September 14, 2025

It’s been a rough week, hasn’t it? For that matter, 2025 has been a rough year; another challenging year on top of the other years we’ve been having—Wars in Gaza and Ukraine, Global warming, political and cultural conflict, gun violence, all the rest; COVID; threats to our health. We’re beaten down, worried like we’ve never been worried before—the familiar words of Yeats’ poem sounding truer than they did when he wrote them over a century ago: “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.”

Our Christian faith seems less a bulwark against the coming onslaught than a fading wisp—not just the growing irrelevance to our culture, but all the ways it has been weaponized to create division and rationalize violent hatreds. Our beloved cultural institutions and products of human creativity: higher education, the arts and humanities eviscerated and exploited, mined for profits; scientific excellence and research demonized and destroyed.

In the presence of all that, a small glimmer of joy and hope—light once more streaming through our beautiful stained glass windows as our roof project draws closer to completion and we can once again enjoy the beauty of our space as we lift our voices, our minds, and hearts to worship God.

In our gospel reading, we are once again confronted with grumbling Pharisees, annoyed that Jesus hung out with tax collectors and sinners. We need to pause for a moment and remind ourselves who these groups are. I know I say this repeatedly, but it’s because the negative image of “Pharisee” is so firmly fixed in our consciousness. We think of them as moral prigs policing the behavior of the population and especially of Jesus. We regard them as literalists of legal interpretation. But they weren’t. They were a movement within first-century Judaism that sought to extend the law to daily life, to give ordinary people a way of connecting their faith to their lives. The law, the Torah, was and still is, perceived by Jews to be a wonderful thing. The conflict between Pharisees and Jesus was about how to interpret the law correctly, a debate internal to Judaism.

Tax collectors, again as I’ve said often before were reviled because they collaborated with the occupying Roman power, and because the system was set up so that they exploited the people from whom they were extracting taxes; the more money they got from the people, the more they could keep for themselves.

Sinners were not primarily those who occasionally had moral lapses. They were notorious sinners, who because of their behavior were excluded from polite society. In other words, Jesus hung out with the worst sort of people. You can draw your own analogies about who those groups might be in our context.

So now we come to the parables. The Pharisees and scribes were grumbling about Jesus’ outrageous behavior and in response he tells them two stories. To get what these parables are about you have to shift your focus. We are inclined to put ourselves in the story—as the sheep or the coin that was lost. But that’s exactly the wrong place to begin. Instead, we need to begin with Jesus’ question to the scribes and Pharisees: “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 until he finds it?” Which one of you would do that? None of us would. We would do a cost/benefit analysis and cut our losses, leaving the one to die while making sure the 99 were safe.

And the second story—about the coin? We can imagine losing something precious and search diligently for it, high and low, systematically. 

The parable describes in great detail the woman’s actions, she lights a lamp, sweeps the floor. The narrative almost stops for a moment, heightening tension, so that the discovery becomes even more dramatic. But then what happens? She throws a party, invites her friends, spends what, as much or double the worth of the coin she had lost? We can see ourselves searching for something, but throwing a party, and throwing what we found away in rejoicing? Who of us would do that?

 Two people behaving completely unexpectedly, in ways that make utterly no sense by any rational analysis. They were so overjoyed by the finding that it’s almost as if they lost their bearings. Nothing else mattered but that joy, and offering others the opportunity to share in that joy.

It’s clear that Luke wants us to see the point of the story to be God’s extravagant joy in welcoming a repentant sinner. So be it. No doubt it fills us with love and gratitude toward God to imagine ourselves welcomed in such a way. But how do we respond? Do we show forth our gratitude as extravagantly as God shows forth God’s love? Is our joy so great that we show it by sharing it as lavishly as the shepherd or the woman shared their joy?

It may be that those feelings of joy are long-forgotten, submerged under the reality of daily life, all of the struggles we have. It may also be that sometimes we may come to feel the joy we once felt was not real, but induced or the product of youthful exuberance. It may be that the joy we should feel is tempered by the responsibilities we have, the concerns and commitments that are in the forefront of our minds, the obligations that church seems to burden us with. 

It may be that the barrage of events in the world around us have so overwhelmed us that whatever joy we might have felt is buried beneath feelings of anger, despair, anxiety, fear and helplessness. It’s hard to feel joy, it may even seem inappropriate, to feel joy when so many people are suffering, as we watch our institutions and cherished values crumble.

            Maybe, just maybe, we are being called to express and share joy in these dark days. What brings you joy? Do you even remember? That’s one of the things I like about ballroom dance. Sure it’s a slog. We’ve been working on a new bolero routine most of the summer. Friday I almost nailed it, but it still needs work. It can be exhausting and frustrating. But when we’re at a dance, and a foxtrot comes on, there is joy in movement and joy on the faces of the others in the room.

Where’s the joy for you? If you’re here because you’ve experienced God’s love and grace and continue to experience it, there’s nothing that you need to do out of obligation or responsibility in response to God. The sheep and the coin that once were lost had been found. The ones searching for them rejoiced and celebrated at their rediscovery. Our gratitude to God should explode in as much joy and celebration. Our gratitude should express itself in all that we do, in all that we are. We should express our joy, share our gratitude in our worship, as we gather for fellowship; when we give of ourselves and our resources. May we all practice and share the joy of God’s love!