May be given to me to speak in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. Please be seated.

Whenever I end up in the pub, which happens every once in a while, there's a good chance that someone will ask me if vicars are really allowed to drink alcohol. Given the amount of gin that my colleagues and I imbibed at theological college, this always strikes me as an odd question. But it betrays an assumption about our faith by those who don't share it.

That being a Christian is about not having fun. If that's the case for Christianity, it goes twice for Lent. During Lent we ask, what are you giving up? Highlighting a feeling that this is a time the church has set aside for us to feel particularly gloomy.

But this morning I'm going to ask whether Lent could in fact be about joy. Now even the grumpiest prohibitionist would agree that Lent is about following Jesus. But Jesus said, I have come that they may have life and have it in abundance.

If we believe him, and we probably should, it's hard to disagree that Lent has to be about abundance. And abundance is nothing if not joyful. Here some terminology might help.

Joy is not the same as happiness. I might feel happy eating a Snickers, but I'll feel joy at being able to play with my daughter without having a coronary. But to experience the latter, I may well have to give up the former.

Happiness is fleeting. Joy is that deeper sense of living a flourishing life, the life that we're meant to be living. And the church teaches that flourishing is about seeing and being seen by the loving relationship of the Trinity.

The whole of Scripture is a description of the arc of how humanity left that relationship of love, and how Jesus came to bring us back to it. And one of the hearts of that arc, of that redemption, is the wilderness, which we celebrate in Lent. The arc starts in Genesis.

In Genesis 1 and 2, we hear the creation poems, which tell of how God made everything and declared it good, then made people and declared it very good, or finished. God finished creation by creating beings who could consciously participate in his love for themselves and on behalf of all creation. In Genesis chapter 2, these humans, Adam and Eve, were placed in the Garden of Eden.

They lived in God's presence, walking with him in the cool of the day, and they were given one command, do not eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But in Genesis chapter 3, they were tempted to eat. Satan, the deceiver, the tempter, told them that the fruit would make them as knowledgeable as God.

Saint Augustine describes how the first sin in Genesis wasn't eating fruit, it was doubting God's goodness. Satan was suggesting that God was withholding the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil from Adam and Eve because he was jealous of his unique power. And it was believing that lie that God had withheld something good from Adam and Eve through no reason other than his own jealousy, which distanced Adam and Eve from him.

The result, as we know, was that they had to leave the garden and enter human existence as we know it. To be clear, Genesis 1 through 3 are not scientific papers. They're an amalgam of mythology, not made-up stories as we tend to mean when we say myths these days, but the true meaning of mythology, an ancient oral tradition which explains truth through narrative.

The creation poems are about exploring how the world came to be, about why human beings suffer, why we die. They reflect that early in our history, human beings decided to be alone and that the decision came with consequences. This decision, made throughout our history and repeated just as much today, is the decision to try and seize control, power, over ourselves, over the world, over other people.

The story of humanity is the account of the discovery that if we choose selfishness, some of us can have more than we ought by mistreating others. Genesis 1 through 3 explore how the loneliness which can characterise human existence is the result of successive generations of human beings living in order to gain power, abandoning the loving justice by which and for which we were made. The Hebrew word for sin, chatta'ah, conveys this idea of straying from the right path.

Once humanity, collectively and as individuals, took our first steps away from reliance on God, towards an attempt to control and have power over our universe, we became unable to find our way back to the innocency of loving relationship with him. One step away from God always leads to another, just like one lie always leads to another, because you have to lie the second time to cover up the first. In the wilderness, Christ undid this pattern.

In the wilderness, Jesus faced temptations which mirrored those faced by Adam and Eve and which speak of the temptations which we struggle with today, but he overcame those temptations. First, the devil tempted Jesus with food, with physical desire. We are each drawn to all sorts of physical desires, to indulgence, anger, envy, lust.

Left unchecked, these desires pull us away from who we're meant to be. Each is an attempt to dominate our universe. Rather than relying on the fullness of the life that God has given us, we imagine a world rich with luxury if we'll just reach out beyond God and take it for ourselves.

Next, the devil tempted Jesus with the easy way out. He took him to the top of the temple and told him to jump, citing the psalmist who said that God would send angels to bear him up if he did so. This would have been the easy way to proclaim his messiahship, being carried from the top of the temple on angels' wings certainly would have shown everyone who Jesus was, and it would have been a lot easier than teaching fishermen, healing lepers, and getting crucified.

Unlike the food temptation, I doubt many of us have felt tempted to jump off something tall in order to see if an angel will catch us, but the heart of the temptation was to take the easy route rather than the godly one. Jesus would have been acclaimed messiah if he jumped, but if he'd done so there'd have been no healings, no teaching, no salvation through the cross. And there are easy routes each of us can take to achieve what seems like a good thing, but which avoid the route which God has for us and the good that he means for us to do along the way.

Finally, Jesus was tempted to worship Satan. Again, I doubt few of us have seriously considered Satanism, but about all of us know the temptation to put things above God. We give our hearts to all sorts of things, career, status, possessions, approval, family, friends.

If we consider what our life is about, it's very easy to find that the answer isn't God. The wilderness was the reversal of Eden. Adam and Eve ate.

They took the easy route. They worshipped power rather than God. Jesus resisted each temptation they failed to overcome.

On an individual level, we all make decisions just like Adam and Eve. And again, Jesus resisted where we have failed. And this is why Lent is about abundance.

Because Lent, the liturgical re-enactment of the 40 days of fasting Jesus did in the wilderness, is about recognising that where we have failed to resist temptation, Jesus has redeemed us by resisting vicariously for us. At Lent, the three great spiritual acts the church calls us to are fasting, prayer, and donating time or money, or almsgiving as the BCP would refer to it. We fast because we want to be like Jesus, who did not live by bread alone, but by every mouth, every word that came from the mouth of God.

We pray because we want to be like Jesus, who trusted God and refused to take the easy route. We donate because generosity frees us from the false gods of money, security, power, teaches us reliance on him. These practises aren't designed to make us miserable.

They are practises by which we ask the Holy Spirit to lead us into the true likeness of Jesus Christ. If sin means straying from the path, then it makes sense that the Greek word for repentance, metanoia, means turning around and going the opposite direction. Through Jesus, the path to abundant, joyful relationship with God is open.

Every time we turn to sin, we fall away, we go the wrong direction. We simply repent. We ask him to turn us back around and follow him where he has gone before us.

The question that Lent confronts us with is whether we'll have the guts to take the path. Will we recognise that though it's tempting to go our own way, to seize power and control where we can, the only true path of flourishing, of true relationship with God the Holy Trinity, the only true joy is following Jesus, becoming more like him, leaning into relationship with him, asking him to make us like him. Amen.