Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7, Psalm 32, Romans 5:12-19, Matthew 4:1-11
Remembering Goodness
The people cry out, Oh God Hear us!
It’s destabilizing at times, to be awake to the reality that we are witnessing global reordering, systemic transitions, and power struggles that impact the well-being of our world. Shifting climate patterns, economic instability, authoritarian resurgence, and intentional deception campaigns are not just headlines– they impact our bodies’ senses and shape our relationships. Depending on the identities that we carry, these collective pressures and struggles manifest in a multitude of privileges, disadvantages, individual and collective traumas. They show up as individual and interpersonal pain, discord in our relationships and material bodies, and these struggles embed into the systems we create to protect us. . . and if we’re not careful we will succumb to the impossible demands modern Empire1 places on our bodies and abandon ourselves– override our limits, disconnect from our bodies, and sacrifice our neighbor in the name of urgency and self-preservation.
These realities activate an awareness of what is broken in our world and stir a desire to lend our energy towards setting matters right. Many of us find ourselves rooted in some form of public truth-telling, collective organizing, material redistribution (mutual aid), noncompliance with unjust power (protest), and/or engaged in practices aimed at social repair. These are the practices of activism, love, justice, and care manifesting in the world, in material form, for the sake of all our kin. . . All our relations.2
In an age of deception and manufactured scarcity where it’s easy to forget the sound of the genuine3 and hope seems far off in the world, reclaiming the spirit of the ritual of Lent creates space for discernment. Lent makes room to tell forgotten and obscured truths that mend and fortify our commitment of care and love to one another even amidst the decaying structures that anchor alienation, sowing discord. Said another way, Lent invites us to remember and locate the individual and collective truths of God’s active love contained in all bodies. The invitation to rest and “fasting” helps us resist the deceptions of empire and activate the creative power of community stewardship– Activism as God’s Love moving in the world.
Remembering Origin Stories: You are Good
The people cry out, Oh God Hear us!
For me, Lent becomes a season of embodied questioning and remembering– sensing and listening to where hunger shows up in my body, practicing restraint long enough to cultivate curiosity and slowing down long enough to experience a sense of clarity. This remembering is not a performance of perfection but rather, a contemplative, restorative return to the origin story of goodness.
In the spirit of the Judeo-Christian origin story starting at Goodness, it is important to name from the outset that our modern culture has built particular narratives and practices that shape our identity around food and body image, so it’s important to clarify when I talk about fasting and hunger that I invoke these practices as metaphors. In many communities, “fasting” has been weaponized—as a performance of holiness4, a marker of spiritual worth, and often a proxy for body control and status. If Lent is going to invite people to the body and thus to community, the invitation has to be re-formed, remembered differently. Some people will fast from food. Many won’t—and that is not a lesser Lent. Others will notice habits or activities that contribute to the body feeling heavy and weighed down, others may find that they need to take in information to stir the body to action. For some bodies, food fasting is unsafe or harmful, and when we are curious about this ritual we see both communal care and invitation. What if the Lenten invitation is embodied awareness: practices that bring us into aliveness and into care for each other? If you have a history of disordered eating, body shame, medical complexity, chronic illness, or anything that makes food restriction unsafe: do not fast from food. Choose a practice that supports your nervous system and your relationships. After all, a product of the individual fast was the ability to locate those who could not fast and ensure their needs were accounted for and accommodated communally. What shifts when the starting place is “you are good”and not depravity or striving?
Fasting From The Doubt of Goodness
The people cry out, Oh God Hear us!
In this week’s lectionary readings we are given additional glimpses into origin stories that will go on to shape and impact a people’s identity for generations. Genesis situates us in the origin story of a good creation and the human vocation to engage in the stewardship of creation– to be in relationships of care with one another, to “till and keep it”. Yes, our relationships are like gardens. Where are you experiencing the invitation to till and keep God’s creation?
The Genesis creation story reveals how the first human pair were to be active in the world, namely through cultivating identity through relational trust and environmental responsibility. The text goes on to tell a story about how that identity is distorted through doubt, distrust, manipulation and shame. The serpent/deceiver’s question, “is it really so?” plants doubt in the human pair’s mind and clouds their ability to hear and know God’s voice as love. Stripping away gendered hierarchy that has been read into the text and used to subjugate women across time, we are invited to a remembering that the start of creation is goodness, not perfection. What if the serpent’s presence was to remind us that we all struggle with deceptive thinking and limiting beliefs? That we all struggle with desire and realizing our imago dei. Where do you hear this question in your own interior life?
- Is it really so. . . that you are alone?
- Is it really so. . . that there will never be enough?
- Is it really so. . . that safety is realized only through control?
Is it really so or is it God’s nature to withhold goodness and provision from us becomes a central question that shapes human relationship and ritual in the Judeo-Christian story. When doubt wins over, shame and self-preservation emerges as the organizing engine of relationships in the story.
And so in our fragility, in our weakness, we encounter rituals of renewal – rituals of remembering, rituals of care, rituals of contemplation– that invites us into acts of renewal through confession or accountability.
Confessing we have Forgotten our Power
The people cry out, Oh God Hear us!
The Psalmist declares, “I will confess my transgressions”. Said another way, I will remember what I have forgotten. What is the Psalmist remembering? The text responds, “The way in which you should go”. (Psalms 32:8 )The psalm names a physical reality: when the truth is buried, the body carries the cost; when the truth is spoken, liberation is the breath that mercy and justice breathes.
From a sociopolitical perspective, many people and nations are asking, debating, and fighting about “the way in which we should go”. Many opportunities stand before us as it relates to technological advancements but we do well to question the environmental impact on our neighbors. We wrestle in body, mind, and spirit as we witness the oppressed align with empire and become the oppressor. Those who also claim an expression of Christian faith land with differing theological positions as it relates to welcoming the immigrant into our midst or the inherent dignity of the trans body, which result in the playing out of cycles of violence against the most vulnerable among us. Black and Brown bodies are treated like the prophets of old, performatively valued for what they bring to culture but the deeper message of our sirens go unheeded. It seems we have forgotten our power: the power to tell the truth, the power to repair what has been harmed, the power to choose relationship over domination, and the power to organize our lives toward the kin-dom of God.
Confession becomes a doorway back into that power, but it also becomes an entry into the wilderness.
The Wilderness: Discernment as Resistance
The people cry out, Oh God Hear us!
We meet Jesus in the wilderness facing a similar disruption. In his hunger and longing, will he remember this origin story? In his hunger and longing will he remember his power and choose to yield it with wisdom? Three times, Jesus sets right what is presented as misaligned and distorted. “It is written” becomes the refrain of resistance. The wilderness tests whether Jesus will succumb to misinformation and pursue goodness through the lens of Empire.
It seems the tempter’s strategy is consistent: distort what is real and sow seeds of doubt. Trade trust for control. Betray your knowing under the lie of self-preservation. Trade communal life for life of Empire.
So a Lenten question emerges: Who is the deceiver today? Whose words are we going to believe? Will we follow Empire’s admonition to look away from the horror we see or do we heed the admonition of Rev Dr. Melva Sampson who proclaims in recounting the courage of Mamie Till, Emmett Till’s mother – “Open up the Casket!!!”5 – reminding us that the voice of God often sounds like love that can tell the most difficult truths without collapsing and that love can act without becoming that which it opposes.
Committing to the Mending and Resurrection of The World
Another person was shot and killed in Minneapolis as I type this. The disinformation campaign was swift and immediate. In such turmoil we are left to ask, What are we to reflect on as we enter this Lenten season when the thumb of empire continues to press down on our neighbors. . . continues to press down on us? If Lent prepares us for Jesus’ arrival, what does it mean to prepare for the resurrection in a world where death feels routine?
This Lent, what I offer and invite us to consider is that through rituals of memory and collective care we’re being called to practice a faith that returns us to our bodies and to each other. We’re not measuring piety by what we give up but rather how we show up. We’re measuring love by how present we become—how truthful, how tender, how accountable, how connected. Choose a practice of care that supports your nervous system and strengthens your capacity to be in community. For 40 days is there someone or a situation you can bring awareness around and connect with the needs that surface in that awareness: shared meals, rides, childcare swaps, mutual aid requests, check-in buddies. Rejecting business as usual, that is our fast.
We practice being with the hunger of connection and reject the feast of individual indulgence that numbs us to our needs and knowing. In doing so we cultivate life giving kindness towards people and prepare ourselves to trust in our connection with one another. In doing so we begin to dismantle the ruthless systems of oppression that strive to govern over the kin-dom of God.
The people cry out, Oh God Hear us!
If fasting helps us connect with our bodies and embodiment leads to community, then let the practices of this Lenten season be ones that connect us to the care we have in one another:
- Questions to explore this week:
- Where did I feel alive this week?
- Where did I go numb or disappear?
- What support do I need?
- What repair am I being invited toward?
1 Here I use empire to mean the extractive, domination-based systems that orient our individual and collective lives, training us to abandon our limits, consume land, and dominate our neighbors.
2 Interconnection is a central core of First Nations, Inuit and Metis worldviews and ways of knowing. Some First Nations sum this up with the phrase “All my relations”. For more see First Nations Pedagogy Online
3 The Sound of the Genuine (Baccalaureate ceremony) (Spelman College), 1980 May 4 · The Howard Thurman Digital Archive. (n.d.). https://thurman.pitts.emory.edu/items/show/838
4 Cleveland, C. (2023). God is a Black woman. HarperOne.
5 Rev. Dr. Melva Sampson, “See It In The Distance”, Sermon, Saint James Presbyterian Church, Greensboro, NC, January 19th, 2026
Bibliography
Cleveland, C. (2023). God is a Black woman. HarperOne.
Coogan, M. D., Brettler, M. Z., & Newsom, C. (2010). The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press.
Holmes, B. A. (2017). Joy Unspeakable. In 1517 Media eBooks. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1tm7hhz
Interconnectedness Overview from the First Nations Pedagogy Online Project. (n.d.). Retrieved January 27, 2026, from https://firstnationspedagogy.ca/interconnect.html
McBride, H. L., PhD. (2021). The wisdom of your body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living. Brazos Press.
Sampson, M. (2026, January 19). See It In The Distance. Martin Luther King Jr Morning Service, Greensboro, North Carolina. https://www.youtube.com/live/5E7-faXZipg
The Sound of the Genuine (Baccalaureate ceremony) (Spelman College), 1980 May 4 · The Howard Thurman Digital Archive. (n.d.). Retrieved January 27, 2026, from https://thurman.pitts.emory.edu/items/show/838
Thurman, H. (2012). Jesus and the Disinherited. Beacon Press.
Tommy Allgood (Thomas Allen Garvin V) is a facilitator, organizational consultant, and coach with The Allgood Collective. They are a seminarian at McCormick Theological Seminary and their work sits at the intersection of trauma-informed practice, relational intelligence, and participatory leadership.Tommyspecializes in circle-based facilitation and group process design, drawing from Circle practice and the Art of Hosting. They also support teams with restorative and relational accountability—especially in the aftermath of leadership harm, conflict, or rupture. Alongside this, Tommy partners with organizations on culture repair and strategy, helping groups rebuild trust, strengthen emotional literacy, and align their ways of working with their values
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