![The steeple of the Memorial Church](/sites/g/files/omnuum7126/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2025-02/160725ChurchCalArt4.jpg?itok=rG9ZvXzh) # Sermon: Fourteenth Sunday of Pentecost September 16, 2025 - [ Blog ](/news-categories/blog) *By the Rev. Dr. Calvon Jones* *Assistant Minister/director* *The Memorial Church of Harvard University* *(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Sept. 14, 2025)* *Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like like me.* *I, I once was lost but now I'm, I'm found, was, was blind but now I see.* I have sung John Newton's Amazing Grace more times than I can count, and I'm sure you all have. We've sung this song in church pews and hospital rooms, at funerals, baptisms, in the shower, in the car, on our walks while we walk our dogs, meditating and thinking about these words. It's one of those songs that has lived for me and lived inside of our hearts for years, and we will forever love it. But I wonder, maybe it needs revision. In my homiletical imagination for the sake of these lessons and parables today, may I push our thinking a bit? What if we sang, "I once was found, but now I'm lost"? Because if I'm honest, that line feels just as true, maybe even more true, in the times in which we live in these yet-to-be United States. I know what it feels like to be found. I also know what it feels like to lose my way, and it appears that we are losing our way in this nation. To wonder if God still sees us, to wonder if God is still present, to wonder if God is still hearing our prayers. And I'm sure that's how so many of you feel this morning, when you turn on the television and you read your newspaper or you scroll down your timeline, lost. Rendered invisible, wondering if we are worthy of God's love anymore in this nation. And that brings me to this strange, scandalous, yet beautiful parables that Jesus tells us in Luke 15. Once again, Jesus is being criticized for spending time with the wrong people. Tax collectors and sinners have gathered to hear him speak, and the religious leaders are offended. They mutter, "This man welcomes sinners and eats with them," not knowing that in the Greek, that sinners really means one who has missed the mark. Haven't we all? In response, Jesus tells two stories. First, a shepherd loses one sheep and leaves the other 99 behind to go and find it. Then a woman loses a silver coin and lights a lamp, sweeping her whole house until she recovers it. And in both stories, when the lost is found, there is joy, celebration. Friends are gathered, neighbors are called, and a party is thrown. For years, if I may be honest, I was taught that these parables were simply just about evangelism. About reaching the people out there, the people who don't know God. The people who really, really need salvation. The people who don't act like me, who don't act like the righteous folks, the people who don't come to church, the people who don't pay their tithes, the people who are not a singer in the choir, the people who cannot exegete a text. The people who don't believe, necessarily like me, the people who are not a part of my denomination. But the more that I read these stories, beloved, the more I realize that this is not the full story. The lost lamb already belonged to the shepherd. The coin was already in the woman's possession. They were not outsiders. They were a part of the household, part of the fold. These parables aren't just about the so-called unbeliever being found. They are about us. The insiders, the faithful, the churchgoers, the bread and wine takers, the ones who read scripture and say our prayers. The stories are about how even we can get lost. And if you have ever felt like you were ever losing your grip on God, or maybe even like God was losing grip on you, these stories are not a rebuke, but a promise. Because whether we recognize it or not, we all get lost. If I could be honest right now, I'm lost right now. We get lost in anxiety and bitterness and shame and self-righteousness. We get lost in addiction, in ambition, in distraction, in grief. We get lost when relationships fall apart, when our dreams collapse, when we ask the questions we were told to never ask. And sometimes it's a quiet drifting, but yet God comes looking. Harvard Memorial Church ยท The Rev. Dr. Calvon Jones - Sept. 14, 2025 | Sunday Sermon The shepherd doesn't scold the sheep. He picks it up, puts it on his shoulders and carries it home. The woman, and I know this messes up some readers, God as woman. Come on, somebody. The woman doesn't blame the coin. She turns her house upside down until it's back in her hands. One writer puts it this way: "Lostness happens to God's people. It happens within the beloved community. It's not that we cross over once and for all from sinful lostness to righteous foundness. We get lost over and over and over again." End quote. This is not just about being found once. This is about being found again and again. This is about a God who knows that even the faithful lose their way. As one writer states, "It sounds crazy to leave the 99 until it's you." Because God's kingdom, in God's kingdom, there is no us versus them. There are only people who are lost and people who are trying to be found. This is the reckless and beautiful absurdity of the shepherding, sweeping God. A God who does not care that it's bad business to leave the 99 sheep unattended, A God who does not care that it is inefficient to search all night for a single coin, a God who does not care about our capitalistic ideas of what is reasonable or sustainable. The God who searches, and the God who rejoices. And on this day, we remember 24 years later the day the towers fell on September the 11th, 2001. We also remember the ones who ran toward the smoke. We remember the firefighters, the police officers, the EMTs, the paramedics, the chaplains, nurses, doctors, the construction workers, and the countless ordinary citizens who became extraordinary that day. They didn't turn away. They climbed stairs while everyone else ran down. They dug through rubber with their bare hands. They held strangers in their final moments. They carried the wounded. They sacrificed their own safety. They remind us what love does. Love searches, love reaches, love goes, love takes risks. And in the days that followed, a fractured nation paused and leaned toward each other. For a brief and sacred moment, we remembered that we belonged to each other. We prayed together, we wept together, we rebuilt together. But now, nearly a quarter-century later, we find ourselves in a different kind of a wilderness. Not a wilderness of falling towers, but of crumbling trust. One filled with white lashes, resurgent ideologies, and pathologies of hate. We find ourselves in a wilderness of a democracy that is seemingly in pieces. Rising violence. We live in a land where blood cries out from the ground. Classrooms echo with the silence of stolen laughter. City streets whisper the names of the fallen, and dreams are buried beneath bullet casings. Political assassinations rattle our history like thunder over dry bones, and school shootings have become a grim liturgy of our times, yet still the nation slumbers. Still, the halls of power remain hushed. Still our laws limp behind our lament. Where is the outcry? Where is the righteous indignation? Have we grown so numb to the sound of gunfire that we mistake it for the rhythm of freedom? Hatred wrapped in holy language. White Christian nationalism masquerading as the gospel. Can I preach it like I feel it? We see the erasure of identities and stories, the marginalization of the vulnerable, the oppression of the poor, the attack on immigrants and women, the resurgence of racism, and the spreading poverty of both body and soul. God, where is the outcry? And yet, and yet today, Memorial Church, as I begin to head to my seat, if the parables of Jesus tell us anything, it is that God has already gone ahead and to the wilderness. God is out there searching, searching for the lost, the wounded, and the weary. Calling us not to just be found, but to join in the search. Let us be the people who go searching not to shame, but to walk beside and to say, "Come home, we missed you. There's room at the table for you." For the kingdom of God, and the kingdom of heaven, really looks like a shepherd sweeping woman who has lost something. For the kingdom of heaven looks like a God who will not stop until he finds you and me. For the kingdom of heaven looks like a God who invites us to join the search until the good news reaches the poor in the valley. In the words of James Forbes, nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor. The kingdom of heaven is not a string of orange reused in the middle of the Rio Grande, encased in a razor wire, keeping children and their families as they try to immigrate to a new place. The kingdom of heaven is not someone who refuses medical treatment because they cannot afford it, or because they're not insured. But the kingdom of heaven looks like a God who invites us to join in the search, to proclaim liberty to the incarcerated, to recover sight to the blind, and to set at liberty those who are oppressed. For the kingdom of heaven looks like a shepherd sweeping woman who has lost something and will not stop until God finds you and me. For the kingdom of heaven looks like the reign of God's love breaking in. The beckoning of a beloved community, a reconfiguration of the landscape of reality from this current nightmare. Because that's what love does, love goes after what is missing. And I say this story, there's a story about Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth that happened. Frederick Douglass was in a room, and Sojourner Truth was listening to him, and he was just despairing. And she goes in and she says, "Frederick Douglass, it looks like there's no hope for this nation." And she said, "Frederick Douglass, is our God dead?" And Douglass replied, "If God is not dead, then neither is truth. If God is not dead, neither is justice. And if God lives, then justice will be done." Beloved, I beckon unto you today to embody the scripture that says, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." That God invites us to join in the search, knowing that eventually we will celebrate. For heaven rejoices over one, and God won't stop until God finds the least of these. That no matter how lost you are, how lost I am, or how lost our nation may appear that God's reckless, enduring, and endless love will find us. I once was found, but now I'm lost. ## Full Sunday Service ## See also:- [ Sunday Service ](/blog-categories/sunday-service) - [ Calvon Jones ](/media-archive/calvon-jones) - [ Sunday Service ](/archive/sunday-service) - [ Sermon ](/archive/sermons) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)