Septuagesima (February 1, 2026)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

Today is Septuagesima Sunday. Septuagesima comes from the Latin word that means 70 because we are 70 days from Easter. Lent begins 40 days before Easter so we call this period “Pre-Lent.” These weeks give us a gradual transition into fasting. Liturgically, we switch to purple, the color of penance, we stop saying alleluia and singing the Gloria. Historically, people would use pre-Lent as an opportunity to empty their pantries of meat, dairy, and eggs, culminating in Mardi Gras/Shrove Tuesday. In other words, while we haven’t started the formal fast of Lent yet, we’re getting in gear for it. I like to think of Pre-Lent and Lent as spiritual training seasons. Look at how seriously athletes take their training regiments. The legendary basketball player Kobe Bryant used to train 6 hours a day, 6 days a week, for 6 months during the off-season. He would often start at 3:30 or 4 in the morning and spend two hours on basketball skills, two hours of weightlifting, and two hours of cardio. That’s a lot of work to play a game. How much more seriously should we be taking spiritual training since it involves our eternal souls? Here in the first Sunday of pre-Lent, we look to the tension at the heart of the Christian life: it’s the tension between the accessibility of the Gospel, its openness, its freeness on the one hand and the demands of the Gospel on the other. In acknowledging this tension, we have to avoid two extremes. The first extreme might be what has been called “cheap grace” which often breeds license to sin. The opposite extreme that needs to be avoided is legalism that reduces the Gospel to a list of dos and donts. What we see today is that we should avoid these extremes while we live in that tension between God’s free gift of grace and the demands that grace places on us.

In both our collect and Gospel reading this morning, we’re reminded of how accessible the Gospel is. We deserve punishment for our sin because the consequence of rejecting God is death, separation from him. The Gospel is that God loves us so much that he sent his only Son to take on our nature and refurbish it and die on the Cross to repair what had been broken by sin. Because of the redemption he effects, God invites all of us into his work of redemption, he hires us to be his workers. The parable of the wage workers that we heard read this morning shows us that the Gospel is open to all: whether you came at the first or the ninth hour, the Gospel is for you. The Gospel is the expression of God’s love and is, therefore, without boundary because nothing can hem in or curtail God’s love.

The Gospel is God’s move towards us and, in that movement, God enables us to respond to him, he empowers us to participate with him in the unfolding of the Gospel in space and time. That participation isn’t a nice, little extra thing: it is the thing. When we receive God’s gift of grace, we don’t get to tell him that we don’t want to be his co-workers. Participation with God is what we might call the demand of the Gospel, remembering the words of St. James, that faith without works is dead. Christ gives us two exhortations: “Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy-laden” and “Pick up your cross and follow me.” St. Paul speaks of the Christian life as a race that requires training and ascetical discipline to run successfully. Training isn’t always easy, glamorous, or fun, but it is essential. Our training includes regular reception of the Sacrament, reading and studying Holy Scripture, prayer, fasting, abstention, works of mercy and other spiritual disciplines. The demand of the Gospel is not extraneous, it’s not an imposition; it’s that we become who God made us to be.

St. Paul talks about running the race autobiographically because he’s worried about saving others but himself being cast away. He’s afraid of the opposite of the workers: putting in the work for the kingdom and then leaving before payday. Apostasy, the sin of renouncing our faith, is a very real possibility and it’s an all too common reality for pastors and laity alike. Faith is a journey towards a specific destination: our beatitude. It requires constant submission to the demands of the Gospel, an obedience that brings comfort. But the danger of apostasy is real and we can slide into it over time without realizing it. It requires vigilance to avoid it.

So welcome to Pre-Lent and Lent, our training ground. We are preparing for fasting and abstinence. During Lent, we fast on all the days except for Sundays and the big feast days listed in the Book of Common Prayer. On fasting days, we eat one normal sized meal and two smaller meals, the aggregate size of them should be equal to about the one normal sized meal. Further, on Ash Wednesday and the Fridays during Lent, we’ll observe days of abstinence, those are days where we don’t eat meat in addition to the normal fast. Fasting is a way of mastering ourselves. It’s a way of responding to what God does for us by sacrificing for him. Fasting constitutes our response to the Gospel.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.