The Rev Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg
St. Peter’s and St. Alban’s, Tollville and Stuttgart
The First Sunday in Lent Year A
February 22, 2027
About 7 years ago, my parents bought a farm in Northeast Mississippi. Now, this might not seem like big news to y’all, here in the Arkansas Delta, but I have to admit that I thought they were crazy. They were in their late 60’s at the time, so they had an eye toward doing this in retirement. My dad is a lobbyist, and my mom is a retired teacher who also worked as a county court administrator. They had always liked to garden, and they had this dream of owning a farm so they could grow their own food in the form of organic vegetables. Together, with my youngest brother and his wife and newborn twin girls, they all embarked on the adventure of our family farm, learning all that they could about farming from YouTube videos.
About a year after they started their adventure, I asked my brother what had been most surprising to him about the whole endeavor. He told me that farming had been for him a lesson in how little of life a person can actually control. It was humbling, really, to recognize how much of farming was out of his control and that he couldn’t work his way or think his way out of hardships like drought or weeds or burst pipes in the barn.
My dad has shared his favorite quote about farming that’s not original to him. (I suspect y’all have heard this before.) “God made farming hard, and then God invented weather.”
I’ve been thinking about all of this in light of our readings for this First Sunday in Lent, especially the Old Testament reading and the gospel. In Genesis, we see Adam and Eve at work farming, tending the garden of Eden. God gives them so much freedom and only one stipulation: whatever you do, don’t eat of the fruit of one particular tree—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Anything else is fair game. So what do they do? They eat of that one tree. And I can’t help but wonder why? Was it because it was the one thing in the garden that was outside their control?
We see the counter to this potential need for control in how Jesus interacts with the devil in his temptations in the wilderness. If you look closely, each one of the three temptations offered by the devil are temptations to control, to try to assert one’s will over trusting God’s care and providence. And Jesus refuses to do that. It is utterly astounding to me how he resists those temptations to try to exert control. And each time he resists, he reiterates the call to trust only in God.
When he says, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” He is saying: “I trust God.”
When he says, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ He is saying, “I trust God.”
When he says, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him,’ he is saying, “I trust God.”
And we see this supreme trust in God in the way he lives his life as well. It is at the heart of his journey to the cross, which we will follow over the course of these forty days. It is a slow, steady relinquishing of control, even to the point of giving himself up for death at the hands of his enemies.
So, what might all this have to teach us today? Maybe y’all have already learned the lessons you need about control and trusting in God, but for me, it is a lesson I need to learn and re-learn just about every Lent.
A few years ago, I read the book A Different Kind of Fast: Feeding our True Hungers in Lent by Christine Valters Paintner. The book is essentially a Lenten retreat where the author invites the reader to take on a different type of fast during Lent and then using the space created by the fast to embrace more life-giving practices. Each week, she offers a different practice, and for the sixth week she encourages the reader to “Fast from certainty and attempting to control the outcome of things so that you might grow in trust in the great mystery of life.” Embrace the beauty of the unknown and be nourished by new possibilities we would have never dreamed.”[i]
I’ve been thinking about that invitation a lot this week as I’ve been contemplating the ways that I most frequently act like Adam and Eve and contemplating the invitation to act more like Jesus in this area of control and putting my trust in God.
And something else that I’m reading currently has helped me in this contemplation. It’s from the book titled the centuries wrap round us: a thousand ponderings on beauty, bridging, and being in an age of fear, fragmentation, and fragility by John Paul Lederach who is well known as a Mennonite and a successful peacebuilder/conflict mediator. Lederach writes, “From Hannah Arendt I understood the greatest of all human paradoxes. We have the capacity to remember but no power to change the past. We have the capacity to imagine, but no power to control the future. To embrace the paradox of powerlessness, to hold its extraordinary tension, humility remains the constant guidepost.”
He continues with his definition of humility writing, “Humility (n): The courage to hold your truth lightly enough that the light of another, even one you fear, can unexpectedly illuminate your path; also known as living with a tender tenacity.”[ii]
Let me read that one more time: “Humility is the courage to hold your truth lightly enough that the light of another, even one you fear, can unexpectedly illuminate your path; also known as living with a tender tenacity.”
Which goes back to farming, doesn’t it? I can’t think of a better image of tender tenacity than little green shoots started from seeds and just beginning to spout up from the dirt. And even the earth itself can teach us about this spiritual practice of humility. The Latin word humus, which means earth, ground, or soil, is the root word for both human and humility.
We are not strangers to dirt and dust in these early days of Lent; just the other day, we heard the haunting call to“remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
In light of all this, here are some questions I invite you to join me in considering this week. Where in your life do you need to try to fast from seeking to control? How might God be inviting you to practice humility—holding your own truth lightly enough that the light of another can also illumine your path? Where in your life are you being invited to trust God, to trust others, to abandon all sense of control and to lean into uncertainty? Where is God offering you the nourishment of new possibilities?
In closing, I’ll share with you a blessing by the Methodist minister, artist, and poet Jan Richardson. It’s titled:
Blessing the Dust
All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners
or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial—
did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?
This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.
This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning.
This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.
So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are
but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made
and the stars that blaze
in our bones
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.[iii]
[i] Paintner, Christine Valters. A Different Kind of Fast: Feeding our True Hungers in Lent. Broadleaf: Minneapolis, 2024, pp 29-31 in kindle edition.
[ii] Lederach, John Paul. the centuries wrap round us: a thousand ponderings on beauty, bridging, and being in an age of fear, fragmentation, and fragility. Outskirts Press: 2026, pp 15-16 in Kindle edition.
[iii] Richardson, Jan. from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons. https://paintedprayerbook.com/2026/02/17/ash-wednesday-to-ask-where-love-will-lead-us
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