Trinity Church in the City of Boston
The Rev. Morgan S. Allen
September 14, 2025
The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 19), Luke 15:1-10
In you, O Lord, have we taken refuge; for the sake of your name, lead us and guide us. Amen.1 From Psalm 31.
I suspect most families have their story about the time one of their children became lost from the rest of their brood. For my family, the year was 1982(ish); the players were my mother, my maternal grandmother, my two sisters, and I; and the scene was the Columbia, Louisiana, Arts & Crafts Festival along Highway 165, just outside of Monroe, my hometown. Like most festivals of the sort, this Columbia affair dotted the roadside with tents and tables where vendors sold quilts, homemade jellies, and avocational artwork. Of that day, I first remember the uninteresting wares blessedly interrupted by a man selling baseball cards he had sorted into teams bound neatly in Saran Wrap. In the capricious way a seemingly random memory can endure with vivid detail, I recall the Fleer, baby-blue set of Atlanta Braves with pitcher Al Hrabosky featured as the facing card – a beacon in a sea of adolescent boredom.
My sister Emily celebrates her birthday today, more senior now than that fateful morning when she was the perilous age between two and four-years-old, by which time one has achieved full and active mobility, yet without anything approaching full and active understanding of their environment (and, for the record, I will mostly resist the big-brother comment that after all these years Emily still has not achieved that latter appreciation). In any case, I suspect that it was Granny who bought her the duck on a stick.
Maybe you will remember these particular toys, which, for a season, were as ubiquitous at such fairs as clothespin-cocking rubber-band guns. See, there was a broomstick attached to the tail feather of a two-dimensional, wooden duck. The duck – cut with a jigsaw from a 1” x 6” plank – was painted as a smiling, green-headed, mallard drake.
Now, here’s the kitsch: on each side of this duck were thick, wooden wheels, to which flat, floppy pieces of black rubber cut in the shape of webbed foot had been stapled [can you picture these]. Therefore, when one rolled the device (especially on, say, a linoleum floor), the toy looked delightfully silly and made the most satisfying smacking noise you’ve ever heard: smack smack smack smack smack smack smack smack smack smack. Further, a nearly equally satisfying pulse of resistance reverberated through its handle, and pushing this duck, one could certainly become lost in their play …
Now, today’s lesson from the Gospel of Luke immediately precedes the familiar story of the prodigal son, and the story of the prodigal will be introduced by the very same three verses introducing the two parables we heard today: the first bars of Chapter 15: “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 [Jesus] told them this parable…”2 Luke 15:1-3.
We should read, hear, and receive these parables as a unit, for Luke positions all three – the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son – as responses to the Pharisees’ and scribes’ grumbling about the company that Jesus keeps. Jesus tells them these parables of welcoming the lost, and listening with this ear, the comment closing “The Lost Sheep” more clearly sounds with sarcasm: “… there will be more joy in heaven over one [“sinner”] who repents, than over ninety-nine righteous persons [ahem, like all of you who “need no repentance”] …”3 Luke 15:7.
Importantly, in all these vignettes – including “The Prodigal Son” – Jesus invites the outcast to come near, and the stories serve as the flipside of the difficult narrative we’ve been hearing for some weeks:
not the forever weeping and gnashing of teeth for those cast into the outer darkness;4 Among other references of the sort, Luke 16:19-31, from Proper 21, to be read this year on September 28.
not of the dividing of mothers from daughters, fathers from sons, in the coming judgment;5 Luke 12:49-56, from Proper 15, read this year on August 17.
but God’s gracious reunion and joyful celebration at the welcome of the “lost.”
Apparently my sister found especially compelling the smack of that duck’s floppy feet and the rhythmic thump reverberating through its handle, for, as my mother will still recount with little prompting, we were all right there – right there! – and getting ready to leave, when Emily vanished. As you can imagine, hysterics ensued, and the absence of a fence between the festival site and the road became more conspicuous now: the state highway was so close, and that duck was a lot more fun to run on hard asphalt than soft grass.
Screaming and crying, my mother set out in search of Mr. Johnny James (and when she tells the story, she will get excited in this moment, saying, “I told mama, ‘Mama, you stay with Morgan and Amanda, and I’m going to go find Mr. Johnny James’”). My family was not the sort who knew people, but somehow we did know the man in charge of this fair, and my mother did find Mr. James [poor, Mr. James!]. He made announcements over the loudspeaker system, and my mother called out my sister’s name …
For the Pharisees, these three parables challenge their snobbery, for no longer could they assume themselves as God’s favored: This Jesus welcomes the riff-raff! He calls on them in their ratty homes, eats at their meager tables. Why, the best of them went to public universities – and some didn’t even go to college at all! How could he prefer their sad squalor to our well-earned splendor, the riches of the righteous … Does he not know who we are? Does he not realize who they are?!
Combatting this entitlement, Jesus casts the scribes as the self-important, impatient sheep, tapping their watches while the shepherd goes off again after that same lamb who’s been nothing but trouble since the day he was born [Can’t we just leave him behind, already?]. Jesus casts the Pharisees as the son who’s always walked the straight and narrow … yet for reward, not righteousness, all along looking out for himself first and resenting that he’s been denied the fatted calf and the good wine to which he felt entitled. In a Colonel Jessup sort of moment, Jesus baits those who “need no repentance” into condemning themselves with their reactions.
In our day, Jesus’ parables challenge the civic and religious leaders who would dare pray over their partisanship and declare it holy – those who, in the face of dangerous division and murderous violence, remain absorbed in the oblivion of their self-interest, pushing their little ducks on a stick: smack smack smack smack smack smack smack smack smack smack. Leveraging fear and confusion, they traffic lowest-common-denominator pablum and AI-generated images of madness, until, inevitably, a neighbor or cousin or colleague we thought we knew shares the inanity with us … which tempts our smuggery and spite … prompts our search for a more comfortable echo chamber, our own little duck to push.
Thanks be to God, there she was: clear on the far side of the festival, happily playing with her toy. Frightened and unsettled as we were, my family did not punish my sister for her wandering. My mother gathered her in her arms, pressed her cheek to her own, and kissed her sweaty head. Back at the station wagon, we hugged her and buckled her tightly into her car seat. On the way home, Granny gave thanks to Jesus [very personally, directly, with several enthusiastic signs of the cross!], and we talked about how as a family we look out for one another.
All of us spend time as a rolling coin, a dawdling lamb, a distracted preschooler … lost, whether we know it or not – and be sure that Jesus also tells these parables for us. Jesus reassures us God’s capacity for Grace has not diminished because we ended up between the world’s sofa cushions. Jesus tells us that God never calls off the search, promises that God’s patience, persistence, and grace will always overcome our wandering.
And these parables tells us more than that Good News: by these stories, God calls us to join that Holy Spirit constancy – no matter how annoyed or enraged or aggrieved or threatened we might feel. God calls us to humility, to search thoroughly for the blindness and oblivion by which we can injure one another so easily. Jesus calls us to join in the search for the lost with God’s patience, persistence, and grace … this can feel very difficult! Yet, frightened and unsettled as we might feel, God calls us to seek our neighbors restoration with joy and not judgment.
Praying for grateful hearts and gracious lives,
Amen.