Herding sheep is a never-ending task. As soon as one lost sheep is found, another wanders off. Or so I’m told – and perhaps you have experienced: Our lives follow a similar ebb and flow of aimless meandering and blessed rescue. One minute you’re feeling like the world’s your oyster and you’ve found your way, then in a heartbeat, you’re feeling lost and alone, right back in the pit of barely holding your own. The struggle is real.
The promise of this morning’s Scripture lesson – the Parable of the Lost Sheep – brings Good News: No matter how “lost” or “stuck” you feel, the Good Shepherd remains on the lookout.
The first audience to hear Jesus stake that claim is a rogues gallery of tax collectors and sinners, scribes and Pharisees. Luke makes no mention of shepherds or sheep ranchers loitering in the crowd. But when the religious types grumble about the Lord’s scandalous hospitality to sinners, Jesus employs a flock of sheep to proclaim rejoicing in heaven when just one lost sinner repents.
Jesus never defines who or what a sinner is. But given what’s known about the political and economic pecking order of Jesus’s day, these “sinners and tax collectors” probably aren’t social outcasts who live on the wrong side of the tracks but more likely schemers and ne’er-do-wells who violate long-held community standards of decency and expectation. In our day, “sinners and tax collectors” would be code for arms dealers, loan-sharks, insider traders, slumlords, enemy collaborators, or anyone whose illicit or immoral behavior is explained away by the majority as “just how things are done” or “simply how the world works.”
That understanding polishes an interesting lens through which to examine this Parable of the Lost Sheep in the Gospel of Luke: Who really are the lost, and who really are the found? Keep those questions in mind, as you listen to the Word that God has spoken in this Lenten season of repentance.
The theologian Frederick Buechner offers a provocative take on these parables of Jesus. He reads them as jokes about God – in the sense that the Parable of the Lost Sheep and its biblical cousins all essentially focus on the outlandishness of a God who does impossible and socially unacceptable things with impossible and socially unacceptable people!
The comedic aspect of parables is not just a spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine of hard truth go down. What’s comic is the human foolishness and idiocy that parables reveal. As my Grandma Fielder always wisecracked with a smile, “Sheep are stupid.” And as Dr. Buechner contends, “God is the comic shepherd who gets more of a kick out of that one lost sheep once he finds it again than out of the 99 who had the good sense not to get lost in the first place.” Imagine, then, his scene of heaven’s ironic humor at work among the “lost” and “found” –
When the star-studded, much-envied and -admired crowd of industry-captains and power-brokers all end up having better things to do than accept God’s invitation to “abide with me” and “come to the table,” the Lord is the quirky, unconventional host who goes out into the skid rows, soup kitchens, and charity wards and brings home a veritable freak show: The man with no legs who sells shoelaces on the street. The old woman in the moth-eaten fur coat who makes her daily rounds of the garbage cans. The old wino with his pint bottle in a brown paper bag. The drug pusher and the whore – the village idiot who stands at the traffic light waving at passing cars and trucks.
Within a great banquet hall, God shows each and every greasy one of them to seats ringing tables covered in fine linens. Candles flicker; champagne flutes bubble. On cue from the host, the live chamber orchestra in the gallery strikes up its first tune, “Amazing Grace.” How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me, once lost but now found. It’s no laughing matter, but sometimes, you just have to laugh: Just exactly who are the lost, and who are the found? Perhaps all are lost until all are found!
Much was lost, and many were found, last September in the Carolinas, as an endless deluge from the swirling clouds of tropical storm Helene laid waste to the region. Heavy rain pummeled roofs and saturated the ground; fierce winds roared, tossing mature trees like spent matchsticks.
Then out went the electricity, then the water, then cell service. Creeks and rivers swelled with destructive force that swept away everything – homes and cabins, entire communities, and human lives. Landslides and sinkholes only added insult to injury. Thus I reached out to a boyhood chum who with his wife lives in the area.
Thanks be to God, they were spared the worst, but as they and their neighbors ventured out in search of family and friends, everyone found themselves carefully navigating a maze-like wasteland – downed trees or power lines, or washed-out roads forcing course corrections with alarming frequency.
Step by tenuous step, loved ones were located – greeted with sighs of great relief and anxious questions of urgent need: Do you have enough drinking water? Need any food? Got a place to stay? Though relief supplies were still days away, neighbors helped neighbors survive. Churches opened their doors. Firefighters and first responders persisted. Helicopters air-lifted water-logged souls to safety. Surely no one would remain a lost sheep. None would rest until all were found, one by one, even unto death.
Theirs was the pursuit of the shepherd, so singularly focused on the one who is lost, vulnerable, and at-risk. The good shepherd steadies the lost sheep on his shoulders and steps forth from the chaos. His gaze finds yours, and the artist hopes you’ll hear him whisper, “I will never stop searching for the lost. I will never stop rejoicing when one is found. That’s how much you mean to me: I know you by name.”
Who are the lost, and who are the found? Each of us, in various seasons of life, precariously stand somewhere on the spectrum of lost and found. Lent extends an invitation to consider where you exist on that spectrum in this moment, and where God might be seeking you in your midst of sun or storm, and where God might be calling you to search for others with the heart of a shepherd. Indeed, none are found until all are found.
Listen to the Word that God has spoken.
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message during worship on the Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 23, 2025, at First Presbyterian Church in Waukon, Iowa, USA. Scholarship, commentary, and reflection by Fredrick Buechner, Lisle Gwynn Garrity, Joely Johnson, Amy-Jill Levine, Mork Mindy McGarrah Sharp, and Ben Witherington III inform the message. It is part of Pastor Grant’s Lenten series, “Everything in Between: Meeting God in the Midst of Extremes.” The video clip is from Lumo’s Gospel of Luke.