14th Sunday after Pentecost, Year C
Proper 19
Sept. 14, 2025
Luke 15:1-10
Today is what we might call “grumbling and rejoicing” Sunday or “Lost and Found” Sunday. Kind of like the way Marty hides a Yeti in our weekly newsletter–prompting us to look for the lost! I will say that some among us clearly did not grow up in the mountains because they’ve been looking for a to-go cup, not a fictional furry monster. (Point to Deacon.)
Today we heard Deacon Vicki read the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. Yet there are three lost and found parables told by Jesus in this same conversation. The one missing in our reading today is the parable of the Lost (or Prodigal) Son because we read that parable usually in Lent. However, they all three belong together because Jesus builds on the theme by starting with one in a hundred sheep lost, to one in ten coins lost, to one in two sons lost. The point being that even one is important to God and not a throw away.
Just in case you’re not familiar with the Prodigal Son story, the younger son has demanded his portion of the inheritance before his father’s death and goes and squanders it and finds himself living among pigs. So he heads back home to ask if he can work as a servant for his father, but the Father has already been looking for his Son to come home and meets him and welcomes him and puts on a huge feast to celebrate that his son has come home. But the older son is not happy and grumbles about how unfair that is.
So who is Jesus addressing with these three parables? To begin, it is important to pay attention to the opening words of the passage. “Tax collectors and sinners” are coming to Jesus. Tax collectors were often-despised individuals who gathered income on behalf of the Roman Empire. For many, they represented morally compromised people who were aligned with the oppressor of the Jewish people.1 The sinners were notorious sinners. Everyone at this gathering knew the reputations and the nature of the things these folks had done. The grumblers, the Pharisees and scribes, are taking great issue with the kinds of folks Jesus eats with.
I think we’ve figured out already that Jesus likes a good party. He is frequently found at a dinner table with all sorts and often compares the Kingdom of Heaven to a banquet. And many righteous people, today we might say “good Christians” even, like the Pharisees and scribes of Jesus’ day, grumble about a God who “welcomes sinners and eats with them” and rejoices over it.
Too much of our faith has unfortunately been shaped by the misunderstanding that we are sinners in the hands of an angry God rather than the broken being invited to sit at a banquet with Jesus. The kind of hospitality Jesus offers to folks who seem questionable in our society is a radical hospitality that leads to “grumbling” among the religious elite. Quite frankly we often find ourselves still grumbling about this kind of thing even today. Yet the church should be full of folks who are having a hard time getting it togetther–because that is who Jesus invites to a banquet!
We have the crowds pressing in and gathering around Jesus for a variety of reasons. Let’s look at who all is there at this dinner party. The disciples are there to receive instruction, probably still a little unsure as to what Jesus is up to and a little concerned about his PR image. There are the people who do not really belong anywhere because they have lived so much of life on so many fringes. They are the people no one else wants to hang around with, for fear that they might be implicated by their reprehensible reputations. The Pharisees and scribes were disciplined law-keepers and they are there to keep tabs on Jesus’ radical teachings. As individuals who sought to carefully follow Jewish teachings, they would’ve understandably been scandalized to see Jesus, in the words of the psalmist, sitting in the company of “the wicked.”
Yet here they are, all of them, eating with Jesus. If you are, after all, known by the company you keep, Jesus has completely thrown the community into a panic. The whispering starts, “Who invited them? Why would Jesus embrace this woman, this man? Does he not know who they are, what they do for a living? He talks of godly things on the one hand, and yet he eats with ‘them’ on the other.” In this context, Jesus begins to tell the grumblers a parable and launches into stories of the faithful shepherd, the persistent woman, and the prodigal father.
Now Jesus responds to the growing divisions in the crowd by describing the nature of God in terms that matter to almost everyone. He talks to them in economic terms and in terms about the things they value.
In the first story God is depicted as a faithful working-class shepherd who values every sheep in the flock. The health and safety of a flock is important as it is the flock owner’s source of financial stability. If one is missing, the whole is incomplete. God is also a persistent woman, like the widow who so values every coin because it is all she probably has to live on. And God is a father who does not disown his head-strong, self-destructive son, but waits with an anguished heart for the first sign of his returning. God’s nature is love, and love looks like one who goes out tirelessly searching, because the one who is lost is so lost that she cannot find her way back home. And it’s interesting that the lost sheep and a lost coin do absolutely nothing to be found. The action is God’s, looking and searching until the lost is found.
Jesus is telling these stories to the grumblers, the religious, not the tax collectors and sinners. They’ve already been found and are quite happy to eat at the table with others and enjoy the celebration. Eating isn’t catching a quick bite at the local coffee house and moving on. Eating–that is, sharing table fellowship–is a mark of camaraderie, acceptance, and friendship. And so in eating with tax collectors and sinners, Jesus is demonstrating a deep and abiding acceptance of those society has deemed beyond the moral pale.2 Jesus is trying to get those who believe they are already in the right to move from grumbling about the others who have been invited to the party, to joining in the celebration of those who were found.
I think we can all think of instances where you might refuse to go to a dinner party because of who is going to be there. There are people we have in mind that we don’t think deserve to be in God’s presence or anyone else’s. We question their choices, their lifestyle, and the company they keep. God might invite us to a similar banquet today, and many of us might find an excuse to not attend because of who might be present.
The Love of God, though, desires to transform our hearts and minds, and move us from grumblers to rejoicers. Yes, there are those who will say no thanks, but any soul that God has found stuck on the edge of a cliff or rolled under the carpet, unnoticed and forgotten, and brought back is the missing piece to making a community whole again. God’s desire is that we rejoice with the angels in heaven over that one. Whether or not we think they are worthy.
The coin and the sheep aren’t repentant. They are simply found. They take no action, and have no agency. It is the shepherd and the woman who do all the “work,” and then call their friends to a celebration. They are also not involved in their being lost. A coin doesn’t lose itself, nor can a sheep really be blamed for wandering off. Others see the sinners as being totally at their own fault and places blame for their “lostness.” Instead, Jesus shifts to the amazing effort that God is willing to do to claim and celebrate those who are found.3 The prodigal son comes home with a speech he has prepared but he never gets to say it because the father’s love is so great at the sight of his son that he is immediately embraced, not cross examined.
The murmurings of the Pharisees and scribes would judge Jesus by the company he kept, implying that the one who shows hospitality to the sinner is himself a sinner. The sinner would see things differently. Jesus understands the struggle with being lost, the emptiness of being separated, and the struggle to return. Jesus does not turn away from the sinners, but toward the lost, to make a place for them, to welcome them home.
Jesus understands that those on the fringe of the community are integral to what the community in all its fullness should be. Until they return, the community is incomplete. These parables call the community to open its doors and rejoice. This call is repeated again and again. I wonder what it would look like if we were to embody God’s expansive embrace? When we grumble, and boy do we grumble, can that grumbling be transformed to rejoicing?
Sinners and tax collectors gather at the table with Christ? Rejoice! Laugh! Be glad! They have returned home and now sit in the presence of God. The sheep who wandered off from the rest of the flock, lost in the thicket, is now safe and sound! Hallelujah! The coin that fell through the cracks was easily forgotten but is blessedly retrieved. We can feast! Hope is restored! That is how it is in the household of God.
- E. Tracy Clark. Working Preacher Commentary, “Commentary on Luke 15:1-10” ↩︎
- David Lose, Working Preacher. ↩︎
- Pulpit Fiction, Proper 19C. https://www.pulpitfiction.com/notes/proper19c/#Luke15= ↩︎
Magdalena's Musings 