Lost and Found

Psalm 32

Luke 15: 1 – 7

March 30, 2025

There is a story told of C.S. Lewis, a famous Oxford Fellow and Cambridge professor. Lewis, a man born into an Irish home in Belfast, and, as a young man – a boy really – was one who had denounced his Christian faith when his beloved mother died at an early age of cancer. Lewis – in heartbroken response - declared himself an atheist.

Lewis spent the next 25 years or so denouncing Christianity. Oh, he wasn’t angry or nasty about it. It was more of an academic dismissal of something he didn’t need. But God was persistent as Lewis wandered. Through close friends, Lewis found himself - much to his surprise - once again a believer. God had been patient, and persistent, and as an act of grace kept after Lewis until one day, on a walk with J.R.R. Tolkien he surprised both himself and Tolkien by declaring that now he believed.

Years later, at an academic conference on comparative religions, the great minds of Oxford and Cambridge were discussing what makes Christianity unique. As academics (and pastors!) will, they were going on for a while, each was sure that they were making the final, definitive word on the subject only to be challenged yet again by someone else.

Lewis came to the discussion late. He sat down, listened to the comments, and very quickly, decisively declared that he had the answer to the question, “What makes Christianity unique amongst the great religions of the world?” “It’s grace,” Lewis declared. “Only Christianity offers salvation as a free and unearned gift from a loving God.”

There was a second part to his answer, an expansion mentioned in other writings and conversations that doesn’t get the same play as his definitive, mic drop moment around grace. But let me hold that as a teaser for a point to get to later.

Our lesson for today, the famous Parable of the Lost Sheep, is one of three critically important parables in the 15th chapter of Luke. Each deals with the notion of lost and found. The chapter opens with the story of the shepherd and his lost sheep and is closed by an equally important parable around things that can get lost, “The Parable of the Prodigal Son” – a story really of two lost sons.

In-between is the familiar tale of the lengths one would go to look for and recover a coin of important value.

It is a lost and found chapter. So let’s play with the story a little bit.

Jesus finds himself in a mixed crowd of tax collectors and other sinners and the professionally religious aren’t buying it. Pharisees and Scribes, men who believed that they were set apart from the common rabble because of the purity of their faith and obedience, don’t like that this rabble rouser from Nazareth fellowships with tax collectors and other broken folk. He should know better…. as they do.

If it would have just been the common folk, those who could not compete with the Pharisees over their faithful obedience and practice it would have been one thing. But tax collectors? These people who were perceived to be traitors and instruments of Roman oppression, these Jews who added their take – the cost of doing business – to the already burdensome taxes that the Romans collected?

Jesus is breaking bread, fellowshipping with the traitors and thieves. Jesus, offering the same love and grace that Lewis found so exceptional; Jesus, offering unconditional love to the lowest of the low. The professional religious types don’t like it, and they are grumbling, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.”

Jesus sees, Jesus hears, and Jesus responds…. and the Pharisees and Scribes just get even madder.

Now, who among you, having 100 sheep and losing one doesn’t go after it? Seems like an innocent question, until you remember to whom Jesus is talking. The question requires these men of the religious aristocracy to see themselves as shepherds in the question. Shepherds! Shepherds, you have got to be kidding me! In one sermon I read this week, shepherds were described as the lowest of people. They were the people of the earth, the lowlife, the scum, the unacceptable, the outcasts, the unclean in the society of the Jews. Of all the legitimate tasks and labors, they were at the bottom. We romanticize them today, but in the day of Jesus, shepherds were viewed as untrustworthy thieves, their testimony was not even allowed in the courts of law.

So these Pharisees, these men so proud of their piety, purity, and obedience were supposed to put themselves in the position of a shepherd.

If you had a 100 sheep, and lost one, which one of you wouldn’t go out to find the lost one?

Sheep are so cute. Bouncing in the pastures, fluffy wool covering their big, black eyes. Munching clover, just busy at the business of looking cute. But notice. Jesus did not choose a cow, or a pig, or a dog for his story. Unlike those animals, sheep do not intentionally run away. A dog will run out the front door if it is looking for freedom. Cows have busted down fences to get to where they want to be. But sheep….. not sheep. Sheep just drift away, wandering after a good-looking patch of grass.

The good grazing lands for sheep in Israel were not plentiful. The narrow, central plateau lands of southern Israel was only a few miles wide and ran down to steep cliffs. Sheep could easily, quickly get lost. Sheep are not the most agile of animals. If they fall on their sides or back, they have a very difficult time getting up on their own. Sheep are defenseless and the good pastureland of Israel was inhabited by predators who saw the sheep as easy prey.

Sheep needed constant care. They tended to wander, and shepherds needed to be vigilant in the care of their flocks. In the evenings, sheep would be counted into holding pens where they were kept overnight. These pens were crude constructions. The best were made of stacked stone. Sometimes a cave was used with wood across the entrance. Worst came to worse, brush piled on top of one another could serve as a holding pen in a pinch.

The sheep were counted in. They were checked for minor injuries. Dr. Timothy Laniak, a professor at Gordon-Conwell, spent a year in the Middle East living with the Bedouins as they walked the land and cared for their flocks of sheep. Of sheep, Laniak wrote:

“Even the hardy mountain breed with which I worked was susceptible to pneumonia, pasturella, hypothermia in the winter, scab and scrapie in the summer. They ignorantly push their heads through fences and get cut or stuck; they try to climb trees to pick at foliage and get their legs caught; they fall down embankments, get bitten by snakes and stung by wasps. They gorge themselves on sour leaves and swell up like balloons; they starve, freeze, and fall ill, but every affliction they face is countered by a good shepherd.”

Fortunately, the shepherd of our parable is a good shepherd.

Sheep are prone to wander looking for good feed. They don’t mean to get lost, they just stray. Sheep do not have the instinctive ability to find their way home should they get lost. Once lost, they tend to stay lost. In their wandering they become easy prey for predators. In their hunger, even food that makes them sick looks good. As they find themselves lost, Laniak tells us, they will panic and run themselves into exhaustion as they run and run in circles.

Until the shepherd comes.

Friends, are we not a little bit like these sheep? Oh, I know, like the Pharisees who got offended because Jesus equated them with the shepherds, no one of us like to think we are like sheep. There is even aa derogatory modern word for it in use today. Sheeple.

But alone, in our own hearts, aren’t we likely to wander, to stray, to move a few steps away from the flock when something enticing comes into our view? Oh, we don’t mean to wander. We don’t mean to stray. But we are just looking for our own paths. We wonder what life outside the care of the shepherd looks like. And on our own, left solely and completely to our own defenses, are we not more vulnerable, in greater danger, easier prey for the predators in our world?

I think of the worst situations I have ever found myself in. I never meant to go there. I never meant to get in such danger. I thought I was just taking a few steps away from the crowd to discover something on my own. The grass on the next hillside looked fresh and unexposed to the flock. With my head down I wandered, and it was only after a period of time - or the approach of danger - that I looked up and found the mess I had put myself in.

Lewis said, in his famous story, tat it is grace that makes Christianity unique. But he also said that it is only Christianity that offers a God – a Jesus – who has come to seek us out when we were lost. Grace offers the blessings of God when we don’t deserve them. But it is love that compels Jesus to seek out those who have wandered and save them.

Friends, we have all had our times of wandering. We have all been enticed by attractive, shiny, expensive looking things and lifestyles. We don’t mean to get lost. We don’t necessarily mean to stray. But we do. We have; and we probably will again.

But we are in relationship with a God of grace, a God of love, who does not abandon us when we wander. Instead, Jesus has come, to look for and gather up the lost. To remind us that we are loved….. sometimes in spite of ourselves. We are loved this much! YOU are loved this much! Out of grace and because of love. Thanks be to God. Amen.