First Sunday in Lent | February 22nd, 2026 | The Rev. McKenzi Roberson

Welcome to Lent. We started this season on Wednesday, gathering in this space to be reminded of our mortality with ashes smudged on our foreheads, and being invited to a time of shedding distractions, introspection, prayer, and repentance. Today we leaned into that call to prayer by starting our worship with the Great Litany, a prayer that (at least in broad strokes) prays for just about everything. We have come to the threshold of Lent and taken our first step through.

Similarly, in our Gospel this morning, Jesus has come to the threshold of his public ministry and is about to step through. Just before we pick up the story, Jesus was baptized. He submitted himself to this human experience and was claimed as God’s child “with whom I am well pleased.” It’s a powerful moment for Jesus, and from that place of strength, made sure in his identity as God’s son, Jesus follows the spirit out to the wilderness to be tempted.

John Chrysostom, a theologian from the 400s who I would argue was rightly given the name Golden Tongue, offers some commentary here I had not encountered before this week. He explains how the devil had seen Jesus exulted by both God and John in his baptism, and yet now saw Jesus famished after his forty days of prayer and fasting. Chrysostom then claims that the devil “was thenceforth in perplexity, and neither could believe that [Christ] was a mere man, because of the things spoken concerning Him; nor on the other hand receive it that He was Son of God, seeing [Christ] as he did in hunger.”

Briefly, the devil is a character who probably needs a little unpacking. We aren’t talking about some red figure with horns, a tail, and a pitchfork. I think all of that is human projection on something we can’t quite get a handle on. What is helpful is to remember that this character, the devil, the tempter, in Hebrew “ha-satan” is the accuser or the adversary. This is a mythical being whose role is to poke at things to see if they are as they seem. You might think of Job, who is accused by this character of only loving God because everything is good for him.

Returning to the story, this devil is unclear about who the heck Jesus is. All signs point to Son of God, a fearsome agent of the Lord, and yet here he is famished in the wilderness. The devil is struggling, according to Chrysostom, with what we might nowadays call cognitive dissonance. We are expecting something specific and yet are facing something that doesn’t fit into our categories.

So in the way of the accuser, this character pokes at Jesus, starting with, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become bread.” Be God and do a miracle, or be a human and do what you can to alleviate your discomfort, but either way serve yourself (and thereby the purposes of the tempter) rather than God. But Jesus was clear on his priorities and knew that this form of bread was simply a distraction from what was truly needed.

When that temptation doesn’t work, the devil learns from the experience and preempts Jesus’ use of scripture by using words of scripture itself to justify the demand, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself from the temple.” You claim you are the Son of God after all, you have the power to do these things. Here is some of your very own scripture handed back to use as a convenient excuse to serve your own glory rather than God’s. But Jesus stands firm in his purpose.

At this point in his commentary, Chrysostom refers to the tempter as a boxer, who has received two deadly blows and is now reeling about and not making much sense. In a final effort, barely glancing off Jesus’ chin, as it were, the devil offers all the power and wealth of this world, if only Jesus would worship him. It feels almost silly in light of how self-possessed Jesus has been through the first two temptations, and not even self-possessed really but God-possessed.

Jesus can’t be tricked; he knows that he serves God, and now, too, so does the accuser. The devil flees, and Jesus is attended to by angels.

A longstanding tradition of the church for engaging the stories of scripture is to imagine yourself as one of the characters. How does it feel to be Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross for Jesus? How does it feel to be in the crowd shouting “Crucify him!” As I settled myself into this story after reading Chrysostom’s commentary, I couldn’t stop wondering, how often are we the accuser?

“If you are the Son of God, give me a good job, a good home, a good partner.”

“If you are the Son of God, bring about an end to the injustice being wrought by ICE.”

“If you are the Son of God, don’t let this parish close.”

Much like bread in the face of starvation, these are not inherently bad things to ask of God. Having good things in our lives can help us to find nourishment and sustainment so we can continue to live the lives God has called us to live. Of course God cares about seeing an end to injustice. And I truly believe St. Peter’s has a lot left to give to the world.

But these kinds of demands land somewhere on a spectrum between embittered and entitled. We don’t quite believe in God’s love anymore, so we throw it in God’s face, or we are engaging a corrupted version of God’s love that treats God like something of a vending machine that will give us what we want when we want it because we want it. Maybe if we are praying like this, it is because we are experiencing a cognitive dissonance of our own, confused by a good God who is allowing bad things to happen to ourselves or others, and then we lash out because of that confusion.

Part of what we miss when we take this posture in prayer is our God-given agency. We are not automatons running around set to God’s purposes. We have been given free will. We get to choose how we will live, how we will respond to each situation as it arises before us. We have the freedom to choose if we will actively join ourselves to God’s purposes, fight against God’s plans, or passively sit by and do nothing, hoping that things will work out alright without any effort from me.

God doesn’t just do things because we show up to church demanding them. God has given us the agency to shape our reality. We get to co-create life with God.

There is joy and freedom in this reality, but it also means we face the consequences of our actions, for good and for ill. The choices we make have a real impact on our reality.

And, tragically, this also means we are often left to deal with the consequences of other’s actions. An incredible number of people face lives of poverty and violence as the consequence of the greed and fear of a few.

Does all of this mean I don’t think we should pray and ask God for what we want? Of course not. I am rather inviting us to reflect in this season of Lent on how we are praying and how we are living. What is our stance when we come to prayer?

There is a certain kind of safety to come to God with demands and expectations. It becomes about God’s action or inaction rather than ourselves.

It is far more vulnerable to come before God, holding out our hands, and showing God our tender desires, our secret hopes. To be honest with God about our hopes and dreams is to risk facing rejection that is about us, not about the demands we have made.

But to be honest in our prayers is also to build intimacy with God. It is another moment we get to exercise our agency, opening the door to the God who asks permission to enter.

Further, we are changed in this kind of intimate prayer. We share ourselves with God, and God shares more of Godself with us. We become more in tune with God’s purposes in the world, better able to align ourselves with the God of mercy, justice, and love. And, I do believe that as we become better practiced with hearing the nudges of the Holy Spirit we become better able, if you’ll indulge a curling metaphor, to let go of the stone at just the right moment with just the right spin to avoid the defensive stones and land exactly where we meant to land.

God sees the whole in ways we can never comprehend, so when we learn to pray and listen to God we can be better able to time the energy and direction of our actions to cut through the powers that might be trying to thwart us.

You, each as individuals and as a community, are loved by the God who longs for your flourishing. As I said on Wednesday, there are likely some difficult days ahead for you, hard choices and harder work. You will have many opportunities to pray and to practice your agency.

It is my sincere hope that you will come to each other and to God not with demands and expectations, ruled by fear and uncertainty, but with kind words and gentle hands holding hopes and dreams and the wonder of what could be. As you step into the work of the coming months, remember that you are not alone, my friends. And you are so deeply loved.