Sermon: Calvin/Deer Park United Church September 14, 2025 Proper 19, Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost Luke 15:1-10. "Lostness and Foundness"
Sermon: Calvin/Deer Park United Church
Kevin Parks, Sunday September 14, 2025
Proper 19, Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Luke 15:1-10
Please pray with me:
God, we come to your presence.
May your word be our rule,
Your spirit our teacher
And your greater glory our supreme concern.
Amen
“I once was lost but now I’m found.” I did not choose John Newton’s hymn for this Sunday. I’m sure there’s much that could be said about it. But I’m also sure you’ve heard that sermon, and today I need a fresh perspective.
What is the Gospel of Luke conveying to us about being lost? What is lostness? What is found-ness?
I want to take a minute and back up in Luke’s Gospel, a few verses before today’s reading, just to set the scene. Jesus is travelling about the countryside accompanied by a large crowd. He’s been performing miraculous healings and saying some pretty incredible things. Things like “whoever comes to me and does not hate [their] father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” Now, hate in this context means something different from our literal notion of ‘hatred’.
There’s a rhetorical form of this ancient time that hyperbolizes the nature of relationships—so, one might say “I love you” when speaking of an acquaintance. After, all, the greatest commandment is to love—not just ‘like’—one another. We can go deeper by remembering there are at least four kinds of love: phillio or ‘friendship love’; storge or ‘familial love’; agapē,or ‘unconditional love’; and eros, or ‘passionate, romantic love’.
In the rhetoric of the day, “Love” is hyperbolized and so is hate. In the case of Jesus saying you can only be my disciple if you hate your family and friends and even your life, Jesus is using hyperbole to illustrate that there are sacrifices that need to be made—that anyone who intends to be a disciple of the Way of Jesus—must renounce everything else that stands in the way of their commitment to this road.
Now, of course, Jesus is speaking in parable terms—about the quality of the integrity we bring to our intentions with one another, and to our intention to be a follower of Christ.
How we love, how we ‘hate’, and what is the integral quality of our intentions to follow Jesus. These things will matter toward the end of today’s message. For now, I just want to say that Luke’s Jesus doesn’t mince words, does he?
So picking up the narrative from what was read today, Jesus is musing about all these things to the crowd that’s following him. But the turn here is that some people get up close and personal with Jesus, and they are the undesirables—the tax collectors and the sinners.
Now, the tax collectors were seen to be Roman collaborators, people who by virtue of their role of taking money from the Israelite people—probably in extortionary proportions that made life quite unbearable—these tax collectors were contemptable in the eyes of all. And Luke conveys this contemptibility, lumping the tax collectors with garden variety sinners.
And the Pharisees and Temple officials were not having it—
They grumble, quite audibly:
“This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
But you know what? Rightfully so!
Sharing table fellowship was and is an occasion of close personal affinity. And the Hebrew Bible makes plain in numerous places that associating with evil people is to be strictly avoided.
Psalm 1 makes this plain:
God blesses those people
who refuse evil advice
and won't follow sinners
or join in sneering at God.
2 Instead, they find happiness
in the Teaching of the Lord,
and they think about it
day and night. (CEV)
The Pharisees were entirely in their rights to call out Jesus’ “radical and disturbing behaviour”[1] Because, for them, that is exactly what it was. And their response was their job.
But Jesus diffuses the situation by telling three parables about lostness and found-ness—we heard two of them—first of the lost sheep and then the lost coin.
Let’s hear these two parables again and allow me to take some liberty to freely paraphrase them.
Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and you lose one of them. Wouldn’t you leave the ninety-nine to fend for themselves and go after the lost sheep until you find it? 5 And when you find it, wouldn’t you call up your friends and neighbors and say, ‘Come over and celebrate with me, I’m overjoyed, because I have found my lost sheep.’ 7
8 “Or suppose a woman has ten hundred dollar bills[a] and loses one. Doesn’t she turn on all the lights, get out the broom and sweep all over the house, searching carefully until she finds it? 9 And when she finds it, she calls up her friends and neighbors and says, ‘Come over and celebrate with me—share in my joy. I have found my lost money.’
What is it about lostness. And what is it about found-ness?
Are these parables about us solving the lostness of the world?
I was able to spend some time at yesterday’s Saturday Breakfast and meet our volunteers, some from within our community and others who come because of what we are doing to support the broader community, one Saturday a month. I also met several guests, and had some delightful conversations with them about their lives.
It is not difficult to see and hear how they may be lost. Some have lost their comfort and security. Some are lost in loneliness. Some are lost in their struggle to contend with an unfriendly and unwieldy bureaucracy that intends to improve their lives, but throws up many barriers on the way.
This is one way to see lostness…but is it the way of this Gospel reading?
You’ll notice that the sheep and the coin were at first under the care and in the possession of the shepherd and the woman. At most they’ve been misplaced. If they could know, they would know to whom they belong. And so it is, for many who experience the misfortune of being unhoused, or unwell yet unable to access the healthcare system. They know whose they are. Most especially, for those who are people of faith, they can easily claim their foundness in Christ. They name it, clearly.
We had a gentleman here in the lobby earlier this week who was seeking help. And he needed our help…he needed us to call ambulance for him. But this man was not lost. He knew we were a place of safety, and that he belonged here; even though the last time we saw him was in 2019. He also knew that he has people out there who look out for him, and he could give us a phone number of a person to call who would follow up with him in the coming days. And, as a person of faith, he knew he could ask for and would receive our prayers. He was certainly not lost.
So if it is not the lostness of the world that Luke is speaking to, what is ‘lostness’ in Luke’s parable’s today?
Well, Debbie Thomas in her commentary offers that “These parables are about us, the insiders. The Church-goers, the bread and wine consumers, the bible readers. These are parables about lostness on the inside”[2]
She adds that “lostness is not a blasphemous aberration; it’s part and parcel of the life of faith.”
We are lost over and over again, and God finds us, over and over again.
Where are you lost, today?...
…Are you lost because of the news?
…Is it in regard to your health?
…Are you lost in grief?
…Are you lost about a family situation?
…Is it a matter of faith?
…Are you lost because forgiveness is too hard, and hatred (hyperbolized) is too easy?
We get lost. Every day.
I prefer to leave the lights off in my office, and I think people find that strange and wonder a bit about whether I’m lost in some way. It’s just easier on my eyes, but I do find comfort in not being overwhelmed by the light.
But--I’ll admit it—the news has made me feel lost. And I have my days where doubt and worry are stronger than faith and hope.
I take my comfort that “Jesus is seeking the wanderers yet”!
God is doggedly looking for me, and for you!
God is where the lost things are.
That secure place you’ve hidden yourself for safekeeping…God is there…
God is in the middle of lostness.
So, if you’re looking to find God, you need to Get Lost!
You need to know you are lost, and then consent to being found.
What does ‘being found’ look like.
Well, Richard Gillard says in The Servant Song
“I will hold the Christ-light for you
in the night-time of your fear;
I will hold my hand out to you,
speak the peace you long to hear.”[3]
Friends, what I have observed in my short time with you thus far, is that you bear the Christ-light for one another, and this light illumines a path that shows the ways out of lostness into being found.
And you speak peace…the peace you each long to hear, as you work out problems, as you bear one another’s burdens, as you celebrate your joys.
We don’t do this alone. We might get stuck in lostness all by ourselves, but we are only found through the intervention of another.
And it’s critical that we do this for one another, for if we can be found, here, in one another with God, how much more able would we be—by bearing the Christ-light, by speaking peace—to illumine the same pathway for others.
Once we have been found, what follows?
Well, we will have learned a thing or two
…about being vulnerable,
…about empathy,
…about humility
…and patience.
We will have learned who we are, and who God really is.
But most especially, in our ‘foundness’…
…there is rejoicing,
…celebration,
…a gathering of the spirits.
…The renewal of hope.
God is where the lost things are. God is present here.
Let us rejoice, for what once was lost has been found.
Amen.
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