Lost and Found: God shows us the way!
In the name of the Living God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
The two parables we just heard are commonly known as the Lost and Found parables. The core message is that God relentlessly pursues us when we are lost and rejoices when we are found. With that summary, I’ve just saved you hours and hours of exegesis—hours and hours of exegesis! But more seriously, this morning I want to invite you to reflect on a time in your life when you were lost, really lost. How did you feel? Where did you turn? What resources did you lean into to get your bearings again?
When I was reflecting on our passage during the week and the questions I just posed to you, what came vividly back into mind from my own life was a time about thirtyish years ago when I was at the farm that my husband John and I had in West Virginia. We loved to go there and be in God’s nature to be restored and refreshed in the beauty of God’s great creation. We loved to hike and look outside and discover the new things that had happened since we’d last been there.
It was one of those beautiful days and we were out hiking. We were on the highest area of the property, and we’d been out for a while, and I was ready to go home. John, however, wanted to go look at some extraneous something—extraneous to me, at least. We agreed to meet back at the house so off we went. It was not too long before I discovered I was lost— like really lost. I didn’t know where I was. I was trying not to panic, realizing that it was late afternoon and the sun would soon set.
Now, for those of you who are twenty-five or younger, you may find this hard to believe, but there was a time when cell phones and GPS did not exist! So, I was without phone or GPS. I prayed fervently that God would help me find my way. Then I recalled some wisdom that John had shared with me. In his most gracious way, he had pointed out to me that God had given me many gifts, but a sense of direction wasn’t one of them. He said, if you ever find yourself lost, go straight downhill. You’ll come to a road or a stream or something and you’ll find civilization. You can always find your way home from there.
So, I looked in front of me and to the right and to the left—solid brambles of multiflora rose bushes. They have beautiful, sweet little flowers and treacherous thorns. But there was no choice. I had nowhere to go but through them. I’m getting scraped and scratched and my clothes are being ripped, but I’m making my way downhill. And with God’s help, obviously I found my way home.
Upon reflection, I thought how that’s so much like life, is it not? Sometimes when we are lost, be it geographically or spiritually or emotionally, we just have to make our way through the thicket to find our bearings and our way home. We realize how important it is to hold fast; that the true GPS for our life is God, the source of life and light and love.
In talking about these parables of the Lost and Found, Tom Long in Proclaiming the Parables offered this wisdom: “…the parable is…a powerful image of zeal in searching and joy in finding…the heart of God is to search out those who are outside, and the mission of Jesus is to ‘seek out and to save the lost.’ When the mission is accomplished, it generates abundant joy.”
He goes on to write that this parable “…guides us to all of those places where true repentance occurs, to places where people who are broken and who feel lost and endangered are summoned back to wholeness and restoration.”1
This reminder that God is our true resource, our refuge and strength in troubled times seems ever more urgent. It’s been a challenging week, to say the least. We have seen yet once again, a young person who was lost, hopelessly lost, and felt that the answer to his problems, his issues, was to take up a gun and kill someone. We are tragically seeing this over and over and over again. Governor Cox, in the wake of this great tragedy, implored all of us to tone it down, get off social media, to take an off ramp. I too am imploring all of us to do the same. Governor Cox in his public service has made disagreeing better a core value that he is lifting up, and it completely aligns with the Cathedral’s theme that we started over a year ago of A Better Way. And I would note that on this very platform, the first public forum we held for A Better Way was with Governor Cox and Governor Moore, who are on very opposite ends of the political spectrum and yet have a deep and abiding friendship and respect for one another. They simply sat there and had a civil conversation and talked about the things that they admired and respected in one another and why they reach out to one another. When they concluded there was a standing ovation.
Friends, there is a better way, and I would argue it is the way of our Lord. God is the source of life and light and love. In order for us to carry that forth, we too, need to replenish our souls and try to offer the grace and mercy and compassion and the love of our Lord, recognizing that each and every person—every life—is precious, precious to God. I think there are many ways to re-anchor ourselves in our relationship to God. One of them is to be together, together as we are today in community because we are better together. And to be in a place that inspires awe and reminds us of the vastness of God’s mercy and love.
Nature is a wonderful place to restore our souls. Washington Post columnist Dana Millbank wrote a very provocative article that came out on Friday. It’s entitled, “I was a political columnist. Here’s why I’m now searching for hidden beauty.” He wrote, “For the past three decades, I have covered the dehumanizing cauldron that is our current politics, and the last decade has been particularly soul-crushing. I begin today a new column dedicated to reclaiming the humanity we are losing to the savagery of politics, the toxicity of social media and the amorality of artificial intelligence. One of the keys to that recovery is nurturing our innate sense of awe, the feeling we get when we contemplate something so vast and mysterious that it quiets our anxieties and ambitions and puts our differences and disagreements into perspective.”2
He then noted that “Research shows that experiences of wonder reduce depression and anxiety, ease loneliness, improve physical health and even lesson the polarization and alienation in our politics…It takes us out of our self-centered individualism and helps us understand that we are part of a family, a community and an ecosystem.”3 Being armed with a magnifying glass and some scientists who knew what they were doing, they explored a hayfield and the beauty in different kinds of grasses—the diversity, the gift that is God’s creation, reminding us that we are part of a beautiful, diverse whole.
So, nature’s one way to replenish our soul. I found another in abiding in beauty. I think there aren’t many places that are more beautiful than this cathedral, but I recently read an exquisite little book called All the Beauty in the World. It’s written by Patrick Bringley. Bringley was twenty-five when his older brother, at the ripe old age of twenty-seven, died of cancer. It was crushing—soul crushing. His grief was so deep and so vast that he knew he had to do something to find some way to be still to allow himself to heal. He made the difficult decision to leave a highly coveted and sought after job as a writer with the New Yorker. He decided to go to the place that he knew of that had the most beauty.
He became a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art knowing that he’d be surrounded by beautiful things. What he didn’t know was how much it would change him. And it wasn’t just the art but the people he encountered. There are some 600 guards at the Met! Who knew? Over half of them are foreign born. But as he came to learn from the diversity of the people with whom he worked and the diversity of the people who came to the Met seeking solace and beauty, he slowly but surely started to get his voice again and to heal and to help fill that huge hole in his heart.
He knew after ten years that he was ready. He was ready for the next chapter. He decided before he left that he was going to select one work, one work that meant the world to him that he would carry with him—not physically, that would’ve gotten him in trouble! —but carry within him. You know what I mean. He chose Fra Angelico’s Crucifixion and he wrote this about it:
“I like old Christian art and its luminous sadness…Christ’s body looks like it’s been nailed to the mast of some storm-tossed ship. It’s the center around which the rest of the world seems to rock and wheel. A graceful, broken body, it reminds us again of the obvious: that we’re mortal, that we suffer, that bravery in suffering is beautiful, that loss inspires love and lamentation. This part of the painting performs the work of sacred art, putting us in direct touch with something we know intimately yet remains beyond our comprehension.”4
God may be beyond our full comprehension, but God relentlessly pursues us when we are lost and desires nothing more than a personal, intimate relationship. If you remember nothing else about what I’ve said this morning, remember this: God loved us enough to take on flesh and dwell among us so that our lives would never be the same, so that we could see and understand that we are precious and beloved in God’s sight, each and every one of us. God is our life’s GPS.
Our world is broken. So many are hurting. Let us recommit ourselves today to reconnecting deeply with that light and life and love that is God’s gift to us and to the world so that we are better equipped to carry it out to those who badly need that Good News. Amen.
1 Thomas G. Long, Proclaiming the Parables: Preaching and Teaching the Kingdom of God (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2024), 306-307.
2 Dana Millbank, “I was a political columnist. Here’s why I’m now searching for hidden beauty,” Washington Post, September 12, 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/09/12/touch-grass-nature-humanity/
3 Millbank
4 Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me (New York: Simon & Schuster, LLC, 2023), 174.