1st Sunday in Lent
Texts: Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7;
Rom 5:12-19; Matt 4:1-11
YouTube: https://youtu.be/EU40uTwl9JA
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from John Dear
CHOOSING THE RIGHT METAPHOR FOR SIN:
PANDEMIC OR ENSLAVEMENT, NOT GENETIC INHERITANCE
I introduced a theme for Lent on Ash Wednesday. I’ll recap it every week in the Sermon Notes, like in today’s notes, so that it stays fresh every week, even if you miss a Sunday.
The theme is: “Called Out from Our Cultures of Death to God’s Reign of Life.” And it’s based on this book by Catholic peace activist John Dear. Titled Lazarus, Come Forth!,1 it takes in the whole of John’s Gospel, but focuses on the story in John 11 that climaxes our Gospel Readings for Lent, the story of Jesus calling out his dead friend Lazarus from the tomb. The subtitle really captures the theme we will encounter throughout Lent: How Jesus Confronts the Culture of Death and Invites Us into the New Life of Peace.
Dear’s book proposes seeing Lazarus as representing all of humanity, which means we might consider it to be “the key to the entire Gospel”: “The story of this raising is John’s way of dramatizing how Jesus has come to call everyone and every culture out of the tombs of death into the new life of peace.” So that’s what I plan to do. We will read all of the Gospels in Lent through the lens of this theme, and we will be looking for the two elements within the theme:
• Culture of Death: what deadly aspect of our sin is being revealed in each text?
• New Life of Peace: how does Jesus liberate us from that aspect of our sin to invite us into the way of peace?
Let’s start, then, on today’s readings. The Gospel is the story from Matthew of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness, and the other two readings are both heavy on the sin element, the Culture of Death. It’s going to be harder to find the new-life-of-peace element this week, given such a heavy dose of the culture-of-death element. In the other four weeks of Lent, it won’t be quite as hard, since the Gospel Readings will be from John’s Gospel — which is the inspiration for our two-element theme around Cultures of Death and the New Life of Peace. But we will find that second element of New Life at least implied in today’s readings, so I promise you we will end up there with a glimpse of the New Life from a surprising source.
Today’s Gospel Reading shows us Satan trying to tempt Jesus into sinning. Is there a way to characterize these three temptations? I would say this: It shows Satan trying to tempt Jesus to take control of things himself, ultimately forcing God’s hand. He can use his god-like powers to turn stones into bread. He’s hungry. He could jump off the tower of the temple and rely on God’s angels to break his fall. And biggest of all he could have control of all the kingdoms of the world, if he only bowed down to Satan himself. Implied in all this is to choose control over others instead of loving others. As St Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, love never seeks to control others. The way of Satan is the way of control, the way of ruling over others, assuming that you know better than them. It is the way of taking away freedom from others. It is the way of nationalistic politics. ‘God chose us to rule over all of you.’
Jesus fends off all of these temptations of control over others. He will pioneer God’s politics of love, which cares compassionately for others and seeks for them to flourish in life. Rather than wielding the violence of things like execution on the cross, he will submit to the cross in love, trusting in God’s power of love as the power of life itself. Jesus will trust in resurrection.
Our first two readings, on this first Sunday in Lent, tell the story of sin, one in narrative form, the story of the mythological first man and woman in the God’s paradise garden. And the second from St. Paul in Romans 5 in the very difficult, condensed form of a typological anthropology, where Paul boils being human down to only two types. One type has fallen under the Powers of Sin and Death, and the other type of being human is to follow in the way of Jesus the Messiah. Paul truly puts the matter in the way of our Lenten theme. We can either be bound by Cultures of Death or accept the invitation into the New Life of Peace.
Before we end with the way of the New Life of Peace, I need to briefly deal with a dead-end way of reading these two Bible passages. St. Augustine (way back in the 5th century) is credited with our dominant way of understanding “original sin” as somehow inherited by the rest of humankind. He used both of today’s first two readings to make his case that every human being since Adam and Eve have inherited their sinfulness. But neither of these two readings say anything in terms of inheritance. This is really important because, especially with today’s understanding of genetic inheritance by DNA, we would understand inheriting sin to be irreversible. Can you and I change our DNA? We would be absolutely stuck in sin if we’ve literally inherited it in our genetic structure, our DNA. And much our theology since Augustine has seemed to at least imply that, if not stating it outright. Much of Justification theology, which I’ve argued against in the past couple years, puts forward a view of sin for which we can never hope to reverse it. We can only hope to receive God’s forgiveness in Jesus Christ, and then go to heaven when we die, finally being free from sin and death’s lock on us.
But, as I said, we don’t need to read these two Bible passages in terms of inheritance. I could argue for reading the Genesis 3 passage in terms of a disease/contagion metaphor. The serpent — through a false conspiracy theory about God holding out on them, trying to control them — tricks the woman into desiring the forbidden fruit, and then the woman passes this desire for control onto the man. Sin is like a pandemic of desiring to control others instead of loving them. Armed with an immature, less-than-godlike knowledge of sin and evil, we try to pigeon-hole each other into who’s good and who’s bad, who’s a friend and who’s an enemy. But there is a cure for this pandemic. Receive the inoculation of God’s love through Jesus the Messiah, a love that goes beyond friend and enemy to loving even our enemies. If we are vaccinated in Jesus’ love we can begin to find healing from the long pandemic of Sin and Death.
So the Genesis 3 reading can be read in terms of disease and contagion rather than genetic inheritance. I propose to you that the reading from Romans 5 should instead be read in terms of enslavement and liberation. If we were to read a few verses more into Romans 6, we would find Paul explicitly using the word “slavery.” This is Paul using similar language about sin as we will be doing in our Lenten theme about Cultures of Death. That we have allowed ourselves to become enslaved in these cultures based on death. Based on controlling others, on constant threats of violence and warring with one another.
Jesus comes to liberate us from all that and to invite us into God’s reign, with a whole new politics, a whole new culture, based on love.
I’d like to end with a glimpse of what a culture of love might look like. We’ve certainly been encountering a lot of the culture of death lately, a lot of violence, a lot of seeking to control others. Just this past Wednesday Governor Pritzger of Illinois delivered his State of the State Address to his assembled legislature. He ended it in the most remarkable way.2
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about love – about loving people and loving your country and the power involved in both. . . . Love is a superpower – it teaches the brittle to bend, it shows the selfish how to share, it grants courage to the coward. . . .
I also know that love unrequited can break a heart made fragile by dashed hope. Which is why it’s important for me to stand before you today and tell you that your country is loving you back – just not in the way you are used to hearing. It’s not speaking in anthems or flags or ostentatious displays of patriotism. It will never come from the people who say the only way to love America is to hate Americans.
Love is found in every act of courage – large and small – taken to preserve the country we once knew. You will find it in homes and schools and churches and art. It is there; it has not been squashed.
Over the last 12 months, I’ve heard love start to shout here in Illinois. I heard it from the bicyclers who showed up in Little Village every day during Operation Midway Blitz to buy out tamale carts so the vendors could return to the safety of their homes. I heard it from the parishioners who formed human chains around churches so that immigrants could worship. I heard it from the moms in the school pick up line who whipped out their cameras and their whistles. I saw it in the face of every Midwesterner who put on their heaviest coat and protested outside on the coldest day.
I am begging my fellow politicians, my fellow Illinoisans, my fellow Americans to realize that right now in this country we are not fighting over policy or political party. We are fighting over whether we are going to be a civilization rooted in empathy and kindness — or one rooted in cruelty and rage. What you choose to arm yourself with in this fight – love or hate – exposes which side you are fighting on. Only the weakest of people believe that love is the weakest of weapons. [Remember our reading from 1 Corinthians 1 a few weeks ago? About how God’s power looks like weakness to the world?] And it turns out that love actually is all around – and that those who think that cruelty can destroy it are incapable of understanding the power of a nation moved by it.
I love my country. I refuse to stop. The hope I have found in a very difficult year is that love is the light that gets you through a long night.
Amen!
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, February 22, 2026
YouTube: https://youtu.be/EU40uTwl9JA
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from John Dear
Notes
1. John Dear, Lazarus, Come Forth: How Jesus Confronts the Culture of Death and Invites Us into the New Life of Peace (Orbis Books, 2011).
2. You can Google for a transcript. Here’s one place I found: https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/chicago-politics/read-the-full-text-of-gov-jb-priztkers-state-of-the-state-address/3895911/
