February 22, 2026 (First Sunday of Lent) - Fr. Steve Moore

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The grace and peace of God our Father, the love of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

The song goes, “It’s a tale as old as time.” But that’s not the tale I’m going to tell today.

There was a movie that came out a number of years ago called The Crime of Padre Amaro. It was about a charismatic young priest in Mexico who went to this rural town fresh out of seminary, filled with life. And as so often happens, he fell in love with a beautiful woman in his congregation. And one thing led to another, as it so often does. But he didn’t want to give up his priesthood. He didn’t want to dig ditches. He decided to try and get out of it, as so often happens. And unfortunately, because of the botched nature of the abortion, the woman dies, and he has to live with this crime.

Now that’s a horrible story. And unfortunately, the film does not bring a lot of redemption, although it does tell a tale as old as time. But it happens all over the place.

I think back to the war on terror, when psychologists in my own profession helped develop torture methods using psychological science, saying they were just doing what the psychology—what the science—taught them to do. We certainly can look up on any malpractice website and see, in our own community, those who practice medicine making numerous ethical violations. We can read the news and see, just this past week, yet another teacher called out and suspended for unethical conduct. And on and on and on. A tale as old as time.

But one has to wonder—and I’m picking on the helping professions because that’s where I stand—we have to wonder how this happens. Because, like Padre Amaro, we don’t start out thinking we’re going to do these things. So often people mean well. They have noble intentions. They want to do the good. And yet somehow lose their way.

A tale as old as time.

And I think we get a key in our Gospel reading today. Jesus goes out into the desert to face temptations. And the issue isn’t the things that Satan tempts him with. Do you realize that the temptation to turn stones into bread—Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel, will feed four thousand and five thousand. In Matthew 14 and 15, he does multiply bread to feed the multitudes.

So with this temptation, we have to ask ourselves, well, what is the issue with this one? Why here? Why now? Is God being tempted in Jesus in this way?

But think about how Satan puts it: “If you are the Son of God, do this.” If you are the Son of God, do it for your own purposes.

We live in a world where we recognize that there is an illusion—really, no neutrality—where we can pretend that we’re doing the right things for the right reasons, and it can take us down the wrong path time and time again.

Part of the gift we are given at our baptism is the sense of following the good, the right, the Gospel.

The Jesuit psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró argued that in psychology there is no neutral. There is always a value, and we must make a choice about what our values are and how we follow them. And I would argue that that is true in all of life, no matter what your profession, no matter what your role. We must always return to our essential values and why we do the things that we do.

Jesus is baptized and then sent out into the desert.

And The Queer Bible Commentary, which is a biblical commentary made up of LGBTQ authors looking at the scriptures through that lens, makes the point that baptism is very much like the experience of the coming-out process. You come out and you recognize and claim your identity and step into the world, but then you’re sent into the desert. And for LGBTQ+ people, there is that pushing back into the closet that can often happen.

Not marriage, just a civil union—that should be enough for you all. Be out, but don’t be too flamboyant. Don’t push your agenda too hard. Use the bathroom we want you to. And so on and so forth.

I found that example striking because that is often what happens when we start to claim our freedom, when we start to recognize the gifts that we have been given through the Spirit.

And Jesus, when he goes into the desert, is consciously aware of who he is already and is acting out of that Spirit, and because of that does not claim the power or the authority that is his. He is free to pick up and to lay down. He can turn stones into bread, but he doesn’t have to. He has the power to do these things, but he also has the power to lay them down.

And so it is with you and I, living into our baptism, living into this Christian life. We have the freedom to walk through this world and recognize that we can do things differently.

In fact, that’s how Christians have marked themselves for centuries: in the face of violence, offering peace; in a world built on selfishness, choosing poverty, choosing to give in a world that takes; choosing to reach out an open hand to the other.

That is what must mark us.

There are many ways—and we will dive into them as we go through this Lenten season and through our Christian life—to encounter these scriptures. But one thing that I have found quite helpful is a psychological reading of the scriptures, because it invites us to look at them in reflection of our own humanity.

We are given the first reading from Genesis this week—the garden and that archetypal experience of the serpent and the fall, as it is often called in Christian theology. But another way to look at it is as becoming conscious.

You see, before this time, Adam and Eve, our first parents, couldn’t tell the difference between good and evil. They didn’t need to. They relied only on God to show them the good and the bad. And they went through life rather unconscious. But somewhere along the line, they woke up. And so they could no longer live in the garden as they had before. They were thrown out to live in the world.

You and I have the knowledge of good and evil—something we have to hone, something we have to recognize, something we have to work with in relation to our values. But this reality, this knowledge of good and evil, is what allows us to walk in the world and choose the good and be free to do something different.

Now, in just a few moments, you and I will invite Jeanie forward for her election as a candidate for baptism at Easter. We as a community will call her forth and promise to support her in these final steps of her journey in becoming a Christian—one among us.

We do so not because we are in any way better. We do so because it brings out the best in us as well. In supporting her, we recognize the best of who we are.

And in walking through this Lenten journey together, and acknowledging both the bright and the dark parts of our lives and in our world, we come to a deeper understanding of how God is continually at work.

The devil quotes scripture back to Jesus time and time again in Matthew’s Gospel—there are all sorts of ways in which our lives can become twisted and we can misunderstand where God is calling us.

But it’s in and through our community, and through our baptismal vows, and through living this life together, that we ultimately grow and become the people God is calling us to be.

We rejoice with Jeanie because she is becoming one of us. We rejoice together because, in our great becoming together as a community, we become who God calls us to be.

We learn to feed one another. We learn that our power is at the service of one another. And in recognizing that, we can walk out of the wilderness together to transform our world.