Given at St Edward’s, 22 Feb 2026 (Year A)
Readings: Matthew 4:1-11, Romans 5: 12-29
So, we begin Lent again. I wonder how many Lents we have lived through as Christians and how many we have engaged with fully?
You know, Lent comes from the old english word Lencten which means spring season. It can feel a dry season, a difficult season but it is also about new life as the name suggests. It is the period from Ash Wednesday up to Easter, although in some churches this varies slightly. It is 6 weeks of devotion, traditionally of fasting, with Sundays being a break from the fast, so once you take those out it is 40 days. 40 days which reminds us of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness as we heard from Mark. 40 days as a reminder of the 40 years of Israel wandering in the desert, searching the promised land.
Lent has long been shaped around three pillars: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Yet today we often just reduce it to ‘giving something up’. In early Christianity it was traditional to follow a ‘black fast’, fasting from food and liquid apart from one vegetarian meal after sunset, and this is still observed in some denominations like the Orthodox Coptic church. Early documents say that only bread, vegetables, salt and water are allowed in Lent, and in Holy week no veggies either! St Augustine of Hippo wrote that fasting was necessary, it was a sin not to do it!
And this was all based on scripture, for example Moses went into the mountains for 40 days and 40 nights, we can read in Ex 34:28, during which time ‘he neither ate bread nor drank water’. As he spent time with God, God gave him the 10 commandments. Likewise in 1 Kings 19 we read of Elijah, having had a meal as led by an angel, he then went in the ‘strength of that food’ for 40 days and 40 nights to the mountain of God (Mt Horeb). After this he heard from the Lord clearly in the still small voice, and then saw the end of a drought covering the land.
The lesson seems to be that these 40 day fasts of Moses, Elijah and Jesus prepared them for what was to come. So whatever we do this Lent, perhaps the question for us is: How are we preparing ourselves for what God will do next?
I have talked before about the wilderness being a metaphor for a place of encounter with God. Rather than being a place that we might think of as desolate or desert like, when people in the Bible went out to the wilderness they met with God.
Moses at the burning bush.
Hagar encountering the angel of the Lord in her distress having feld from Sarah
Elijah hearing God in the whisper, the still small voice
And Jesus, led by the Spirit into the wilderness.
It is interesting that we read ‘Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil’, if we put that the other way around the Devil also met God in the wilderness…
When we find ourselves in wilderness seasons, when life feels dry, confusing, or difficult, temptation often feels stronger. We may feel far from God. Yet those very places may be where God is most present, if only we remember to look. And we might think of temptation as a big word, like we might feel tempted to do something awful like steal, or commit adultery, but the reality is that temptation is usually far more subtle, it speaks untruth to us, so that we question ourselves. Or we are led a little bit astray, a little bit further from God. The devil twists God’s message exactly as he did to Jesus.
Throw yourself down, the scriptures say God will protect you.
Worship me and not God and I will give you all this stuff.
Have something to eat, you deserve it, you can do it…
or
Don’t worry about taking time to pray, you have got important stuff to do today, God won’t mind.
Don’t worry about reading your Bible, you have read it already, you’ll hear a sermon on Sunday.
Don’t worry about giving to those in need, God has blessed you.
Temptation draws us little by little away from the truth.
Now this is a season of repentance where we get to hand over to God our wrong doing once again. As we heard in Romans we are all sinners ‘Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned’ But you know this is not a season of punishing ourselves, of condemning ourselves. One of the biggest things we are tempted to do is to believe we are not good enough, we are not the person God has made us to be. A voice trying to sway us from the truth.
As we read in Romans, we get freedom through Christ, once and for all. We heard about Adam, and his sin but then he is likened to Jesus, he is a type of the one who was to come (v14). Jesus is a second Adam who stands in place of him and of us so that any punishment we may be due is taken by him on the cross.
As we heard:
Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous
And this gift of freedom & righteousness is a free gift v15. So let nothing tempt us away from that truth.
and perhaps our biggest reminder is about hope as I talked about in our service on Tuesday. Hope not only for the end of the story — but for the present moment. The new Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullay has talked about hope quite a bit since she was announced, including last week at General Synod. Where she said,
It is sometimes said that hope is a muscle that we must build and develop. In the seemingly impossible situations we see around the world, we must flex the muscle of hope, strengthening our sense of God’s work and presence in the world. This does not mean that we deny the challenges that are in front of us – the challenges of inequality and injustice, the volatility of global politics, the climate crisis and more – but it means we can say with confidence that God is in the midst of us.
Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally
I wonder if this Lent this hope can be our focus. As we reflect and repent yes, as we look to be and do better, we do so not in shame or self condemnation, but in hope for something different. For ourselves and for our world.
After all Lent comes from spring season and I always think that at this time of year we see signs of hope in the natural world. Bulbs pushing their way through frozen ground or this year very muddy ground, once again returning; buds forming on trees; catkins blowing in the wind, snowdrops and new green shoots. Hope is written into the whole creation by the creator.
There are many ways we can engage with Lent, sign up to do our Lent course, try a prayer app like Lectio365, read through a Book of the Bible, or a Lent book, fast from something or take something up, Lutheran Pastor Nadia Bolz Weber even has a theme this year called ’40 days of Good Shit’, where people are encouraged to share good things each day to encourage one another, to bring hope.
Hope is not denying what is around us, as the ABC said it “doesn’t skip over grief, pain and messiness of life but enters into it, and tenderly tells us that God is with us”. The point is not really what we do, but that we do something intentional to seek where God is truly and tenderly with us. This year it feels like Lent is an invitation to seek a stubborn, resilient, faithful, spring-like hope.
So, let us seek the God who we can find in the wilderness. Let us be patiently prayerful, and optimistically hopeful, as we await the resurrection dawn of Easter.
Amen
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