February 22, 2026 - First Sunday in Lent: Gathered by Grace

February 22, 2026 First Sunday in Lent
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Psalm 32Romans 5:12-19
“Gathered by Grace”
Melissa K. Smith

A Native American Proverb says, “Tell me the facts and I’ll learn. Tell me the truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.” Stories are powerful. They are a valuable vessel for teaching truths. Stories can be fictional or non-fiction, they can be fantastical or real-world, they can be full of facts that are set in another context so they can be heard new or in a new way.

When I was a child, my parents were getting ready to take my siblings and me to an art museum. They wanted us to enjoy the impressionist paintings, but were trying to figure out how to get five-year-olds interested enough to make it worth it. Sitting us down and telling us about Monet, Renoir, and Degas was not going to work. Telling us about impressionism and teaching us that it is an art movement originating in France that focused on capturing the fleeting, sensory “impression” of a moment, was not going to capture our attention or be an effective teaching tool.

Rather, my parents found a book that told us a story. It was called “Katie Meets the Impressionists”. In this story, Katie magically “jumps into” famous impressionist paintings by Monet, Renoir, and Degas to find flowers to create a bouquet for her grandmother. It was whimsical, it was fun, and it worked. When we got to the art museum, our eyes lit up and we ran from painting to painting – we ended up being the ones teaching my parents about paintings and sharing stories of what they represented because we learned about them through the art of storytelling.

Scripture gives us a master class on the art of storytelling. God is the ultimate storyteller and has given us sixty-six books – a library – of stories that tell us who he is, who we are, and the lives he calls us into.

The first story we see in scripture sets the tone for the whole Bible. Genesis chapters 1-3 tell of God creating the world and speaking it into existence. We see God taking the dust of the ground, adama, and breathing life into it, creating adam, Adam, the first man. In this story we see God giving Adam responsibility to tend to his creation. Adam is a co-ruler of creation. But Adam and Eve did not obey God’s command to not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and sin entered the world through what we call “the Fall”.

Author and theologian G.K. Beale views Adam as a priest-king who was commissioned to expand the Garden sanctuary, but through the Fall, this mission Adam was tasked with now needed – it now required – a Redeemer.

From Genesis on, the Hebrew Bible tells us stories of humanity falling short and God, through his love, continuing to save them. From Adam to Moses to the judges to the kings to the prophets…our way was not working. What is clear in each of these stories is that humanity is incapable of redeeming themselves.

In the first story of scripture, Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden because of their sin. Through this story we see that sin disperses, it isolates, and it breaks relationships apart.

In Psalm 32, the passage Landen read for us this morning, we see David’s testimony of the ways sin isolated him and broke him. David says, “When I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.” His sin was isolating, it was exhausting, and it was all consuming.

It was through confession and experiencing God’s forgiveness and grace that David was able to rejoice in the Lord and his heart was once again ready to join community. Sin isolates. Grace gathers.

Paul speaks to the reality of sin and the significance of grace in our passage this morning as he writes to the people of Rome. He says, “Therefore, just as sin came through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because we have sinned – for sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who did not sin in the likeness of Adam, who is the pattern of the one to come.”

Paul is evoking this first story and alluding to other stories throughout the Hebrew Bible to show us that the reality of Adam’s sin is ever present and the need for redemption is crucial and urgent.

Paul builds off of the stories of the Hebrew Bible that help us to recognize our brokenness and isolation, and he shows us how through Jesus Christ we are made whole and gathered together once again through the gift of grace. Paul says, “If, because of the one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.”

Paul is showing that Jesus is the second Adam. Adam was meant to co-reign with God but fell short through sin. Jesus, God incarnate, was sent into this world to retell the story of Adam, to properly rule with God, and to offer us the life God originally intended for us that we lost in the garden. In First Corinthians Paul elaborates more on this concept. He writes, “The first man, Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man in heaven” (1 Cor 15:45-49).

Jesus came as a second Adam – he came into this world in the flesh, in the dust – but unlike Adam he did not sin, rather, he bore all of our sins on the cross and died that we might live. Jesus rewrote the story. No longer are we bound to a story that ends in sin, shame, and isolation. We are now invited to join the story of life, of grace, and of fellowship.

The story of Jesus Christ tells us the facts and the truth while doing so in a story that finds its home in our hearts. Last Wednesday we became acquainted with what it means to be of dust as we remembered that we are dust and to dust we shall return. We cannot deny that we are human and we are prone to sin. But what we can do is make the conscious decision to turn away from our sin and turn toward the God who loves us. Lent is our opportunity to learn the story of Jesus Christ: a story of love, of redemption, and of new life.

This Lenten season I encourage you to take the bold step of entering into Christ’s story – of learning, of asking questions, and of identifying ways you are perhaps stuck in the patterns of the old story and ready for the reality of the new.

We are on a journey to the cross with Christ. We cannot reach the reality of the resurrection without first enduring the reality of the cross. So let us prepare our hearts and minds. Let us walk towards the cross in humility so that we might be ready to accept the free gift of grace from God.

Let us spend this Lenten season sharing with one another how our stories are part of Christ’s story – a story of fellowship, of grace, and of gathering together.

We are a community gathered by God’s grace through his love, his sacrifice, and his defeat of sin and death. May you learn this story, treasure this story, and share this story.

Thanks be to God. Amen.