Sermon for the 17th Sunday after Pentecost, our final joint worship service before we begin weekly services at each building next week. This week’s lectionary readings are Luke 15:1-10 and 1 Timothy 1:12-17. This sermon draws from my sermon six years ago as well as David Lose’s writing at his blog, In the Meantime.
Today’s worship service also included giving Bibles to our three year old and third grade students, as well as distributing backpack tags as a back to school blessing. It was a fun service! Here’s the livestream and the audio of just the sermon.
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and Jesus our good shepherd. Amen
If someone came up and asked you, “Who is God?” how would you answer? Where would you start?
You could start the way the Bible does, all the way at the beginning in Genesis with creation, the story of God forming the world out of nothing, molding people out of the dust of the earth. Or, maybe to describe God, you might begin with the church and describe what we do as the Body of Christ, loving and caring for neighbors.
You could start with a philosophical argument about how God is the spark of the universe, the source and root of all life, the unmoved mover. Or, you could do what Jesus does, and start with some stories. Today’s gospel from Luke says, “Jesus told them this parable.”
Do you know what a parable is? For those of you who just got a Bible, this is an important word to learn. A parable is a story with a point, a story Jesus makes up to tell us something about who God is.
Today, we heard two parables from Jesus, two stories about what God is like. In these parables, we learn that God is really good at hide and seek. God seeks out the lost; God cares for individuals. That’s not a bad place to start in describing God’s character.
First, there’s this story about a shepherd who has a hundred sheep, but one of them wanders away and gets lost. Instead of abandoning that lost sheep, the shepherd leaves the rest of his flock and goes to look for it. Then, when he finds it, he carries it home, and he even throws a party to celebrate.
In this parable, you and I are sometimes the 99 who are incomplete because one is missing, but at some point, each of us is the one who wanders away. This story shows a God who searches for you when you wander. No matter how far you’ve strayed away, God still searches for you. Not to punish you, or to trap you, but to pick you up and carry you back where you belong.
The interesting thing about these parables is the question Jesus asks at the beginning. Which of you, if you were missing a sheep or a coin, would leave everything else behind to find it?
Well, most of us probably wouldn’t. 99 sheep is still a pretty good flock, after all, and you wouldn’t want to risk them.
When I heard this story, I used to picture the shepherd leaving the 99 safely locked up in a pen, or maybe trusted to a neighboring shepherd. But look more closely. It turns out, the shepherd really is taking a risk here. Look at verse four. Do you see where he leaves the 99? In the wilderness. The shepherd is willing to risk everything for the sake of the one who is missing. That’s powerful.
I would probably spend a few minutes searching for a missing coin, especially if it’s 10% of what I have. But when I find it, I’m hardly going to have a party. The woman here probably spends as much on entertaining her friends and neighbors as she saved by finding the coin!
What does this tell us about God? It tells us that God rejoices over each one of us. God’s love is extravagant and irrational. These parables tell us that you matter to God.
It’s really easy, sometimes, to get so overwhelmed by everything going on in life that we think we have no significance. How many people do you think have lived in the last 2,000 years since Jesus told this parable? Take a guess.
It’s impossible to know for sure, but estimates are somewhere around 55 billion people have lived in the last 2,000 years. There are about 7.8 billion alive today.
And among those 7.8 billion people, among those 55 billion, God cares about you. God doesn’t need you to wear a name tag to remember who you are; God knows your name. Whether you’re royalty and the head of a church, or a pauper living in a hut, God rejoices over you.
The shepherd does not get upset at the sheep after finding it, or blame it for wandering off. The shepherd rejoices. The shepherd’s joy overcomes any sadness, worry, fear, shame, or guilt. This parable is a picture of God’s grace.
And here’s the thing: Most of us probably wander off more than once. I don’t think it’s an accident Jesus compares us to sheep—sheep aren’t the brightest animals in the world. Their only real defense against predators is to stick together in a herd, and yet they wander off. They need a shepherd to take care of them.
This is my favorite example of a shepherd caring for a sheep.
How often do we do that? How often does God rescue us, call us back from wherever we’ve wandered, and then we turn around and do it again?
We follow a God who is persistent, who doesn’t give up on us, who never gets tired of looking for us, pursuing us to bring us back home.
God does not say, “Ok, I guess you can come in. I suppose I’ll go to the effort of looking for you, but then you’ll be on probation for a while until you’ve made it up.” You don’t owe more to God because you sinned more, because God had to look harder for you. All of us are in the same boat, or rather the same flock. All of us are here because God has come out looking for us, and brought us back home.
Some of us grew up in church, and came back after confirmation, and even kept watching during covid when there were no in-person services, and it can be tempting to think that we’re really part of the 99, that we’ve got it figured out, that we’re somehow better than the one that wandered away.
On some level we all ought to know we’re the ones who have wandered away, the ones the shepherd came looking for and brought back to the flock, but it’s still tempting to pretend we don’t wander.
In fact, the very next story Jesus tells is the story of the prodigal son, who leaves home and then when he returns, he’s welcomed back by the Father. In that story, there’s an older brother who gets upset that grace is shown to the one who left, that the Father seems to still love him just as much as the one who stayed.
Beloved of God, don’t give in to that temptation! I’m really convinced in this story that the characters Jesus intends us to identify with are the lost sheep and the lost coin. Later in the story, in Luke 19, Jesus will say, “The Son of Man has come to seek and save the lost.” We are the lost who have been found.
In 1 Timothy, Paul uses himself as the proof of God’s seeking and finding. If you know Paul’s story from Acts, you know he’s not exaggerating when he says he was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, a man of violence.
And yet Jesus did not give up on him. Without even waiting for him to change his ways, to stop sinning and repent, Jesus sought him out and changed his life.
That’s an important point in these parables. The sheep doesn’t decide to get found. It doesn’t hear an inspirational sermon and decide to come forward and accept the shepherd as its personal lord and savior.
Maybe it recognized it was lost and started looking for the rest of the flock, but it doesn’t come back on its own. All it does is wander away, and then get found. It’s the shepherd who does all the work.
That’s even more clear in Jesus’ second parable. A missing coin is an inanimate object.
There is literally nothing it can do to be found. It has no capability to roll out on its own. The coin’s only hope is that the woman is looking for it. The coin’s only hope is that there is someone who thinks it’s worth seeking.
As Lutherans, we confess with Martin Luther that it is the Holy Spirit who calls us to faith. Even when we think we’re doing something to get closer to God, it’s always the Holy Spirit doing the work. It’s always God seeking us.
We are saved by God’s grace, not by anything we do. If you deserved it, it wouldn’t be grace. Grace is freely given, undeserved, given simply because God wants to give it.
Beloved of God, hear this promise: God’s grace is for you. God thinks you’re worth seeking and finding. God rejoices over finding you.
Once you were lost, and now you are found. There will be times in the future when you get lost again.
There will be times when you go chasing after greener grass somewhere else and wander away, or perhaps when you feel like you’ve slipped and rolled away under a cabinet, and that’s ok.
Because you belong to Jesus, and Jesus never gets tired of seeking you. Jesus never gives up on you. And when one sinner repents, when the lost get found, there is joy in heaven.
Amen