“Navigating Lent”
This sermon was given at Grace Episcopal Church in Astoria, Oregon on February 22, 2026 on the First Sunday in Lent,
Wilderness in the Holy Land
Lessons:
Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7
Romans 5:12-19
Matthew 4:1-11
Psalm 32
The last time I was with you, I stood in that pulpit as a newly minted Episcopal priest—It was over 35 years ago and I had been invited by your then rector, Sallie Shippen, to be the Sunday preacher. She had been a mentor and though I remember at the time being mildly terrified by the thought of coming to an unknown place, because it was Sally I said “yes.”
I had a wonderful experience then and I’m grateful to have this time with you today.
Lent is a season for confession, so let me make a small confession. In the period before Christmas each year during my shopping for books to give to others, it seems I’m unable to resist purchasing a book for myself. And I usually can’t justify it as a book I really need, so it becomes my early Christmas present to myself.
Now since I love maps and have a small though highly disorganized collection of them, some year ago this Christmas present to myself was Kathleen Harmon's volume of inventive maps.
Her curious collection is an adventure into personal geographies and the untamed sphere of the imagination.
I liked her title: it was called simply, “You Are Here.”
In the book, Harman explores one of our deepest desires which is to understand the world around us and our place in it.
Included in the book, for example, is a wonderful map of the United States created by an Irish artist—it has the state lines and geographic features, but the only place names are those cities and hamlets that have lost in their name— so we find towns with names like “Lost Creek.”
Included in this largely visual collection, I discovered an essay by Stephen S. Hall who proposes an intriguing concept which he calls “orienting.”
“Orienting,” he writes, “begins with geography, but it reflects a need of the conscious, self-aware organism for a kind of transcendent orientation that asks not just where am I, but where do I fit in this landscape? Where have I been? Where shall I go and what values will I pack for the trip? What culture of knowledge allows me to know what I am, which is often another way of knowing where I am? And what pattern, what grid of wisdom, can I impose on my accumulated idiosyncratic geographies? The coordinates marking this territory are unique to each individual and lend themselves to a very private kind of cartography.”[1]
From time to time, we all need to get a fix on our lives: to find our bearings.
Where are we?
Where do we want to be?
How ever do we get there?
Whether we recognize it or not, we are all amateur cartographers.
Engaged in charting our way through the largely unknown territory of life.
Just when we think we know where we are and are navigating our lives with a small measure of confidence, something comes along to dislodge us from our momentary ease, and we're thrust into territory that is not familiar.
Joan Chittister in my Lenten reading book this year puts it starkly, “There is no one who has not known what it is to lose in the game of life, to feel defeat . . .”[2]
Perhaps it’s when a relationship come unexpectedly unraveled.
Or when illness strikes us.
Or when we lose a loved one.
To borrow from Kathleen Harmon's book title . . .
We have arrived at one of those “You Are Here” moments.
Marked by Ashes
This past week we celebrated Ash Wednesday—the beginning of the season of Lent.
Ash Wednesday is that day when we are marked by ashes—a sign of our mortality.
On Ash Wednesday we can’t hide from the fact that our lives have finite limits.
That there is a sense of urgency about the business of living.
For Ash Wednesday is a “wakeup call.”
Today—the first Sunday in Lent—is an occasion for “orienting,” to see how we will navigate the struggles and challenges that are before us.
How will we invest this precious gift which is our life?
Today can become for each of us a “You Are Here” moment as we seek to find a way forward.
The Gospel lesson appointed for this day is Matthew's familiar story of “The Temptations” of Jesus.
This scene follows immediately after Jesus’ baptism by John when Jesus is led into the wilderness and fasts for forty days and forty nights, an echo of the wilderness journey of his own people—those people of Israel who wandered for forty years in the wilderness.
And Jesus we're told was famished.
What then unfolds is a conversation between Jesus and “the Devil” and this tempter or adversary puts forth a series of challenges to Jesus:
To turn stones to bread.
To leap from the pinnacle of the temple.
To fall down and worship him in exchange for all the kingdoms of the world.
Jesus responds to each of these challenges or temptations with words from his own Hebrew scriptures.
Now there is much we might say about each of these temptations but underlying them all there is a fundamental clash between kingdoms.
It was no secret to Matthew's readers that the kingdom they knew best was the Roman Empire—indeed the word in Greek for kingdom is the same as the word for empire.
The Roman Empire had its bread, its circuses, its political power—hence for the tempter there were stones to turn into bread, there was proposed a theatrical leap from that pinnacle, and the offer of a power grab, acquiring the kingdoms of the world.
In his rejection of these temptations, we catch an early glimpse of Jesus as the leader of a resistance movement.
In resisting the temptations Jesus was beginning to craft a different way: neither submitting to the empire, nor simply opposing it as a Messiah who rides in conquest on a charger.
Jesus was instead offering another way—call it “the Jesus alternative”—a way which will unfold as Matthew's gospel story continues.
Jesus will offer us the vision of the kingdom of God as another way of relating to the world.
This is the good news of the Gospel. For the kingdom Jesus was speaking of had a different center than the one that revolved around the divine Caesar.
And this different center was not a place of escape from the world . . . but a place of authentic engagement with the world.
For Jesus, the Kingdom of God was a counter Kingdom to the powerful Roman Empire, and his claim was that even now this alternative kingdom was breaking into the world.
Perhaps we can better understand this kind of kingdom in our day by using the language of “the reign” or “rule of God.”
For when we live under the rule of God, we remain very much engaged with the world, but our engagement is the kind of engagement reflected in the beatitudes which appear in the next chapter of Matthew's gospel.
In the beatitudes we see that “the Jesus way” identifies with the poor, the merciful, those who mourn, the peacemakers, those who are “outsiders.’
The earliest Christians were known and often referred to as “People of the Way.”
And they were able to navigate their lives by this alternative vision.
They were able to engage the world of their time by offering their witness that God is King and Caesar is not.
So we too are called to be “People of the Way’— we’re invited to live by an alternative vision.
In our personal relationships and in our public lives, we are called to follow in this alternative way of Jesus.
And this way can be costly—for this a way that was ultimately embodied in suffering love.
You see, there is a temptation we face that goes beyond those things we have done and or left undone, although these are important to address.
But as with Jesus in the wilderness, there is something deeper and more pervasive to attend to.
It is our primal temptation is to become captive to the values and ethos of our world:
By condoning of violence and injustice on a national and even global scale,
By an addiction to over consumption
By a failure to be stewards of God's fragile creation.
A “You Are Here” Moment
We have before us on this day a “You Are Here” moment.
Lent is a time for more than giving up something that may be destructive in our lives.
Lent is a time to ask fundamental questions about how we are orienting our lives.
What in all that we are doing really matters?
How in our own way, are we furthering God's vision for human life?
How are we resisting the Caesars of our day?
Of all the maps in my personal collection one of my favorites is a map I first acquired on a visit to London a number of years ago.
It was the map of the underground tube. This map gave me the power to get anywhere I needed to go.
No wonder that the roundel symbol for the London underground became rated as the second most defining icon of the British people.
Sometimes we need to go underground to find our way.
Gordon Laird once wrote: “Lent is a time when Christians go underground to try to understand more completely the mysteries of the Christian life and the radical differences between that life and regular life.”
“You Are Here”
On this day when we find ourselves living in a time of great uncertainty and struggle—a time that can feel so much like a wilderness—when we can so easily withdraw from an engaged life. Take heart, llike Jesus, we have a companion, the holy and life-giving Spirit of God.
This same Spirit is present to be our guide during these Lenen days to live more deeply into the alternative way of Jesus, on an “underground journey of faith,”.
To rise again in 40 days into the hope that is Easter.
_______________________________
[1] Hall, Stephen S. "I, Mercator." You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, edited by Katharine Harmon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004, pp. 15-19.
[2] Chittister, Joan. Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Willaim B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003, p. 2.
