Sept. 11, 2022, 14th Sunday After Pentecost

 Luke 15:1-10  (The Message )

The Story of the Lost Sheep

15 1-3 By this time a lot of men and women of doubtful reputation were hanging around Jesus, listening intently. The Pharisees and religion scholars were not pleased, not at all pleased. They growled, “He takes in sinners and eats meals with them, treating them like old friends.” Their grumbling triggered this story.

4-7 “Suppose one of you had a hundred sheep and lost one. Wouldn’t you leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the lost one until you found it? When found, you can be sure you would put it across your shoulders, rejoicing, and when you got home call in your friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Celebrate with me! I’ve found my lost sheep!’ Count on it—there’s more joy in heaven over one sinner’s rescued life than over ninety-nine good people in no need of rescue.

The Story of the Lost Coin

8-10 “Or imagine a woman who has ten coins and loses one. Won’t she light a lamp and scour the house, looking in every nook and cranny until she finds it? And when she finds it you can be sure she’ll call her friends and neighbors: ‘Celebrate with me! I found my lost coin!’ Count on it—that’s the kind of party God’s angels throw every time one lost soul turns to God.”

We who are religious like to see repentance first, then God will forgive.

Is it not the other way around?  

God forgives - that is God offers love and forgiveness to the lost - to lead them to repent.

God is open to the lost and rejoices on their being found.  It is in the process of the celebration that repentance really takes place.  Because I have been found, when I didn’t think anyone, certainly not God, would want me, or bother looking for me. 

What a joy to be found and loved before I deserve  it.  To have a party thrown for me before I could even mumble my repentance. 

To be saved is to trust that God loves me enough that I dare risk getting lost again, not because I am indifferent to God’s love, but because I am trying to let  love be at the center of my life, and sometimes that gets dangerous and means I have to do what I don’t want to do.  And I get lost trying to find my way through life’s dilemma’s.

Yet God will find me again, and again, and again, until I get it right.  

 

The parables of Jesus are about  

"a passionately, desperately, 

insanely forgiving God."  

Andrew Greeley  

Prayer thought for the week:  “Lord, don’t give up on me.  I will get it right eventually,

and love as you love me.”