forest hill 
September 21, 2025
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
"God's Accounting"
We’re reading about the parables of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin this week. It made me wonder about the cost of that sheep (or that coin), and whether I’d be willing to put the effort into the search that the story presumes.
A quick Google search suggests a sheep today would be somewhere between $300 - $600. The footnote in my Bible suggests that the silver coin the woman lost is worth a day’s wage. In either case, this is not chump change. It’s not like losing a quarter in the couch cushions! But I’m still not sure I’d leave 99 sheep to their own devices while I went and searched for the missing one; what if several others took off while I was away from the herd? I always do a bit of a cost-benefit analysis before I put a lot of energy into a search. Is the thing I’m searching for really worth my energy, or should I just suck it up and take care of what’s left?
Even when people go missing, the authorities make that kind of analysis. A huge search can be mounted very quickly, especially for a lost child, but after days go by and nothing turns up, resources for the search dry up. There comes a point where even a lost child doesn’t trigger a lot of time and energy from the authorities any more. That’s got to be one of the most gut-wrenching decisions that a police department has to make, but most of us can understand the rationale. Searching stops when the cost of the search outweighs the likelihood of finding what’s lost, and the value of the thing you’re seeking.
Is the point of the parable that God does that cost-benefit analysis differently? That the cost of searching is always worth bearing? That God doesn’t give up on people nearly as quickly as we might?
Luke frames the two parables as a response to grumbling about the company that Jesus was hanging out with. Instead of spending his time with kindly respectable people, he had the temerity to kibbutz with tax collectors and sinners. Riff raff. The sorts of people that the rest of us like to avoid. These aren’t missing children; but they are certainly “missing” from our every-day social circles.
And if we’re honest, most of us have a “sort” of person we like to hang out with, and others that we don’t; folks who make us feel relaxed, and folks we’d rather avoid. Social media algorithms are all built around that assumption – feeding us posts, ads and people that they think we’ll “like” and downplaying or even ignoring the ones from people we’d never invite to dinner. Jesus, on the other hand, seems to have been willing to hang out with all sorts of people that Facebook would never have recommended to him. I wonder why? I wonder what difference that made… to him, and to those others?
We’ve frequently used these stories to insist on the importance of evangelism – go and seek the people who have left the church, and persuade them to come back. But maybe it’s more about recognizing the value of the people we wouldn’t otherwise spend time with. These stories are prodding me to consider who is “worth my time,” and what that might look like.
Join us on Sunday as we reflect on the value of sheep, and coins, and tax collectors, and sinners!
We worship in person and online, Sundays at 11am.