September 14, 2025
Readings and Message
JEREMIAH 4: 11-12, 22-28
What we have before us this morning in the first reading from Jeremiah is the coming of the Babylonian invasion…and this is historical for it did happen and it basically wiped out most of Judah…Jeremiah puts the blame of this invasion upon the people themselves for they haven’t kept their covenant with God…the holocaust is going to happen and it’s their own fault…but…and this is a huge ‘but’…Jeremiah says that God will not make a ‘full end’….this means that there will always be hope and even when the Babylonians take over, God will seek them out and bring them home once again…the lost will be found…maybe each of us should take these words into ourselves…when we are lost, never despair, for God is with us – even in the darkest times…
1 TIMOTHY 1: 12-17
Our second reading is from 1 Timothy and just for some information, there is 1st Timothy and there is 2nd Timothy and if we put the letter of Titus also in this mix, we have what is called the Pastoral Epistles which in essence are letters focused upon the third and fourth generation of believers and deal with issues of leadership and administration…we’re not really sure who wrote these three letters in that they seem to steer away from Paul’s thoughts but they definitely have a Pauline tradition mixed in with them…whatever the truth may be on their authorship, these letters were included in the canon because the early church thought that they were valuable for the ongoing life of the church… what we have here today is really a mini-biography of the author and we might as well call the author Paul for the sake of any argument…
LUKE 15: 1-10
So our Gospel passage this morning focuses on nothing else than ‘finding the lost’…and we have two instances of ‘lost’ brought forward, the lost sheep and the woman with the lost coin…what’s interesting is that biblical language quite often is in triplets and guess what follows these two parables of ‘lost’?...the parable of the Prodigal Son…
Well…the lost ones are gathering around Jesus and not all the folks there find this to be a positive thing…the Pharisees and the teachers find this to be a reason for grumbling….Jesus calls the Pharisees and the scribes to be like shepherds and women – a challenge indeed when we remember that neither unclean shepherds nor women were able to fulfill the law’s demands as well as the Pharisees could…nonetheless, this triplet of “lostness” really can point to any of us at any time in our life…for don’t tell me that you’ve never felt lost – ever…
“ARE PARABLES GREAT INTELLIGENCE…or…
JUST SOME SORT OF RHETORIC?”
I can remember as a young child, growing up in the little town of Bowness, outside of Calgary, summer evenings…and during the slowly gathering darkness of the summer, all of the neighbourhood kids would be gathered in the area around our house and we would be playing “lost and found”…do you remember doing this too?...it can still be fun…
We had a barn near by and some old houses with beautiful yards to hide in…next door to us was a corral with horses and a whole bunch of buildings to hide in…a great place for “hide and seek”…but there was always one kid who spoiled the whole game…and he spoiled it because he was too good at hiding himself…every kid knew that in lost and found or “hide and seek” as we called it, you wanted to hide well – but not too well…eventually, you must be found…that was part of the game and this is what made it real…but this kid was great at hiding….he would sometimes go out of the boundaries of the playing area and this was against what we thought was right…sometimes he would go deeper into the woods where we didn’t go…or he would slide down some basement where nobody would go looking for him…
Do any of you know somebody who, even though maybe not a child, is really good at hiding?...well anyway…one by one, we would all be found, except for this one boy…and we would say, “Ah shucks, you found me” but this kid would never be found and so…we would start another game and he would eventually come back and he’d be really mad at all of us… “You know”, he’d say to all of us, “this game is hide and seek not hide and give up!”…
But there are some people who are so good at hiding…so good at camouflaging themselves…so good at tucking themselves away where nobody would dare look…they just ruin the game…they ruin the game in their “lostness”…and this becomes the central theme of Jesus’ three little parables found in Luke…to find those who are in their places of being lost and bringing them back, to whatever back may look like… in his parables it was back to the sheepfold…back to the place where the rest of the coins were saved…and back to the family in terms of the Prodigal Son….and at the very beginning of this passage in Luke Jesus is getting real close with the tax collectors and what the biblical text calls ‘sinners’…and why would he associate himself with such folk?... well, because while other religious leaders of the day saw their task as being to keep themselves in quarantine – away from the possible sources of moral and spiritual infection – Jesus saw himself as a doctor who’d come to heal the sick…there’s no point in a doctor staying in quarantine is there?...he or she would never do their job…and this is what Jesus was called to do and what he chose to do!...
But in this crowd of people that are surrounding Jesus, we have different factions from the disciples being close to hear and receive instruction…to the Pharisees and Sadducees who are keeping tabs on Jesus’ radical teachings…to the people who don’t really belong anywhere so they are called ‘tax-collectors’ or ‘sinners’ just because they’ve lived all of their lives on the fringes and no-one wants to hang out with them for fear of their own reputation…of your own reputation…wouldn’t especially be your dinner list would it?...
And the side conversations begin… “Who invited them?”… “Why would Jesus embrace that woman or that man?”… “Does he know who they are?”… “And who is this ‘Jesus’ guy anyway?”…
Jesus understands these questions and begins to address the growing division in the crowd…and he does this by talking about the nature of God…and guess what…he approaches this on an economic term – something which all the folks would understand…and we even do this today…in 1988, when The United Church of Canada made its decision to embrace a different sexual orientation than maybe your own, folks spoke with their money…Mission and Service funds dropped dramatically as voices said, “None of my offering is going to go to the national church – whatsoever!”…so Jesus knows that money talks and so he uses this as his focus…for example, the shepherd values the health and the safety of his flock, his source of income…
The woman values the hard-earned money she has scraped together… the parent values the happiness and well-being of his or her children…
So think of that thing which is the most precious in your life and what it would be like to lose it…something on which you place extreme value, goes missing…I believe that you might be devastated would you not?...
And it’s not that you can’t continue because you can…people adapt but life then becomes somewhat incomplete…part of the whole is missing…
Singer – songwriter Joan Osbourne sang these words years ago (35 years ago to be exact) and Alanis Morissette made it into a hit single: “What If God Was One Of Us”…just a slob like one of us…just a stranger on the bus…trying to make his way home…if God had a face, what would it look like?...Back up in heaven all alone…nobody callin’ on the phone… ‘Cept for the Pope maybe in Rome”…
And Joan sang these words to express the longing of the Lost to be found…and Jesus understands that those on the fringe of the community are integral to what the community in all of its fullness should be…until they return – the community is incomplete…until we open ourselves to bringing in others, we are incomplete…and folks…these parables call the community then and the community today to open our doors and to rejoice…laugh!...be glad!...are parables great intelligence?....Yup!...and they are there for us to seek the understandings which they portray…may the words of my mouth be a testimony to the love of God, the one who seeks the Lost….Amen.