The Neighborhood Podcast
This is a podcast of Guilford Park Presbyterian Church in Greensboro, North Carolina featuring guests from both inside the church and the surrounding community. Hosted by Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing, Head of Staff.
The Neighborhood Podcast
"Lost & Found" (March 30, 2025 Sermon)
Preacher: Rev. Stephen M. Fearing
What kind of shepherd abandons 99 sheep to search for just one? A foolish one by earthly standards—but this paradoxical wisdom sits at the heart of God's extraordinary love for each of us.
Through the lens of Luke's parable of the lost sheep, we journey to Skagit County, Washington, where a community called Tierra Nueva ("New Earth") embodies this radical search-and-rescue mission. There, a man once known only by his street name "Neeners" transformed from someone lost in cycles of incarceration and gang violence to a shepherd helping others find their way home.
The divine comedy in this parable isn't meant to simply amuse us but to overturn our carefully constructed categories of who belongs and who doesn't. As Frederick Buechner notes, these stories reveal "the outlandishness of God, who does impossible things with impossible people." When we look closely at all three "lost" parables in Luke 15, we discover something profound: being lost comes in many forms, and not all lostness results from moral failure.
Like sheep that naturally wander or coins that can't lose themselves, humans experience lostness for countless reasons—addiction, poverty, trauma, circumstances beyond control. What matters isn't assigning blame but celebrating recovery. The theological truth shines bright: "None of us is truly found until all of us are found."
Perhaps our greatest spiritual growth happens precisely when we feel most adrift. And perhaps faith at its core isn't about congratulating ourselves for being among the "righteous 99" but simply looking at our neighbor and saying, "If you're lost, so am I." Listen now to discover how God's upside-down kingdom replaces our cutthroat calculus with unimaginable celebration.
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Please join me in prayer. Shepherding God, you look for us, you search for us. You turn every corner and climb every mountain. You call our name until your voice is hoarse when we lose our way. You never stop seeking after us. So, once again, we pray, find us in this moment, look for us and then surround us with your presence so that we might feel you near With hope. We pray with hope. We listen, amen.
Speaker 1:Our scripture lesson today is from Luke, chapter 15, verses 1 through 7. Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus, and the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying this fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them. So he told them this parable which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the 99 in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices, and 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. Just so I tell you there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance. Holy wisdom, holy word. Thanks be to God.
Speaker 3:Friends, let us pray, o Lord.
Speaker 3:May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight, o Lord, our rock and our redeemer, amen. So I learned this week about a new community, a new worshiping community I wanted to share with you all and a part of the country I am not familiar with Skagit County Washington. Skagit County Washington is a fertile farming community located about two hours north of Seattle, and within this county, the town of Burlington serves as the home base for an alternative worshiping community known as Tierra Nueva, which translates to New Earth in Spanish. It was founded by Bob Ekblad, who's a Presbyterian minister who was the staff chaplain for the local county jail. Back in the 1990s, he began to minister to and engage with the poor, underserved and marginalized inmates of that community. Ekblad witnessed firsthand the intersection of many factors that can cause individuals to become lost in various ways, including mass incarceration, addiction, homelessness, gang violence and poverty. Approximately 25% of the jail population was comprised of Mexican immigrants from the particularly vulnerable community of migrant farm workers.
Speaker 3:And one of the inmates at this county jail was a man known by his street name, neeners. Neeners became acquainted with some of the folks at Tierra Nueva during a couple different stints at the Skagit County Jail. The folks at this worshiping community listened to his story, walked alongside him without judgment, prayed together, read scripture and supported one another. In other words, they embodied the hands and feet of Christ for him. Today, niners is no longer involved in a gang. He is no longer incarcerated. Instead, he is now on staff at this worshiping community, tierra Nueva. He now ministers to others who have walked the path that he knows all too well. Thanks to the Christian witness of those people, nieders has become a new kind of leader in his community, one who shares the love of Christ with the population in dire need of some good news. I love this story for many reasons, but chief among them is that it blurs the distinction between sheep and shepherd. It blurs that line between the one lost sheep and the 99 righteous sheep. If we're honest, we often prefer those distinctions to be very clear and straightforward. We typically see ourselves, of course, being on one side, while relegating those we don't like to the other, gating those we don't like to the other. However, parables captivate us by challenging our assumptions about who belongs and who does not, who is labeled a sinner versus a saint and who is deemed right versus wrong. Parables are funny like that.
Speaker 3:I find today's parable to be downright absurd. Sometimes I believe a more fitting title than the parable of the lost sheep would be the parable of the foolish shepherd. I choose a more colorful metaphor, but that's the best I can do from the pulpit. What shepherd in their right mind would leave 99 sheep in the wilderness to find the one who has wandered off. Shepherds weren't small business owners. They worked for other people. They worked for landowners. So upon learning that their employee abandoned 99 sheep to search for one lost one, I suppose that any sensible landowner would likely fire that shepherd for gross negligence.
Speaker 3:It's bad business, doesn't make sense. It's not a sustainable model for protecting one's herd. But fortunately God doesn't care much about our capitalistic definitions of what is sustainable. And if that absurdity isn't enough, there's an amusing line that Jesus adds at the end of the parable. He says just so I tell you there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous people who need no repentance. One of the joys that I have as your pastor is to discuss scripture with you all and wrestle with it before we come to this moment every sunday and as I discussed this text with several of you.
Speaker 3:More than one of you shared genuine doubt about whether there in fact exist in this world 99 people who are free of sin and need no repentance. You and I know better. Anyone who believes that they have always been among the 99, while everyone else they disliked, is the one, should read a story in the Gospels where Jesus talks about a speck and a log. Parables can often seem nonsensical. They function as divine humor, in my opinion. However, this does not mean that we should avoid approaching them seriously. Humor serves as an effective means to recognize the allure of the kingdom of heaven. Once the laughter subsides and we reflect, pondering wait, was he serious? We can do the work of unearthing the harsh metrics that frequently dictate worth, confer privilege and determine who is deserving of God's grace. I have to envision Jesus concluding this parable with a subtle little snarky smile, while observing the astonished faces of his listeners. Right, these stories possess an element of playfulness, and this spirit of play can actually foster a vibrant faith. Concerning this parable, frederick Buechner once said I think that these parables can be read as jokes about God, in the sense that what they are essentially about is the outlandishness of God, who does impossible things with impossible people of God, who does impossible things with impossible people. And I believe that the comedy of them is not just a device for making the truth they contain go down easy, but that the truth they contain can be thought of as comic End quote Friends. This comedy is not only present in this text but also evident in the two additional parables found in the 15th chapter of Luke's gospel.
Speaker 3:The 15th chapter of Luke's gospel emphasizes lost things. The first, obviously, is today's passage about that lost sheep. The second is a related parable about a woman who loses a coin and then spends the late hours of the evening searching for it until she finds it and then wakes up all of her friends and says we got to get together and party. And then the third parable is perhaps the best known of the three, the parable of the prodigal son, which culminates in a grand party to honor the younger brother's return, of course much to the dismay of his older sibling, course, much to the dismay of his older sibling. So one reason I believe it's essential to hold all three of these lost and found parables together is that pairing them highlights the diverse reasons that you and I can become lost.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, we can undoubtedly become lost due to our own faults. The parable of the prodigal son illustrates this truth. He chose to hurt his father by asserting that his inheritance was more important than their relationship. He chose to squander that inheritance. His poverty directly resulted from his choices.
Speaker 3:But when reading these parables, it's important to acknowledge another truth, and that's this being lost is not always the result of some moral or ethical failing. Sometimes we find ourselves lost due to circumstances far outside our control. It's cruel to attribute conditions such as addiction or poverty merely as ethical failures, as doing so grossly ignores the systemic realities at play. Consider the sheep. Sheep wander, it happens all the time. This doesn't necessarily mean that they are bad sheep.
Speaker 3:The next parable, the parable of the lost coin, involves an inanimate object. Attributing its lostness to its own fault is silly. If anything, it was the woman's fault. These stories remind us that being lost is sometimes just a part of the human experience, happens to all of us, and it doesn't necessarily make us bad people or unfaithful Christians. The Israelites were lost and God guided them to a new way of being. Zacchaeus was lost and Jesus invited him over to share a meal with them. Saul was lost and then a voice of heaven bestowed upon him a new vocation and a new name. The woman at the well and John was lost and marginalized, and yet Jesus chose her as the first person to reveal his identity as the Son of God.
Speaker 3:So if you're sitting here today and you happen to be feeling lost, I've got news for you you are in good company. And there's even better news. Whether you are lost due to your own choices, whether you are lost due to your own choices or circumstances beyond your control, or some combination of the two, there is one heck of a celebration waiting for you and for us when you're found. And I wonder what conversations these celebrations might spark. What if they evoke memories of everything we've learned while feeling lost? Speaking for myself, I have learned much more about who I am and who God is calling me to be during the chapters in my life when I have felt adrift. This is certainly not to romanticize the idea of systemic lostness stemming from the issues we've mentioned addiction, poverty, violence and other destructive cycles but I do think it suggests that sometimes feeling lost can be a period of transformation, both for those who are lost and those who are found, those who are hoping to be discovered and those who are doing the looking, as Ms Kim talked about, with the children. The theological truth of these parables is this None of us is truly found until all of us are found.
Speaker 3:I invite you to focus on the artwork you'll find displayed on the television screen. It's also printed on, I think, the second to last page of your bulletin. It was created by Reverend Lyle Gwynne Garrity and is appropriately titled Lost and Found. The most prominent aspect of the piece is her depiction of the Good Shepherd with the sheep, formerly known as Lost. However, other details are also significant. You'll notice that the overall color palette is rather brown or muddy. That the overall color palette is rather brown or muddy. I wouldn't be surprised if this reflects that Lyle created this piece in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Helene's devastation of her hometown of Black Mountain, just a few hours to the west of us.
Speaker 3:We all remember seeing the images and the videos last September of the destruction that affected our neighbors there Washed out highways, demolished houses, tattered communities it had to wait as long as six days for emergency crews to reach them Collapsed bridges and endless rivers of debris and destruction that followed. But there were other images that also emerged from that painful time Neighbors helping neighbors, churches such as ours stepping up to feed and shelter and heal. Therapists who specialized in trauma therapy, who offered their services pro bono. The sharing of resources and the outpouring of compassion followed that historic flooding, including thousands of pounds of food that we and other churches gathered and donated. The shepherds were, and continue to be, abundant, those engaged in the holy work of helping individuals who, in this case, were lost through no fault of their own.
Speaker 3:None of us is truly found until all of us are found. There's something sacramental in the celebration to which God invites us when what was lost is found, and perhaps these stories aren't just about how God finds us. Maybe they're also about the celebration God announces when we find one another Right. The life of faith, friends, as I trust you know, is a series of ebbs and flows, moments when we oscillate between being lost and being found. Therefore, I don't believe the point of today's parable is to pat ourselves on the back for being in the 99 club, while pitying those in the lonely lost club.
Speaker 3:Reducing this parable to such a self-serving interpretation completely misses the point. Instead, what if we simply allowed ourselves to sit at the feet of the unfathomable. What if we set aside the calculus of our cutthroat culture to dream with God of a world where the biggest parties aren't hosted in the mansions of billionaires but in the fields of shepherds? And hear this y'all? This dream isn't just a nice idea, it isn't just a possibility. No, it's a foregone conclusion, because we trust in the kingdom that is and will be not through our doing but by God's command. So what if we understood that the essence of Christianity is about finding one another? Perhaps this thing called faith is really about looking at our neighbor and saying simply if you're lost, so am I. In the name of God, the creator, redeemer and sustainer, may all of us, god's sheep, say Amen, let us pray. © BF-WATCH TV 2021.
Speaker 2:O teach me, lord, that I may teach the precious truths that you impart, and bring my words that may be rich, my hidden gifts of prayer. O God, my dear angels, come to the Lord, come, fill me with your holy blood until my every heart shall know that you are my heavenly Father, the Holy Spirit. You'll see how you'll see in me the strength to will and will and will Until your blessed days. I see your rest, your joy, your glory share. The Lord is with you.