1 Timothy 1.12–17, Luke 15.1–10
The Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity, 14 September 2025
Austwick, Keasden
The lost sheep and the lost coin are stories which describe how much value God puts on us; how precious we are in his eyes. How he longs for relationship with us, and will search and search for us however lost we may be to him.
How comforting to be assured of this, living as we do in a throwaway society, where it often seems that little is valued or precious, that everything is disposable and our relationships – with things and with people – are cheap.
Indeed, a present-day parable might go like this:
She had a hundred blouses; and she threw them all away… so she could buy a hundred more.
Her flat was full of clothes; in cupboards, on chairs, under the bed, in plastic containers stacked in the hallway and behind the settee. Day by day it filled up more as she spent her hours scrolling the fashion websites and ordering whatever caught her eye.
It was easy doing this, for everything was so cheap: a two-piece tank top and wide leg pants for £10.99; a floral pyjama set for £3.49; loungewear top and leggings £3.99. [1] She’d already got plenty of these sorts of clothes, but they were in boxes somewhere, and for her, the joy was in getting something new: finding a lovely looking bargain online, the satisfaction of the one-click purchase, the frisson of receiving delivery parcels every day.
But it depressed her, being surrounded with all this stuff, having to clear a way through bin bags full of shoes just to get to the kitchen. She knew that she needed to have a clear-out. If she cleared out her flat it may help clear up the gloom she felt inside her. She couldn’t bring herself to do this, though; being a hoarder she found it impossible to get rid of anything. So after many months of deliberation, eventually she looked online and found a professional organiser to come and do the necessary decluttering for her.
The declutterer was ruthless. With no room for nostalgia or emotion she threw hundreds of items of clothing away: including one old cardigan which had sat at the bottom of a drawer, untouched, for ages, the one which had been knitted years before by a loving grandmother, gifted with love, now frayed and shapeless, and washed-out of colour, it was one of the first things to go in the skip.
After the declutterer had gone, the woman’s flat looked a lot emptier, cleaner somehow. How long would it be before she reached for her phone and began scrolling the fast-fashion websites again?
One of the stark statistics about our throwaway society is that less than 1% of clothing waste is recycled into new clothes – as our recycling systems just aren’t up to the task. So 99 per cent of the clothes we tip away end up in landfill. And as the majority of them are made of plastics, they’ll not decompose, they’ll just keep piling ever higher.
There are other startling statistics, as detailed by Patrick Grant in his book Less:
“In 2023, 100 billion garments were made worldwide, most by workers paid virtually nothing, 70 per cent of them from plastic textiles made from oil. Thirty per cent of all the clothes made are never sold, two-thirds of the clothes we own we never wear, and new clothes are now so cheap they’re often thrown away rather than being washed and worn again. The British Fashion Council reported that 23 million returned garments were sent to landfill or incinerated in the UK in 2022 alone.”
I think Patrick speaks for many of us in saying that “We buy clothes and all sorts of other things with little or no care or consideration. Our consumption is thoughtless and careless. We buy so much, we have so much, and yet we enjoy so little.” [2]
So the parables of the lost coin and the lost sheep mean little to people who don’t care about losing things, as everything is disposable and easily replaced.
Except when we stop to consider how, in the midst of all this reckless abundance, we ourselves can feel lost. “We have so much, and yet we enjoy so little,” Patrick wrote. The woman in the flat surrounded by her boxes was in a depression not uncommon to those of us who sense that we’ve been reduced to the function of consumers. We suspect that beneath the surface we may have rich and wonderful created natures, waiting, longing to come out, but we feel imprisoned in a way of life in which the precious, healthy, creative sides of us are not required to play a part.
And so, we might pray for an ending to the modern-day parable in which the women in her flat laments the loss of her grandmother’s old knitted cardigan, and in response, sets out to learn how to knit, so that she can give her newborn niece a baby blanket. She goes to a knitting class and makes new friends, finds she has a talent for it, and with her new-found friends sets up a little project knitting clothes and doing repairs for people in mother and child hostels and homeless and refugee families.
And we might celebrate the many businesses which are actively working to offer something different to fast fashion: like Patrick Grant’s Community Clothing, an online retailer which works on the principle of producing high quality everyday clothes at a third of the price of other premium brands, making 100% of them here in the UK, in 48 partner factories mostly in the North West, Yorkshire, the East Midlands, southern and central Scotland and South Wales, areas of severe economic and social deprivation whose mills have stood empty for decades. [3]
The business began when Patrick bought out the historic Blackburn clothing manufacturer Cookson & Clegg, saving it from closure, and now, by sustaining and creating jobs – good, fulfilling, well-paid jobs – Community Clothing is helping to restore local economic prosperity and pride in all these places, as well as offering potential customers like us a satisfying, ethical outlet to support.
“I once was lost…. but now I’m found; was blind, but now I see…” [4]
In our throwaway society, where it often seems that little is valued or precious, that everything is disposable, and our relationships – with things and with people – are thus cheapened, let us always remember how very, very, highly God values us; how absolutely precious we are in his eyes.
We can affirm and celebrate this, in the way we live our lives, even down to the way we wear our clothes; and certainly in our relationships with others. We can find fulfilment in doing our bit to search for the lost in the world around us, and find ourselves rejoicing when they are found.
Notes
[1] Actual priced items from Shein website accessed 9 September 2025.
[2] Patrick Grant, Less: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish: How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier. p.74.
[3] Community Clothing: Our Mission. Website accessed 11 September 2025.
[4] John Newton, Amazing Grace.
