Luke 15:1-10 Pentecost 14
Pastor Ron Koehler
Grace—Tucson, AZ
September 14, 2025
At a place where a lot of people are at lots of times, things tend to get left behind a lot. Take church for instance. There’s stuff left here all the time. Those things often end up in a Lost & Found box or a spot in a church office cabinet so that they can be returned when someone realizes that they lost their glasses or their keys or their steel tumbler that usually gets knocked over onto the concrete floor at some point during the service! Once you realize that you’ve lost something, you start to look for it. You eventually remember that you had it with you at church--either in the church itself, the fellowship hall, the courtyard, or wherever you attended a meeting. And so, you start looking around. If it’s important enough, you are relentless in your search. After a successful hunt, you might even tell a friend or family member, I knew I had it with me at church. Thankfully, I finally found it under the pews! Jesus talked about this kind of thing in a couple stories he told—things that were Lost & Found. The stories themselves don’t contain words that wound. They’re actually happy Lost & Found stories. They have a healing message. What can be wounding words come right after each story. Hopefully, the people hurt by those words at the time found healing in the stories. We might be wounded because of those words too, but there is healing for us in him and these stories that tell us about his love. THE LOST & THE FOUND Haters of the Lost and of Jesus There were many religious groups active in Israel at the time of Jesus. A number of them are mentioned in the Bible. Members of two of them were watching Jesus closely, as they often did—the Pharisees and the professional students of the Scriptures, the “experts in the law” of God. But they weren’t just observing, they were muttering complaints about 2 no-no’s of Jesus. First of all, you don’t hang out with notorious public sinners and disgusting tax collectors. If you eat with them, you’ve really crossed the line! This was too friendly with terrible people. That was simply not done—not because God said it was wrong, but because it was the tradition that was followed. You can start to see the problem. The Pharisees were notorious for feeling that they were pretty righteous because they kept ALL of God’s laws, along with all sorts of other invented rules and traditions. They even equated those with God’s laws, insisting that everyone else do those too. So…tax collectors who teamed up with the Roman government and stole from the Jewish people were high on their list of people they thought they were better than. And people that everyone knew lived godless lives… Well, all of this is what started those very religious men complaining about what Jesus was doing. “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” Their complaining tells you two things: what they thought of those people and what they thought of Jesus because he was willing to spend time with them. So, he was definitely NOT a religious teacher anyone should have been listening to! But he was about to make them listen.