A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on September 14, 2025 by Rt Revd Mariann Budde

Readings for address: 1 Timothy 1: 12-17, Luke 15: 1-10

Good morning. It’s wonderful to be here. My thanks to the Revd Dr Sam Wells for his kind invitation to join you in worship and other events throughout this day. Thanks to all at St Martin’s for welcoming my husband Paul and me so warmly.

I’m grateful to have the opportunity to thank St. Martin’s for your far-reaching witness. Though this is my first visit to St. Martin’s, I have studied you from and for years Sam has been a friend and source of wisdom to many of us in the US. Two years ago, James Fawcett came to help us launch Being With in our diocese. As a result, all members of the diocesan staff and many of our clergy now consider James a personal friend, as do Paul and I.

Friendship across the Atlantic has been a particular blessing these days. I bring you greetings from your friends in Christ of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington DC.

The theme running through our biblical texts today is that of lostness. I’ve been thinking about the many ways we experience ourselves as lost or having lost someone or something precious to us.

Being lost is a universal experience, one of our greatest fears in childhood. It’s also a parent’s greatest fear–the prospect of losing our child or children. The story of Mary and Joseph, Jesus’ parents, comes to mind of the time they frantically searched for Jesus when they realized that they had lost track of him in a crowded city. How tightly I have held the hands of my own children in similar situations.

Yet in some seasons of life, we need to get lost in order to grow and mature, and we need to let those we love get lost without rushing in too fast to rescue them. In the words of the French author Andre Gide, “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” [1]

And isn’t it true that when we lose something or become lost ourselves it often feels like something that happens to us? While I am the one who misplaces my keys, I’m just as likely to tear around the house asking “Where did my keys go?” as if they picked up and went on their own.

On a more serious note, we speak of losing one another when our relationships grow distant, as if we had nothing to do with it. Or of losing the disciplines or practices that once guided our days. We speak of losing our temper. Of losing our sense of direction and meaning in our lives.

Who among us in midlife or beyond can’t relate to the opening stanza of The Divine Comedy?

Midway upon life’s journey
I found myself within a forest dark,
The right road lost. [2]

To be sure, lostness is often self-inflicted. We lose track of things; we lose track of each other. We can get lost just by making one wrong turn, or it can be the result of a series of small decisions that seem inconsequential at the time but nonetheless sets our lives on a course that eventually spins out of control.

The novelist Jane Hamilton describes the latter in the opening line of her book A Map of the World which never fails to take my breath away:

I used to think that if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an unfortunate accident. I hadn’t learned that it can happen so gradually you don’t lose your stomach or hurt yourself in the landing. I’ve found that it takes at least two and generally three things to alter the course of a life. You slip around the truth once, then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of the heap. [3]

Falling from grace is one way to describe self-inflicted lostness. Amazing grace is a way to describe the experience of being saved from oneself.:

 Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found. Twas blind, but now I see.

 Or as we just sang:

Perverse and foolish oft I strayed, but yet in love he sought me.

            And on his shoulder gently laid and home rejoicing brought me.

Therein lies the astonishing mercy at the heart of the gospel–that when we are at our most self-inflicted, or other-inflicted lostness, or circumstance-inflicted lostness, Christ promises to show up. I wish that I could say to you that his purpose in showing up is always that of rescue, but you know better, and so do I. But nor do I want to discount those incredibly sweet moments when somehow, some way, grace finds us and brings us home and we are spared the consequences of our foolishness.

Many years ago, I studied for a college semester in Madrid. We never had classes on Fridays, and so most weekends I traveled by train, usually with a small group from our program, to places in Spain or Portugal. Once when we had a full week off, I traveled on my own to Paris, and from there to Amsterdam, to spend time with someone I had met in Madrid who invited me to visit him. Suffice to say that it was a foolish decision on my part–I’ll leave the details to your imagination. I left Amsterdam shaken and afraid, and for reasons I can’t remember, the train taking me to Paris arrived in Paris late at night, or maybe it was midday, I can’t recall. Whatever time of day, it was dark, rainy, and cold, and the connecting train to Madrid was hours delayed. I decided to take a walk, and eventually I stumbled into an open church where a few older women were quietly praying.

I joined them and there I prayed one of the most honest prayers of my life–one that I have given voice to many times since then:

God, I know that I got myself into this, and I don’t really deserve your help. But if you could help me. I’d be grateful.

 I don’t remember much of what happened after that. All I can tell you is that as I made my way back to Madrid, I felt accompanied—not exactly guided, but somehow sustained and supported from within. Jesus was with me, and the memory of that journey has helped me to trust that he is with me whenever I find myself in a dark wood, the right road lost.

We have before us this morning two biblical texts. The first is from the Apostle Paul’s letter to Timothy, which offers a clear example of how dangerously lost we can be when we are certain that we are absolutely right about something and other people are absolutely wrong. Prior to his conversion, he was so convinced that he was willing to see followers of Jesus punished to the point of death. I’ll leave that there for us all to keep in mind when we are feeling similarly self-righteous.

In the gospel text, we hear two of the three parables Jesus offered in response to criticism he received from the religious leaders of his day for his preference to spend his time with two groups of people otherwise kept out of respectable company: tax collectors and sinners.

I noticed something this week that had never occurred to me before–that with each example, the losses become more intense and life-altering. In the first, a shepherd loses one out of ninety-nine sheep. Any loss for a shepherd in that economy would have been difficult, and the shepherd was clearly determined to find that one lost sheep. Still, I can’t help but wonder if his loss of one out of ninety was not as consequential as the woman in Jesus’ second example who lost one silver coin out of ten. One out of a hundred is unfortunate; one out of ten, especially if that was the entirety of her wealth, would have been far more consequential. Happily, in both situations, the precious item is found and the owner rejoices, as the angels in heaven rejoice, Jesus tells us, when one sinner is found.

In both examples, given that the loss did not last for a terribly long time, we can assume that once the sheep and the coin were found, life went on for the shepherd and the woman much as it had before. In other words, their lost state did not likely mark them in a lasting way, any more than we are permanently changed when in relatively short order we find what we have lost, or quickly recover from our experiences of being lost ourselves. I place my experience on the train back to Madrid in that category of temporary lostness that did not result in permanent change even though the memory of being accompanied back home remains a spiritual touchstone for me.

In the subsequent parable he tells about lostness, however, we can only presume that the outcome would be quite different. This is the story of the Prodigal Son, the wayward young man who insisted on receiving his share of his father’s inheritance and then went off to pursue a life of reckless indulgence.

The father’s loss is beyond calculation–one of his two sons demanding his inheritance early and leaving, presumably for good. We don’t know how long he was gone; let’s imagine it was for at least a year, perhaps longer. Can we imagine how hurt the father was by his son’s actions, and his daily grief as he looked out the horizon wondering if his son might return? When the son does return at last, as down and out as a person can be, the father is beyond overjoyed and the celebration begins.

If, however, we were charged with writing the next chapter in the story of the Prodigal Son, I wonder how we would describe the next morning, when the father and his two sons sat down for breakfast. What had the wayward son learned in this time away? How had he changed? How had life gone on without him? What would happen now? It’s hard to imagine that life would go back as before. Though in the same physical location, they were all different now. If they were to build a future together, it would need to be from a new starting point.

I wonder what, if anything, has come to mind for you as I speak of lostness as a marking experience with permanent consequences. If it’s something you can look back upon, what might you say now about God’s presence with you, or what was the impact of feeling God’s absence? Put another way, How much of the person you are now is directly linked to what you went through in the dark wood, the right road lost. I think of all the people I have heard say, or when I’ve heard myself say, something like, “I would never wish what I went through on anyone, and yet, I’m grateful for the person I’ve become as a result.”

Before coming to London, I was in Sweden, where I had been invited to preach in the Cathedral of Uppsala and take part in a conference for clergy of the Swedish Lutheran Church. Earlier this year I was in France and Germany. The question I was most frequently asked on my first visit was why weren’t more Americans marching in the streets, protesting what’s happening to our country. This time around, the question has simply been, “What is life like for you in America now?”

The question almost always brings me to the point of tears, because the feelings that arise in me in response are of loss. So much is being lost now. Some Americans are quite pleased about the losses, presumably because what once was held little value to them or actively excluded them. Others—and I include myself here-are profoundly sad. I’m certainly capable of being angry at what’s happening, but that’s a form of self-protection, really, to help cope with the overwhelming sorrow.

I hesitate to begin listing for you all that is being lost, for I won’t know when to stop.

  • In the communities I serve, thousands have lost their jobs and seen the public service or international aid and development work to which they have dedicated their lives dismantled or destroyed.
  • The Administration now has the green light and vast resources to carry out its goal of deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, and it is doing so in particularly mean-spirited ways.
  • Scientific data, medical research, library collections are also being scrubbed through the lens of a particular political/ideological worldview.
  • Our commitment to global environmental sustainability is being swept away.

And there is so much more. It’s difficult to read, listen to or watch the news–for each day brings a fresh shock of something that for some of us would have been impossible only a few years ago.

The more time goes on and the more that is being lost, the clearer it becomes that this is a permanent change. Whatever happens next, we won’t be going back to life as before. I don’t mean to discount how many people are working to preserve and protect what we can, and the heroic efforts being made to sustain the institutions we will need to build again when the waves of this political tsunami have receded. But America won’t be the same. Maybe that’s a good thing. The ways things were certainly contributed to where we are now.

All I know is that we are in a dark wood, and I dare to believe, even when I can’t feel it, that God is with us. Thankfully, in Jesus, God has given us a path to walk, and a way of being in this world, grounded and sustained by love and mercy. That path, we know, includes acceptance of loss and suffering as part of the cost of the extraordinary gift of life. We know that in crucible times, the way of the cross is the way of life.  On this path, we ourselves are transformed into the people who can help bring about a future of hope and possibility.

Every day, no matter how lost I feel, I rise and recommit myself to this path, daring to believe that through God’s life-affirming love, something new will emerge from the ashes of what is being lost.

When I am in the courageous, wonderful companionship of people like you, I can also dare to believe in the innate human capacity to take enormous evolutionary leaps for the good. Our forebears have done the seemingly impossible in the past, and It is to that potential for future good that God beckons, even if some of us will not live to see its realization. I’m 65 years old now. The horizon for which I live is for children and grandchildren.

Should you be in your own season of loss, I pray that my words have reminded you of God’s gracious presence and that out of loss, new life will emerge.

Wherever we are, but especially in a dark wood, on the dark waters, Jesus is our way, our light, and our true home.

Would you pray with me now, borrowing words from the refrain of a beloved hymn:

In all the ways we are lost, dear God, lead us with your kind light and gracious light.

We do not ask to see the distant scene. One step is enough for us today.

 

Amen.  

 

[1] I don’t remember where I first came across this statement. It shows up in several pages of Famous Quotes, including  Goodreads

[2] Dante Aligheri, author; Steve Ellis, translator, The Divine Comedy: A New Translation. Vintage Classics, 2019)  Paperback – September 1, 2019

[3] Jane Hamilton, A Map of the World. (New York: Anchor Books, 2010), 3.