Claimed, gathered and sent

This is the sermon I preached last Sunday at St. Timothy Lutheran Church . The text was Luke 15:1-10. There is no one definitive interpretation of any parable. Parables are like multi-faceted jewels. You hold it and look at it one way and think you understand. Then you turn it over, gaze at it from a different angle, and you still have a different perception of its beauty. One way to interpret this parable is: lost, found, party. Amen.   But today, I want to focus on the numerous times we find joy and rejoicing in this gospel passage.   First, I want to ask a question. Who all is rejoicing and experiencing joy in this passage? Let’s look at the reading. First, the shepherd rejoices when he finds the lost sheep and calls on his friends to rejoice with him. They’re gonna party!   Looking at the story of the lost coin. It doesn’t say, but we can assume the woman rejoiced when she found the lost coin. She, too, calls on her friends to rejoice with her because of the...

Here are some thoughts about this Sunday's gospel. Luke 16:1-13 1 Then Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. 2 So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.’ 3 Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. 4 I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ 5 So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ 6 He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ 7 Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take you...