Finding Who Wants to be Found

“Finding Who Wants to Be Found”

September 14, 2025 Cobleskill United Methodist Church, Pastor Anna Blinn Cole

Luke 15:1-10 (CEB)

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost 

The Parable of the Lost Sheep

15 All the tax collectors and sinners were gathering around Jesus to listen to him. ² The Pharisees and legal experts were grumbling, saying, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

³ Jesus told them this parable: ⁴ “Suppose someone among you had one hundred sheep and lost one of them. Wouldn’t he leave the other ninety-nine in the pasture and search for the lost one until he finds it? ⁵ And when he finds it, he is thrilled and places it on his shoulders. ⁶ When he arrives home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Celebrate with me because I’ve found my lost sheep.’ ⁷ In the same way, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who changes both heart and life than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need to change their hearts and lives.

⁸ “Or what woman, if she owns ten silver coins and loses one of them, won’t light a lamp and sweep the house, searching her home carefully until she finds it? ⁹ When she finds it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Celebrate with me because I’ve found my lost coin.’ ¹⁰  In the same way, I tell you, joy breaks out in the presence of God’s angels over one sinner who changes both heart and life.”

I don’t know about your family, but in my family, we lose things a lot.  There is always some toy that is in a state of being lost forever then there are the wallets and the keys and the hairbrush and so on and so forth.  It seems like almost every day I have to recruit one of the others in my household to help me locate my phone.  And this loss of my cell phone wasn’t just limited to times when I was home this summer.  As the crew that went to Iona could tell you there were some tense moments before our plane left Boston when my phone was no longer in my pocket where it always is and a search party was alerted.  Much relief and much celebrating happened when the phone was located inside the rental car we had left behind.  

I have no doubt that you have also experienced the emotional rollercoaster it is to have something valuable and important go missing unexpectedly and the frantic search that then unfolds.  

Our scripture verses today are two of the most well-known parables Jesus tells and they strike a chord with us because we can all relate to what it feels like to lose something and then search for it.  

The nature of a parable is that it’s a story about ordinary things and ordinary people that tell us something extraordinary about God.  What are the things that are lost?   A shepherd with 100 sheep loses one sheep.  And a woman with 10 coins loses one coin.  The sheep and the coin make a good connection point to people of Jesus’ day who would have known, maybe, these exact situations themselves.  But it’s okay if you’ve never lost a sheep before because the story is not really about sheep or coins.  It’s about God’s nature.  

The parables are a metaphor.  God is both the shepherd looking for his sheep and God is the woman looking for her coin.  God is the one searching until what was lost has been found.  The point here is less about how things got lost in the first place, but the effort the shepherd and the woman go to pursue what is lost until it is found.  The shepherd, literally, puts everything else on hold.  The entire rest of his flock he leaves alone.  It doesn’t say how long he looks but that when he does find the sheep, the shepherd is so overjoyed that he carries the sheep home on his shoulders, a place of rest and comfort and then invites his neighbors over to celebrate.  

A woman searches her home carefully with a lighted lamp.  Every dusty corner.  Under every object scattered about.  Places where it would make no sense to find it, but she searches there anyway.  She searches until it’s found.  Her joy is palpable.  “Celebrate with me, friends!” she calls to her neighbors.  Over a coin?  Yes, over a coin.  It was missing and now it’s found.  It’s as simple and as profound as that. 

Jesus tells us these parables because they tell us some things about the nature of God.  By casting God in the characters of the searching shepherd and woman, the first thing we learn about God is that God’s priority is not with the perfect and found.  God isn’t satisfied by having a majority of present sheep or 90% of the coins.  God is most interested in who is not there and where they might be.  The second thing we learn about God in these parables is that changing hearts and lives in the midst of despair is not only possible, but it’s the source of God’s deepest joy.  Ours is a God that doesn’t just reward us for being right and living well.  God loves us back into the fold; God loves us into life itself.  God’s mission is to bring wholeness to all, not just the few who already have it figured out. 

A common parallel made with this story and our present times is that those within the walls of the religious institution are not always going to be God’s focus when there are others outside of the walls who need God’s searching love.  This is not a bad parallel and it’s humbling for us to remember that sometimes we are the ones already in the flock and God’s attention is not always directed on us.  It’s healthy to remember that we are one small part of a bigger world, not at the center. 

But there’s another dimension to this, too.  Generally speaking, we are living through times when feeling lost is almost a universal feeling right now.  The news cycle and internet algorithms demand numbness from us.  Our screens flash from scenes of war or violence in one frame to ads for sunglasses and mattresses in the next frame.  Each and every day we run into a debate about what is true and what are the facts.  We listen to leaders tell us not to do things that they themselves are doing.  It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of apathy or, alternatively, despair.  How is anyone at all not a little bit lost right now?  

And so, the question posed by these parables becomes more of how does God find us when we are this lost, as a society and a people?  

…

Last week we had a different kind of sermon.  I posed a question: what is a meaningful invitation you’ve received?  And you all chimed in.  

• Invitation to join CUMC in membership 

• Invitation to go to lunch with someone at a new church

• Invitation, two stories like this, actually, to sit at a table with others when you didn’t know where you were going to sit

• Invitation to join a fraternity that made a point of being inclusive to people other fraternities didn’t welcome.

• Invitation to volunteer at the Thrift Store

• Invitation to attend the Block Party.

All of these meaningful invitations had something in common.  The invitation brought someone from an outer edge into an inner community.  The invitations brought people together.  They built something better because with that person now included the community was more complete.

Invitations have that kind of power.  The power of drawing in.  The power of breaking into isolation.  The power of searching and finding.  An invitation’s power is that it’s like a lamp that lights the dark corners and finds what wants to be found.  

The critical challenge before God right now, and us the people of faith who believe in a God of love, is to break through the empires of fear and isolation that want us to be silent and afraid.  To use instead the power of invitation to draw our circles wider.  To search for one another’s humanity and to celebrate when we find it.  Let me repeat that: our task right now is to search for one another’s humanity- the humanity that is getting buried and lost right now under the weight of the world- to find that humanity within all of us and to celebrate in community when we find it.

I truly believe that the antidote to violent rhetoric and denigrating, dehumanizing messages all around us, is the invitation into a community where love comes before judgement and theologies of hope replace theologies of fear. 

I truly believe that God stops at nothing to search us out in our despair and our worry and to bring us into places like this.  Places of belonging.  I truly believe that it’s when we share our small victories and our hard challenges in safe circles of care that we will feel seen and found.  I truly believe that God brings us together from our distant fears and worries so that we can find solidarity in our common purpose to be God’s love in a hurting world.  

An invitation is no small thing.  It’s an opening of light in a world that feels very dark.  It’s an offer of companionship when the problems feel too big.  It’s the first step toward something that’s true in a world of competing lies.

God not only searches for what was missing, God invites what is lost to come alongside, on God's shoulders, back into community.  

Sometimes we are that one who has been buried under our grief and worry, drifting from the reality of God’s love.  If that is you, know this: Ours is a God who never gives up on us.  There is no where you can go that is too far for God’s love to find you again. 

And sometimes, we are not the ones scattered out on the margins but the ones who offer to carry God’s lamp in the search, finding and then celebrating with grace who wants to be found.  

There are a lot of reasons why I feel helpless right now in the larger picture of the world.  But there is one reason why I’m not giving up hope.  I know there is a place where I am safe and wanted.  A place where God is always inviting me in.  And I know that I, too, have this power of invitation.  To be a co-creator with God, a co-searcher, a co-finder.  Part of the rescue party in these broken times.

This church is a place of belonging.  We’re not perfect.  We don’t all think alike.  We make mistakes.  We disappoint.  But we also belong to a love that is greater than any of us individually.  And we have the invitational power to keep drawing this circle of belonging ever wider. 

I’d like to close by sharing a beautiful poem the modern-day prophet Steve Garnaas-Holmes wrote this week.  The poem brings the metaphor of the lost coin to life.  

Lost coinGod the homemaker, the house-sweeper,searchesfor your lost coin.It may be a grief swept under,a shame covered over,a gift denied.In her hand it's worth something.She will find it, and rejoice.You be her lamp. Help her look.And when she finds it (even maybeher love for you, that you'veforgotten behind something),join the celebrationas she holds it up to the lightand dances.

…

May peace be our resistance. 

May love be our legacy. 

May Christ be our hope. 

Amen.