September 14, 2025

Pentecost 14 Lectionary 24

Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28, Luke 15:1-10

Epiphany, Winnipeg

“Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, just leave them alone in the wilderness, just leave them there, just abandon them so that they can wander off and get lost too, so you can go after the one that is lost?”

Which of you would do that? I don’t think I would; it doesn’t quite make sense. I’m just looking after all these sheep, and if I leave the ninety-nine to go get the one who’s lost, what will happen to the ninety-nine with no one to keep an eye on them? To lose one sheep of a hundred isn’t great, but at least there are still ninety-nine left. It’s only a one percent loss.

But Jesus points to something different, where that one percent really matters, because God does not work with balance sheets and percentages, and God will never say, “Well, you can’t win’em all.” God just sees that there’s one missing, and God takes all the risks in the world to go out and find that one who is all alone and afraid.

Maybe you’ve been a lost sheep, maybe you are, maybe I am. You’ve just kind of followed your nose and then looked up and realized that you’re not even sure where you are any more. And even worse, you’re pretty sure nobody has even noticed that you’ve gone missing?

In God’s accounting, a lost sheep is a lost sheep and needs to be found. Because each one matters.

“Or what woman having ten coins, if she loses one, doesn’t turn on the lights and turn the house upside down and sweep in every corner to find that coin?” Now that makes a little more sense, because she’s lost ten percent of what she has, and that lost coin matters so much. It’s a whole day’s pay, it’s one less day of the next ten that she can pay for food.

It’s one lost coin out of ten, and it’s really valuable, and the woman who runs the house will do everything needed to find it.

If you’re a lost coin, tucked in there with the dust and crumbs between the couch cushions, or you fell out of a pocket in the corner of the closet and you’re not sure if you’ll ever be found, Jesus points to some good news. The woman who runs the house thinks you’re worth everything - everything - and she’ll find you. God will give anything to find the one who feels lost or forgotten.

Here’s the thing about these little parables Jesus tells: He talks about repentance, and about how much joy there is among the angels, and in the heavens, when one sinner repents. He talks about repenting, which means most simply just turning around, changing your mind, turning away from the paths where we hurt ourselves or our neighbour or the world and turning back to walk on ways that give life; as we say in one form of confession, to turn around and “delight in God’s will and walk in God’s ways.” If we kept on reading today the very next thing we’d hear is that story of a young man who gathered up his inheritance and wandered off to get himself lost, spending everything in “dissolute living.” He looks at his life and realizes what a mess he’s made, so he turns around to go back home and make amends. That’s one piece of the story.

But today it’s a different piece of the story, with this lost sheep and a lost coin. There’s really no repenting and turning around. The lost sheep doesn’t stop to get its bearings and then get un-lost and go back to the safety of the flock. The sheep is just lost. And a lost coin? The only thing a lost coin can do is sit there being lost and forgotten, until someone tries to find it.

The picture today is not of a God who is waiting for us to get our act together or to get ourselves unlost. It’s just that God, like the shepherd who somehow lost one sheep or the woman who misplaced that coin, God comes looking to bring the sheep and the coin back home.

I don’t know what “being lost” might mean to any of you, but I’m guessing we’ve all found ourselves lost at some point. Being lost might be like when you’re a kid in the store with your parents and you take one turn and then another and suddenly you don’t know where you are or how to get back to where you were. Then you try to find your way and just end up more lost. Some mistakes here and there, a bad decision or two or five or eleven, a habit that you just can’t kick. It can be so easy to get lost and stay lost. It can just sneak up on us.

But being lost doesn’t have to mean being all alone because you’ve gotten off track. Sometimes being lost could just be that weird feeling of being in a crowd, even a crowd of people you know, but just not feeling like you belong. You’re supposed to be a certain way, or look a certain way, or dress a certain way or feel a certain way, but you just can’t do it, and it’s a lonely kind of being lost in a crowd.

Or maybe being lost just feels more like being that coin between the couch cushions. Has anybody even noticed that I’m missing? Am I even worth noticing?

Today we hear of a God who’s not waiting for us to find our way back to some kind of belonging. Instead we hear of one who seeks us out because one in ten or one in a hundred or one in a thousand or more is worth everything to God. And we hear about Jesus, who gets himself into trouble again because it seems like his favourite thing is to hang around with lost people. “Tax collectors and sinners,” they’re called. They may have gotten themselves lost, or they may have been kicked out of the flock for no reason or for dumb reasons, they might be outsiders, never really being allowed to belong. I suppose they might even be the ones who everyone else thinks really have their act together, but who know that they really don’t. Is that you? Or me? The tax collectors and sinners and lost ones at the table might be just like us, people who come together once a week or so and more often than not start the whole get-together with confession, which is a fancy way of saying “Yup, I did it again. Even though last week I said I wouldn’t.” And then Jesus sets a table for us and we eat together – tax collectors, sinners, lost sheep and forgotten coins. Because at Jesus’ table there are none who are lost and forgotten. Just people who have been found again and fed.

This lost and found thing can reach much further, though. It’s bigger than just you and me. I will again resist the urge to rhyme off a list of all the things that are going wrong in the world, but I’d invite you to take a moment to hold up in your mind, or hold up before God, a thing or two, a place or two, a person or group or two, a forest or lake or species or two…any one or two of the things we hear about in a world we so often think might be headed somewhere in a handbasket. Just take a moment….

It’s such a dire time we seem to be living in, isn’t it? But that’s nothing new. Every generation has lived in a dire time. “It couldn’t be worse,” we’ve said again and again, through so many thousands of years. Even in today’s reading from Jeremiah, we hear it. The poet makes it clear that it couldn’t be worse. The nation is filled with injustice, the people have no understanding of what’s going on, they are skilled in doing evil and have no idea how to do good. The earth is a wasteland, the mountains and hills are wavering, the birds have fled and fruitful land has become a desert. The whole earth mourns. That’s Jeremiah twenty six hundred years ago, not David Suzuki a month or two ago.

We’ve got this beautiful place, this earth. It’s the whole world to us, but it’s such a small part of all the beauty and elegance and wonder of stars and planets and galaxies and universe upon universe. Billions of years old, and in the middle of all that here’s this little home of ours. Earth could be a lost sheep – we really have wandered off and lost our way. Again. Haven’t we? Now I’m no astrophysicist or whatever you need to be to understand such things, but my guess is that if we were completely forgotten and we faded away, like a coin behind the fridge in the kitchen of the universe, nothing much would change in the life of that universe. But for God every lost sheep is worth finding. The beauty of it all is that God just won’t stop seeking out this lost world, and God won’t stop working out this promise to heal it all, to make the creation whole, to find us in this corner of everything that is.

And God finds us again today. When God finds us today, it looks an awful lot like Jesus welcoming a bunch of tax collectors and sinners, lost sheep and lost coins, beloved ones who mean the whole world to the one who calls us to the table. And a gift is given for us and for all creation as we gather at the table and our host says, “I’m so glad I found you. Let’s celebrate. Here’s bread, here’s wine this is my body, this is my blood, all my life and love, given for you.”