21 June 2026 • Trinity 3 • Luke 15:1–10
In the Name of the + Jesus. Amen.
The tax collectors and sinners drew near to hear Him, and the religious men muttered the truest thing they ever said: “This Man receives sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2). They meant it as an accusation. Jesus takes it up as His glory, and answers with three pictures: a shepherd who has lost a sheep, and a woman who has lost a coin, and a father who lost his son(s), but that will have to wait for another day.
Look at the woman. “What woman, having ten silver coins, if she loses one coin, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it?” (Luke 15:8). She lights the lamp. She takes up the broom. And she sweeps in the corners, under the table, through the dust and the crumbs and the dark places where a small thing slips out of sight. She doesn’t sweep because she’s angry at the floor. She sweeps because somewhere in that house is something of hers, and she will not stop until it’s back in her hand.
You know what it is to be swept. You know the seasons when the broom comes through your life and stirs up everything you had let settle. The diagnosis you didn’t expect. The work that fell through. The grave you stood beside. The marriage has gone cold, the child who won’t come home, the fear at two in the morning that you have wasted your one life. When the broom comes through, the old conclusion rises with the dust: God is against me. He keeps a club behind His back. This affliction I’m suffering is the wage of my sin and the proof that He has thrown me out.
But hear what your Lord is doing. He isn’t using a club. It is a broom. He’s not driving you out. He’s sweeping you home. “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way” (Isaiah 53:6), and a lost thing left to itself only stays lost. The sheep wanders farther into the waste. The coin lies still in the crack of the floor and can’t so much as cry out to be found. You couldn’t climb up out of the dark on your own, and so He has come down into it after you, lamp in one hand and broom in the other, and He is sweeping you out of the dust toward Himself.
That is what your tribulation is for. It isn’t punishment. It’s His pursuit. The losses that tear your hands loose from the things you were clutching… are His way of prying your fingers open until they’re empty enough to be filled. He lets the world go bitter in your mouth so you’ll stop trying to drink your comfort from it. The very sorrow that drives you to your knees has driven you, without your knowing it, out of the corner and into the open, where the Shepherd’s hand can finally reach you. He’s been seeking you longer than you’ve been running. Every dead end you ever hit was a wall He set there to turn you back toward home. “Cast your burden on the LORD, and He shall sustain you” (Psalm 55:22), for the same hand that lifts the broom is the hand that will carry you.
See what He does the moment He finds the wanderer. He doesn’t lecture the sheep. He doesn’t make it limp home on its own to teach it a lesson. “And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing” (Luke 15:5). The whole weary weight of you goes up onto Him, and He carries it, and He is glad to carry it. You don’t walk back into the favor of God on your own two feet. You are carried there on His. Let the “roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8) roar all he likes; he cannot drag you off the Shepherd’s shoulders. You are not held by your grip on Christ. You are held by His grip on you. He bled to take hold of you, and a hand pierced through does not let go.
And the coin, remember, bears a face. A coin is stamped with the image of its king, and when God made you, He pressed His own image into you. Sin has worn down that image, smudged and buried it in the grime, but it’s still His, still His treasure, and a king does not write off His own coin because it rolled into a dark corner.
So He lights the lamp of His Word, and He sweeps until the lamplight catches the gleam of you, and He lifts you up and rubs away the dirt, and the face that comes clear again is the face of Christ, into whom you were baptized. He paid more to find you than the coin was ever worth, more than the sheep, more than anything you could weigh, for He spent His own blood to do it. You were worth the whole house turned upside down, not for anything left shining in you, but because His image is on you and His blood has bought you.
This is why He receives sinners and eats with them. That is the only kind of person He ever came for: not the ninety-nine who are certain they were never lost, but the one who knows the dark. “I say to you that likewise there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine just persons who need no repentance” (Luke 15:7). And don’t mistake that joy for a mere quiet nod of official approval.
When the woman finds her coin, she throws open the door and calls in the whole street: “Rejoice with me, for I have found the piece which I lost!” (Luke 15:9). When the Shepherd comes through the gate with the sheep across His shoulders, heaven can’t keep still. “There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents” (Luke 15:10). The angels sing over you. Over the very one who was sure God had turned His back.
So you have been swept here this morning. You may have thought it was your own idea to come, or your habit, or your duty. But it was the Lord’s broom. He has lit His lamp in this room, the Word read and preached, and He has swept you out of the corners of the world and set you down in the one place He has promised to be found. You don’t have to feel found to be found; His Word says it over you, and His Word does what it says. His own voice said, “I forgive you all your sins.” At this rail, He gives you Himself even as He carries you: His body and His blood, given and shed for you, the food of the found. You came in this morning as a lost coin. You go out as treasure in the King’s own hand.
Rejoice with Him, then, you and all the sheep He has carried home, with the angels and archangels and all the company of heaven who will not stop singing. You were lost. You have been found. You are His.
The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Amen.
Rev. Christopher R. Gillespie
St. John Ev. Lutheran Church & School — Sherman Center
Random Lake, Wisconsin