Sermon Notes — September 6, 2026
“Two or Three”
Matthew 18:15-20 (NRSVUE)
Rev. Dr. Mary Beth Bernheisel
September 6, 2026
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I am bringing this graphic of the church year back again.
Today we find ourselves at the bottom of the circle in Ordinary Time – I really wish there was some way to note how hot it is at the bottom of the circle, but alas, that is where we are.
The overarching function of the bottom of the circle is to focus on the story of the people of God…to focus on what it means to be the church.
We’ve touched on this for the past couple of weeks – two weeks ago Terry urged us to consider the question, “Who do we say that Jesus is?” Last week we heard Jesus’s invitation to follow him and learn to live like him so that he can teach us what it means to lose our lives so that we can find them again in him.
These last two weeks have given us permission to think in individual terms – who do I say that Jesus is, who is Jesus to me, how can I learn to live like him so that he can teach me to lose my life in order to find it again.
But today is the end of that – today we stop thinking about ourselves as just ourselves – as individual humans following Jesus. For the next two weeks we’re going to get into what it means to live in a community with other disciples, and from there we’re going to start thinking in terms of God’s kingdom as we hear Jesus’ difficult words in parables.
Will you pray with me and for me?
So what compels Jesus to take on such a difficult topic in today’s text? This topic of how the church is to respond when one church member harms another.
To answer that question we have to go back to the beginning of Matthew chapter 18, so I hope you’ll get a Bible – pew Bible, Bible that you brought, the Bible on your phone – and turn to Matthew chapter 18.
Matthew 18:1 – how does it start?
(Wait for it–the disciples ask Jesus who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven)
Right. Just so we get the setting right, Jesus and the disciples are still in Galilee, where they were last week, and even after Jesus tells them that if they want to follow him they have to take up their cross, even after he tells them that they have to lose their lives in order to find them – even after all of that, the disciples ask Jesus,
“Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”
And Jesus gives them a list, starting with the most important and going all the way down to the least important.
No.
Jesus calls a child to come to him and he puts the child in the middle of the disciples and he says
Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
That’s not what they were expecting.
And then he continues.
If any of you – and you can imagine him talking directly to the disciples – if any of you cause one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for you if a millstone was tied around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea.
And then he shifts. He shifts from talking about children to talking about sheep. About lost sheep.
If a shepherd has a hundred sheep and one of them wanders off, doesn’t he leave the other ninety-nine to find the one that’s lost? And he is more overjoyed about finding the one lost sheep than he is about the ninety-nine that didn’t get lost.
And then Jesus finishes by telling them
It is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost.
Children, sheep, we are to guard them with our lives.
So what compels Jesus, in today’s text, to give the disciples explicit, step-by-step instructions about what to do when one of his followers harms another one?
He is compelled to make his disciples – and the church–understand his Father’s inexhaustible concern for the most vulnerable and marginalized. God’s inexhaustible concern for the most vulnerable and marginalized. Which should be our love – the church’s love – for the most vulnerable and marginalized.
Today’s text is simply the next installment of Jesus trying to make the disciples understand that being part of God’s Kingdom is not about being the first or the best and it’s not about winning. It’s about living out in our bodies God’s love for the world and especially for those who are most easily passed over and ignored.
When I first read this passage I thought this sermon was going to be about reconciliation among Jesus’s followers. I thought it was going to be about repairing relationships that are broken within the church. But the more I listened and learned, the more I began to rethink what we might hear and learn in this text.
The text isn’t so much about conflict between disciples or about disagreeing with each other in the church, or even about disciples offending one another. The text is about the church’s responsibility for the most vulnerable, and the seriousness of harm to the most vulnerable in a place intended to be a sanctuary for all of God’s children.
You don’t have to watch the news for very long before you hear a story about someone who has used a church as a base of nefarious operations – someone who has used the trusting and gracious nature of a congregation to take advantage of its most vulnerable people. This is why we insist on Safe Gatherings training for everyone in this congregation who works with children and youth and vulnerable adults. The data tells us that the more strict we are with our screening and training processes, the less likely it is that someone will target our congregation as a place to get away with harm to our most vulnerable.
Jesus gives us ultimate responsibility for protecting vulnerable people in our midst, going so far in this passage as to say that the church has all the authority of heaven to protect the most vulnerable among us – even if it means removing them from the congregation and treating them as a gentile or a tax collector. Treating them as someone who needs to encounter the Jesus of compassionate love and the Jesus who insists on justice.
God forbid that we should ever need to refer to this text in our own congregation, but what it reminds us is that Jesus is always on the side of the vulnerable. Jesus is always on the side of those who are most often ignored or pushed aside, and Jesus calls us as the church to match his love and to match his justice and to match his care for the most vulnerable.
And that led me to think about how we as the church tend to think about vulnerable people, and about what our responsibility is to vulnerable people. Jesus put a child in the middle of the disciples to represent vulnerability – to call attention to vulnerability – to say to the disciples, I am going to make you pay attention to this child. You have to look at this child. Why does Jesus do that? Because a vulnerable person is a person whose needs – whose very existence – we can ignore with no consequences to ourselves. A vulnerable person is someone whose needs we can minimize because minimizing their needs doesn’t affect our well-being. It’s all about power, right? I’m going to help someone more powerful than I am because it’s in my best interest to do so. Maybe I’ll get favorable treatment in the future, or maybe I will avoid poor treatment in the future.
But if I ignore a vulnerable person it doesn’t affect me one way or the other.
Jesus said to the disciples, “You are responsible for the vulnerable people.” Why, because if the church isn’t responsible for them then who is going to be?
Room in the Inn is coming up fast. The Missions team has already created the bulletin board in the hallway and you’re going to hear a lot about it in the next few months because we need all hands on deck. And I’ve been thinking a lot about Room in the Inn this week. Don Fagan and I had a long conversation about it. And I’ve been thinking about it in relation to this text. I want to be clear that this text speaks explicitly to relationships among disciples – relationships within the congregation of people who have agreed to live in covenant with each other and serve Jesus together. But it also gives us a broader understanding of the church’s responsibility for the vulnerable.
Unhoused people are vulnerable people. If we want to, we can walk right by unhoused people and offer nothing to them and it will not affect our lives in any material way. Hopefully it will pierce our conscience, but it won’t affect us materially. When the church goes and picks up unhoused people and brings them into a warm place and feeds them and gives them a safe place to rest – that’s the kind of stuff that Jesus is talking about when he puts the child in the middle of the disciples. See and serve the people that everyone else will ignore.
In our conversation, Don jokingly said that Bethlehem has a five-star rating for Room in the Inn. The unhoused men who stay here know that when they come to Bethlehem they are going to be treated with dignity and respect. They know that they are going to get the best of what we can offer. Don told me that the hosts who spend the night with the men do their laundry for them. Wash and dry and fold their clothes so that when they wake up in the morning they have fresh clean clothes waiting for them. I said to Don, “That’s foot washing.” to do something so humbling not because you have to, not because it’s going to give you some kind of advantage, but because you can.
I have a few friends in the area who visit Unit Two at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution every week. Unit Two is commonly known as Death Row. How can death row inmates be vulnerable if they’re the ones who committed crimes so horrible that the state is going to put them to death? They’re vulnerable because no one other than the people who work there ever have to pay attention to them, ever have to do anything for them. We can go our whole lives and never think about them. Visiting incarcerated people gives us no material advantage in this world. We can pass over them forever and there will never be any consequences for us. But Jesus tells us that they are the responsibility of the church.
In fact, later in Matthew’s gospel Jesus is going to tell a story about when the Messiah appears on earth in all his glory and is going to commend the people who gave him food when he was hungry and gave him something to drink when he was thirsty. He’s going to commend the people who showed him hospitality when everyone else ignored him, and the people who gave him clothes when he didn’t have any clothes. He is going to commend the people who visited him when he was in prison. And the people that the Messiahs commends are going to be confused because they never did any of those things for him. And the Messiah tells them that anytime they did those things for anyone else – for the vulnerable people – it was just like they did it for him.
The most vulnerable are the people we don’t have to look at. They are the people whose stories we don’t have to listen to. They are the people we can ignore or push aside or minimize because doing so doesn’t have any consequence for us.
And those are the people that Jesus says that we have to pay attention to, the people we have to listen to, the people whose needs we have to meet. Because that’s what it means to follow him. Because in doing so we become more like Jesus. We learn to lose our lives so that we can find them again. When we make ourselves vulnerable to the deep tragedies of other people’s lives we become more human ourselves.
Friends, Jesus gathered at the table with his friends and betrayers the night before he was executed – the night before he became vulnerable, even vulnerable to death on a cross. When we come to this table, we join Jesus our savior who became vulnerable for our sakes, who tells us that we are responsible for seeing, serving, and loving the people that everyone else will ignore. Because he is their hope and we are his family.