Lent 1A 2026: The Stories We Live By

My grandfather had a saying: “Expect the best of a person and they will rarely let you down.”

It’s something I thought about often in my music teaching days. Again and again I noticed that the greatest limitation on a student’s potential was not talent or resources — it was what I believed they could do. If I quietly assumed a student would struggle, they often did. But when I refused to let cynicism creep in, something remarkable would happen. Gifts would emerge — often unexpected ones — but with them confidence would grow. Students would discover capacities they didn’t know they had. And so I worked hard not to let my expectations shrink their horizons, and was constantly amazed by what unfolded.

Out in the grown-up world, it’s harder to live that way. It’s easy to become cautious — especially if you’ve been at the receiving end of an accusing email or bad behaviour. But even without that, it’s easy to assume the worst when we don’t understand someone’s choices. And once we start down that path of suspicion we get caught in a downward spiral: when we assume the worst of a person, our perception becomes all we see. It no longer matters how much good they might do — we begin to attribute all behaviour to the poorest motive we can imagine. No wonder the world gets itself into such a mess.

It is so easy to let fear shape how we see the world. And perhaps that is because we are always living inside stories we tell ourselves — and the stories we live by shape what we notice, what we fear, and what we trust.

I think about my love of horror films during my teenage years. I used to love jump-scare films, but the film that stopped me in my tracks was The Blair Witch Project — a story of filmmakers lost in a dark woods and gradually overwhelmed by fear. I’ve never managed a second viewing because the setting truly terrified me. The dark wilderness tapped into something deep: our collective human fear of strange, untamed places.

Admittedly those fears are reinforced by real stories — dingoes taking babies, the outback backpacker murders, stories of the harassment of women walking alone at night. Yet our fears don’t tell the whole story. Statistics remind us that harm is far more likely to come from familiar relationships than from strangers; that we are far more likely to meet misadventure in the city than in remote places; that we are more likely to die in the safety of our own homes by choking than we are to be harmed by a wild animal.

The poet and farmer Wendell Berry suggests that even the word “wilderness” may mislead us. Having lived closely with the creatures of woods and fields, he writes that he can no longer think of them as wild — they are simply going about their lives, making shelter, finding food, raising their young, far more at home in their places than we are. And he wonders whether it is we who might appear wild to them — restless, unrestrained, often out of balance.

It’s not hard to look at the news and see what he is talking about. Stories continue to emerge of exploitation, of power used without restraint, of systems that protect the powerful while the vulnerable are harmed. The wilderness we fear is rarely out there in remote places — often, as we’ve seen in the tragedy around the Epstein files, it is hidden in plain sight, in the halls of power and in the neighbourhoods our TV shows have taught us to admire.

So when the lectionary brings us two wilderness stories, it gives us pause to ask: what kind of wilderness are we really talking about — a place of threat? Or a place of revelation? A place of learning?

The first wilderness is set not in a wasteland, but a garden of abundance. Yet it’s worth noticing what isn’t in the story. There is no apple. There is no devil with horns. And the word “sin” is not actually sitting there like a label slapped onto the narrative.

Rather we have a story that asks what it means to trust, what it is a story about how human perceptions can be bent. The serpent doesn’t begin by offering a bad behaviour; it begins by offering an alternative story. It invites the humans to assume the worst of God — to see God as withholding — and to see themselves as lacking, to see the world through a lens of suspicion rather than provision. And then the text says something crucial: the woman “saw” that the tree was good — beautiful, desirable, promising wisdom.

It would be a gross oversimplification to say that the figure of Eve wanted something that was bad; more accurately, the serpent in the story represents the false prophets of our world, and the sin lies in the distortion of a place that was good, and turning it into something divisive.

Suddenly the garden of provision becomes something to grasp at rather than receive. Having enough feels like deprivation from having more. Mutual trust becomes a struggle for control. And that is a pattern that is familiar to us. We know that when fear or jealousy takes hold, our field of view narrows — so rather than reading the story of Eden simply as the moment everything went wrong, we are better to hear it as a reflection on the human condition — what happens when our perception is clouded by false narratives.

The second wilderness story follows Jesus into the desert. The tempter begins: “If you are the Son of God…” — and then the temptations escalate: turn stones to bread, make faith a spectacle, seize power.

These are not random tests; they are the universal pressure points of human life — the universal voice in all our ears that says: prove yourself, seek validation, assert your worth. And Jesus refuses that voice. He receives his identity rather than grasping for it.

Which tells us something very important: temptation is not simply a list of things to avoid. Perhaps more destructively temptation might be the invitation to inhabit false stories — stories where God cannot be trusted, where we must compete rather than belong, where we must be bigger, better, more powerful than anyone else to be successful, where we must impose ourselves to secure our place.

These narratives surround us constantly in this world, which is why I think Lent is important. Not as a time of testing how long we can go without chocolate, but as a clearing in our lives. Our unadorned churches in lent remind us to remove the distractions and see more clearly. The ashes traced on our foreheads proclaim that we belong to God even in our frailty. Our baptism says we are marked by grace before any striving of our own. The turning seasons of the earth remind us that we are continually given the bread we need.

Which brings us back to parish life — and yes, to the AGM. Because AGMs can tempt us into the same old distortions. Seen through scarcity, we become anxious. Seen through suspicion, we become cynical of other’s efforts. Seen through productivity, we chase numbers instead of faithfulness.

But when we see relationally — when we listen with generosity, speak with humility, when we ask questions before jumping to conclusions we remain open to the Spirit’s slow work — and we leave space for the Spirit to continue her work in us - an imperfect people and imperfect community… which is vitally important, because what temptation ultimately seeks to erode, in every wilderness, is trust.

If a community is not relational, it will not be sustainable - regardless of whether the budget ends in black ink or red.

Lent invites us to return to the clarity of the desert, to the goodness of the garden, and to the simple truth that love is the only story that can reorder our fears and restore us to one another.

And it is this same love that must shape our life together —
in our conversations, in our service of each other,
in the gentleness of ordinary everyday interactions.

As we walk this Lenten path may the story we live by be
That love is stronger than all our fears —
in the wilderness, in the garden, and in this life we share.

Amen.