16th Sunday After Pentecost 2026

Blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Blessed be God's family now and prayer.

Amen.

Let's pray together.

And the spirits are here.

Cleans the hearts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit.

The Lord be with you.

And also with you.

Let us pray.

Oh God, because without you we are not able to please you.

Mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

As you're being treated, our children grades five and below are invited to join Godly play in the back with working and everything.

Reading from verse Samuel.

And it was about when David and his men came to Ziklag on the third day after being dismissed by the Philistine ruler.

The Amalekites separated the Negab and Zikli.

They smoked Ziklag and burned it with fire, and they took captive the women who were in it, from young to old.

They did not kill any.

Rather, they led them away and went their way.

So when David and his men came to the city, they found it and burned, and their wives and daughters and sons taken captive.

Then David and the people who were with them raised their voices and wept, until there was no more strength in them to weep.

Now the two wives of David had been taken captive, and the Jezreelite, and Abigail, the wife of Nabal at Armalife.

David was in great distress.

So the people said to stone him, because the souls of all the people were embittered on account of their daughters and sons, and David strengthened himself, and the Holy One is God.

Then David said to Aviatar the priest, the son of Ahimeleh, Bring to me the Ephar.

So Aviathar brought the Ephar to David.

And David questioned the Holy One of old, asking, Shall I pursue this man?

Will I overtake them?

God answered them, Pursue.

For you shall surely overtake, and you shall surely rescue.

So David smote them from the twilight until the evening of the morrow.

None of them escaped, except four hundred young men, mounted camels, and fled.

And David rescued all the Amalekites he took.

David rescued his two wives.

None was missing, whether young or old, daughters or sons, spoiled for anything they took for themselves.

David brought back everything.

The word of the Lord.

Thank you, God.

The psalm for today is Psalm 13.

We will read responsibly five and a half verse.

How long, holy one?

Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your faith for me?

How long will I counsel myself?

Sorrow in my heart every day?

How long shall my enemy be exalted for me?

Look, answer me, faithful one my God.

Enlighten my eyes will I seem to the devil.

Then my enemy will say, I have prevailed over him.

My father will rejoice.

Yet I trusted in your loving kindness.

My heart shall rejoice in your salvation.

I will came to the womb of life.

Because he is Lord and Love Me.

It was a fitting for God, because of whom and for whom all that is is in bringing many daughters and sons to glory, to make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through suffering.

For the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all of one.

For this reason, Jesus is not ashamed to call them sisters and brothers, saying, I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters.

In the midst of the assembly I will praise you.

And again, I will put my trust in God.

And again, here am I in the children whom God has given me.

The word of the Lord.

Jesus said, See to it that you do not treat one of these little ones with contempt.

I say to you all that their angels in the heavens see the face of my Abba, who is in the heavens all day, every day.

What do you all think?

If a person had one hundred sheep and one of them wandered off, would they not leave the ninety-nine on the mountain and go search for the one that wandered off?

And if they find it, truly I tell you, all truly I tell you all that they rejoice over it more than over the ninety-nine who did not wander off.

In the same way it is not the will of your Abba who is in the heavens that one of these little ones should be lost.

This is the gospel of the Lord.

Amen.

Please be seated, friends.

Good morning.

It's nice to see y'all the blue, the blue crew up here, and the blue in the choir.

It's really lovely for me.

So last week I was not here and I was over at guest preaching at The Good Shepherd, and as I was there, I knew that the reading from this morning was coming up.

And I was looking, it's of course they have a bunch of icons and different things about Good Shepherd.

That's the name of their church.

And I thought, isn't it nice that we're gonna get to talk about Christ the Good Shepherd?

Am I the only one that finds it super comforting?

Ah, we all come with stained glass with Jesus with a little lamb on his shoulders, and I I love it.

I find it really comforting.

But here's the thing, is like there is a there's a version of it in Luke, and that's the one that that I really like.

You know, it talks about the good shepherd, the the shepherd who loses a sheep, and then the shepherd searches until the sheep is found, and then there's rejoicing and brings it back.

And so as I sat down to read this version, I was like, oh, that's actually not what it says.

It's like remember, folks, that each gospel has its own context, and even though there are similar stories in the different synoptic gospels and in John, they're they're sort of couched in a very particular way.

For the Gospel of Matthew, it's in the 18th chapter, and it's when Jesus is responding to a very specific question that is being asked of him of the disciples.

In fact, most of 18, if not probably all of 18, is just Jesus in in some way responding to a question that the disciples offer him.

And it's a question that I think is really important.

In fact, it's a question that we all ask ourselves.

It's a question that I think is underneath a lot of our decision making and the way that we move in the community.

Now, I will tell you that it is definitely not a question that we ask in polite company.

Anyone know what that question is?

Who matters most?

Thanks, Mike! Somebody heard the eight o'clock sermon.

That question is who matters most?

The disciples say who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, but I translate it to who matters most, and we know that this is a question that we all answer in our communities, in our nation, and in our families.

Whose opinion gets 51% of the vote?

Who changes the energy of the room when they walk into it?

Whose emotional state, whether it be their anger, or their sadness, or their anxiety, their depression, takes precedence over everybody else's emotional state.

Who matters most?

When they're gone, who gets noticed?

And so the disciples ask Jesus, what does it mean to be great?

Like, who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?

And Jesus responds interestingly.

We all love our kids, don't we?

We love our kids so much that many of us, I would say, probably have a good portion of their identity wrapped up in how well their kids do.

I can't be the only one.

How much they like me, how successful they are.

So of course I think, Jesus, grab the kid.

It's the vulnerable cutie that we want to have, you know, yay.

But here's the thing, y'all.

Like, Jesus was not trying to subsidize our sort of idolatry of children.

Jesus is taking a person in a society that has no rights or privileges.

That as far as the society goes, I mean, the families love their children.

Don't get me wrong, but society didn't care about the kids.

They were expendable.

A lot of them died when they were young.

Like they they couldn't produce anything.

They were basically, there was no rights or protections for them.

Like, it's it's the kind of a thing that you can just disregard and move past, right?

He takes the thing that society says has no value and he puts it in the midst of him.

And that's what he uses as his object lesson to answer the question about who is the greatest?

What does it mean to be great in the kingdom of heaven?

And then the piece that we get to today is he says, be careful not to despise one of these little ones, is the translation.

And then he tells the version of the lost sheep or the good shepherd.

Now, what's interesting is that the word despise, cataphronio, in the Greek, it's not hatred, right?

It's like it's like disgust and contempt.

I mean, hatred burns hot, y'all.

I mean, if if I have hatred or anger towards you, I mean I'm I'm moving towards you.

Like, that burns hot.

Like this this word burns cold.

I guess it doesn't burn cold.

It's cold.

It says I can just completely step over you if you were on the street and disregard you.

And he says, be careful not of the ones in your life and the people that you have decided are no longer worth your time or your energy.

And then he does this interesting thing.

He says, because they have angels in the court of God who look upon God's face.

Basically says, because heaven probably takes them way more seriously than you do.

And then he tells you this interesting story, right?

This parable of the sheep.

I told you it's different than the Luke.

He says the sheep doesn't say that the shepherd lost the sheep.

It says that a sheep wandered.

The sheep wandered away.

And then it says that the shepherd went after her, and it says the shepherd doesn't the shepherd finds them.

There's sort of like this conditional on there, which is interesting.

Like these big differences, right?

I started thinking about like the wandering.

I was wondering, like, why did the sheep wander?

My first image was like a cartoon I had when I was a kid where there was this cute little lamb and a butterfly catered, and it was like prancing after the butterfly, and it was like and maybe it just carelessly fell away.

There's no malice or harm.

I wondered, maybe there was like some bully sheep.

And he like made it feel unsafe.

And it like said, hey, we're all going over here, and then it went somewhere else, and then it was just lost.

And maybe the sheep was just mad at the shepherd.

Maybe the shepherd gave all the good treats to another sheep, and so it thought, forget this! I'm gonna go out on my own and I'm gonna get my own treats.

I don't need this flock.

And then I wondered, maybe it was just tired.

Maybe it didn't sleep well for a couple of weeks or something.

It was worried about the state of the world.

And then like every day it just walked a little slower than everybody else until eventually it looked up and saw.

I don't know why the sheep wandered, y'all.

I just know that the sheep was in the wilderness.

Boy, do I know what it feels like to be in the wilderness.

Wandered away, and I have no idea how I even got there.

Sometimes I do.

And that's when I read the psalm, Psalm 13.

I'm not particularly in love with the Translation we get, if you want to open up your prayer books, you can look at the other one because like four times right at the beginning, the psalmist cries out, How long, O Lord, I'm in the wilderness, I'm by myself.

Where are you?

How long?

I thought I know what that feels like.

How long am I gonna have to feel this pain?

How long am I enemies gonna prevail against me?

How long am I gonna have to wait to get some type of beauty and blessing in my life?

How long, Lord?

Sure, I've wandered, but here I am all alone, and I'm wondering where you are.

How long must I wait?

Do you even care?

That is called a cry of lament.

How long?

And Jesus, I think, is trying to remind us what the psalmist says.

If you look at the end of that psalm, is that the psalmist says, but I will trust that you are who you say you are.

Just because I feel like I'm abandoned doesn't mean that I'm abandoned.

And that's what Jesus says.

Jesus says that God is like the shepherd who notices.

See, I think my first thought was the miracle is that they found the sheep.

You know?

That is a miracle.

But but even before that, I think there's another miracle.

I think the miracle is that God noticed.

The shepherd noticed.

Like, I don't know about y'all.

I mean, I'm kind of a perfectionist, but 99% is pretty damn good.

Isn't it?

I mean, I get to 99, I'm like, ugh, 9 out of 100, that's pretty good.

I get to 90, I'm like, it's pretty good.

But apparently, it's not good enough for God.

God gets to 99 and says, somebody is missing.

And it's in God's nature to go look.

I started thinking about, man, wouldn't that be interesting as a church?

I mean, the church isn't going to be the place that we don't fail.

You're going to fail.

I'm going to fail.

The church is not going to be the place where we don't wander.

We're going to wander.

The church isn't going to be the place where we don't argue.

We're going to argue.

But can the church be the place where somebody doesn't disappear unnoticed?

Is it possible to live our life and be people who don't let people disappear unnoticed?

You know, I'm not I'm not talking about like not coming to church.

I mean, I'm not saying, like, hey, we should go out and we should start calling and checking on people.

Well, I noticed that you weren't there on Sunday, so uh I think you need to explain yourself to me.

Listen, y'all are adults.

You're all adults.

If you're not here on a Sunday, you don't owe me any explanations about how you decided to spend your adult time.

You pay taxes.

You don't owe me anything.

But we could be sitting in this pew every single Sunday and be wandered off into the wilderness crying out, How long, O Lord?

We could feel like we've been cut out and isolated.

Perhaps we're the sheep that made a series of small choices every single day over the course of a long time, and now we're sitting in the wilderness.

Wondering if we're worthy of God's love.

Because here's the thing, y'all.

Like, like when I imagine this in my head, I imagine it like a video game.

So, like coming from the top, I'm looking down and I'm like, oh, there's the shepherd, and there's the sheep, and oh, he's just gonna go find the sheep.

But like, if you're the sheep, you have no idea that the shepherd is looking for you.

What you might get a hundred feet, a hundred yards, a line of sight.

You don't know that the shepherd is out there looking.

But in our epistle today, it says Jesus is not ashamed to call us brothers and sisters.

Like, essentially, there is nothing that we can do that will exempt us for God searching for us as we wander.

So I wonder what the invitation is in the story today.

Like, what is the thing that Jesus is trying to tell us, right?

Because, you know, it can't be that you gotta be good sheep or bad sheep.

You know?

It's not like there's righteous sheep and there's the one unrighteous sheep.

There's obedient sheep and there's the disobedient sheep.

Friends, there's just sheep.

It's just sheep.

And we're the sheep, we're all of them.

Because sometimes we are out in the wilderness and we feel like we've wandered and we're all alone, and then nobody cares, and we're crying out, and sometimes we're on the mountain with the other 98 and we're feeling pretty darn good about ourselves.

We're both.

And I think the invitation is to recognize that there's nobody so high that they're beyond wandering.

And there's nobody so low that they're beyond being sought.

And so if we're in that place right now and we're the sheep, what does it mean to cry out?

Don't fall into despair.

Oh Lord, have mercy, don't fall into despair.

I think Jesus is saying, don't fall into the trap of believing that tomorrow can't be different from today.

Maybe I should just stop there.

Don't fall into that trap, y'all.

Cry out.

Cry out, cry out in this place, cry out to somebody, cry out, Lord, how long?

Lament.

Just because you feel abandoned doesn't mean that you are.

Cry out.

Ask for help.

Say that you're wandering, say that you're alone, say that you feel unloved.

Cry out.

Because the shepherd is looking.

The shepherd is looking.

God's love has a direction, and that direction is toward you and me.

And if you're in the 99, if you're in the 99, if you're feeling pretty good, right?

You know, friends, I'm saying sometimes, sometimes faithfulness looks like hallelujah, and sometimes faithfulness looks like how long, oh Lord?

And if you're in that 99 and you're feeling like it's hallelujah, then maybe the call is to notice.

Have you ever had somebody notice you?

I mean, you know who I want to be when I'm older is that I I want to be somebody that people say, you know, when I'm with Sean, I feel like there's nobody else in the room.

Boy, that's the man I want to be.

I'm not that man right now.

I want people to feel noticed.

So if you're in the 99, maybe just notice.

Did somebody wander physically, emotionally, spiritually?

Are they feeling alone?

Are they feeling in the wilderness?

Are they feeling cut off and unloved?

And if so, can you move towards them?

And what does that look like?

I mean, is there somebody in your life that you've decided you can just disregard?

It's not worth the energy, it's not worth the time.

And can we have the courage to join God because God is moving towards that person always?

So, friends, I I guess what I'm saying overall is that we're all sheep.

We're all sheep.

And God is the good shepherd.

And and God's love moves towards us.

And I think Jesus is.