How’s your Lent going? How’s my Lent going? We’re nearing the half-way point of the forty days of Lent. I’ve always taken great encouragement from those words in our Lent Eucharistic prayer:

‘ … in these forty days you lead us into the desert of repentance that through a pilgrimage of prayer and discipline we may grow in grace and learn to be your people once again.’

There’s so much packed into this single sentence. I am especially drawn to the phrase ‘ … and learn to be your people once again’. But, in the light of our readings this morning the phrase ‘you lead us into the desert of repentance’ also stands out.

Jesus in the Gospel reading gives a stern warning to the people of his time. Were the people who Pontius Pilate brutally killed particularly sinful? Were the people on whom the tower fell crushing them to death particularly sinful? No, says Jesus, but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did. It’s one of those sayings of Jesus that we’d love to soften or ignore. But he does say it twice and St Luke (one of our parish’s patron saints) did think it worth putting into his Gospel. In fact it’s not in any of the other Gospels. If we don’t repent we die. That’s what Jesus is saying.

So, back to the question, How is my Lent going?

Let’s turn to St Paul. The reading we have today is from the first letter he wrote to the church in Corinth. Corinth is in southern Greece. Paul founded the church in about AD 50. It would probably have looked like a house group.  It was Paul who taught that really early group of Christians to ‘be God people’. The fact that he had to write several letters to them, suggests that he had to to teach them repeatedly to ‘learn God’s people once again’. Read the two letters we have if you want the details.

In our particular passage Paul reminds them of the Jewish story of how God saved them in Egypt, and led them into the wilderness on their journey to the land and the life that God had promised. It was a story of God’s promise, liberation, and guidance.

‘I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, 2. and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, 3. and all ate the same spiritual food, 4. and all drank the same spiritual drink.’

They were led by the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of cloud by night. God had parted the waters of the Red Sea. Moses was their divinely appointed leader. They were fed by the divine gift of the manna. They drank from the rock from which water gushed out. At every point they were saved by God’s provision. After all, they were God’s people.

But as Paul reminds the Corinthian Christians, the people did not trust God’s promise or his guidance. They put their trust in the golden calf and later the god Baal, the Baal of a place called Peor. This was a disaster. They died as a result of this folly. If we distrust the source of life and think we know better, disaster awaits, just like Jesus says.

Paul was, of course, a Jew. But he believed since his conversion that all the promises of God were fulfilled in Jesus. Jesus is the true King of Israel. He looks back on Israel’s story of liberation from the perspective of Jesus. The waters of the Red Sea foreshadow our baptism ito Christ. The rock that Moses struck and the water flowed was Jesus himself. The manna foreshadows the food of eternal life, the body of Christ, on which we shall feed soon, this morning, here. But the sad experience is that we seem to know better than God and put our trust elsewhere, to our hurt.

What’s this story telling us asks Paul. He writes,

‘So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall. No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful …’

This is full of realism, wisdom and assurance. ‘To err is human’, goes the saying. ‘If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves’, says the Bible in St John’s First Letter. We need to wake up to what being human means. ‘No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone’. That’s the realism. Also, ‘If you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall.’ That’s the wisdom. Watch out for complacency. ‘Pride comes before a fall’, so goes the saying. 

And the assurance? The Church of Jesus provides every Sunday the opportunity to say sorry and repent for our failures and sin in the confession near the start of the service. There’s an old mantra about preparing for Holy Communion: Bring one thing to be thankful for; one thing to be sorry about; one person to pray for’. It’s sound teaching. It might be the spiritual ‘take away’ this morning. 

Repentance and confession is not wallowing in sin and failure. It is the exact opposite. It is about liberation and life in its fulness. Of course we need to be as clear-eyed as we can about what we have done and what we can be like. But as Christians, as those baptised in the waters of new life, baptised into the death and resurrection of Jesus, we trust in the forgiveness of God. And more than that we trust in God’s advocacy on our behalf when we fall; we trust in the Holy Spirit poured into our hearts by whom and with whom we walk in the new life that is God’s gift. This is the assurance. As Paul writes, ‘God is faithful’.

God is indeed faithful, utterly trustworthy, the passionate lover and creator of all things, each and every person. God has freed us from our sins, and opened for us the gate of everlasting life. The gate is Jesus and he is here with us this morning as promised. Let’s learn, now, this Lent, to be his people once again.

Service: Canon Bill Croft 23rd March 2025. (St John The Baptist Church Peterborough UK)

Reading: Isaiah 55.1-9; 1 Corinthians 10.1-13; Luke 13.1-9