Sermon: "The Gospel of Search and Rescue"- September 14, 2025

The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Luke 15:1-10

The Rev'd Ezgi Saribay Perkins, Rector 

Transcript

Just two days after 9/11 my dad handed me a newspaper article and insisted that I read it. It was about two men in the South Tower: Brian and Stanley.

Brian was an ordinary office worker on the 84th floor when the first plane struck. Chaos and smoke had filled the air. People were scrambling for escape routes, unsure of where to turn. And then, above the noise and confusion, Brian heard a faint cry: “Help me! Help me!”

Stanley was trapped behind twisted metal and broken walls. He could not climb out. The article described how Brian could have kept moving. After all, every second meant life or death. But instead, he stopped. He searched through the smoke, followed the sound of that desperate voice, and finally found Stanley pinned. He pulled and pulled until, with one last effort, Stanley tumbled free. Together, they found the stairwell and walked down into daylight, emerging just three minutes before the tower collapsed.

The newspaper writer called this a miracle. But as I read it now through the eyes of Christian faith, I see it also as a parable. Stanley could not save himself. He was as helpless as the sheep in Jesus’ story, curled up with no way back. Brian became a type of  shepherd, unwilling to leave a man behind. He sought until he found, and when he did, they both lived.

And that is the heartbeat of Luke 15. These parables are not about misplaced objects or wandering animals. They are about the character of God revealed in Jesus Christ. The text shows us something abundantly clear throughout Jesus’ ministry: Jesus came to seek and to restore the lost. Here is point of our biblical story from today: God’s mercy is not about cutting losses or writing people off. God’s love persists, God’s initiative searches, and God’s joy overflows when even one sinner is found and restored back to community.

First, God does not give up or cut his losses. You and I live in a world that constantly calculates return on investment. Businesses, even our government, cut programs that underperform. Even in our personal lives, we are tempted to give up on people when the cost of love feels too high. We quietly decide that some relationships, some communities, some situations are beyond repair and redemption. The Pharisees in Luke 15 operated with that same kind of framework. They looked at the tax collectors and sinners crowding around Jesus and thought, “These people are not worth the trouble. Better to protect the ninety-nine righteous sheep than risk everything on the one.”

To most of us, one percent loss would be acceptable. The risk of leaving ninety-nine unattended in the wilderness for the sake of one seems irrational. And yet, Jesus asks his audience to picture that shepherd heading out into the dark, searching the hills and gullies until he finds the missing one. “Until he finds it.” That is the striking phrase in verse 4. There is no resignation, no shrugging of the shoulder, In God, there is relentless determination.

 The rabbinic thought of the time believed God welcomed the penitent sinner, but the initiative rested on the sinner. The sinner had to come back and restore himself. Jesus shifted the center of gravity with this proposition that God does not wait passively but goes out, actively seeking.

The parable also echoes the book of Ezekiel, where Israel’s failed leaders are condemned as shepherds who let the flock scatter. God promises in chapter 34: “I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out” (v. 11). When Jesus tells this story, he does not only comfort the sinners also indicts the Pharisees and scribes. They saw themselves as guardians of the flock, but they have abandoned the very sheep God cares most about. By eating with tax collectors and sinners, Jesus shows that he  was the true shepherd, was enacting God’s own promise to seek and to save.

The shepherd may have ninety-nine safe, but he cannot endure the loss of one. Christ, though surrounded by myriads of saints and angels, is not content if even one soul is still lost. J. C. Ryle presses the point: if only one sinner in all of history needed redemption, Christ would still have left heaven to seek and to save. That is the measure of God’s love, an infinite pursuit for every individual soul.

The parable also confronts us with the reality of being lost. Sheep do not find their way home. They are helpless, exposed, unable to retrace its steps. Left to themselves, they curl up in fear, paralyzed, waiting to be devoured. In other words to carry them, the shepherd must bear the full weight on his shoulders. The image is powerful: salvation is not a cooperative project where we contribute half the effort. It is God’s initiative from start to finish. 

The image of the shepherd also recalls Christ himself as the Good Shepherd in John 10: “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” The search is not costless. For the shepherd, it means danger, exposure, exhaustion. For Christ, it means the cross. The celebration of heaven comes at the price of his suffering.

For the Pharisees, this was offensive. Their world was built on boundaries, on defining who was inside and who was outside. But Jesus’ parable insists that God’s operating principle is different. God cannot cut his losses. God cannot tolerate even one being written off. The Pharisees grumbled because they thought holiness meant separation from sinners. Jesus shows that holiness means pursuing sinners until they are found and rejoicing when they are restored.

And so the first truth of these parables is clear: God does not give up and God does not cut his losses. The worth of a soul is not measured by percentages. Every single person is of value. Augustine once said that God loves each one of us as if there were only one of us to love.

Secondly, God diligently seeks the lost by taking the initiative.
If the parable of the lost sheep shows God’s unwillingness to cut losses, the parable of the lost coin teases out God’s determination to search. Jesus invites his hearers to picture a poor woman who has ten silver coins, likely her life savings or even her dowry. To lose one of ten for her was no small matter. Each coin was worth a day’s labor. She was largely leaning on that small bunch to survive in a bartering system. It is as if a tenth of her life has slipped through the cracks of her Middle Eastern home, which had no windows. The floor in such a home was mixed with earth and rocks. The loss was a needle in a haystack. That is why she lights a lamp, sweeps every corner of her dark house, and refuses to stop until the coin is located.

The image here is not of a sinner finding God, but of God seeking the sinner. We are like the coin, lifeless and hidden until God bends down to recover us. As Lancelot Andrewes once preached, Christ “is found of them that seek him not.” Our role is not to engineer our own rescue but to be willing to be found.

This persistence of God’s love is captured in the simple words, “she searched carefully until she found it.” There is no “maybe” in that seeking. The rabbinic tradition urged people to search diligently for the Law as one might for a lost coin. But Jesus reverses the logic: it is God who does the searching here.

Notice also who Jesus chooses to represent God in this parable: not a king, priest, or landowner, but a woman sweeping her home. God is not only like a shepherd, a figure already despised in Jewish culture, but also like a village woman, diligently scouring her dark house for what she treasures. This would have been very shocking to Jesus’ hearers: no other parable in the New Testament portrays God in explicitly feminine terms. Yet this is Jesus’ image for divine love, persistence, tenderness, and relentless attention.

Friends, God’s search does not look like detached sovereignty but like the care of one who will stop at nothing. A coin cannot cry out for help. It is helpless, inert, unable to signal its location. The finding depends entirely on the diligence of the seeker. So too with us: when we are spiritually inert, curled up in fear or hidden in darkness, God is already sweeping, lighting, searching.

God does not abandon us, but shines a lamp into our darkness, sweeps the dust from our hiding places, and rejoices when we are home again.

Lastly, God celebrates when someone turns toward him and is folded back into unity with others.
Both parables end not in quiet relief but in festive celebration. The shepherd does not simply drag the sheep back to the fold, and the woman does not slip her coin into a drawer. Each calls friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me!” The finding of what was is not private. It was and is communal. Jesus presses the point heavenward: “There is joy in heaven over one sinner who repents … joy in the presence of the angels of God” (vv. 7, 10).

This is one of the most startling truths of the gospel: the repentance of one sinner sets heaven itself ablaze with joy. Where Jewish tradition could say, “There is joy before God when those who provoke Him perish,” Jesus overturns it. God’s joy comes not in destruction but in restoration.

Notice what heaven celebrates. Angels are not said to rejoice over the ninety-nine who are safe, or the nine coins secure in place. The joy is not simply about the one, but about the whole being made complete.

The shepherd in the story rejoices not only because the sheep is back, but because the flock is together again. The woman rejoices not only in the recovered coin, but because her savings, her wholeness, is intact.

Tom Wright is right to say, “To refuse joy at the repentance of another is to be out of tune with heaven.” The Pharisees grumbled at Jesus’ meals with sinners. They asked, “Why do you eat with these people?” Jesus answered, in effect, “Because heaven is already eating and drinking with them.”

The question turns to us: Who are we reluctant to celebrate with? Who would we prefer God left outside the party? God’s mercy keeps widening the guest list. If we refuse to rejoice, we shut ourselves out of the celebration. That was the tragedy of the elder brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son. He would not join the music and dancing for his repentant sibling. True repentance, then, is not only about turning back to God but also about learning to rejoice at God’s grace to others.

The final note of these parables is not duty but delight. God is never reluctant to forgive. God throws a party. And he invites us, not with suspicion or grudging murmurs, but with laughter, song, and joy. To be in tune with heaven is to rejoice with every restoration, to see no return as too small. When one sinner turns back, heaven pierces into earth, much like the moment of Eucharistic consecration, when the family of God is knit together again.

Conclusion:
The parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin leave us with a question that is both profoundly theological and deeply practical: what does it mean to belong? For Jesus, belonging is never earned by merit, doctrinal mastery, or social standing. It is conferred by grace. The shepherd does not ask the sheep to find its own way back. The woman does not wait for the coin to gleam on its own. God’s initiative defines the story, and our identity is sealed not by our own striving but by God’s seeking.

For those of us raising children, navigating careers, and juggling competing demands in our thirties and forties, this vision is a needed correction. The world teaches our families that worth is performance-based: our children’s test scores, our productivity at work, our curated lives online. Yet the gospel of Jesus announces that our value is neither fragile nor contingent. It is anchored in God’s unwavering delight. To teach our children this truth, and to live into it ourselves, is a radical act of resistance against a culture of meritocracy.

For those new to the Mediator or discerning whether to join a parish at all, these parables remind us what our church is for. The church is not a society of the already found, nor a museum of the morally upright. It is a flock where God still seeks the straggler, a household where God still sweeps for the coin. Anglican polity gives flesh to this conviction. Our vestries are not simply running nonprofits. They are practicing discernment while committed to holding the circle wide so that the whole can be made complete. We have sheep who are not here yet. We are incomplete as a parish. We will always be. 

And to those wondering whether they fit in, whether because of doubt, past wounds, or a sense of being on the margins, hear this: you are already the cause of heaven’s joy. The shepherd shoulders you. The woman lights her lamp for you. 

Our task is to rejoice with God, not only in our own restoration, but in every life folded back into the unity of Christ’s body. And if we take our prayer seriously, “on earth as it is in heaven,” then we are summoned not just to believe this truth, but to embody it: in our families, in our parish, in our city. Friends, God is already rejoicing. The only question is whether we will add our voices, our efforts, and our time, talent, and treasure to that kind of song. AMEN.