A sermon for the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 14, 2025. The scriptures are Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28, Psalm 14, 1 Timothy 1:12-17, and Luke 15:1-10.
Who doesn’t love a good “lost and found” story?
Just last week, a greyhound dog in Arkansas who had been missing for two years turned up in a Walmart parking lot and now Wade has been reunited with his family.
A 17th century painting of the crucifixion by Peter Paul Rubens was found in a Paris mansion, having been lost for years.
And this summer, a Canadian man searched through the trash at the local dump and was able to retrieve his wife’s wedding rings, which had fallen off, and accidentally got mixed into the trash while she was cleaning up.
Whenever we hear these stories of something or someone who has been lost, and then found, there’s a feeling of excitement, of joy, really.
This kind of celebration over finding or being found, is the kind of spirit Jesus is offering in today’s Gospel. Jesus says “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents,” over each of us, when we turn or re-turn to God.
In the first scripture lesson today, Jeremiah preaches to a people who are still lost, still cut off from God, as though they’ve turned their backs on God. “…. The people are foolish, they do no longer know God; they are like little children babbling and not listening, … they have no understanding.” Sometimes we feel lost because of sin. But other times, it seems to just happen as a by-product of life.
People can feel lost for all kinds of reasons. People sometimes get lost in the busyness of a new city. They leave a smaller town, go to school, or move for work to a new city and quickly fall into a new pattern of work and striving. Sometimes such a person becomes lost in the work or lost in the attempt to become something for other people. Or, there are layoffs, funding cuts, reorganization. Those who await trials or convictions in our prisons, and those caught in our broken immigration system sometimes seem “lost,” even though a number can sometimes say where they might be kept temporarily.
People can sometimes feel lost in place. Alzheimer’s or dementia can take a person to some far away place. Disease, drugs or addictions can make a person lost from family but also lost to himself. And then there’s the euphemism we so often hear for death—“I’ve lost my grandmother. Or, I’ve lost my spouse.” But so often it’s not the loved one who is lost. That person is very much found in the heart and heaven of God. But it’s US—it’s you and me, the surviving, who feel lost.
However the loss happens, whenever we feel it or know someone who is overtaken by it, the question can arise (in a lot of us, anyway), “Where is God?” Have we lost God, too? Where is God when someone can’t find their way out of addiction? Where is God when someone’s mind no longer allows her to recognize her family? Where is God when people die senseless deaths?
Our scriptures today tell us exactly where God is. God is there. God is here. God is wherever God needs to be, seeking the lost, doing whatever it takes, changing divine plans, changing the course of history if it takes that, just to save and find one lost person.
The second reading has the Apostle Paul explaining to Timothy how he, himself was lost, until Christ came for him. Paul had hunted down Christians, he had persecuted them, and he had done all he could to undermine the way of Jesus and the people who followed him. But in what Paul describes as the “utmost patience” God found Paul, and that helped Paul find himself.
In the Gospel, we see a God who will go to desperate means for us. God will do whatever it takes to find someone, and to bring that person home.
Jesus tells the story about a shepherd who has 99 sheep. One wanders off and can’t be found, so the shepherd leaves the 99 and pursues the one.
There is a lost coin. A coin that has fallen out of reach, or has gotten behind something, or has seemed to disappear altogether. So, the woman stops what she’s doing and basically turns her whole house upside-down to find the lost coin.
The point in all of these stories is that God goes out of his way to find what is lost, to re-claim what is lost, to recover and restore anything and anyone who is lost. God reaches out for us. God looks for us. God does not stop calling our name.
I learned an important lesson about the seemingly when I was first ordained and was leading a simple worship service at a nursing home. At this little service, my rotation was once a month, and it took a lot of energy to try to be present, to be “with,” and to be engaged, when only about five or six people seemed alert, and another twenty or so seemed— well, they seemed sort of “lost.” On one particular day, I had led them in singing a hymn, and the five faithful helped me sing it. Then, I invited them to join me in reading Psalm 23, which was printed in a large printed card for them to use. The five faithful people joined in. But so did several others. One woman, in particular, who never spoke and never looked one in the eye, but always seemed far away in another world almost—her lips began to move, as she recalled from some deep, old place, the words of a Good Shepherd who finds us.
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” God leads us into green pastures—not that we’re cows or sheep, but the green pastures become a symbol for whatever is for us a place of rest and refuge, a place of nurture and sustenance. God lead us beside still waters, stilling the rapids of our life, slowing us down, and collecting us in one place. God restores our soul. Even when we walk through the “valley of the shadow of death,” we have nothing to fear, because God is there. Even if we don’t see God, even if we don’t particularly feel God in that moment—God is there. Even when (as we recalled this week on the Anniversary of September 11) there are those who die all too suddenly, those whose lives are taken– God nevertheless calls, God loves, and God welcomes by name.
Psalm 23 reminds us that God leads us into a place where there’s an enormous feast, a feast so big that it includes not only everyone we’ve ever loved, but even our enemies, transformed into friends. There in the full presence of God, in the fullness of love, God anoints us and calls us by name.
No one and nothing stays lost from God. God seeks and searches and calls out by our truest name, and calls us into love, into laughter, and into life everlasting. As the church, it’s our job to help one another hear God’s calling. Whether we are the lost who are found, or whether we are among those who fling open the door and welcome those who return—we are, all of us, called to join in the celebration.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.