What’s Wrong with the World?

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on February 22, 2026, by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Readings for address: Genesis 2: 15-17; 3: 1-7; Matthew 4: 1-11

Not long ago I met a person with a story to tell. He was fiercely intelligent and multi-talented. But he had episodes when he was irrational, irascible and unreachable. He put this down to his parents. His parents, he said, were cruel, uncaring and controlling. This didn’t stop him continuing to let them pay for his accommodation and rather stylish taste in clothes. His account rather contrasted with his siblings’ experience. They didn’t recognise such painful characteristics in their parents; instead, they found them gentle and kind and patient and generous. In fact, no one else seemed to experience his parents this way. It struck me this young man was struggling to understand how he was reacting. He felt humiliated by the things he knew he said and did when he had an out-of-control episode. His way of being able to live with the reality of his life was to tell a story that justified the way he was. What his siblings experienced from their parents as gratitude and tenderness he expressed as resentment and bitterness.

The first Sunday in Lent is the day in the church’s year when we wrestle with sin. Sin is the three-letter word that indicates all is not well with our soul and all is not well with the world. I want today to explore what’s wrong with our souls and what’s wrong with the world, to get to the heart of what Christianity is all about.

It’s probably fashionable in every era but certainly today to lament how bad things are in the world. We’ve certainly got some challenges with climate denial, AI transformation, global instability, brutal war and economic stagnation. But let’s get a sense of perspective. It’s not the Black Death. From 1346 to 1353 around 50 million people died in agony, perhaps 50% of Europe’s 14th-century population. It’s not the First World War, where junior officers had a 17% mortality rate. It’s not the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century, when some German states lost half their population due to combat, famine, and disease. I’m not sure which world we’re comparing things with when we say things are terrible. The world as we know it, and even the universe with all its 14.8-billion-year existence, is not permanent. The Christian faith is that there was a time before this current existence; and there will be a time after it. God is bigger than creation.

What that means is that creation is inherently limited. This is true for the physical nature of things: mountains have a particular shape and extent, gravity means things can’t move at will, distance is static and overcoming it takes time. But it’s also true for our experience of things: we can’t be in more than one place at a time, there was existence before we were born, and we do die. Half the key to life is to learn to live within our limitations. We’re a society obsessed with overcoming limitations, by finding new cures, reaching new planets, breaking new records, discovering new technologies. But the real joy lies in enjoying the existence we already have, realising the wonder of what we take for granted, relishing the glory of life and breath and body and beauty.

But the other half of the key to life is to realise that this inherent limitation is not a curse but a gift. An angler died and went to the pearly gates and St Peter said, ‘What can I get you?’ The angler said, ‘Put me on a river and make the fish come plentifully and fat and hearty.’ Instantly he found himself fishing and the catches came thick and fast. After three hours there were 30 fish. Peter came by and the angler said, ‘How bout some lunch?’ Peter said, ‘No lunchbreak – this is eternity.’ The angler said, ‘Will there be supper?’ Peter said, ‘No.’ The angler said, ‘So I’ll just go on catching more and more fish, without a break?’ Peter nodded. The angler said, ‘This doesn’t sound like heaven to me. This sounds like hell.’ Peter said, ‘It’s what you wanted.’

The truth is we long for an end to struggle, we yearn for there to be no work, we dream of ease and comfort; but we shape our lives by overcoming challenges and getting out of tight corners. To have a life without limitation would be like having a body without skin. It would just fall out everywhere like jelly – shapeless, storyless, structureless. We think we want peace, calm, quiet, serenity; but in truth we find our existence in challenge and adversity, and the resilience, character, ingenuity, patience, solidarity and partnership it takes to find a path through it. If you’re on a sailing boat on a lake, it’s fine for a few minutes for the wind to drop and the sun to shine; but the action only really starts when the wind gets up, and you have to grapple with the sail and rudder to work with the wind rather than against it.

Limitation isn’t just about constraint. There are other dimensions. One is the limitation of our bodies. Cancer, heart disease, strokes – the things that end our lives – together with diseases and viruses, are varieties of limitation. So are the threats from predators like snakes or tigers. And seen this way, the very worst things in life – the genuine malice and hostility that people bear towards us, sometimes with murderous intent – are parts of that same limitation: the constraints that are put around every life.

Let me take you back to the young man with whom I began. He experienced limitation. I don’t know if he had a diagnosed condition or if there was another reason for these distressing episodes that left him powerless and humiliated. But there was something else going on in his situation: something that led him to blame his parents and tell himself a story by which they’d hurt and neglected and oppressed him. And at this point we may turn to the story of Eve and the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Remember God had told Adam he could eat from any tree in the whole enormous garden. It was a gift almost without limitation, because it would have taken an unimaginable time even to glean one fruit from each tree. The only constraint was not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This is the epitome of abundance. With just one tiny limitation. But the serpent turns the story round. He persuades Eve that this isn’t a story of abundance – but instead one of scarcity. The serpent makes Eve feel resentful and bereft that she doesn’t get to eat from every single tree. The bountiful provision of God is forgotten, and in its place comes a story of unreasonable denial and the unfair withholding of a rightful possession. Grace is turned to deprivation, gratitude to entitlement, truth to falsehood, joy to resentment, gift to possession, trust to disgruntlement, companionship to alienation, life to death. The two humans created to be God’s companions now hide from God in the cool of the evening, and their nakedness is turned from intimacy to shame.

This is a parable about how sin works. Sin is a false story that turns abundance into scarcity, trust into fear and companionship into alienation. When you’re tempted to steal, to cheat, to lie, you tell yourself a false story: everyone does it, it’s not so bad, people have done worse to me, no one will find out, no one’s seriously hurt by it, other people do much worse things, it’s more than offset by all the good I’ve done, no one’s perfect, it’s only a small thing, the person I’m hurting had it coming, where’s your sense of humour, it’s not technically anything wrong, give me a break, don’t be so judgemental, if I do it quickly I can pretend it didn’t happen. But the result is you’ve substituted poison for truth and set in motion a sequence by which one lie leads to another. Lying, cheating and stealing turn you into a cat in a ball of wool who’s worn out by trying to put right the next problem without exposing the falsehood that temporarily got you out of the last one.

See how with the young man, he had a huge challenge in his life because of whatever was causing his difficult episodes. But he actually had loving, caring people around him to support him with that. The real challenges in his life were the ones he made for himself by the false story he created in his refusal to own his limitations. That false story became a ball of wool he couldn’t get free of. I’m not saying our lives aren’t full of serious, sometimes grievous, agonising and deadly challenges, made more painful by their unequal distribution across the population. Life is often painful and frequently unfair. But I am saying what really defines us is the way we respond to those challenges – in truth or falsehood.

The traditional way to tell the story of sin is to say everything was fine, and then there was a fall, and now everything’s a mess, but don’t worry, Jesus came, and it’s all fine again – even better in fact. But that’s not a very satisfactory story. There’s two problems with it. One is, Jesus coming can’t have been down to a mistake. The other is, everything’s far from fine. So the usual telling of the story makes Jesus an afterthought and a failure. I suggest a different version of the story.

In this version, the point of existence is for Jesus to be with creation, in general, and humankind, in particular. What we see in the Jesus story is that the limitations of the world and the sins of our false stories all cluster around Jesus in his ministry and especially in his death. In the wilderness, the devil presents him with three false stories. Everything will be sorted if everyone has enough food. Everyone will follow you if you do eye-catching things. Everything will be set right if you take over the world. We miss the significance of these temptations if we forget that these are basically good things – and they’re exactly what the people expected a messiah to do. But it turned out Jesus hadn’t come to overcome our limitations and fix everything. He’d come to be with us come what may in the multiple dimensions of our existence that can’t be fixed. Of course he was tempted to snap his fingers and sort everything out. We still want him to, much of the time. But that would go against the nature of creation, which is inherently limited and where facing adversity is simply part of what it means to be alive. Jesus’ calling was not to sort everything out but to embody God’s original purpose to be with us come what may. Like the young man with his parents, we get furious at God and think we’ve been abandoned and betrayed and cruelly used and forgotten. But we’re asking for a Jesus that Jesus turned his back on in the wilderness.

The challenge of life is to distinguish between the limitations we can overcome and the limitations we must learn to live with. In the face of the intractable ones, we remind ourselves of the plenitude of life and love and laughter and lavish abundance that still surrounds us. But then we realise the Holy Spirit isn’t about fixing the difficulties, but makes Christ present to us as our companion; and in that solidarity we find truth and meaning by facing adversity together. And if we experience this with Christ, how much more do we embody it with one another, by partnership and fellowship and support; and in the end communion. Sin is a false story that assumes such solidarity and communion are impossible or too demanding, and seeks a shortcut to fixing or distracting from our challenges into the fantasy of a quick win.

Lent is a season when we face up to our limitations and our false stories, and welcome the Holy Spirit into our lives to make Christ present as the one who walks with us in our adversities and sorrows and inspires us with a truth that transcends our failures. And it’s a time when we remember that this present existence had a beginning and will have an end. And before that beginning God purposed to be with us. And after that end, God will be with us forever, in a story that ultimately has no limitation; and where all our falsehoods are swept up into God’s truth.