You Have Been There

By Jared Warner

Willow Creek Friends Church

September 14, 2025

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Click to read in Swahili

Bofya kusoma kwa Kiswahili

Luke 15:1–10 (ESV)

¹ Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. ² And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” ³ So he told them this parable: ⁴ “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it? ⁵ And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. ⁶ And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ ⁷ Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. ⁸ “Or what woman, having ten silver coins, if she loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and seek diligently until she finds it? ⁹ And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ ¹⁰ Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

As many of you can imagine, this has been a difficult week. Our nation is all riled up. Our faith communities are riled up. Pretty much everyone I know is riled up in some way or another. We cannot really blame ourselves too much because this week was the anniversary of tragic events that happened twenty-four years ago, that defined an entire generation. My eldest son was two when the plane hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. His entire life we have been involved in a war on terror. If I could have joined the military at the time, he and I would have had the opportunity to have served in the same war a generation apart.

I have thought about that this past week. The war on terror has cooled, when the forces were withdrawn from Afghanistan. It has cooled, but in many ways it is just as hot as it has ever been. I remember the early years of the conflict, I remember well because I had just entered ministry and I stood in a pulpit and expressed as a Friends pastor how I supported the President’s decision to invade Iraq. At the time I felt as if I was being brave. I felt patriotic and bold.

That was the first couple of years that I had been a pastor. I learned a great deal at the time. I mainly learned that I did not have a clue to what I had said yes to when I answered that call. I was young, energetic, and passionate. I invited the students over to our house and we would have bible studies and I was proud of the men that left to go serve. Two of them went to serve in the military they followed the encouragement of their pastor, they followed the encouragement of their peers and their parents, and I am proud of them. One of them serves in a different way, one of those students from my first church is a pastor in Oregon. That really is not a bad record.

Time moves and at the time tensions were high. I was a young pastor, and I had absolutely no pastoral training at the time. And a church member came to me and said that her husband and her were getting divorced. I did not have any words to say. I could not comfort or encourage. And not long after that happened the church fell apart and closed. I realized at that moment I needed help.

I did not want to see another church close. I did not want someone to come to me with a hurting heart and not have words to say. I drove to Wichita and I enrolled in a master’s program at Friends University so that I could obtain the tools that I was missing.

As Friends we do not have strict requirements for much of anything. If you sense a call to ministry that is all that is required. If a church or meeting recognizes that call in you life you might be asked to become a minister among them. There is no requirements other than faith. I felt secure in that calling. I believed that God would give me the words to say if I had faith. But I quickly sensed that I did not have any framework to begin some of these conversations. I did not know how to council a student in a decision to join the military, I did not know the questions that needed to be asked. I did not know how to speak to a couple struggling in their marriage, to be honest I did not even know what marriage really was at that time since Kristy and I were in the honeymoon stage of things.

I needed help.

I started in my master’s program. I began learning theology. I learned the basics of counseling. And I learned a great deal. In all of that learning the thing that I learned the most was that I still did not know a thing. I everywhere I turned I was bombarded by more and more struggle.

Wichita is an interesting place. It is one of the largest population centers in the United States for Armenian refugees. I was going to school in this city not long after the war on terror began. I watched good American people harass and bully this group of people that had lived peaceably in this community for decades. Their children only knew Wichita as their home, they only spoke English, and they were devout Orthodox Christians. Their grandparents left their homeland to escape persecution from other religious groups and the communists. Yet because their skin tone resembled the skin town of our enemies, they were harassed.

I struggled with this. I knew some of the people, I knew why they were in Wichita, and I knew their faith. I loved these people and the more I learned about them the more I loved them.

That same year I also took a couple of classes I had church history, and introduction to theology. And the professor of these classes did something that was different than any other class I had taken before. We had the lectures and all. We read more books than I realized could be read in that amount of time. But each week we were required to write a paper answering and giving council to a person or group using the various theological positions fundamentalist, liberal, reformed, Lutheran, Trinitarian Incarnational, and since I am a Quaker our own theological traditions. Each week I would read theology, scripture, history, these deep questions about life the universe and everything and I had to give an answer, along with footnotes discussing why this or that theological position was relevant.

I wrote these papers. I read the books. And I watched Armenian Christians scrub racial slurs off the sides of their businesses and houses.

This past week, these are the things that have been going through my mind. My own emotional response to an attack on my country. My call to ministry. My counsel to young men wanting to be brave. My lack of knowledge to help. And the utter ignorance of racism. Two men went off to serve their country. They both served honorable, but one returned home and took his own life. I have served in three churches. Two have closed their doors. I have reflected this week. And there are times I feel as if I have wasted everyone’s time.

These were the things going thing that were going through my mind all week. All the papers I wrote in theology class. The papers dealing with how we would use our understanding of faith to walk with a family through various issues. How would you as a missionary encourage an new believer, who had multiple wives? How we would respond using our theological perspectives if a Jewish family had knocked on our door in during the era Third Reich. How we should respond to our employees during a strike as a devout Christian? And in the same moment I was listening to the news.

I have reflected a great deal this week. On the day that most of this reflecting had taken place, it was Albert’s birthday. God had blessed my family with something to celebrate when the rest of the nation was mourning. But Albert did something that he did not know would encourage his dad so much. He gave me a card for his birthday. In that card he said “Thank you for 12 fun years living. 9 great hockey seasons and being a great dad.”

I thought about all of these things this week, as I considered this week’s passage. “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. And the pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.’”

I looked at this passage in light of my reflections and I began to replace the characters as I began to pray. I began to replace the tax collectors with other people that I might not like. It takes some practice to think of someone other than a tax collector that you might not like but try it for a moment. Who do you see? Then I replaced the Pharisees and the scribes, I did not put some random person in that place, instead I placed myself. I put myself in that place because so often I do think that I know what is best. I think I know what it means to be a good Christian, at least I hope I do since I am a pastor.

I replace these characters and I sat for a moment with them. People I do not like, that I have fundamental disagreements with drawing near to Jesus. People I do not want to associate with because I am better than them, wanting to hear what Jesus has to say. And Jesus is interacting with them and eating with them.

Can you see that in your mind? Jesus sitting with the biology professor teaching our students about evolution instead of Creationism? Jesus sitting with a candidate for office, laughing and talking as he pours some more coffee into their cup? Jesus passing a plate of food to a Muslim? What if they were having that conversation in a different language? What if that person should not even be there?

I sat and I reflected on these things. And I realized quite quickly that I am the person in the story. I am the Pharisee and I am the sinner. I have been on both sides of the table and at times I am both at the same moment. We have all been there. We know this in our heads. We know that God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, and that whosoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. We know this and yet so easily we can grumble. And so easily we might say we should not go to the table because I do not qualify.

Jesus looked at these grumbling religious leaders and he told them a parable. “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it?”

I do not know how many of you have stopped to think about this deeply. But as someone that has grown up on a farm I understand the power of this story. As someone that has owned a pet I get the gravity of what Jesus is saying. When you have been given the responsibility over the life of another living being something changes in our mind.

We once owned a chinchilla. These animals are some of the fluffiest creatures on the earth and you just want to cuddle them, but ours was not very cuddly. It wanted to be free. We did everything we could to get the thing to play with us, but it only wanted to run away. It was fast and it always like to find the hardest to reach places to hide. One day we tried to get the chinchilla out to let him run a bit, but before we could do it safely he hopped out of our hands and crawled up into our couch. We were frantic. We could not sit down because we did not want to squish him. We did not want to move anything because if we lifted anything up he might get caught in the mechanism and get hurt. For hours we sought to figure out as way to get in to find this silly little fluff ball.

We had to find it, we were responsible. We needed to feed it. We needed to make sure it was safe. Nothing else mattered. This is what Jesus is speaking about in the parable. Ninety-nine sheep are just fine but one is missing. Is it in danger? Is it lambing and having trouble? Has it fallen in a hole? All these things could happen because sheep are pretty annoying creatures. They just put their heads down and eat until they have lost all bearings and then they get scared and run for no reason and usually end up somewhere worse.

But the shepherd is responsible. The ninety-nine are safe, but that one needs help. They consider everywhere they had been in that day and they retrace their steps. They look in the ditches, in the little caves, under the shrubby bushes scattered throughout the pastures. They will continue to seek out this lost sheep until it is found and brought safely back.

Jesus then continues his story, “And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’”

We might not know the full extent of this rejoicing. When we finally got our chinchilla back into his cage I was not calling my neighbors, I was grumbling. But there have been times where I did rejoice. The child who lost their dog and just found it again rejoices. When the one cow that wondered away from the herd was found and she had a new calf with her. I rejoiced. When my uncle was on vacation and the fences broke under the weight of ice and all the cattle were back safely in the pasture and the fences were put back up there were high fives going on, because everything was back to where it was supposed to be, and I was not going to have to explain why there were less cattle to my boss.

We rejoice because it is as it should be. Everything is safe and secure.

But then I sat in my chair again. And a thought went through my mind. Am I among the ninety-nine or the lost one? And if I am part of the ninety-nine and I watch as the shepherd goes after that one what do I feel?

Jesus is concerned with that lost one. The ninety-nine are safe at this moment but that one is in danger. That is where Jesus’s focus is in that instant. This leads us to Jesus’s second parable. “or what woman, having ten silver coins, if she loses one, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and seek diligently until she finds it? And when sh has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’”

In American culture this parable seems a bit abstract. For one, we do not care much about coins in our currency. If we have coins we usually just throw them in a jar or something until it gets full and we take it to the bank to get some bills instead. But in this first century culture these coins were significant. They are likely this woman’s dowry. Some have said that when coins were given with a dowry they would incorporate them into the woman’s veil so that it could be on display. If this is the case if she lost one of those coins it had dire social consequences. For a woman to spend her dowry would mean that there was trouble. Either something was wrong with her husband and he was unable to work, or he had made a bad financial decision and they had to use this woman’s dowry to make ends meet. And if these coins were hanging on her veil the entire community would know that a tenth of wealth she brought into the marriage is gone. She would make every effort to find what was missing. She would literally move mountains in an attempt to find this one coin because their social standing depended on it.

It is only one sheep. Only one coin. What is the big deal?

One card was given to me this week and it changed my entire week. It changed my entire year. Something we might consider insignificant to someone else is life changing.

When I went to Friends University, we studied various forms of theology. But one question was always within it. How does this affect the way we live? Jesus, in the parable, was concerned with the one sheep, with the one coin. Everything that was done in that moment was to bring that one to a place of fellowship. What does this tell us about the way we should live?

The tax collectors and sinners are sitting at the table, and the righteous are grumbling. Replace the characters with something else. Who is in danger, who is in a place where their life, or their social standing is threatened?

I have spoken a great deal the past few years about Ukraine. They are threatened, they need help. Their very lives are at risk of being lost. Should we care? I say this know full well that there are others facing war. My uncle lives in Thailand and his nation was recently involved in a conflict. I have friends in India and I have friends in Nepal all of which are in need right now because their very existence is threatened. We have friends and family in our church who are living in places that are threatened. They are the ones that we should be focused on. Why focus on them? Shouldn’t we be focused on our own needs right here?

There is something that we often miss in these parables. The part we miss is the verb rejoice. Rejoice with me, Jesus says it twice. The term rejoice is to be merry, enjoy the company of others, it is a celebration. We cannot fully rejoice with one another until we know each other. We cannot laugh together until we are in a place where laughter can be given. We cannot rejoice until there is peace.

That is what we are missing. We are not at peace. We are grumbling. Instead of inviting people to the table. This week I remembered the struggle of the Armenian Christians, I remembered what brought them to this place. What drove them to come, and why they stayed. I remembered a song I loved to listen to when I was a student. A song about a young man whose brother died in war and the yellow letter was sitting on his porch and in his sadness he walked through his neighborhood walking past a house with a flag flying out front and a couple sitting on their porch watching him walk. He waved to the couple seeking community with them, seeking recognition and comfort that his brother did not die in vain, but the couple did not wave back.

Jesus went after the one, he went after the ones that are hurting and can not be at peace, and he brings them to the table. You have been there. And it is the unexpected kindness and grace that brought you out of the darkness and into the light. It is that little wave, the card, the invitation to the party that brought you to a place of peace where you can rejoice. We have all been there in one way or another. We have been the boy or girl walking on the street looking for a reason to believe. Jesus came for that one, will we join with Jesus and rejoice?

Previous Messages:

Living Stones

By Jared Warner Willow Creek Friends Church May 03, 2026 Click here to Join our Meeting for Worship Click to read in Swahili Bofya kusoma kwa Kiswahili 1 Peter 2:2–10 (ESV) 2 Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation— 3 if indeed you have…

by jwquaker May 3, 2026May 3, 2026

Endure

By Jared Warner Willow Creek Friends Church April 26, 2026 Click here to join our Meeting for Worship Click to read in Swahili Bofya kusoma kwa Kiswahili Query 4 (Faith and Practice of EFC-MAYM pg 61) Do you provide for the suitable Christian education and recreation of your children and those under your care, and…

by jwquaker April 26, 2026April 26, 2026

Ransomed to Love

By Jared Warner Willow Creek Friends Church April 19, 2026 Click here to join our Meeting for Worship Click to read in Swahili Bofya kusoma kwa Kiswahili 1 Peter 1:17–23 (ESV) 17 And if you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time…

by jwquaker April 19, 2026April 18, 2026

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