Luke 15: 1-10 - Sunday, September 14, 2025

 

This morning’s scripture is about being lost, and the one who finds us.  

Some experiences of being lost are fleeting and frustrating, but not particularly scary: missing your exit then getting turned around in an unfamiliar city, starting a job that had insufficient guidance, or not being able to find those miserable ding-dang keys.

Some remnants of being lost are harder and longer lasting. I hear stories from adults who can recall becoming separated from their parents in a store as very young children, or separated from childhood friends exploring the woods, and they can recall the panic of being lost as if it were yesterday. 

An ill-suited, even disorienting career can leave one feeling lost, and so can retirement from a career that suited one really well. The fading or ending of a primary relationship, by death, by dementia, illness, injury, or by choice, can leave one feeling lost.  Having one’s personhood absorbed by addiction or debilitating shame, can leave the person and/or their support system feeling lost.  For some, it could be an existential feeling of lost-ness:  the dark night of the soul, when meaning itself is up for grabs, a time of deep alienation from life and from God.   And this past week has been one of soul-searching, sorrow, fury and fear following the shooting of Charlie Kirk, whose name gets added to a list of adults and children whose lives were ended by hatred and violence; we pray for our neighbours to the south, and all impacted beyond their borders, as the overall situation in this point of their history feels very, very lost.

The 15^th chapter of Luke begins with a series of three stories by Jesus, that speak of something or someone being lost.  We heard the first two of those stories today: the lost sheep, and the lost coin.  The third story is a much longer one that we looked at separately a few months ago (Sunday, March 30), the story of the lost or “prodigal” son. In all three of these stories, something gets lost: a sheep wanders off, a coin gets misplaced, a son chooses to cash in his inheritance and then squander it.  And – SPOILER ALERT! - in all three of these stories, there is a reunion: a shepherd rescues the sheep, a woman’s diligence finds the coin, a Father rushes out to embrace his disgraced son.  Each of the stories tells us about being lost, and the God who so deeply wants us to be found and restored to a place of health and love.

Emmy Kegler, Pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, authored a book six years ago entitled One Coin Found: How God’s Love Stretches to the Margins.  

She writes (pp. 2-3): “Sheep wander.  That’s what they do, it’s in their nature.  Most herd animals do it.  That’s why, when humans domesticated cattle and goats and sheep, there arose a new role: the shepherd, the rancher, the cowboy.  Someone’s got to keep the herd together, because otherwise they’ll go wandering off.

“And sheep wander for good reasons. They wander because they’re hungry…. [or] sometimes the sheep are sick, or injured, or cold…. They drop to the back of the herd, lie down somewhere to rest… And sometimes sheep run.  A hundred sheep are a hundred potential meals for the wolves..[and so] the sheep run, fleeing as fast as their hooves can take them, getting them lost but keeping them alive.”  So the task of the shepherd is complex and demanding, watching out for wolves, ensuring that all the sheep can graze and drink, and that none have wandered to the margin without notice.

Moving from the lost sheep to the lost coin, Emmy writes (pp.4-5) “The funny thing about coins is that they can’t get lost by themselves.  [They have no will,] they can’t roll away on their own.  Coins get lost because their owners aren’t careful…. Covered in years of grit they fall…to the floor or a car or the sand of a sidewalk, dropped and forgotten.”   Traditionally, we understand that these coins were likely from the woman’s dowry, originally attached to a necklace or headdress, and we surmise that the woman was perhaps now a widow without family support; so the loss of even one of those coins could be the difference between stability and starvation.

Emmy reminds us that in this gospel reading, the sheep and the coin were not just left to be lost forever: God the seeker went looking.  She writes (pp.5-8), “God has never been careless with us, [even if] those who claim to speak for God have. … God has donned a shepherd’s cloak, …clambered over rocks and climbed down cliffs.  God has found us, [hungry] and … hurt and terrified, and cradled us close to say: No matter why you left or where you went, you are mine.   [As] lost and dusty coins, we have gone unnoticed, rusted from others’ indifference, misspent and misused, and our friends and leaders did not see our neglect. But God has picked up a woman’s broom and swept every corner of creation. God has tucked up her skirts and flattened herself on the floor, dug through dust bunnies and checked every dress pocket.  God has found us, dustier and rustier and without any luster, and held us up to the light to say: No matter how you rolled away or what corner you were dropped, you are mine.” Emmy writes from  the perspective of a queer woman, so she has far too many first hand experiences of being judged as “lost” by others (including Church folk), but very much loved by God.

Although these parables clearly put God in the role of the searcher, part of our calling as Church is to join in this concern and, where needed, open ourselves to being found by God when we start to drift away.  And we note that in these parables, thankfully, those who were lost are found.  

In this Season of Creation, we think of some of the big ways that things can move from being lost to being found.  After some meagre harvests, particularly last year, we give thanks to God for a ridiculously abundant harvest in the south Okanagan, which feels to me like a move from lost to found.  We hold gratitude for this land we live on and the people who were here before we were, we give thanks for what it means to be Canadians who recognize the need for reconciliation with our Indigenous hosts. This one is a work in progress, still unfolding.  And perhaps tangential to the Season of Creation, I also want to give thanks that the people of this pastoral charge can come together in worship and praise each Sunday, and for our commitment to keep our hearts open and our eyes looking outward at the needs of our neighbours.  [Osoyoos: Do not underestimate the difference that the thrift shop makes to people who are feeling the financial crunch, or the difference that all manner of community outreach that happens from this building makes to folks who need caring connection.]{Oliver: As we flesh out the plans for who we want to be and where we want to be, I know that your collective heart will not only be caring about our needs as a congregation, but the needs of our neighbours}.

But we also, in this Season of Creation, identify the places where there is enduring lostness.  We remember the harmful, shameful things that have been done to this planet for the sake of economic growth and human ease, and we express sorrow that there is hunger and malnutrition in a world that produces so much good, healthy food.  We continue, as the United Church of Canada, one of the denominations responsible for the Residential Schools, to work with Indigenous nations to address past wrongs, and we struggle to get out of the way as Indigenous Churches and leaders attempt to find their healthy path forward.  And we name those places where we, as Church, aren’t as deep, bold and daring as our call and vision statement would suggest, in our approach to local inclusion, and in our engagement of the brutal circumstances faced by much of the world.

We bring all this to God, along with all forms of lostness we carry on this day, with sorrow, with commitment, with yearning, and with hope: a belief that God, ever-loving, ever-searching, ever-mending, desires us to be restored to wholeness, absolutely and completely found.  God is both the one who seeks us in our lostness and brokenness, and the one who empowers us to go seeking for the broken hearts around us, with gifts of compassionate kindness, rugged advocacy, and healing grace.   God, the shepherd, leaves the ninety-nine sheep while he secures the safety of one who wandered off.  God, the woman who turns her house upside-down looking for a coin that was both precious and lost, will not cease her searching until the lost is found.  In these messed-up, mean-spirited days, my friends, there are days when a belief in a God of infinite goodness and boundless love is the main thing that coaxes me out of bed in the morning, but that is more than enough.  For whatever reasons that there is lostness, the very heart of God wants us to be found, and to be those who create safe, loving places for those who have been cast out by life.

In his classic bestseller, All I Really need to know I learned in Kindergarten; Robert Fulghum reflected on a game virtually everyone has played, hide-and-seek, and I’d like to close with his words on this topic because for me, he adds an important note of joy and even whimsy into our discussion. He wrote (pp.54-56), “Did you have a kid in your neighbourhood who always hid so good, nobody could find him?  We did.  After a while we would give up on him and go off, leaving him to rot wherever he was.  Sooner or later he would show up, all mad because we didn’t keep looking for him.  And we would get mad back because he wasn’t playing the game the way it was supposed to be played.  There’s hiding and there’s finding, we’d say.  And he’d say it as hide-and-seek, not hide-and-give-up.” After some further reflection on some hard life lessons around being lost and giving up, Robert Fulghum continues, “Better than hide-and-seek, I like the game called Sardines [where] the person who is IT goes and hides, and when you find them, you get in with them and hide with them.  Pretty soon everybody is hiding together, all stacked in a small space like puppies in a pile.  And pretty soon somebody giggles and somebody laughs and everybody gets found…. I think old God is a Sardine player,” he concludes, “and will be found the same way everybody gets found in Sardines – by the sound of laughter of those heaped together at the end.”

In the name of the God who yearns for all people who feel lost and for the healing of situations that feel hopeless, in the name of the God who helps us to be found and enlists us as accomplices in searching for others who are lost on the margins, in the name of God who loves to be found by us: Amen and Amen.

References cited:

Fulghum, Robert.  All I really need to know I learned in Kindergarten: uncommon thoughts on common things. NYC: Ivy Books, 1986.

Kegler, Emmy. One Coin Found: How God’s Love Stretches to the Margins.  Minneapolis: Fortress, 2019.

© 2025 Rev Greg Wooley, Osoyoos-Oliver United Church Pastoral Charge.

Jeremiah 31: 27-34 - Sunday, September 7, 2025

a sermon preached by Rev. Greg Wooley at a joint communion service and picnic of the Osoyoos-Oliver United Church pastoral charge

This morning we embody our connection with one another as people of faith: coming together from Oliver and Osoyoos for worship, sharing communion to recall the life-force of God coming alive in Jesus, and enjoying one another’s company through the shared picnic to follow.  It fits, then, to conclude our three-week mini series on the prophet Jeremiah, with a scripture that speaks of our commitment to God not just being a string of meaningless words, but something embodied: written on our hearts.

Without getting into the fine points of who was conquering whom at the time of Jeremiah, his nation, the land of Judah, was on the verge of falling; it was so bad that some of his people were already being exiled.  Within these profound hardships, Jeremiah saw transitions they needed to make, for as he looked at his people, he saw them focusing on the minutiae, the specifics of the 613 commandments of the Torah, while missing the main thrust of what God intended. While the people saw embraced the letter of the law, Jeremiah noted that in their hearts the spirit of the law, that is, God’s urgent desire for justice-infused love, was not embraced very much at all.

The prophet saw few signs of hope in the actions of his people and distrusted the guidance offered by their so-called leaders.  But while he did not hold out much hope, God was still hopeful, as God always is.  And God, through Jeremiah, promised the people that following all the trials they were presently going through, there would be a new day, shaped by a new covenant, a law written, not on scrolls but on their hearts.  A day would come, when the Divine principles of power-filled love that gave coherence to the Torah would become second-nature to the people; and the heart of God would be as close as the blood pumping through their arteries and veins.  Each breath, each moment, would be infused by the gracious love of God, each choice they made, each loving action undertaken, would be evidence of God. The old hierarchical, xenophobic, male-dominated, rule-bound ways would be replaced by new ways of being that would bring hope to everyone, most especially who had been judged or excluded by the old ways.  

Many Christians see a prefiguring of what God would later do in Jesus Christ in these words shared by Jeremiah.  Jeremiah wouldn’t have seen it that way, as he was in a crisis at that moment, and God needed him to speak to what was happening right in front of him, but God is capable of doing two things at once.  People were being sent off – deported to a land other than their own, if you will – and God needed Jeremiah to engender hope for the day when the people could come back to Jerusalem, perhaps even within their own lifetimes.   One chapter later, in the book of Jeremiah chapter 32, the prophet buys a plot of land in the midst of all this commotion, as a symbol of hope, a promise that the people would have a place to dwell on their return.  Jeremiah, understandably, has a shorter and more local horizon, but I do believe that it is legitimate for Christians to hear the hope spoken here through Jeremiah, as something God wishes not just for the people of Judah 2600 years ago, but for the world and its people in 2025.  For in Christ, we experience covenant, embodied.

The first covenant, between God and the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, did not need replacing; but the way it got put into practice sure needed to change.  And I find the words spoken by Jeremiah so rich and deep here: in a new way, God’s commandments would be written on the heart of all who love God, and the profound love and justice of God would be lived out in all its fullness.  In his time and place, Jeremiah needed the people to start seeing the forest of God’s holy intent instead of just focusing on the trees of each individual rule; he needed them to trust the core of scripture, the call to love and justice, rather than nitpicking the fine points.

And what about for us, in our day? What it would mean to have the law of love really written upon our hearts?... and how might this happen?  A plain-spoken American professor of Christian Ethics named Stanley Hauerwas has written extensively on this.  Stanley has described as a left-leaning evangelical, which in these divided days strikes me as a really good voice to be heard. His basic idea is that the process of making good, ethical Christian decisions is not  a matter of memorizing all the rules so you don’t goof up, nor is it even having a principled, well defined decision-making process.  For him, the key to Christian decision making is the development of good old-fashioned Christian Character.   Rather than some mechanistic process of decision making, he calls for something that is in the bones:  you learn about the love of God, preferably when you are a child, you keep checking your life against the measuring stick of the great commandment – love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself – and don’t sweat the details.  For me, that’s very much what “a law written on the heart” is all about: having the love of God “in our bones” as it were, not external to us but as close as our next breath.

And so when I think of God’s law written on our hearts in the year 2025, I can picture the word LOVE being so deeply held and boldly displayed in our collective character, that it has the power to over-write everything else that tries to say that it is closest to the heart. (And here, I mean the full, Shalom-style love, a love that insists on justice and inclusion, a love that breaks down barriers so that all may have full opportunity, full and equal access to the things that make life delightful.) 

·       Imagine with me, then, the lies we hear constantly, from the present regime in the US but not just from there, calling people to be selfish in all the worst ways, and imagine that getting over-written by LOVE, so you can barely even see the word “selfish”.  

·       Imagine a world where hatred of “the other” and fear of “the other” got over-written by LOVE, so you couldn’t even make out where hatred and fear had previously been.    

·       Imagine a world where all those simplistic black-and-white dualities could get overwritten by love: imagine if we could take the present white-supremacist narrative being sold by governments as if it’s “common sense”, and defuse it, along with all its sub-points, that there’s only one allowable way to understand things politically, only one allowable way to embrace and express one’s sexual personhood, only one preferred colour of skin, only one legitimate way to worship God.  Imagine over-writing all of those either-ors with both-ands, overwrite the black and white binary with the exquisite colour pallette of God’s extraordinary world, take all of those no’s and overwrite them with the great big YES of God’s love. 

·       In the world of today, Empire is trying its best to divide us, to get us angry at one another rather than angry at injustice, and in this glorious prophecy of Jeremiah we are given the gift of resisting this, in the name and power of love.  We can as individuals, as people of faith, as citizens of the world,  focus our efforts on ending war, at restoring dignity, at doing the hard work of building justice when Empire wants us to be distracted. We can, by the power of the Holy Spirit, paint the world LOVE on top of all the miserable, soul-eroding things that empire would want us to do.  And that, to me, is the essence of a heart that bears the imprint of God.

God’s hopes for the world, written on the heart, applies to our life as a pastoral charge, our life as The United Church of Canada, and our life as believers.  All people – Jews, Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, people who carry Indigenous sacred teachings, secular folks  who just want the best for their neighbour – all are called to participate in doing what we can to make the world a better place.  Our task, as Christians of (mostly) somewhat advanced years, is to trust and live into Christ’s vision of a world where the poor, the humble, the meek, the persecuted, will be restored and honoured.  Our calling, in the way we are right now and in the transitions we will be making as congregations in the coming months, is to have God’s word shape our hearts and actions… and to prepare to work hand-in-hand with other people of good will, as they seek that too.  That vision, of God’s powerful love written on our hearts and our lives, is a bigger and stronger source of hope, than all of the demoralizing messaging that pummel us each day.  The more we trust that love, the more we will realize that the messages designed to build hopelessness and fear are authored by those who are scared silly of what things would look like if God’s law of love were actually written on our hearts and expressed repeatedly in our actions.

On this day when we celebrate communion, and enjoy one another’s companionship, we recall Jeremiah’s longing for a day when God’s intention for love will live, not just in words but in hearts that have been changed.  We give thanks for the way that the words and teachings and ongoing presence of Christ answer these hopes, at the same time acknowledging that the world we live in falls well short of this goal over and over again. And we accept the responsibility for opening our hearts to this path of love and justice, as people of faith striving for greater inclusiveness, as citizens of the world concerned for a sustainable future.  May love, written on our hearts, make all the difference.  In the name of God, Creator, Christ and Spirit, may this be so. Amen.

References consulted and/or cited:

https://bibleproject.com/guides/book-of-jeremiah/

Hauerwas, Stanley. http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape10/PQDD_0026/MQ52032.pdf

Mang, Shannon.“Jeremiah 32”
https://gwsermonsite.blogspot.com/2024/11/jeremiah-32-october-27-2024-and.html

Wines, Alphonetta. http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=3017

© 2025 Rev Greg Wooley, Osoyoos-Oliver United Church Pastoral Charge