Proper 19, Year C 2025: Luke 15:1-10

There’s an old hymn that begins “there were ninety and nine that safely lay / In the shelter of the fold / But one was out on the hills away / Far off from the gates of gold / Away on the mountains wild and bare / Away from the tender Shepherd’s care.” It’s a lovely sentiment. Unfortunately, it is inaccurate. The song ignores an important word and therefore tames the text so much that it takes most of the risk out of what the shepherd does.

Luke and Matthew both contain this story about a shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine behind to find the single lost sheep. But they aren’t left behind in gates of gold, or safely in the shelter of the fold. Matthew has the sheep “on the mountain”. Luke is even more stark in where the ninety-nine are: “in the wilderness”. So, unlike the song suggests, it isn’t just the one sheep who is on the “on the mountains wild and bare”, it’s the ninety-nine as well.

Today we read the first two in a series of three parables about finding something that was lost. We began with a shepherd leaving behind the ninety-nine sheep in search of a single lost sheep. Our second story is of a woman who loses one of her ten silver coins - the Greek word translated as coin is drachmas, worth about a day’s wage for a laborer. The value of the coin and the sheep are roughly equivalent. It’s hard to figure out what, exactly, the value of each was, but the point is that both the woman and the man have lost something of significant value.

Sometimes we get lost in ways where we are easier to find, or where the risk of trying to find us is lower. The risk of the woman losing the rest of her coins while she searches for the lost one is pretty close to zero. Assuming she’s in her own, safe home, which seems like a fair assumption because she goes and tells her neighbors when she finds her coin, she has far more to gain than to lose by tearing the house apart to find that coin. 

But the risk the shepherd entered into by leaving the ninety-nine remaining sheep is far greater. He’s willing to risk those ninety-nine scattering to find the one missing. A colleague of mine worked in a parish where there were some people who raised sheep and asked one of them, “Was this man a good shepherd?” to which the man responded, “no, he was an insane shepherd. You would never leave those sheep.” But he understood that that was the point of Jesus’ rhetoric. His pastoral audience would know that the risk was insane. Jesus was saying that, to God, there is no risk that you are not worth.

Sometimes we are unaware that we are lost. The sheep certainly could have just been grazing away, unaware that it was too far from the rest of the flock or its shepherd. I was with my kids at the Antelope Park playground. That playground is hard to get around if you’re too tall to criss-cross under the equipment. So I had my eye on my two-year-old. I swear I was watching her. And all of a sudden I couldn’t see her. As I circled the park I grew more and more panicked until I spotted her, on another piece of equipment, playing away without a care in the world. We are sometimes like my two-year-old - so caught up in our own business that we don’t notice what we’re doing. She would’ve noticed she was lost eventually, but the longer we wait before looking up and noticing that we might not be where God is calling us to be, the longer it takes to get straightened out.

Sometimes we actively get lost through our own bad choices, as we see in the third story, which is left out of today’s text. Jesus drives home the point he makes at the end of each of the first two stories, that “there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” and that “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents”, and Jesus reiterates that point by the telling of that third story. We heard it back on the fourth Sunday in Lent: the story of the lost, or prodigal, son. It’s the story about a younger son who requests his inheritance early, then goes and squanders that inheritance. While broke and feeding the pigs, he has an epiphany - he could go, apologize to his father, and request work as one of his hired hands. But his father rejoices at his return, throwing a party because his lost son has been found.

These are all stories that, while the titles we give them are that they are lost - the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son - they are all stories about things that are found and found with rejoicing. Finding and restoring the lost gives pleasure to God. But this joy is also the offense of the Gospel - and is why it’s important to notice the inclusion of the story of the lost son. Because it’s easy for us to understand celebrating the return of the lost sheep and the lost coin. No one would argue the sheep or the coin getting lost was its own fault - even if the sheep wandered off, most of us wouldn’t say, “well, it shouldn’t have done that, tough for the sheep.” 

But celebrating the return of the lost son gives us pause. Because not only would we say the son getting lost was his own fault, the text says so too! The son’s whole plan is to return home and take accountability. To repent. In the Gospel of Luke, repentance is not only an obligation, but a gift or an opportunity. In the words of commentator Fred Craddock, “Would it not be better for him, a better witness to the neighbors, and a better demonstration of the righteousness of God if he were taught a lesson he would never forget?” But he was taught a lesson he would never forget: that his father’s love and forgiveness is boundless. His father is more grateful for the safe return of his son than he is upset about the loss of things. And we are taught that God’s righteousness isn’t human righteousness. That God will never cease searching us out, that God’s forgiveness doesn’t have an expiration date, and that God is always there to help us out of a mess, even when it is a mess of our own making.

Growing up, I had a teacher that would always say, “the first rule of holes is, when you’re in one, stop digging. Then you look up and start climbing up.” We can always stop digging. There is no hole too deep to look up and hand God our shovel. To accept his outstretched hand. Because God will never stop looking for us. Amen.