A caveat: I know what I’m about to say is a bit harsh, but here goes anyway… God is a loser. Literally. If we happily go along with many traditional interpretive lenses for these parables, that’s the end result. You see there are many problems with parables if we try to read them straight and make easy sense of them. In fairness, I guess it isn’t really the problem with parables so much as it is with us parable-readers.
I often wonder why Jesus spoke in these riddle-like 
stories and muddy-watered metaphors. I think it’s because we humans have a tendency to over-complicate his simple teachings, so maybe this was his way of trying to get us to think our way out of that bad habit, his way of saying… “It really is this simple…though it is not that easy…”
Anyhow, back to my heretical opening line. God is a loser. If we stick with the most common paradigm for reading these two parables, anyway. Because the stories are almost always setup and interpreted like this:
Parable 1: Lost Sheep.
We’ve got some sheep, right. 100 of them. 1 gets lost. So the shepherd leaves the 99 and goes searching for the missing one. Who knows how long it takes. But when the sheep is found: PARTY! Joy in heaven. More for one who repents than 99 who think they’re too good to repent.
Parable 2: We’ve got some coins. 10 of them. 1 gets lost. So the woman lights a lamp and sweeps the house searching for the missing one. Who knows how long it takes. But when the coin is found: PARTY! Joy in heaven over one who repents.
So….where is God in these parables? Traditionally, what’s the interpretation? God as shepherd. And God as searching woman. Right!
But that creates a whole pile of problems. I got 99 problems, and God is very nearly all of them! The first of which is that in the second story, God is definitely a loser. A coin doesn’t lose itself right? The woman lost it.
Sheep have a bit more agency than an inanimate coin, so I suppose we could argue that the sheep did in fact lose itself, but…doesn’t that make the shepherd…a sorta lousy one?? Sure, it’s a tough gig, but a good shepherd doesn’t lose sheep.
What other problems do you see cropping up if God is the shepherd and God is the woman?
- Carelessness of losing something valuable.
- Irresponsibility of leaving the 99 other sheep.
- Extravagance of such a celebration for finding one coin, even if it’s worth a half or full day’s wages.
Now here’s what I do like about this traditional reading. As one preacher and scholar puts it, “To lose a sinner would be tantamount to losing part of Godself, inasmuch as the sinner bears the imprint of the Creator. The recovery of the sinner is, then, not simply the recovery of something that has been lost; it is the recovery of God’s image-bearer.”
“In response to the Pharisees charge that Jesus associates with worthless, good-for-nothing tax collectors and sinners, Jesus’s response is, “Obviously.” Throughout the Gospel of Luke, Jesus dines with the poor and the rich, the tax collectors, sinners, and the Pharisees.” Amanda Brobst-Renaud
All of them have value. All of them are worth finding. Even at the risk of a shepherd leaving 99 other sheep. And all of them are worth celebrating once they’ve been found.
But as we’ve seen, God as searching woman and God as shepherd obviously have some interpretive challenges. Another challenge for me in this reading is where it leaves us. People. Humans. Where are we in the story?
Yep, we’re typically the sheep and the coin. In addition to all the questions about whether God really careless enough to lose us, this position for us people in the story makes me wonder because…um, last time I checked, neither a sheep nor a coin could repent…so our parable has some other holes in it. And it seems to me that repentance is an essential response to being found.
So I want us to play with the parable a bit. Go with me down a different interpretive road. We’re going to use what some have called our “sanctified imaginations,” the holy gift of playing with Scripture to expand our repertoire of possibilities for its meaning.
Here’s what I wonder: What if we humans are both the shepherd and the sheep, both the woman and the coin? And what if God is in the celebration and the repentance instead?
If that’s a possibility, then the searching woman has lost something of value, something that matters, something that means something to her. Since we know parables are symbolic, I wonder if that coin might represent an integral part of herself. What if she has lost part of what sits at the very heart of who she is? Maybe life hasn’t unfolded as she thought or planned or hoped: maybe there has been so much pain that she can’t find her joy; maybe there has been seemingly insurmountable hardship, and she’s searching for her resilience; maybe loneliness and isolation have left her checking every dusty corner for belonging or meaning or hope.
What if she has lost an essential part of herself and won’t stop looking until she finds it? Because it seems to me that she’s searching as if her life depends on it. And perhaps it does. Only then can I make sense of the celebration that comes after finding a single coin.
As one professor notes, “Upon recovering the sheep and the coin, respectively, the shepherd and the woman call their neighbors and friends to rejoice with them. In their joy and in their celebration, one wonders whether they spent more than they gained in the recovery in the lost sheep and coin.4 The measure of rejoicing might suggest to us that the recovered object was irretrievably lost and its recovery was unlikely—if not impossible.” (Amanda Brobst-Renaud)
That’s certainly worth throwing a party!
Now, about this shepherd and flock of sheep. What if this is our faith community? Sheep are natural wanderers. Aren’t we all? So we need attentive shepherds to pay attention to those sheep who are tired or hungry or thirsty or not paying attention. Or else…one goes missing. Things get busy and we lose track of a sheep, we get stuck in our own comfy patches of grass, and forget to make space for others. In short, we lose one another. And off goes a shepherd in search of the sheep, which is a risky endeavor.
What if we’re all both shepherd and sheep? What if together, we’re called to pay attention to and go in search of one another? Because if I’m honest, keeping up with just a couple sheep seems like a lot some days…much less all of you. So Suzanne and I rely on y’all to shepherd one another, too. Because a few hundred sets of spiritual and emotional needs, a few hundred sets of priorities and hopes for the future is a lot to wrangle…even for two very talented, capable shepherds…thank you very much. So what if we only manage to pull this off together?
Because I know there are moments when we’ve all felt a bit like the lost sheep here. That twinge of hurt around feeling unseen or unheard, the ache of feeling left behind or forgotten, the twinge of misunderstanding. So we need all the sheep-y friends and shepherds’ crooks we can get working to keep this flock together. We need each other. We all long to feel safety and belonging here, to find and be found.
Which brings me back to our story and to this noticing. When the sheep and the coin are found, there’s great joy and rejoicing, and Jesus makes a connection to repentance, but I want to pause here to clarify something important. “Unlike the English word repentance, which implies contrition and remorse, the Greek word metanoia has to do with a change of mind and purpose – a shift in how we perceive and respond to life. When God finds us when we are lost, [when we recover essential parts of ourselves and when we find one another], our usual ways of perceiving and responding to life are transformed.” (Lois Malcolm)
Metanoia. Friends, I think this is the heart of this season of transition and transformation for us. This is an opportunity to be fundamentally changed by the work of finding God, finding ourselves, and finding one another again. We who do the losing are also called to do the finding. And in the midst of it all, we are transformed into the image that God has for us, individually and together.
Us lost sheep and lost coins, us seeking shepherds and searching women. May we commit to find and be found so that together we might know the promise of rejoicing. Even if we have a hard time imagining it in this moment, a party is waiting on the other side of the transition and transformation! May it be so. This day and each day. Amen.