Sermons
March 23, 2025 (3rd Sunday in Lent)
Land of the Lost
Luke 15:1-32
Have you ever lost something really important?
I don’t mean when you pull your clothes out of the dryer and find that you’ve lost one of a pair of socks, or when you’re digging around looking for a lid to match the plastic container you’ve put leftovers in, and there just isn’t one. Where did it go? It’s not like it grew legs and walked away…but it sure isn’t where it’s supposed to be.
No, I mean something really important.
During Lent sometimes, I take off all my rings other than my wedding ring. I don’t know why that is a thing I think I should do, but I generally do it. Right now I’ve got my wedding ring, the rings I wear on my thumbs, and my fitness tracker ring, and that’s it. My hands feel a little bit naked.
The first year I was here, on Ash Wednesday I noticed that I had forgotten to take off the sapphire-and-diamond band Mike had bought me on our tenth anniversary, which I normally wore on the same finger as my wedding ring.[1] Just before I went into the sanctuary for the service, I took it off, and put it in some safe place so I’d know where it was when I wanted to put it back on. I forgot about it that night, and when I thought about it again, I could not find it.
I haven’t seen it since.
It seems to me like I put it in the pencil drawer of my desk, but I have emptied that drawer out several times, and it’s not there. I’ve been through all the other drawers, and it’s not there, either.
If you’ve been in my office and seen the top of my desk, you’re probably thinking, “It could be there and how would you ever know, with all the stuff that’s piled there?” But I hadn’t even been here a month at that point, not nearly enough time to accumulate a bunch of stuff on my desk.[2]
Have you ever lost something like that?
My usual response when I have lost—or, more properly, misplaced—something is, “It’ll turn up.” Of course, it’s sort of a universal truth that things generally “turn up” right after you give up and replace them. But oftentimes, things do turn up. (My ring, however, hasn’t.)
We discovered we had misplaced our safe deposit box keys last summer. They give you two keys, and I had one and Mike had the other one, and we couldn’t find either of them when I needed my birth certificate to renew my driver’s license. The bank can’t open the box unless you can produce a key,[3] so I headed home to look harder; and I found one of them in a desk drawer there—something else we’d put in a “safe place” so we’d know right where it was when we needed it. But we still didn’t know where the other one was…until a few weeks later when I changed purses and found it in an inside pocket of a bag I hadn’t used for months.
Have you ever lost something like that?
Today’s reading from Luke contains three parables, which are all pretty familiar to most people. The three are all about people losing things. Luke likes to pair parables featuring men with parables featuring women, and that’s done with the first two parables here.
In the first parable, a shepherd caring for a hundred sheep notices one is missing. I’m a city girl and know little about any kind of livestock, especially not sheep; but I’ve heard that they have a tendency to get lost because they go from one clump of grass to the next without paying much attention to the world around them. Maybe that’s what happened to the lost sheep Jesus was talking about.
When the shepherd noticed that one of his sheep was missing, he left the rest of them—were they safely in their pen, or still out in the wilderness, possibly grazing themselves lost, too?—to go look for the lost one. He looked high up and low down, calling the lost sheep’s name, peeking under bushes and in piles of brush. He climbed up a tree so he could see the whole field and all the ones around it, and, with his heart in his throat, he even looked over cliffs and embankments in case the poor wee creature had fallen. He looked and looked and looked, until finally he found it and brought it back to the fold where it could be safe with the others.
99 sheep weren’t lost, but one was, and when he found it he went to everybody he knew and invited them to a party in the lost sheep’s honor.
Next we hear about a woman who had a collection of coins. Some people say she was keeping those coins to pay for her wedding at some point, but the parable doesn’t say for sure. But they were important to her—maybe that was her entire life savings; who knows?—so when one of them went missing, she dropped everything to look for it.
She cleaned her house, looked under the furniture, shined a light into all the dark corners, maybe even got one of those telescoping cameras and looked down the heat vents in case it had fallen in there. When she found it, she, like the shepherd, called all her friends and kinfolk and threw a party in honor of her coin that had been lost.
It occurs to me that the notion of throwing a party over a coin that had been lost is sort of ridiculous. Even throwing a party when a lost sheep—one of a hundred—is found is a little odd. I’m sure Jesus knew that. Parables generally contain some odd detail, something that’s just a tad unexpected, meant to set us just a tiny bit off kilter so we think about what we’ve heard.
A shepherd throws a party over one found sheep? A woman throws a party because she found one coin? That’s not how the world works!
But parables aren’t about this world. They’re about God’s kingdom, which is more real than the real world but also sort of hard to wrap our minds around.
Parables also often contain comparisons from something small to something big: “If you…, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him?”[4]
“Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight…Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.”[5]
And so, in this series of parables, Jesus starts with two parables about somewhat small things in the grand scheme of things, and then the third parable raises the stakes. But that parable is about something that happens in the real world.
Years ago when I was working at the council of churches in Portland, one of our programs was tasked with providing information about destructive cults, and helping people find resources to get loved ones out of such cults. A lot of the time when someone joins a cult, they cut off contact with their family and friends, and it has often happened that the family doesn’t have any idea where their loved one is.
The manager of that program, whose name was Kent, told us a story about such a family. He had had contact over the years with a couple who were looking for their daughter, with whom they’d lost touch after she joined a cult in college. Over and over again Kent and the woman’s parents had gotten frustratingly close to catching up with her, only to have her disappear again as she apparently bounced from one cult to another.
They finally found her in March of 1997.
She had gotten into the Heaven’s Gate cult that believed a spaceship was hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet and would come get them as soon as they died and resurrect them into some kind of glorious extraterrestrial eternity.[6] She was found among the 39 members of that cult who had committed mass suicide.
The third parable in Luke contains a heartbreaking element of truth—as young people grow up, they do sometimes get caught up in things that lead them to be distant or estranged from their families, and those things can be destructive.
Oftentimes when we read, or study, or preach the third in this series of parables, we put ourselves in the story as the younger son. For some of us that is exactly where we belong—some of us have gone astray and gotten lost, and ended up having to swallow our pride and go home. But that’s not everyone’s story. It’s certainly not mine.
If I tell the story from the point of view of the older brother, it’s a better fit with my experience. I don’t mean that my family is literally like that, with a hyper-responsible older sibling and a younger wild child. But I do mean that I’ve generally behaved myself and done what I’m supposed to do, and that doesn’t tend to make headlines. (My sister has, too, which is why we aren’t literally like the family in the parable.)
What if we imagine ourselves in the position of the main characters in all three parables, who have lost something precious?
It’s one thing to pull our laundry out of the dryer and discover that one of our socks has gone to that mysterious alternate universe where odd socks and Tupperware lids go;[7] it’s quite another not to be able to find something valuable—or someone we care about.
What would you do to find something or someone like that? What lengths would you go to? Would you put your own life at risk?
Would it surprise you at all to know that all three of these parables is about how far God will go to seek out and save lost humanity? Would it surprise you at all that Jesus Christ has revealed to us a God willing to lay down his very life for the sake of this world that he loves?
[1] That might sound expensive, but I happen to know he gave $75 for it at a secondhand store. That doesn’t take away from its sentimental value, though.
[2] As I was writing this, it occurred to me that I hadn’t ever checked the side pockets of my desk blotter to see if it had gotten in there. Unfortunately, after I cleared the blotter off and looked there, the ring is still missing.
[3] Actually, they can, but they have to drill out the lock and it costs the customer $300. That was a pretty powerful incentive to keep looking.
[4] Matthew 7:7-11
[5] Luke 12:6-7
[6] The History Channel’s website has a story about the cult and its mass suicide, which was discovered on March 26, 1997. http://history.com/this-day-in-history/heavens-gate-cult-members-found-dead.
[7] There’s a Sniglet for this alternate plane of existence (there’s always a Sniglet): “hozone.”