Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost: September 14, 2025 | The Rev. Nat Johnson

Readings: Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28 | Psalm 14 | 1 Timothy 1:12-17 | Luke 15:1-10

This last week, I was in Portland with students and faculty from Church Divinity School of the Pacific. We were there for an intensive gathered session with three and a half hours of class time in the morning, two and half hours of class time in the afternoon, interspersed with prayer and worship and meals. On Wednesday, as we left our morning classes, many of us opened our phones to the news that had begun to spread of another high school shooting and of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Over the next 24 hours, I sat with students who held a range of emotions – anger, numbness, fear, sadness, shame, shock, uncertainty. During one conversation in my own classroom, a student looked at me and asked, “how can we be faithful priests in this moment, in this context of fear and division? How do we do the work God has given us to do without going numb or without being paralyzed and overwhelmed? What is happening in our society is so overwhelming and yet stories like these are frequent. What are we supposed to do?” We spent nearly an hour that morning debriefing what had happened the day before and processing our own feelings, fear, and outrage.

Friends, I sometimes feel – and I suspect often sound like – a broken record when I stand up here. And, in this space, perhaps more than any other, we must face the reality of the world in which we gather. We must tell the truth about the persistent violence that greets us at every turn, about the pervasive greed that sows division, about the economic and social systems that marginalize so many and leave a growing number of individuals, families, and communities in fear of how they might survive to live another day. Because this is the world into which we are sent out to do the work God has given us to do. When he sent his disciples out in mission, Jesus warned them he was sending them out like sheep among wolves. He told the truth about the resistance they would encounter, about the division they themselves would sow as they preached the good news and healed the sick and how that mission would threaten the powers and principalities of the world into which they were sent.

To tell the truth about the world in which we exist and into which we are sent is part of the work we have to do. But we cannot get stuck on that task alone. We gather, week after week, to share a sacred meal, to feast on the bread of life and the cup of salvation. Together, we offer eucharist, thanksgiving, and in that sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, we are constituted as God’s people, strengthened by a heavenly meal, and bolstered by the presence of Christ in this morsel of bread and sip of wine. In our tradition, we believe that in our gathering, blessing, eating, and drinking, Jesus is really present here with us. We believe that in our sharing of that meal, we are united in Christ and to one another, and that this union is more powerful, more real, more tangible than any ideal or like-mindedness. The gift of unity in which we participate Sunday after Sunday is much deeper than simply sharing similar values. It is mystical and mysterious, effected by the fiery presence of the Holy Spirit, whose movement is always to break down barriers and draw us out of centers of conformity. It is this reality that we embody every time we gather here, every time we hold out our hands to receive the bread and the cup. And in this embodiment, we become signs and animators of the reality to which this ritual meal points – we become the very thing we receive, the Body of Christ broken for the world.

This is who we become as we are sent back out into the world. This is who we are as we encounter the chaos and violence we name in the world. We cannot let ourselves become numb to the atrocities that happen day after day. We cannot disconnect from what is happening in our world. But we also cannot let fear of those atrocities paralyze us. Because, we become what we receive – the Body of Christ, broken for the world. We are called to be Christ in the world, not as little saviors, but as loving presence, as signs and animators of Christ’s loving presence. Just as Jesus was sent so we are sent, and we are sent out as participants in God’s mission of reconciliation.

Our gospel reading today images God as a shepherd seeking out a lonely sheep and a woman who tears apart her house to find a single coin. In both of these images, God is in relentless pursuit. I wonder a bit if there isn’t some intended irony in Jesus’ question – “who of you wouldn’t leave the 99 in search of the one?” I suspect that many of us might answer, “Me, Jesus. I wouldn’t do that!” It’s impractical, nonsensical, a bit ridiculous, if you think about it.

I suspect that many of us who have heard these parables before have been invited to consider ourselves as one of the sheep or one of the coins – and, perhaps most consistently, to consider ourselves one of the lost who has been found. Today, I want to invite you to consider, perhaps, a different perspective. To consider that Jesus, in telling these parables, challenges our theological imaginations about what it means to participate in a divine mission given to us by a God who does the unimaginable, the ridiculous, the impractical, and all for the sake of finding “the one.”

Over the last century, there has been a significant shift in the way theologians think about “mission.” Instead of thinking about “mission” as an activity of the Church, as a task centering on conversion, we have recentered it as the primary action of God. God is, in other words, a missionary God, a God who sends. This missionary God sent Jesus into the world and in doing so was pleased to reconcile the world to Godself in him. God sends the Spirit as comforter, as guide, as bearer of truth. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus commissions his disciples to “Go and make disciples of all nations…” In our own gathering, we acknowledge that God sends us out to do the work God has given us to do. Our God is a sending God. In the field of missiology, it is now common to hear the phrase: The Church doesn’t have a mission, God’s mission has a Church. In our tradition, we believe that that mission is about restoring all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.

Through the parables of the lost sheep and lost coin, Jesus gives us an image of this missionary God who goes to great lengths to bring about even one person’s restoration. Throughout the gospels, all of Jesus’ healing ministry is aimed at restoring people to community. The unity and restoration we speak about in our understanding of “mission” is oriented always toward the community, toward healing the ruptures that sin creates in the context of community, and it is this mission into which we are enlisted through our baptism and in which we participate as we become who we receive around this table.

I return, again, to my student’s question: how are we to be faithful in this present moment? Friends, I wish there was a checklist I could give you. I think the world in which we exist and our place within it are far too complex for a single answer to that question. But I do think our Gospel reading today gives us a good starting point: to faithfully participate in the mission of God, we must follow God’s example and seek out the lost. I know, in our contemporary moment, and in our church in particular, we resist using this language of “the lost.” We find it offensive and we recoil against the ways in which it has been misused in Christian-speak. But perhaps there is a way of picking the term back up without all the baggage, especially if we do so without also naming for ourselves the task of “saving.” And maybe part of how we do this is to realize that, even in these parables, the lost sheep and the lost coin were never outsiders. The sheep for whom the shepherd seeks was already one of his fold. The coin for which the woman seeks was already her possession. The reckless God who leaves the 99 in search of the one, who tears the house apart in search of the missing, is searching for one who already belongs, who simply needs to be restored.

 I wonder how this might apply to us in this present moment? What “one” might we be called to seek out, right now? There are people surrounding us in this place, in this neighborhood in which we gather, in our workplaces, in our streets, in our various communities (among whom we ourselves may even be counted!), who are craving a place to belong, who desire connection and community, who need networks of resilience. We are surrounded by people who are struggling with grief, with fear, with overwhelm, with addiction, with exhaustion. And the image of God that Jesus gives us today is that God is relentlessly and tirelessly seeking out those people, and our call to faithful participation in God’s mission demands that we follow, that we become what we receive as we are sent out to seek out the lost, to extend a hand of friendship to those who differ from us, who maybe even make us uncomfortable, to invite them back into the fold of God as a place of belonging and reconciliation.