Rev. Doug Floyd

Lent 1 2026
Rev. Doug Floyd
Genesis 1-3, Romans 5:12-21, Matthew 4:1-11

Today we begin a journey together and hopefully individually at the same time. We are following Christ to the cross. Along the way, we face our sin-scarred lives and our sin-scarred world. There is no hope outside of the grace of God. And His grace is so good, we often struggle to believe it. It seems to good to be true. This is a promise of glory, of communion, of restoration.

We begin with creation. God speaks. God creates. God beholds. God judges, “It is very good.” God rests and celebrates the absolute goodness of His wondrous creation.

Our story today opens with the Lord forming man from the dust of the earth. Just as He shaped the formless and void and filled creation with His glorious light, He shapes the dust, the mud into man, into human, and He breathes His breath, His Spirit into human, into man with His glorious life and light. 

Adam is set in the garden to repeat His Heavenly Father’s pattern by caring for plants and animals. In the mystery of God’s divine plan, Adam becomes Adam and Eve. They are a wonder bound together bone to bone, flesh to flesh. This world is good, is beautiful, is filled with unfolding treasure, and unspeakable glory. 

God is good. Very good.

It is important to pause here. Sometimes we are in a rush to get to the disaster of chapter 3. If we do that, we fail to behold this glorious creation and the wonder, the magnificence of man and woman, Adam and Eve, humanity. 

We all bear the deep seed of this glory. We are all formed in the image of God. When we meet a stranger, we meet someone created in the image of God. We behold a vision of glory. When I behold you, I am beholding glorious images of God. Sometimes the hidden light of glory shines through. I see His love in tears, in embraces, in serving one another, in giving to those in need.

As my Orthodox friends might say, we are created as God’s image, and we are becoming His likeness. We are aware of how far we fall short of His glory. We were created to be dependent upon His grace.

During this Lent, it would do you well to remind yourself that you are created in the image of God. You are glorious and created to reveal His glory.

Now let’s cautiously step forward into Genesis 3. The serpent tempts Adam and Eve. He tempts them in two ways. In one sense, he comes to test them. James reminds us that we will all faces times of testing:

“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.” (James 1:2–3, ESV)

Testing is a kind of judgment. I love to make tomato sauce. Before using it, I test it. Does it need more seasoning? It it good. Will it enhance the spaghetti, the lasagna, or even the chicken parmigiana? I may choose to add more ingredients. In other words, I may have to shape it. Or it may be ready. 

We are all tested. In these tests, we see ourselves for who we are. Often we learn how we need to be transformed. We ask God for mercy.

Sadly, the serpent also tempts the humans to turn away from God. This is a temptation to sin. Romans 1.

“For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.” (Romans 1:21–23, ESV)

This is serious. The communion of God and humans is broken. This means that the communion of heaven and earth is broken. A breach strikes through the very heart of creation.

Everything suffers a kind of death. 

As I reflected on this, I thought of a poem by Robert Cording. He visited “The Legend of the True Cross” in Arezzo, Sicily. This little chapel is filled with paintings of creation, fall, and redemption. Every painting is leading to the cross and resurrection of Christ.

One painting depicts the death of Adam. There are several scenes all combined in that painting. In one scene, his family gathers around him as he sits on the ground. Cording writes, 

We kept coming back to an old Adam
Staggering under the weight of his being.

In another scene, Adam lays on the ground. Cording continues,

Even after he has been laid down,
His children cannot understand their father’s implacable gaze.

Unimaginable. Unimaginable, that first death

Behind Adam laying on the ground, we see his daughter with arms upraised, a look of terror in her eyes, and and her mouth opened in a shriek of horror. Cording writes, 

Until that one child finds her mouth opened
Against the silence of a face turned away.

From her mouth,
Those wild involuntary words must enter
The stricken landscape

No one has ever finished restoring,
Their deep syntax of grief

Something we must have understood even before
We could speak it.

Let’s pause with that image. A girl beholding death for the first time. All creation beholds the death of their Father, Adam. She screams in horror, and Cording suggests that scream reverberates in the heart of all things. The horror of death. He ends the poem with this idea that before we could ever speak, we knew, we felt the pain, the ache at the heart of the world.

Every day reminds us of the horror of death. Though some may seek to cover the pain by calling it a celebration. Death reminds us that something is very wrong in this world. We feel the pain and the separation from the loved one.

As my dad and later my mom faded from us, we felt the grief deep in our souls. I preached both funerals, but it has often been difficult to speak about them. The ache reverberates in my soul. If you have stood with a dying loved one, you know this ache first hand. 

Thankfully, we do rejoice that God has not abandoned them in death. But the ache of death and loss still resides in us. 

Our whole world is reeling under the curse of sin and death. 

This last week, the band U2 released an album this week called, “Days of Ash.” It is a cry for the suffering and dying of our world. They focus on people who have been killed in America, Iran, Ukraine, Palestine, and even the Jews in the Holocaust. Some people thought it was a political album because they only heard the first song about America. But it is actually a lamentation, a cry at the suffering in our world.

It includes a beautiful poem by the late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. 

As I listened over and over, I felt this cry, this ache that echoes across time all the way from the garden. 

Humans, man and woman, Adam and Eve, bear the scars of sin and death. We know the ache of sin in our own hearts; we see the death played out in unkind words, angry thoughts, violence, and absence of love.

This is how we begin the Lenten journey. We journey as a communion of God’s people. We carry both the vision of glory in our creation and the realization of our own brokenness and the brokenness of our world. We journey to the very place of our own sin, failure, and pain. At the same time, we lift up the grieving, sinful, dying world around us. 

We are headed toward the cross of Christ. Only He can lead us home. Believe it or not, we are headed to the beginning of our lives, of our world. The creation filled with light and glory and beauty and celebration. 

Jesus Christ the new Adam is leading us step by step, day by day into the new creation. Jesus faced the temptation of the devil. He walked where Adam and Eve walked. He walks where we have walked. He was tested and tried and He came forth as gold. 

“For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many.” (Romans 5:15, ESV)

We are longing for a home we’ve never seen, but deep in our heart we know the way to new creation has been opened through Christ. 

Even now we see glimpses of light, of glory, of joy, of hope in the faces of people around us. Even now we hear the echoes of a song of celebration calling us to the wedding feast.