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‘To the King of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honour and glory forever and ever. Amen.’The Lost SheepWe begin today with a familiar scene from the life of Jesus: tax collectors and sinners drawing near whilst the Pharisees and scribes grumble.Now, the objection of the Pharisees and scribes is not elaborated but it is fairly sure to say that they were concerned about maintaining separation from those who had defiled themselves through sinning in order that they (that is, the Pharisees) might maintain ritual purity. They had a view of sin which is similar to the view that we have of infectious diseases: if you get too close, you risk contamination.But, of course, this is not what all of this is really about: what it is really about is their sense of religious pride and their hardness of heart towards the people they were supposed to love and serve in the name of God.Jesus, as ever, came to show the world a different way. And so he tells a parable about a man with a hundred sheep. He loses one and leave the ninety-nine to go and find it. And then he comes home, calling his friends and neighbours to himself, rejoicing.There is more joy, in heaven, he tells us, over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine who need no repentance.In other words, the reason that he eats with tax collectors and sinners is because God seeks those who are willing to repent and to be reconciled to him. This brings about rejoicing in heaven. And God’s seeking those who are lost is manifested in the Incarnation: Christ leaving his throne in heaven to become as we are, to enter our world, to journey far from his homeland, so that he might find us and save us.The irony of Christ’s statement about ninety-nine who need no repentance is that such people really do not exist. The Pharisees may have thought they needed no repentance, but they were wrong. With the exception of Jesus Christ, every human being who has ever walked the face of the planet must repent before Almighty God for our sins. And this is not just a one-time act, but a continuous act of self-examination and humility that accompanies us on our earthly journey.So, if you find yourself today, or any day, feeling the weight of your sin, being aware of guilt or shame, the good news of the Gospel is for you. God offers you forgiveness in Christ. And, again, this is not a one-time offer but a continual offer of mercy and grace, a continual invitation to return to the fold, to come back to God, and to know his loving and saving presence once again.“The grace of our Lord overflowed for me”I’d like to mention here the Apostle Paul, from whom we get our New Testament reading in the letter to Timothy. Paul was a high-ranking religious official and intellectual, just like some of these men. He was of the tribe of Benjamin, he was a Pharisee and he considered himself to be completely righteous under the law.What changed for him to bring him out of his religious delusion was an encounter with the risen Jesus, whose church he had been persecuting. He recognised his ignorance and his rejection of the true God who had been manifested to the world in Christ and so he said the words we read today, “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost”.But notice how Paul had to recognise his own sin in order to receive the grace and mercy of God, even to the point of calling himself the foremost of sinners. This demonstrates the truth of a spiritual law, which is that, the more we recognise our own sinfulness, the more we recognise the grace and mercy of God for us.Another way of putting this is that, if we want to be found by Christ, we have to recognise that we are like lost sheep, that we have strayed from the right path, as Paul says, in our ignorance, in our unbelief, in our weakness, and we need Christ to come into our world and rescue us.The Woman and the Lost CoinI’d like to say something about the other