Luke 15.1-10
Sunday 14 September 2025
©Suzanne Grimmett
What shepherd would leave a hundred sheep and go in search of one? Imagine if a wolf came for the others while the shepherd was off looking for the one?
What woman would stop everything she is doing and clean and search her whole house for one coin? Well, only one for whom that coin was so precious she would not accept losing one.
These are two of the three parables in this chapter of Luke’s Gospel about being lost and being found, and both seem to be examples of ridiculous effort or nonsensical risk.
And then there are the parties. Always with God there are the parties! We know well the story of the great banquet put on for the returning younger son which so offended the elder that he remained outside. When you experience something joyful, you don’t keep it to yourself- or at least, that does not seem to be possible in the Divine nature. The gathering of friends to celebrate seems even more ludicrous with the woman who has found her coin- after all, she probably spent the value of that newly found coin in the catering!
So Jesus may say, “Which one of you does not leave…or what woman does not search carefully…” as if these are universal behaviours, but they clearly are not. There is first then the scandal of the vulnerability of a God who would risk so much to seek the lost, and then perhaps the even greater affront of the open invitation to a party where even the most disreputable characters are welcomed and celebrated.
But before we go any further, it is important, I think, to identify how wide this mercy is….to get a sense of whom Jesus is addressing in these stories. We are told very clearly at the beginning of the chapter that ‘all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him’.
“Right,” we might think. “All of those tax collecting crooks and sinners of various stripes hear that God would pursue even them and bring them back to begin a new life. That is an inspiring story.”
But as always with Jesus’ stories, we need to be prepared for the hook in the tail that might catch us as we are busy casting those other people as the lost ones and leaving ourselves comfortably in the fold. Who are the people sitting with Jesus, eating with Jesus, being with Jesus, hanging on his every word?
Those tax collectors and sinners.
And who are the people excluding themselves from the party?
As always…it’s the religious people. The scribes and Pharisees are grumbling about Jesus’ behaviour and the company he keeps.
Who is more lost?
The great reversals of God may be seen here again, in that moment when we recognise that maybe we, too, might be lost. That perhaps it is in our confidence of being on the side of the righteous that we might be losing our way. Certainties, and particularly religious certainties, might be the greatest cause of no longer being able clearly see the path home.
In John’s Gospel (9:39 NLT), Jesus tells the man whose sight he has restored, “I entered this world to render judgement- to give sight to the blind and to show those who think they can see that they are blind.”
I don’t think I was ever so confident about my own clear sight as when I was in my early twenties, had experienced a genuine religious conversion and embraced what I would now call a fundamentalist way of reading scripture. I was full of zeal and was most certainly the kind of person you did not want at dinner parties if the conversation strayed into religion. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happened at a school staff dinner one night. One of my fellow staff members was a Pagan and was talking about the inconsistencies and contradictions of the Christian Bible. I leapt to the defence of the Scriptures of course. (It always pays to remember that God never needs us to leap to the Divine defence). I can’t quite remember my argument, but I suspect there was a bit about the unchanging nature of God and the infallibility of scripture, a lot of manipulating texts to match my own point of view and I am sure an unwavering confidence that I was right. It is a conversation I always looked back on with some embarrassment as I learnt more about scripture with its different genres and historical contexts, deconstructing my earlier rigid beliefs.
More than thirty years later, I was gifted the opportunity to meet up with my Pagan colleague again at an inter faith gathering. I told her of my sense of shame at my self-righteous attitude, dogmatic certainties and utter assurance that I was in the right. She was incredibly gracious. We laughed at our younger selves and hugged. It was one of those moments that felt like stepping back inside to join the party.
There is much more to explore here about the complexities and gifts of interfaith dialogue, but I would like to return for now to our Gospel reading. In these two stories, the lost sheep and the lost coin, we might notice the issue is not about repentance. Being found could not possibly depend on the repentance of the sheep or the coin. They were just able to be found. This suggests that the point of the parables is not the call to repentance, but the invitation to the righteous and the self-righteous to join the celebration.[1] This is not to downplay the importance of repentance, but to challenge the timing. We are not forgiven because we repent- forgiveness is the gracious initiative of God. Repentance happens when we are found- or perhaps found out in all the games we humans play- or, to switch metaphors, when we finally see. In that very moment when we are shaken to the core by the truth of who we are and who we have become…in that moment we find ourselves not expected to ‘walk on our knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting’ as Mary Oliver beautifully phrases it, but invited to a joyful celebration! The grace of that moment can unravel even the most steadfast resistance and soften the hardest of hearts.
The religious word for what separates us from God, one another, creation and even from ourselves is ‘sin’. It is this separation that can cause the darkness to hover over the human story allowing chaos and death to reign, making it impossible to see a way through the violence to new beginnings of peace and justice. Sin is the word to use whenever we forget that we are lost and begin to believe that we are the centre and the sun of our own universe- whether we means ourselves personally or our own group whose identity we patrol and protect. Humility goes out the window whenever we are sure that we, or our group, are right, and violence is never far behind when our dogma or ideologies become more important than our relationships and love of our neighbour. To be utterly convinced that we are right can take us to the kind of violence that believes it can even take the life of another, becoming the sole and final judge. In the US, the killing of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk this week seems to have been motivated by this kind of assured hatred, as was the fatal shooting of Democrat leader Melissa Hortman and her husband earlier this year. When we are convinced of our own righteousness and claim the power for ourselves to choose who should live and who needs to die, we are surely lost. This week I gathered with other clergy at an Islamic College to welcome the children and parents with ‘Asalamu alaykum’ (or ‘Peace be upon you’) after they had been targeted with a bomb scare and an horrific message of racial and religious hatred. It felt like a small but important way to stand against the kind of ideological violence that spreads fear, harms the innocent and divides our communities.
We are called to be people characterised not by what we think or the strength of our beliefs but by our love. Sometimes ‘showing up’ can be the most important spiritual practice. But that means showing up for the God who seeks us out down all the ways that we have become lost. The Good News is that the redeeming love of God can find a way through any chink in our self-assurance, any crack in our certainty, allowing repentance to grow from seeing the truth and mercy to flow like a river. And from this space of grace, we are finally free to join the party.
+Amen
[1] Charles B. Cousar in Feasting on the Word: Year C, Vol 4. 2010 Westminster John Knox Press, Kindle edn.