Spirit direct us. But I’m going to do it anyway. An example of what it might mean to take our own interests out of the center of our lives and center the interests of those who are not us.
As a twenty-year resident of west Tennessee, I became aware of the ways that AI – Artificial Intelligence – impacts the most poor and vulnerable among us. This is not a diatribe against Artificial Intelligence. I pay for a ChatGPT subscription. I have a kid majoring in computer science who’s going to need a job. This is not intended to shame people who use AI for a living. And let me assure you that I have never used AI to write a sermon. And if you’re like me, you might have thought that because Artificial Intelligence operates in the ether, somewhere out there, there is no real cost. But AI has significant environmental impacts and a human cost. Reports from December 2025 tell us that the world’s largest AI supercomputer data center is slated to be built in Memphis and it will use a million gallons of water a day. That’s not counting the huge impact it will have on air quality. This is the second supercomputer center to be built in the Memphis area. The first was built in Boxtown, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Memphis, where the poverty rate is twice that of the city of Memphis as a whole. Memphis was already flagged as the asthma capital of the nation in 2024 due to poor air quality, and the supercomputer requires 35 turbines instead of the 15 that were originally approved.
Why are we sacrificing the health and well-being of individuals already at risk for health complications? Who already have difficulty accessing the basic necessities? Money? Convenience? Because we can? Because they can’t stop it?
Yes. All of the above.
Jesus is clear that the sanctification of all of life is the purpose of discipleship – poor life, vulnerable life, unprotected life.
I am reminded today that the good news isn’t always for me. In fact, it’s far more likely that the good news is going to inconvenience me so that it can save someone else’s life. As a follower of Jesus that is who we are and how we are called to be in the world, remembering that the Savior we worship put us at the center of his life – we who were separated from God by our own sin and could do nothing about it – he put us at the center of his life and then sacrificed his life for us. For our sake. For our salvation. For our reconciliation. The good news wasn’t good for Jesus. It was good for me. And for you. Perhaps our call is to make the news good for all of creation.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.