We Are Lost

 Luke 15:1-11

September 14, 2025

 

The Pharisees and scribes are wondering why

Found Coin
Lisa Konkol

Jesus eats with those people.

Obviously the wrong people.

The tax collectors and sinners and the like.

Apparently, they are not up to snuff for them.

And in response, Jesus tells them this parable.

 

Jesus asks them:

“Which one of you, having a hundred sheep

and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine 

in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost?”

The answer in the Pharisees heads: No one would do that.

 

Today, we might get all sentimental and say,

“of course you would do that.”

Because we’re thinking of them like a pet,

they’re cute we named it George.

But if you have 100 of them, they’re not pets.

They’re business.

 

A reasonable shepherd would not leave 99 of

his sheep by themselves and go looking for one.

The other sheep would get lost too, it would be a big mess

and financially devastating.

 

And Jesus also asks:

If you lost a coin (that was worth about an hours pay)

Wouldn’t you spend a whole day of work looking for it,

and then when you found it, throw a party

(which probably cost more than the value of the coin you found?)

Would that be a wise thing to do?

The answer is no, a practical person wouldn’t do that either.

None of these make much financial sense, the math doesn’t work.

You’re gonna eventually go broke if you do any of that.

 

You don’t risk losing 99% of your flock just to find one percent.

You don’t spend the value of two coins trying to find one coin.

The math just doesn’t add up.

 

Last week, Jesus asked his followers if they calculated

the cost, but it seems from this kind of talk that Jesus

was not very good at calculating costs.

The religious leaders must have that Jesus was crazy

to even suggest it.

 

And that is the first point of Jesus stories today.

He’s just not that good at math.

 

And that’s because math doesn’t apply.

Because Jesus isn’t talking about sheep and coins.

He’s talking about people.

 

Now if you look at people only like numbers

and their benefits to society and to your goals,

like the religious leaders were doing,

then Jesus was doing a terrible job.

He’s not calculating the cost or considering

who he is being seen with and how

It is going to affect him in the long run.

He’s not considering what this will do to

his reputation and to his brand.

 

It just doesn’t make good sense to go looking

for one lost one if you’re talking about sheep and coins

if you’re talking about objects, possessions, things,

the math doesn’t add up.

 

But if we’re talking about lost children,

then it makes complete sense.

God doesn’t see people as commodities

and return on investments.

God sees us as people as beloved children.

So Jesus, as a reflection of God,

doesn’t use math or accounting to

figure who he should eat with.

 

He knows this is will probably cost him.

It’s going to cost him his honor and reputation

in the religious community,

and, in the end it will cost him his life.

But the cost doesn’t matter.

It’s worth it.

 

And this is good news for us.

Especially today.

Especially this week.

Because we are obviously lost.

This country as a whole is lost.

 

We have been lost to violence in all its forms.

We had a young woman randomly killed in Charlotte.

Yet another school shooting in Colorado.

From September 7th-13th there have been

455 gun deaths in the United States.

Which is horrifying, but actually average.

We have shown time and time again that we

love unregulated assault weapons more than we love children.

 

And then there was the killing of this

Political Commentator Charlie Kirk on

Wednesday which has caused a lot of fervor.

Now Charlie Kirk was not someone to idolize as some are doing.

His words were filled with dangerous rhetoric

He said that Democrats and liberals should be destroyed,

that gay and lesbian people should be imprisoned,

that transgender people were violent,

that black people were better off in slavery.

He couched all this in enough Christianity and

selective history and charisma to sound reasonable and faithful

but his words were divisive and dangerous

and not Christ like at all.

 

AND his killing is awful.

 

We can believe both things.

I did not like or respect Charlie Kirk,

I don’t believe he should not be celebrated or honored.

I thought his words were harmful.

And I also think that killing him was harmful.

 

Free speech is a basic right in this country,

and political violence is a special kind of horrible,

no matter who the victim or perpetrator is.

And as Christians, we’re called to love our enemies

and pray for those who cause harm to us.

 

But the response to this killing in this country

was to raise the temperature

and call for more political violence.

From so many people, including the president.

 

More violence is not an answer to violence.

We think it’s going to solve our problems,

or ease our desperation and fear.

But it just spirals us further into desperation and fear

and right into the hands of Satan every time.

 

We are lost.

We had so much promise as a country, but face it.

We are lost.

We’ve turned against ourselves and we decided

that consuming and destroying our own people

is the way to some kind of glory.

 

The columnist, David Brooks wrote an article and he said:

“we live in a fragmented society made up of individuals who have no conception of the common good, no way to come together to pursue a common good, no way to persuade one another what the common good might be, and indeed most of us believe that the common good does not and cannot exist.”

We are lost.

 

And when I’m in my worst and most hopeless,

I really feel like maybe this whole social experiment

of the Untied States might be a loss.

If I were calculating the cost, I sometimes think it might be better

if God just destroyed it all and see what grows out of the ashes.

 

In the first reading from Exodus.

We hear how the people that the God saved

from slavery in Egypt have turned on him.

God saved them, brought them to the promised land,

He was writing up the 10 commandments with Moses up

on Mount Sinai. Then while Moses was delayed

coming down from the mountain for a couple days,

they got worried about things and instantly turned.

Moses own brother Aaron had them melt all their gold jewelry

and they formed a golden calf for them to worship.

 

God took a break from the 10 commandments and

checked to see what was happening with the Israelites

at the bottom of the mountain and he gets really mad.

He calls the people stiff-necked, stubborn, won’t yield, hopeless.

God tells Moses, “get out of the way,

and let me consume these people with fire.

I’ll start all over again, and you and I will make a great nation.”

 

God’s plan was to wipe them out and start over again.

And I get it.  The minute they have some free time

and some fear, they turn on God and worship

some false god. It sounds a lot like us.

 

But Moses negotiates with God and says,

what would the Egyptians say?

That you brought the people out just to kill them?

 

And then Moses reminds God of God’s promises

to Abraham, and Isaac, and Israel,

Moses reminds them of the people that God loved.

These are your children.

And God changed God’s mind about the disaster

that he planned to bring on the people.

 

There’s a lot more wrangling: Moses gets mad at the people.

He breaks the 10 commandments.

He has to go back up the mountain and make them again.

God sends a little plague to remind them whose boss.

Moses implores God for forgiveness.

They make a new 10 commandments.

And they again restore the covenant

between God and God’s people.

 

It’s a complicated story like life is. It seems like God and

the Israelites are both negotiating how this whole

relationship will go forward.

But in the end, God clings to this description

which he declares when the 10 commandments

are finally presented:

 

“I am the Lord, a God merciful and gracious,

slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness”

 

This is God’s chosen identity from then out.

And God really lives into it going forward from there.

And this is the identity of God that

Jesus has come to share with us, and help us understand.

God is not a god of destruction, but is

abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

And God is going to stick with all God’s children,

no matter how stiff-necked we are.

Maybe it would make more sense on paper,

to just give up on the whole thing.

But we remember from our stories today,

that Jesus wasn’t very good at math.

 

God isn’t good at calculating the cost when

it comes to his children.

 

Jesus, why do you do this,

Why do you welcome sinners and eat with them?

Why do you entertain these stiff-necked

people who disappoint and follow false idols?

Why do you waste your time with the likes of us?

Because Jesus was sent to find the lost.

The lost sheep,

lost coins,

lost people,

and lost countries.

And God won’t give up until the lost are found.