Faith in a Geopolitical Wilderness: Sermon Preached on 9th March 2025 (First Sunday in Lent)

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington

Romans 10. 8b-13; Luke 4. 1-13     

“Jesus… was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.”

In the wilderness, the rules and habits that helped us to flourish in civilised life no longer work; in fact, they can be a hindrance to survival. In the wilderness, we are thrown back entirely on our own resources. There is nobody to help us—except, of course, for God. The wilderness can kill us—or we can use it to allow our illusions about ourselves and the world to die. We can use it to teach us to trust in God, and God alone.

“We now live in a geopolitical wilderness where the post-Cold War order has collapsed.” I last used that phrase in a sermon three years and three days ago, on the First Sunday in Lent 2022, when we last had this pair of readings set for us. That was less than a fortnight after Russia launched its massive invasion of Ukraine. It is even more obvious today that the assumptions most of us held about the nature of the 21^st Century world have turned out to be illusions.

We hear that frightening geopolitical wilderness reported every day in the news bulletins, so let us keep it in mind as we turn to today’s Gospel reading, for its detail is easy to overlook. 

Christ is challenged with three very specific temptations: the temptation to put worldly comfort before the Mission given to Him by His Father, symbolised by turning stones into bread; the temptation to take no responsibility for His own wellbeing, abusing God’s care for Him, symbolised by throwing Himself from a building and trusting in angels to catch Him; and the temptation to take power Himself as the solution for all the world’s problems, at the price of worshipping Satan.

These events take place immediately after Jesus was baptised by John, and immediately before He began His ministry of healing and teaching in Galilee. It is seems Christ, truly human as well as truly God, had to confront these temptations before He could brave the crowds who would for a time cheer Him as a wonder-worker, crowds who would try to seize him by force and make Him king.

Christian leaders in every age must confront these three temptations: the temptation to use the Faith as a means of obtaining worldly comfort; the temptation to hide behind the Faith as a means of avoiding personal responsibility; and the temptation to see the Faith as a means of solving the world’s problems.

The last of these is perfectly understandable – we all want to live in a better world. We tell ourselves that if only people could truly live according to Christ’s teachings then all would be well. But at the heart of the Christian faith lies a strange idea—that we can’t actually manage keep to its teachings very well or for very long; if we could, Christ would not have needed to die on the Cross for us. This runs counter to the assumptions that most of us hold as faithful Christians—we want to think the Church is a vehicle for good people to come together with other good people to do good things. In reality, such wisdom as we Christians have lies in this—that in a culture where people think they’re too clever and sophisticated for God, we’re the people who know how badly we need His help.

To explore how that relates to current events, we need to go back to when the dust settled on the Second World War, and people processed how deeply into a barbarism a supposedly Christian country like Germany could sink, and also reflected on how near to total destruction the human race sat after the development of nuclear weapons. As a result, the Church began to see its truly vital role as being its support for international peace-making, in activism in the pursuit of justice, and in reconciliation across barriers of politics, race, and religion. This was perfectly sensible and, for a long time, it was very good. It is easy to forget that the three decades after 1990 probably saw fewer wars being fought than at any time in recorded history.

The downside for the Church was that it started to be so consumed with trying to build God’s Kingdom on Earth that it stopped talking about God’s Kingdom in heaven. It started believing that science and technology had made what it had always taught about humanity’s eternal destiny irrelevant. It started to hope that laws and treaties and international co-operation could bring the dark side of the human soul under control, and psychiatry might even cure it. It fell into the last of the three temptations that Christ faced. Never forget, The Devil knows how sincerely most of us want to do good, at least most of the time, and he always tries to use our best intentions against us.

The Church, like most of us, also forgot that all systems of power inevitably collapse. We forgot that even after seeing live on TV the collapse of the Soviet Empire, one of the largest ever to exist. This country has since 1945, although we can split hairs about the degree to which it retained meaningful sovereignty, been a loyal satellite of the American Empire, which really is the mightiest the world has ever seen. America may well now be withdrawing back to the motherland, leaving us and all of Europe in the wilderness.

In the wilderness, there is nobody to help us—except, of course, for God. The wilderness can kill us; or we can use it to teach us to trust in God, and God alone.

That’s where we turn to our Epistle reading, from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Paul wrote as a citizen of the mightiest Empire the world had seen up to that point, and He wrote to a small group of Christians in its capital when it was at its height.

We know Paul was very proud of his Roman citizenship and encouraged Christians to be enthusiastically law-abiding subjects of the Emperor, even when they faced persecution. It must have seemed to most people then that this Empire would last forever. But Paul doesn’t tell the Romans to put Christian values at the heart of the Roman Empire or to work for their civil rights.

Instead he writes, “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved”, and after warning them against discriminating between Christians of different ethnic backgrounds, reiterates: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” He doesn’t tell them to change their mighty Empire for the better, but to trust that God has already made them citizens of a Kingdom greater than any on Earth could possibly be.

It is God who saves us through Christ’s sacrifice for us on the Cross. It is in the full knowledge of that that we must work with God to try to build His kingdom on Earth. We know we will fail often, and we trust that after we do, God will forgive us whenever we turn back to him. So even when we see the kingdoms of this world going so badly wrong, we mustn’t despair. For we will only see God’s Kingdom in all its fullness in the next world and it is there we will receive our true reward.

In the wilderness, there is nobody to help us—except, of course, for God. The wilderness can kill us; or we can use it to teach us to trust in God, and God alone.

Now praise, glory, and honour be to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is with us in times of plenty and times of austerity, when we are doing and when we are fasting, in all the earth and for evermore. Amen.