Sermon for 19 Proper Year C – Sunday, September 14, 2025
Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28; Psalm 14, 13-18; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10
Repentance.
I’ve always been a sucker for a certain kind of movie. In fact, my daughter once turned to me with a mix of amusement and frustration in her voice and said, “Dad, why do you always love the movies where the main characters go through hell for 100 of the 120 minutes? Why do you like to watch people suffering so much before they finally have an epiphany at the end? Some of the movies you like the most feel like torture for the main characters… doesn’t it drive you crazy to watch them struggle so?”
I had to laugh at the realization that she was pretty much on point. I do love a movie that’s a journey for the characters. I love a movie where the main character’s perfect life is suddenly turned upside-down by circumstance beyond their control. I don’t like it when it happens to me, but I enjoy when it happens to someone else.
One of my favorite movies is the perfect example: “Trains, Planes, and Automobiles”. In the movie Steve Martin’s character Neal Page is an ad executive trying desperately to fly home from New York to Chicago to spend thanksgiving with his wife and daughters. Along the way Neil encounter’s John Candy’s character Dell Griffith, a veteran traveling shower curtain ring salesman whose personality proceeds to get on every nerve Neil has in his body. Once joined together by coincidence, what ensues is 36 hours of mostly hilarious denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance as Neil and Dell suffer one minor calamity after another trying to get to Chicago in two days.
When my daughter made the comment about the type of movie I seem to gravitate toward, I did some introspection about what she was saying about me. I realized she was right. My favorite kind of movie is where, through mostly comedy and some drama, characters are taken from the comfort of their every day lives and forced to question the core of their beliefs about other people and about their own place in the world. The characters become aware of the blinders they have been seeing the world through, and they finally take their blinders off and see others and the world more realistically. It’s usually a painful experience of change for them, but it’s also an experience that liberates them from their preconceived notions of how the world should work and for whom. The part of the experience that most sets them free is repentance – repentance of their own inflated self-importance; repentance of the way they have negatively affected the world around them; repentance of the things in their lives they have taken for granted; most of all repentance of the ways they have ignored the humanity of others. Finally allowing themselves to see their place in the world clearly, and repenting of the evil they have done, and the evil done on their behalf. Then moving back into their world and seeing it anew.
Repentance is what God is waiting for as he speaks to the Israelites through Jeremiah – repentance that will cause God to end his punishment and to begin the healing that comes after it. Jeremiah’s vision of God’s actions are not for the faint of heart. “23I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light. 24I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro. 25I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled. 26I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the Lord, before his fierce anger.”
Jeremiah seems to be describing a vision of the end of the world, including the disappearance even of the heavens. Jeremiah sees nothing but destruction, nothing but waste and ruin. In this vision the mountains themselves are quaking and shaking from the destruction wrought by the Lord. In this vision no life is left – no animals, no plants, no humans. In fact, even the cities themselves, the great achievements of mankind, lay in ruin. And in the midst of all this worldly waste and destruction the heavens themselves have been shut up; mankind’s one remaining hope for salvation has been shut off and is no longer even visible to those who are perishing.
This is the image of God’s fierce anger against his chosen people. This is the picture of God’s full wrath against the Israelites, his children. The Lord himself narrates the coming day of his fierce judgment against the Israelites: “The whole land shall be a desolation; because of this the earth shall mourn, and the heavens above grow black; for I have spoken, I have purposed; I have not relented nor will I turn back.”
And what has caused this great calamity to come upon God’s chosen people? God himself makes his case against them: “For my people are foolish, they do not know me; they are stupid children, they have no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good.”
But as the God of mercy always does, he offers his children a glimmer of hope when he says, “Yet I will not make a full end.” The key to preventing the disastrous judgment of God from completely wiping His chosen people, the Israelites, from creation is in their repentance.
Repentance that results in salvation is what Jesus is talking about in Luke’s Gospel reading today – repentance that brings joyous celebration in heaven and on earth over the one sinner who repents.
Unfortunately, the Pharisees and the Scribes don’t understand the core of Jesus’ ministry amongst them. They are a product of their own special culture, and of the accommodation their religion has made with their surrounding culture. To the culture that Jesus and the Scribes and Pharisees lived in, God was directly responsible for everything that happened. If good things were happening to you, you were being rewarded by God for being a good and righteous person. If bad things were happening to you, you were being punished by God for being a sinner. The rich, like the Pharisees and the Scribes, were rich because God was blessing them for being righteous. The poor, the tax collectors and the sinners, were poor and therefore outcast because God was punishing them for being sinners, or punishing them for their parents having been sinners. In the world of the Pharisees and the Scribes you rejected and shunned the poor and the lame and the outcast and the infirm because God himself has rejected them by making them poor and lame and outcast and infirm. Basically, you were expected to admire and revere the wealthy and the powerful and to reject the poor and the powerless because that was what God was misunderstood to be doing. Wasn’t that just so convenient for the ones on top like the Pharisees and the Scribes?
Except that’s not what God was calling the Scribes and the Pharisees to do. Unlike the culture around them and the way that culture revered the powerful and rejected the powerless, God in Hebrew scripture was calling on the Pharisees and the Scribes to treat everyone with justice. God in Hebrew scripture was calling on his chosen people to practice righteousness for all, not wickedness against those who could not defend themselves. Hebrew scripture is nothing if not a written history of God’s partiality to the poor and the lame and the outcast and the infirm, and especially to the power-less.
Unfortunately, after decades of accommodation with other cultures around them, the Scribes and the Pharisees had stopped practicing the intent of the Jewish Law and had begun insisting on only the letter of the Jewish Law. The old saying, “figures don’t lie but liars sure can figure” became the mantra of the powerful and wealthy Jewish elite. The scribes, the religious lawyers who read and interpreted Hebrew scripture, came up with some very inventive ways of obeying the letter of the law while completely destroying the intent of the law. Then the Pharisees and the Sadducees put those inventive and self-serving interpretations of the law into effect against their own people. And they had been doing it for so long and doing it so well that no one knew any better… maybe not even them.
Today Jesus calls them on it using his two wonderful parables. “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? 5When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. 6And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’” “Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? 9When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’”
I’m sure these parables left the Pharisees and the Scribes completely speechless. I’m not sure they could even have understood the point Jesus was making. And if they were able to comprehend Jesus’ point, I’m sure they would have thought Jesus mad. To any sane legalistic and utilitarian person these parables were nothing more than gibberish. As far as the parable about the sheep is concerned, you would never risk the majority to save a minority – you would not risk many to save one – in fact just the opposite, you would gladly sacrifice the one (not you, of course) to benefit the many. As far as the parable about the woman and the silver coin goes, you would never search so desperately to find a silver coin and then spend the value of that coin to celebrate its finding – madness!
Of course one point that Jesus is trying to make with both parables is that, when it comes to salvation, the one is just as important as the many. In fact, Jesus is making the point that saving one person who is at risk of being lost spiritually is more miraculous than the salvation of 99 others who were never spiritually at risk in the first place.
A second and even more provocative point that Jesus is trying to make with just the sheep parable is this: we are called to a ministry so radical that in it we are called to risk a few of the sheep that are safely in our flock in order to find one sheep who is not. Jesus is calling us to risk losing everything in order to find what is lost.
The Good News today is that Jesus is offering us an amazing freedom – to some a dangerous freedom. Jesus is calling us to a Radical ministry. Today Jesus teaches us the length we are to go to, the high level of risk we are free to assume in order to bring salvation to even one sinner. Today Jesus frees us not just to risk, but to consider risking EVERYTHING in order to save one who is lost.
The Good News today is that, when we take on that high level of risk, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner we bring to repentance than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.
The Good News today is that Repentance brings salvation. It’s just as simple as that. The God of mercy will never abandon us completely to our sinful natures. God will never make a full end of us. God always leaves the door open to us. Always remember – as Paul writes in his 2nd letter to Timothy today – as the ultimate gift of mercy, “Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners.”