Grieve a New World into Being

Proper 19C: Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28; Psalm 14

1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

September 14, 2025

Good Morning, St. Aidan’s. Those of you who have been part of the St. Aidan’s community over the last couple of years have likely heard the story of my family’s beloved orange tabby cat Timbale. The most gregarious member of our strictly indoor feline trio, Timbale, snuck out on our cat sitter while we were on the east coast two years ago. As I shared in an Advent sermon that year, it was a complete ordeal. That year had already been one of tremendous loss for us, and it was as if Timbale carried that loss wildly and ambiguously around our neighborhood as he remained elusive for five months. We were finally able to lure him back once we discovered he was still around, through weeks of feeding him at the door and training him to be willing to cross its threshold without suddenly streaking away. Truly, after we got him back inside, I went around our neighborhood saying essentially “rejoice with me!” as per our gospel reading this morning.  

Fast forward to this past July when we went on vacation for two weeks, soaking up much needed and appreciated sabbath time in mountains. On the last evening Kateri got up from dinner to take a phone call. Returning to the table, her expression was bleak. I asked what was wrong. That was our cat sitter, she explained. She can’t find Timbale. Unlike two years ago she had not seen him get out, and we knew she was extremely careful about external doors, but she had scoured the house and couldn’t find him anywhere. I couldn’t believe it. Given that the last time a week had passed before we could properly start searching for him, and that now he had been lost for a day, I was determined to start right away. (Or as my family would say, I panicked.) I got up from the table, packed my car, and departed. Kateri would follow the next day with the kids.

As I drove into town at 1 AM, scanning the streets for a glimpse of him as I had regularly done two years ago, I was overcome by the feeling of this place I love reverting to a space of danger, lostness, and grief. I can’t go through this again, I thought. Walking into the house, I was immediately greeted by Bongo and Marimba (yes, they are all named after percussion instruments). Timbale was nowhere to be seen. I tore the house apart, searching every closet, every cabinet. I went into the garage (a cluttered disaster) and heard a slight shifting sound but couldn’t be sure it wasn’t random or something I caused. I called, I shook the treat bag. Nothing. Later as I unpacked my bag, I heard the cats playing above me along with a faint, high pitched meowing. As I went upstairs to check it out, the playing and meowing immediately stopped. I checked the garage again, left wet food in there overnight just in case, and went to bed. After a fitful night I awoke early and checked the garage. When I saw that the food was untouched, I was devastated. Again I scoured the house and the garage, calling, shaking the treat bag, but I had to face it: he just wasn’t there. I sat down at my desk and created a lost cat flyer, printed out fifty copies at Staples, and placed them in the mailboxes of our immediate neighbors, calling for Timbale along the way.

When Kateri and the kids arrived at dinnertime, the house was heavy with grief. I hadn’t been able to eat all day, but I had made dinner. After bringing in bags from the car, our oldest turned to me and said, “Daddy, I know you searched the whole house, but I’m going to do it again.” “By all means,” I responded, “go for it.” She headed up the stairs, opened the door to the garage and said, “I see him.” I couldn’t believe it. The rest of us ran into the garage but he had hidden himself again, so we retreated to the living room for a few minutes before our oldest emerged into the foyer, holding him in almost the exact spot I had held him two years before. He was seriously spooked but also obviously relieved to be back in safe, familiar territory with his people once again.

Rejoice with me, for we have found the sheep, the coin, and – once again – the cat, who was lost!

Jesus’ two brief parables directly follow a statement by the Pharisees scoffing at Jesus for welcoming and eating with tax collectors and sinners (Luke 15:1-2). The undesirables, those whom others would not want to be seen with, those who were cast out, lost – those were the people Jesus went out of his way to spend time with. Those were the people whose stories and lives he centered. The parables that Jesus tells in response to this grumbling, in response to this scoffing about outcasts, seem to implicitly cast these undesirable people as individuals who are lost. They are people separated from the rest of the group to whom they originally belonged. The one sheep is part of the ninety-nine. The coin is one of ten. In locating the lost animal and item, respectively, the searchers restore them to their group, those who seem to remain found. The closing line of each parable, emphasizing heavenly joy over one person who repents, can obscure the dynamic pointed out by theologian Justo Gonzalez, that Jesus is speaking to the grumblers, the “supposedly never lost about God’s preferential attention to the lost!”^[1] God rejoices in the finding and re-turning, of the lost one more than the apparently pristine lives of those who stay with the pack – or are allowed to remain there.

In fact, I wonder: how did the sheep become lost in the first place? Did it simply wander off? Did it get curious about the unknown and when an opportunity arose (as seems to have happened with Timbale), couldn’t resist exploring, only to regret it later? Or was this one sheep kicked out by the rest of a fold that positioned itself as righteous, as normal? Perhaps you’ve seen the cartoon in which the ninety-nine sheep confront Jesus who has the one sheep protectively draped across his neck. The group says, “he isn’t lost, we kicked him out.” And Jesus responds, “I know, and I found him.” The pronouns can vary. Sometimes the cartoonist uses a rainbow or the colors of the trans flag to color in the sheep, driving home the various terrible ways this ancient pattern of casting out, and of lostness can play out in our world today.^[2]

And this variety, the fact that the story of becoming lost and found again can and does happen repeatedly, that it is not necessarily one and done, strikes me as I sit with these parables in this moment. Repentance – changing of mind and heart – is not a simple, singular event in the life of an individual or a group, just as conversion is not a one-time occurrence, but a lifelong, ongoing journey. That journey takes place in a complex world of transformations and retrenchments, of insights and refusals, of acceptances and denials, gift and waste. We do not live in in a world of linear progress narratives.  Do individual or even smaller groups of human beings learn and grow over the course of a lifetime? With twists and turns, starts and stops, absolutely. But do human beings as a whole abide by the moral lessons we have learned through the mistakes, the wrongdoings, even the horrors, of those who have come before us? No, not with consistency. It is very painful to witness and experience. Scripture is full of stories of having to learn and turn, to repent again and again. Who is lost in these parables? The one sheep or coin? The group that gets left by the shepherd in the wilderness to retrieve the missing one? Or, in various morally distinct ways, perhaps all of the above?

It seems to me that alienation and isolation, the state of being lost and the process of becoming so, is a widespread phenomenon that our readings invite us to recognize and to name as a shared grief. Jeremiah vocalizes God’s lament over our lost-ness with the language of good and evil: “They are skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good” (Jeremiah 11:22). The Psalmist cries out yet more pointedly: “all alike have turned bad; there is none who does good; no, not one” (Psalm 14:3). In such passages the holy ones who have gone before us channel the voice of God grieving how human beings repeatedly make terrible decisions, hurt one another, do evil even though we know better. Before God finds and ultimately redeems the lost, even as God seeks us, God grieves.

Such outcries are painful to hear. Yet, as the biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann has written, grieving is essential to our redemption, our renewal, our embrace of resurrection life that no human action can contain. “The riddle and insight of biblical faith,” he writes in The Prophetic Imagination, “is the awareness that only anguish leads to life, only grieving leads to joy, and only embraced endings permit new beginnings.”^[3] Jesus modeled this process himself. He understood Jeremiah’s approach, Brueggemann says. “Ecclesiastes said only that there is a time to weep and a time to laugh; but Jesus sees that only those who mourn will be comforted (Matt 5:4). Only those who embrace the reality of death will receive the new life.”^[4]  

In a year of anguish, this has been a week to weep. We are reeling from the combination of a school shooting, a political assassination, the anniversary of 9-11, and ripples of reaction to all of these and additional events, including the scapegoating of marginalized communities and the fanning of grievance and outrage from the highest level of our federal government. Truly, this country has felt like a desolation this week. In response, it is right that we grieve. To do so in conversation with our scriptures – with Jeremiah, with the Psalmist, with Jesus the parable-teller who stands with the lost – is to “reactivate out of our history” language and imagery that are what Brueggemann called “vehicles for redemptive honesty.” With honest, faithful grappling and expression, each of us in our own ways, out of our own experiences, can join our voices to God’s own. Speaking of what Brueggemann calls “the real deathliness that hovers over us and gnaws within us,” we can seek to speak “neither in rage nor with cheap grace, but with the candor born of anguish and passion.”^[5] A passion that God took up in the casting out, the arrest, and execution of Jesus Christ, the Holy One who became lost with us that we might finally be found, whose weeping, as Brueggemann wrote, “permits the kingdom to come.”^[6]

As ridiculous as it was that I lost it and left our vacation a night early, only to fail to find our missing fur baby who was in fact right there, it strikes me now that I was not wrong to have grieved, even as our rejoicing at Timbale’s rapid return brought immense, welcome relief. My grief was not wrong because the losses he had always symbolically carried in addition to his own disappearance remain. Those losses marked a certain end of the world as I had known it, even as I truly believe a new world is in fact on its way. I cannot say that I welcome grief. Yet I believe this to be true: grieving such loss is an essential part of opening up and ushering in the world that is to come, God’s just reign, a world I can glimpse only through a glass darkly but that, together with you, with God’s help, I seek to welcome. If Christ’s weeping opens the door to God’s dream, dear friends, then together let us join him.

^[1] Justo Gonzalez, Luke: A Theological Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 186.

^[2] https://nakedpastor.com/products/lost-transgender-lamb-variable-print

^[3] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Minneapolis; Fortress Press, 1978, 2018), 56.

^[4] Brueggemann, 57

^[5] Brueggemann, 45

^[6] Brueggemann, 57