Sermon: Lost Sheep and a Lost Coin

Date Preached: Sunday September 16th 2007

Bible Reference: Luke Chapter 15, verses 1-10

You’ve just moved house into your dream location – a quiet, secluded cul de sac backing onto a river near woods and fields. It’s your first Saturday night in your new home. Everything seems so peaceful and perfect and having got the kids settled you’re drifting nicely into sleep. Then without any warning all chaos breaks loose: loud music, amplified voices, cheering, even fireworks – all going on without a break into the small hours – keeping the children awake, driving you to utter distraction.  And you begin to wonder:

Is this going to happen every weekend?

Where on earth was the noise coming from?

(And) Why oh why hadn’t anybody told you about this before you bought the house?

But in the morning the explanations begin to come. No it wasn’t a regular occurrence. You discover that it was the local rugby club’s annual party, celebrating a cracking season where the team had topped the division and been promoted to the top flight (we wish!). You manage to return to tranquillity. But it leaves you thinking about how one person’s celebration can be really annoying for someone else, especially if they don’t understand the reason for the party.

Well the three parables in Luke 15 are told because Jesus was making a habit of having celebration parties with all the ‘wrong’ people, and some others thought it was a nightmare. All three stories are ways of saying: ‘this is why we’re celebrating – wouldn’t you have a party too if it was you? How could we not? 

And through these stories culminating in the story of the Father welcoming the prodigal – the recklessly wasteful good for nothing - son home after he’d completely blown it, we get a wide open window on what Jesus thought he was doing – and perhaps on what we should be doing to. 

At the heart of the trouble all this was causing was the character of the people Jesus was eating with on a regular basis. Who were they?

(1) Tax collectors? – well they were disliked and mistrusted not just because they were tax collectors (although perhaps not people’s favourite people, in any culture – & apologies to anyone who works for the Internal Revenue!). But they were hated because they were collecting money for Herod or the hated Romans, or both – so nobody really had much good to say about them. And if they were in regular contact with Gentiles as well – then there were some that considered them unclean.

(2) Sinners? -  well this is the more general category – and people disagree as to who precisely they were. They may just have been people who were too poor to know the law properly or to try and keep it. Certainly they were people regarded by the self-appointed experts as hopelessly irreligious, beyond the pale, out of touch with the demands of Israel’s law as they understood it. They didn’t dress right; eat right; worship or pray properly – they didn’t fit. Religion was for the proper people who knew how to behave. (I wonder does that sort of attitude sound at all familiar?) 

But let’s be clear, throughout this chapter Jesus isn’t saying that such people were simply okay and acceptable just as they stand. The message has always been clear - sinners must repent – turn away from their wrongdoing and start living differently. The lost sheep and lost coin are found (that’s the whole point!– and later the prodigal comes to his senses and returns home. But Jesus just has a very different idea from his religious critics about what repentance actually means and looks like. For these religious folks, nothing short of adopting their standards of purity and law-observance would be good enough. 

But for Jesus, when people follow him and his way, that is true repentance. And – although he doesn’t say this in so many words – but it’s implied – the Pharisees and legal experts who pride themselves on their religious show themselves need to repent in this way. ‘Righteous persons who need no repentance?’ – huh! Try saying the sentence with a smile and a question mark in your voice and you will, probably, be getting close to the irony Jesus really intended.

So that’s the point of the parables.  People are having their lives changed. That’s why a party is going on: all heaven is having a party, the angels are joining in – and if we don’t get in on the celebrations we’ll be out of tune with God’s reality. 

In the stories of the sheep and the coin, the punch line in each case depends of the Jewish belief that the two halves of God’s creation, heaven and earth, were meant to fit together and be in harmony with each other. If you discover what’s going on in heaven, you’ll discover how things are meant to be on earth - which is the point of praying “that God’s kingdom will come on earth as in heaven.” To the self-appointed religious folks – the Pharisees and scribes – the legal experts – the closest you could get to heaven was in the Temple; and worship there required strict purity from the priests – and the closest the rest could get to copying heaven was a similar strict and stultifying purity in ever miniscule aspect of life – with no let up. 

But Jesus is declaring that heaven was having a great, noisy, full-on party every time a sinner sees the light and begins to go God’s way. If earth-dwellers wanted to copy the life of heaven, they’d have a party too. That’s what Jesus was doing (and that’s why people wanted to be where he was). 

The particular sheep and coin weren’t themselves special (The coins, by the way, may well have been the woman’s savings, possibly her dowry – so that losing one would be both a personal and a financial disaster). There was a corruption of Jesus’ teachings about the sheep going around when someone added the idea that what Jesus was saying was ‘I love you more than the others’. But the whole point of the parable is that the only thing different about this sheep is that it was lost.  

Just try and imagine the impact of this on the repentant sinners hearing Jesus’ stories. They didn’t have to earn God’s love or curry favour with Jesus. He loved coming to look for them – seeking them out – and celebrating when he’d found them. 

And what Jesus did – and how the Pharisees hated this – was what God was doing. Heaven touching earth/earth touching heaven. 

And for us – now - today – the real challenge is for us to behave as a church with people in our community looking on in a way that makes them ask the kinds of questions to which stories of being lost and found and parties are the answer.

“Why are you doing something like that?”

“What’s going on?”

“What is it that makes you folks tick?”  

Do you know – as our behaviour, our conduct as Christians starts to provoke questions like this – then we’d get the chance to tell our own stories about finding something that was lost – perhaps telling our own stories of how we’ve been found. Because that’s what God has done in our lives.