The Lost Coin
Luke 15:8-10
When my son Luke was a toddler, my wife and I took him to the beach in Gulf Shores, AL. We had a wonderful time but finally check out day arrived. I was in the kitchen packing up all of the refrigerator items when I heard my wife cry out, “I can’t find my wedding ring?” Well, that started a search of the condo. We retraced her steps. We look all over the bathroom where she said she had set it down. We checked the bedside table and on the floor all around it and still it was not in sight. We then systematically began to take the condo apart, first the bedroom with moving the dresser and dismantling the bed, then the living room with removing every cushion on the coach and chairs and then lifting them up and searching under and behind them. We unpacked all of our clothes only to find nothing. As we searched without any progress, we became more and more frantic. Half an hour passed, then an hour, an hour and a half and at the end of the second hour, we started to talk about making an insurance claim. Regret and sorrow began to fill us. But then my wife realized there was one place we had not looked. We had brought all of Luke’s toys in a cardboard box. As we prepared to leave, we told him to put all of his toys back in the box. Giovanna and I ran over to it and turned it upside down, dumping everything out and in the bottom of the box, we saw it. We screamed out in joy and breathed the largest sigh of relief of our lives. Apparently, Luke had grabbed the ring off the bathroom counter all in an effort to help pack as we got ready to leave.
Have you been there, losing something of great value and worth? As Jesus continues responding to the Pharisees’ charge that He welcomes and eats with sinners and tax collectors, he does so with three parables. The Greek word for "welcomes" literally means to "receive as a friend." This was Jesus’ attitude toward those who were lost in sin, to befriend them and love them back to God, vastly different from the Pharisees’ view of such people. In Jesus’ day, to eat with someone was more than sharing a meal together. It was a convenantal experience, meaning that once you shared a meal with someone, you were bound to them in relationship. If they were ever in need of help, you had to come to their assistance. So the Pharisees were careful with who they broke bread with. They didn’t want to become unclean. But Jesus? He ate with anyone and everyone, including the worst of the worst in the Pharisees eyes, tax collectors and sinners. The Pharisees sought to live pure and holy lives by following the letter of the Law. By Jesus’ time, they had become more critical of others who didn’t live like them or believe like them. They assumed an “us vs. them” mentality, calling those who disagreed with them “outsiders,” now including Jesus. But this is why Jesus came and for whom Jesus came. From the Pharisee’s perspective, Jesus was not seeking to live a pure and holy life because of who he associated with.
Now Jesus has been preaching for about a year and everywhere he goes, he draws a crowd. His teachings and healings only increased his fame and the size of his following. The Pharisees were threatened by Jesus’ growing popularity and influence and so they sought to discredit him by tricking him into contradicting the Law in his teaching, preaching or his actions. And when that didn’t work, they conspired to get rid of him altogether. Jesus responds to the charges of the Pharisees with three parables. Parables were the most common form of teaching in Jesus’ day among rabbis or teachers. A parable is a story set alongside a truth. Thus, all parables have one major truth they are meant to communicate. Parables engage the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, causing the hearer to say, "Wait a minute! That's not what normally happens!” Or “That person did what?" They cause hearers to think about its true meaning. The meaning of most parables is not obvious, and if we assume we know what Jesus is talking about, we’re probably missing the main point. Jesus’ parables drew from nature or common life like seeds and weeds, trees and fruit, land and landowners, and sheep and shepherds.
The first parable we looked at last week was the Parable of the Lost Sheep. Jesus shocks and even offends the Pharisees with the statement, “Suppose one of you has a 100 sheep and loses one...” Now Pharisees considered shepherds to be “sinners” because they roamed on people’s land without permission and the grass and water consumed by the sheep could never be repaid. Thus, it was a sinful and shameful profession. Jesus further challenges the Pharisees by saying it was the shepherd who lost the sheep. In a society where saving face is so important, this would have angered the Pharisees by implying that they haven’t been living up to their responsibility to care for all their sheep. Last week, we learned that the shepherd doesn’t blame the sheep but instead has compassion for it, so much so that it leaves the 99 with the other shepherds and goes to search for the one, placing himself in great danger.
In today’s Scripture, Jesus speaks of a woman who loses a coin in her house and the great lengths she goes to find it. Now a house of a common person in Jesus’ day would have been the equivalent of a small efficiency apartment. In the northern part of Israel, the main building material was basalt or volcanic rock for floors, walls and ceilings. It is dark gray or black in color. Most homes had no windows, or very small ones at best, and so a lamp was needed to find the coin in that dark room. Even though the house is small, the coin wasn’t initially found. That would have incited even greater panic because the woman knew it had to be there. Women were limited in where they could go in Jesus’ day. So the woman was confident that the lost coin was to be found somewhere in her house. Much of her determination and perseverance to find it is rooted in this knowledge. If she will just keep on sweeping, she’s confident the coin will eventually be found. And it was critical for her to find it because it was a day’s worth of wages. In a country where 90% of the poor are struggling to survive, Jesus’ audience understood how important it was to find that coin, and her increasing desperation to find it.
What do we learn from this parable of Jesus? First, it takes great effort to find that which is lost. For many of us, the greatest effort is to begin the search. We’ve grown comfortable with ourselves, where we are spiritually and with our faith community. We fall prey to our culture’s value of independence, that each person is responsible for their own spiritual journey and the value of privacy, that my faith and relationship to God are a private matter and nobody else’s business and so we don’t want to pry into others as well.
If we’re honest, we have to confess to our own lack of desire to start the search. Sometimes it’s a lack of confidence in our speaking ability or even knowing what to say. Sometimes it’s a fear of embarrassment. But rarely is it a lack of opportunity. We have chosen not to act and failed to place our trust in God. In essence, we’ve condemned the lost before they’ve been given a chance at survival. Like the disciples, we need to be filled with Holy Spirit to overcome that, which holds back our witness and ask for that burning passion and desire to save the lost. There are souls in this world who don’t know that they’re lost. They haven’t found Christ in the world and do not know the love of God. Worse yet, they do not know the love of others either. They’ve learned that this is a dog-eat-dog world and that only through their effort can they hope for a meaningful life. These people are lost and aren’t even aware of it.
Where do we begin? First is through prayer. A significant part of our prayers should be for the lost. And we need to ask for Holy boldness and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Second, make a connection. This is what we are to be about, “Connecting diverse communities to a lifestyle devoted to Jesus.” Take time for others. Develop a friendship. Find similarities like a job, a hobby, a common interest, a cause or any number of things. The point is to find a touchpoint of commonality and connection with that person and begin to develop a relationship with them. If you open yourself to it, God will place people in your life, so that we can get to know them and share life with them. We have to shower people with our kindness and love before we can present Christ to them. People don’t care how much we know until they know how much we care! Third, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, begin spiritual conversations and extending invitations. Invite them to church with you, whether it be an outreach event or a worship service.
Second, it takes great persistence. In this parable, Jesus notes specifically that the woman continued seeking after the lost item until she found it. Persistence is needed because finding lost sheep among spacious fields and hills, and lost coins in the dirt floor of dark home would not have been easy. If people don’t respond immediately, don’t give up and walk away. Keep praying. Keep talking with them. It takes time. Our first efforts usually don’t meet with success. Sometimes it takes years of persistence, but we should not be discouraged or give up. If a sheep or coin was valuable enough to persistently search for, then people who are spiritually lost are too valuable to give up on.
Third, know the joy when one is found. The religious leaders of the day had been indifferent toward the lost and even antagonistic toward them coming to Jesus. Jesus uses these two parables to illustrate how wrong their response was, especially when compared to how they would have responded toward recovering something of far less value. If they were joyful at the recovery of a lost sheep or lost coin, certainly then they should have been joyous instead of angered at the lost coming to Jesus. The one thing that matters most to God is the lost, so much so that when the lost are found, even one of them, all heaven rejoices and throws a party! There is more joy over one sinner coming to Jesus than over 99 people being right where they’re supposed to be with God. If lost people matter this much to God, shouldn’t they matter this much to us? Shouldn’t we be willing to give everything needed in order to reach the lost? May we have the heart of God, the mission of Jesus and the passion of Holy Spirit to seek the lost as we follow in His footsteps. Amen.
