15th March 2026

Week 5 (The fourth Sunday after Ash Wednesday)

The Foolish Way of Wisdom - The Desert as a Place of Revelation

Readings: Matthew 7:24-29 & James 3:13-18.     

Firstly, thank you so much Jess and Tess for standing in and holding the fort on the last two Sundays while Charlotte and I were away.

So, how are you getting on with our Lent sermons and midweek studies?  It’s a bit different, isn’t it?  It’s asking us questions that really make is think about what our faith means to us personally.

If you haven’t been to our Wednesday afternoon discussions, for whatever reason, you are still more than welcome.  Each one is self-contained and includes the video available every week on Lectio. 

So far, what have we considered?

1.   The Desert as a Place of Prayerful Pursuit – Reigniting our passion for Jesus

2.   The Desert as a Place of Spiritual Testing – Intensifying our hunger for holiness

3.   The Desert as a Place of Loneliness and Kindness – Loving silence and solitude

4.   The Desert as a Place of Self-Denial and Austerity – The freedom of renunciation

What about loving silence and solitude, for instance? 

This week our theme is The Desert as a Place of Revelation - The Foolish Way of Wisdom, so the key word this morning is wisdom.

Still to come, as we build our sense of expectation for Easter
Next week - The Desert as a Place Without Pretence - Choosing the Way of Humility.

And finally, on Palm Sunday, in two weeks’ time - The Lessons of the Desert - Entering Holy Week

Why should we have a sense of expectation for Easter? After all, it happens every year.  First Palm Sunday, then Good Friday, followed by Easter Day and an overpriced chocolate egg, and it’s all over for another year.

But actually it’s not a benign question.  Think about it for a moment.  ….  Ask yourself “Am I genuinely excited about Easter?  If so, why?  If not, why not?”

I don’t want to steal my own thunder for Easter Day, but if there had been no resurrection, there would be no Easter today.  Worse than that, there would be no Christianity today either.  There would be no hope for any of us, which in today’s political and ecological environment would be nothing short of catastrophic, as someone says that his country might attack Iran’s oil export hub “just for fun”. 

But before I get completely sidetracked, let’s get back to our Lenten journey through the wilderness, joining the Desert Fathers and Mothers in their quest to go against the prevailing tide of culture: pursuing silence, solitude, and greater levels of spiritual maturity. 

Pete Grieg says, in his notes for this week, that we live in an age when social media influencers promise us "the good life": proffering shiny, highly edited visions of their homes, their families and their lifestyles, encouraging us to acquire everything they say we ought to want. 

But as Christians, we know that "the good life" isn’t found that way, but rather along what Jesus called “the narrow path”, a counter-intuitive, counter-cultural route, available only to those who follow Him. 

In 1 Corinthians 1:24, Paul calls Jesus "the wisdom of God". If we build our lives on his words, on heavenly wisdom, we will have a sturdy and secure foundation for our lives. If, however, we follow the wisdom of the world, we will find that our lives are simply precarious sandcastles: beautiful and impressive, but perilous when the storms of life inevitably reach our door.

While, for the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the wilderness was their permanent place of residence, for us that’s not the case.  We might escape from the world temporarily to seek God, but we must eventually return to it, even if not to all its ways.  So, the wilderness teaches us how to live well in the world. In the desert places of encounter with God, pressing in to his word and his presence, we discover the wisdom and revelation of God.  As we’re going to sing in a few minutes Proverbs 8:11 describes that as "more precious than rubies”. “Nothing you desire can compare with her" it says, but ultimately this then leads us out of the desert, to return to the world, armed with revelation to bring transformation around us.

For the true Christian these two go hand in hand. We can’t be of any value to our entourage until we have experienced God, through a relationship with his son Jesus, and the empowering of His Holy Spirit.
But nor can we experience God in that way and not, then, be of value to our community. 

Pete Greig also says that there is, in the world today, what he calls “a crisis of wisdom”. Shifting narratives around the nature of truth make it almost impossible for a consistent and coherent ethical framework to operate in society. This makes practical wisdom for everyday life very hard to attain. How right he is!

The world today is a confusing and complicated moral landscape to try and navigate. On one of our walks last week Charlotte and I were commenting on the lack of any moral leadership today.  We either follow people who are bad examples, or we resort to social media that says how life should look but gives no ethical guidance on how we should act. 

Practical, godly wisdom is sadly lacking and desperately needed.

As Michael Card points out in his beautiful song, and I’ll give you a copy to take home with you, “The Way of Wisdom starts out with a step of holy fear”, doubtless inspired by three verses in Psalms and Proverbs that say, 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.'  In other words, we must begin by looking to God, worshipping Him, and honouring Him above everything around us.

“The fear of the Lord”, though, is very different to the kind of fear which produces anxiety or is concerned with punishment. It is very different to the fear of being lonely, the fear of not having enough, or the fear of not being liked. But rather “the fear of the Lord” is a kind of awe-struck reverence or worship. To "fear the Lord" is to organise our lives with God at the centre, instead of anything else, as we were saying on Wednesday. To "fear the Lord" is to recognise God's divinity and our own humanity. A life marked by the “fear of the Lord” is a life of God-centredness.

Tess just read to us Jesus' parable of the wise and foolish builders which is all about foundations. Do you know that the people who build sky-scrapers pay as much attention to what they do below ground as thye do to what they do above ground? 

Let’s think about our foundations.  When making daily decisions do we ground them on the firm foundation of Scripture in general, and of Jesus’ teachings in particular, or on the worldly values promoted by our mobile devices and our television screens?

If we’re honest, the latter of those two is all too often the case.  So how can we, this Lent "give ourselves to Jesus" in greater measure? 

By first of all spending time in the wilderness, that place of “silence and solitude” to listen and reflect on the word. And then, to go back into the world and live how Jesus taught us.

That’s the wisdom we’re talking about this week. The more we grow in relationship with Jesus, the more we too will walk in the way of wisdom.

In our second reading, by Brigit, James identified two types of wisdom: one that comes from heaven, and the other comes from the world. Heavenly wisdom, which he describes as pure, peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere" and which produces "peacemakers who sow in peace [and] reap a harvest of righteousness"(v 17-18) is counter-intuitive, sacrificial, and rooted in humility. 

Let’s use this Lenten journey to lean deeper into biblical wisdom and make it our foundation, allowing only God. He is our source, our strength, and our guide.