The Searcher Who Never Gives Up

The Searcher Who Never Gives Up
A sermon preached at The First Mennonite Church, Vineland, Ontario
Nov 16, 2025
by Carol Penner

Text:  Luke 15:1-10

In Luke’s gospel Jesus tells three stories to describe how God searches for us, we read the first two. First there’s the story of the lost sheep, then secondly, there’s the lost coin, (those are the ones we read), then there’s a third one that we didn’t read—the  story about the lost son. In all three stories, Jesus paints a picture where the focus is on the searcher.

We are encouraged to imagine the shepherd searching diligently up hill and down till he finds the lost sheep. The woman who lost a coin gets out a lamp and starts looking in all the dark corners, you can imagine her moving the furniture, her eyes peeled.  And then in the story of the Prodigal Son, the father sees the son while he is still a long way off. The father always has an eye on the road, hoping for his son to return. Jesus tells us that all three stories are about how God rejoices when we are found.

Because Jesus tells us the focus is on the searcher, it’s sort of ironic that we often label the first story “The Story of the Lost Sheep.” I wonder what your Bible says as a heading! Maybe we should call it “The Story of the Persistent Shepherd.”  The second story we usually call, “The Story of the Lost Coin,” maybe we should name it “The Story of the Vigilant Housekeeper.”

Instead of “The Story of  the Prodigal Son,” we could call it “The Story of the Always Welcoming Father.”  All three stories could be grouped together and called “The  Searcher Who Never Gives Up!”  God never stops looking for us, God rejoices when we are found!

Searching for something lost is a universal human experience. We can all bond together over seeking something that is lost, whether it’s lost keys, a lost passport, a lost piece of jewelry. We

have all been searchers! Like the woman with the lost coin, we take a light and we search the whole house. 

I remember the time I lost an envelope of 35 cheques. I was the treasurer of Vineland Co-op Nursery School, and every parent had to put in a deposit cheque in at the beginning of the year. If they did their volunteering, the cheque would be returned to them at the end of the year. I was the treasurer, as the year was drawing to a close, I wondered, “Where did I put those cheques?” The search was on!!!

I could not find them anywhere! I tore the house apart, I looked in every corner and nook and cranny, like the woman who lost her special coin. As the day got closer to the end of the nursery school year when I was supposed to return those cheques to people, my desperation deepened and I searched harder and longer, every evening for weeks.  And the night I found the envelope of cheques wedged in the darkness behind a drawer I didn’t think I would have put the cheques in, there was great rejoicing…great joy!!!  I still remember the giddy lightness I felt, like a huge weight had been lifted off of me.

But that searching and that rejoicing pales in comparison to the time I lost my three year old son Alex in a large crowd at the Wainfleet fair. The word “searching” doesn’t even describe it. It was searching in BOLD ITALIC RED LETTERS tattooed on my forehead, I am looking for my son!!! And the joy when I heard the announcement over the loudspeakers that a child had been found…was the kind of joy that leaves you weak in the knees. I still tell the story of finding my lost son as one of the most memorable moments of his childhood,

God isn’t finding us to ream us out. The father doesn’t run to the returning son to say, “You idiot, how could you be so stupid!” No, Jesus the Shepherd picks up the lost sheep gently, saying

“Hey, where have you been little one?  You’re safe now! Remember, you’re supposed to stay with the flock, don’t stray away.” There is rejoicing, deep and wide and loud and long when God finds us.

Today I want to tell you two quite different stories about finding, and both have a very local connection. Both stories demonstrate the greatness of God, who never stops looking for us.

Last week, there was a free book table at Conrad Grebel, the college where I workand I came across this book, that looked interesting. It’s called Logos by Glen Fretz, a very successful graphic designer in Ontario, who happens to have grown up going to our very own First Mennonite Church. He was only 24 years old, newly hired at a design firm, when he designed the Province of Ontario logo—the trillium, that you still see everywhere. He went on to an illustrious career in graphic design, and he made practically every Mennonite connected logo you can think of, including the Mennonite Church logo.

In his book Glen Fretz talks about growing up in the 1950s with his three brothers in this church. His parents were Irene and Dalton, and that was a tragic story, because Irene’s husband Dalton deserted her and their four boys. Dalton went away on a business trip one day and never came back. The children were aged 9, 7, 2 and they had a baby 4 months old when Dalton disappeared.

Irene had no idea where he went, whether he was alive or dead.

Irene struggled along as a single parent, often barely making ends meet, not always knowing how to put food on the table. First Mennonite helped by dropping off meals and groceries, helping in practical and financial ways; not just for a couple of weeks but for years. Irene suddenly was the sole breadwinner, so she needed a good income, so she went back to school to become certified as a teacher.

In this book, Glen Fretz tells the story of the Coffman sisters, three single women who attended this church all their lives. The sisters volunteered to help his mother, by babysitting the boys a couple of hours every week. He talks about how they taught him to make pencil rubbings using the cover of the Life Songs hymnal—that was one of his first exposures to graphic design. When my husband Eugene and I visited First Mennonite in the 1990s, wondering if this was the right church for us, there were two of the sisters left–Barbara and Lena Coffman. They were part of the reason we decided to stay, they were such gracious hospitable people.

The Fretz family lived for years, many years, without hearing a word from Dalton. And then 24 years later, a phone call came informing Irene that Dalton was alive. He was in a hospital in Chicago and was dying of cancer. He had reached out to a local Chicago Mennonite minister who helped to make contact with Irene. Dalton was not dead, not yet. Alive in Chicago.

Irene gathered her grown up sons and together they went to Chicago. Dalton’s four-month old baby had grown into a man in those 24 years. They had a reunion in the hospital where Dalton could apologize, and his family could forgive him before he died. The lost one was found, in the nick of time.

It’s a story of reconciliation, but it’s also a story of community, of a community supporting a family in trouble. Such an important story of God’s goodness that happened in our church;

is it is a lost story? In the early 1990s when my kids were little I came to church here on Monday afternoons—to our women’s group that met to do quilting. It was in the church basement beneat us, which used to be a single room that I heard the story of Irene Fretz from Esther Saito and Jean Culp as we sat around the quilting frames with needle and thread in our hands.  Almost everyone who sat around that frame has died or left the church, except Jane Nigh and myself, I think.

In 2002 Irene wrote a short memoir of her life, and it’s in our church library:“Great is Thy Faithfulness: A Personal Story.”  I hadn’t thought of Irene’s story for years and then I found the book on the free book table this week and it all came rushing back. And now I’m sharing it with you. God is good, God never stops looking for us. Are we searchers? Are we looking for the stories of God’s goodness, the stories that happen right here in our community? These stories remind us who we are, they remind us of God’s goodness. These stories remind us to rejoice! 

Here’s the second story.  I have been working at Conrad Grebel College, which is in Waterloo, as a professor for nine years, but a few months ago I took on the role of chaplain. I’ve had a long connection to Grebel, I was a part-time student there in 1985, just after Eugene and I got married

Ten years later when I was living in Vineland, I started teaching there part-time, which I did for many years, I even taught there part-time when I was working here at First Mennonite as a minister.

This summer, in my role as chaplain and as I thought of all the students coming in fall, I decided to clean out the chapel cupboards. There’s a big wall full of cupboards outside the chapel that were jam packed with all sorts of hymnals and books and papers and candles and every item that was ever used in a worship service over the past many decades. I pulled out everything into giant piles on the floor and I washed the cupboards, and then started sorting.  I had three piles, one for the thrift store, one to put back in the cupboards, and I had a big garbage can for what could be thrown away. And I spent the afternoon going through this huge pile of stuff.

As I was sorting I eventually came to a pile of books. There was this really old and tattered Bible. I looked at it and thought, do we really need to keep this tattered old Bible, it’s outlived its use. I picked it up and I looked at the garbage can and thought, “I’m just going to throw it away.”

And then I thought, “I can’t throw away a Bible, what if someone saw me, the chaplain, throwing away a Bible, that’s not good!” And I thought to myself, “I’ll take this Bible home and throw it away there.”

And I glanced down at the Bible in my hands and I noticed on the bottom right hand corner of the cover that there was a name embossed on it, and the name was “Carol.” 

And I thought, “WHAT!” And I opened up the Bible and it said, this Bible presented to Carol Penner, and the writing was my sister’s handwriting! The bible I was holding was my OWN bible

Forty years ago, in 1985 I was a part-time student at Grebel, and while I was there I lost my Bible. It was the Bible I had gotten as a present from my sister when I was 14. I was a really religious person in high school, and I read my Bible a lot, then I went to Bible college, ditto, the bible was in use all the time. In fact I used that Bible so much from 1974 to 1984 that the spine was broken and pages were starting to come out. So I took my bible to a bookbinder and had it rebound, it was a brand new book. And then the very next year in 1985 when I was at Grebel I lost it.  I retraced my steps, what did I do with it? I even thought maybe it was in the house somewhere. “It will turn up,” I thought, “it must be around here somewhere.” 

I kept looking but month after month passed and my bible was nowhere, and after a year, I figured, that bible is gone for good. I stopped looking for it, I stopped thinking about it. And I remember thinking, “Go figure, I went to the trouble of getting it rebound so it’s brand new looking, and then I go and lose it!”

This book that I now held in my hands was not a brand new looking Bible. It was tattered and worn. I didn’t recognize it–the last time I saw it was brand new looking! This Bible has been at Grebel but it hasn’t just been sitting on the shelf, it’s been used, used a lot. It’s been on a long 40 year journey used by generations of Grebel students. I found a piece of paper in it, with a bible verse on it, not in my handwriting.  A student was asked to read scripture, they didn’t have their Bible with them, they grabbed a Bible from the cupboard. It’s been used over and over again for forty years.

The funny thing is that I have personally known every single chaplain that worked at Grebel in that forty year period.  There have been eight different chaplains in 1985. I am sure if one of them had used this Bible, they would have seen the name embossed on it and the inscription and would have said, “Hey, we should return this bible to Carol Penner.” That didn’t happen. It’s been used by students who didn’t know who I was.

I’ve been in the Grebel building literally thousands of times since 1985. I taught courses there for many years, and I have worked there now full-time for nine years. I have been in the chapel hundreds of times—I’ve walked right by that chapel cupboard where my bible was sitting. But this year, the year I have taken on the role of chaplain, the role of caring for people in their teens and twenties, this Bible, my Bible, the Bible I read when I was in my teens and twenties has come back to me.

Here is my own handwriting, my own underlines and marginal notes. Here is the petal I plucked from the flowers of the funeral arrangement when my dad died when I was 16. Here is the list of scripture passages on the back page that I had memorized. Did I really know all those bible passages? Here are the prayers I wrote out by hand in the back empty pages. On the front pages there is a place for births and deaths, and there I wrote, “Carol Penner, dead to sin!” and “Carol Penner, born to new life!”

To say I was rejoicing to hold this bible in my hand again after forty years, is a pale word to describe how I felt, it is rejoicing in BOLD ITALIC RED LETTERS tattooed on my heart. Because it wasn’t just about getting  a book back, although that is an amazing thing. The really astounding thing is encountering a God who has brought something back to me at the exact time I need it. As I hold this book and look at what I underlined, and what I memorized and the prayers I was writing down, I am finding myself. Who was that 15 year old, that 20 year old, that 25 year old, what did her faith mean to her? I am finding parts of myself, important parts of myself that I haven’t thought about for a really long time, for forty years. And getting in touch with myself at that early stage of my faith journey is really important for the ministry work I am doing now.

I’ve been on a journey for 40 years and I am circling back to the place where I began to find God there waiting for me, and I have the feeling that this journey was planned out for me the whole time. Carol here and now, being presented with Carol then and there. Such is the care of God for me.

Earlier this summer, I had decided that in the fall for Grebel chapel services we would be using the lectionary, a set order of readings that many Christian denominations use to work through the Bible in three years. I had slotted myself in to speak at one of the first chapels in September

and I used my newly found Bible to look up the lectionary readings for the day I was scheduled to preach…what passages were assigned to me to preach on?  And lo and behold, the scripture passage assigned to was this Luke 15, the story of the Searcher Who Never Gives Up: the Persistent Shepherd, the Vigilant Housekeeper, the Always Welcoming Father.

We are people in this congregation at every stage of life, from our teens to our nineties. Each year you live, you leave some things behind, and find new parts of yourself. Some of your choices are great, and some of those choices aren’t. For those of you here who are older, you have had more to lose AND you have more to find.

Can we be like God in these stories, searching diligently for our best selves? Are there good parts of yourself that you have forgotten about? Do you remember a time when you felt great being you? The fabulous feeling of doing things you loved to do, but somehow you’ve stopped doing those things? How certain friends brought out good things in you, but you don’t see them anymore? Or maybe it’s a part of your relationship with God that you’ve mislaid along the way.

If we do the work of looking for our best selves, that is where we will encounter God, who is also seeking us, and revealing things in surprising and mysterious ways.

The same is true for our community here at First Mennonite. Who are we as a church, who have we been, where were we at our best?  People go and people come, we remember some things and we forget others. Can we seek out the stories of God’s goodness, like the story of how our congregation cared for Irene Fretz, and how God worked a miracle in the life of her family?

Will we keep seeking out those amazing stories of God’s faithfulness?

I have been so looking forward to telling you this story about me finding what was lost,

in fact since I found my Bible, I’ve been telling this story to everyone I meet, “Look what God has done in my life!” And now I say to you also, “Look what God is doing in our lives, in the life of this congregation!” Isn’t God amazing!  Finding what is lost–that is God’s work, that is our work! Rejoice with me–the lost is found!