Finding Freedom

The Epstein Files, Purity Culture, Lent, and being absolutely done with bullish*t definitions of "temptation"

An expanded version of the sermon preached at Jubilee Episcopal Church on February 22, 2026.

The devil tempts Jesus in this week’s Gospel story. And given that it’s the devil doing the tempting, we mere mortals are tempted to read this story like the devil is tempting Jesus with bad things.

But, actually, the devil is sneakier and smarter than that.

The devil tempts Jesus first with bread — perhaps for Jesus himself to eat, he’s been fasting for forty days after all. But if Jesus can turn stones into bread, he won’t stop at nourishing himself. Jesus would be able to feed everyone, because then as now, in the global superpower of the Roman Empire, many people were forced to grow food for others while barely being able to feed themselves and their families.

And so the devil says: make these stones into bread.

And Jesus says: no.

But the irony is that … Jesus will feed everyone. Today, we will feast on bread that is Jesus. Before Jesus does that, he’s going to feed thousands of hungry, poor, oppressed people by multiplying a measly five loaves and two fish into enough for them to feast and have Thanksgiving leftovers.

So the devil, then, is not tempting Jesus with bad things. Bread is not bad. Feeding yourself is a good thing. Feeding yourself with carbs, with food that tastes good, with food that fills you up — is a good thing. God does not need you starving to be holy.

God gives us feasts as foretastes of heaven, and even in Lent, every Sunday is a feast. Jesus would not make rich, warm bread and fragrant wine into his own flesh and blood for our nourishment if Jesus delighted in us subsisting on mere nutrients. It is critical to remember this in Lent because we are quick to confuse secular diet culture with sacred fasting.

Do not confuse patriarchal beauty standards that want grown women looking like children — with the will of a God who, at every opportunity, feeds Her children.

God does not benefit from you being smaller or hating your body.

But the devil isn’t done tempting Jesus; next he says: how about healing? You could throw yourself down but not be hurt. Again, Jesus is going to do a LOT of healing, so it’s not the healing that’s the problem, but — yet again — Jesus says: no.

And then the devil says: how about this global superpower? How about this empire that spans the length of a continent?

Maybe this is the trick. Empires are bad. Star Wars and liberation theology taught us that … even if Civics classes are now forbidden from doing so. It is this very Roman Empire that will execute Jesus. And despite this global superpower claiming to have god on the throne — Caesar, after all, claimed he was God’s chosen soldier — the devil’s very offer to Jesus to hand over this empire reveals that it is not Caesar on the throne … but the devil himself.

But Jesus says, often, that he is here on earth to institute the Kingdom of Heaven. That his reign over all the earth is here. So it can’t be a kingdom itself is bad …. or can it?

If bread, healing, and the reign of God are not bad things … what exactly is the temptation here?

As someone who grew up steeped in purity culture, I heard temptation defined as: bad things no one should want, or: things we only indulge in because we are inherently bad.

If the devil were preaching like my purity culture-peddling youth pastors of yore, he’d be tempting Jesus with the decidedly bad things I was told as a child were the pinnacle of evil temptation: wearing a crop top or eating a big piece of chocolate cake.

Because as a little girl, and now as a grown woman and mother to two daughters, I have heard my whole life that girls are both the bane and engine of temptation.

As I wrote in my book, God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us:

“Purity culture told me I was so desirable I had to be contained. Beauty standards told me I was so undesirable I had to hate myself into thinness. … The contradictions sliced two ways: by purity culture standards, any exposure of my body was an unacceptable and inevitable temptation for men to sin, and yet by the beauty standards of the early 2000s, my body was unacceptably unattractive and an inevitable disappointment to me no matter what I wore, ate, or did. Put these purity and beauty standards together, and you create an expectation of violence from men that women must both endure and somehow ignore.”

And the engine of both of these predatory systems was not something evil: it is something good. The desire to be loved, the desire to be with people, it is an innate, God-given gift and ache of being human. God did not make us to be individual machines, God made us to be in community — “it is not good for humans to be alone!” (Genesis 2). But systems of abuse take something innate, and beautiful, and good, and vulnerable — and say: my way is the only way you can have this good thing, and any other way you try to be beautiful or loved is bad.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about purity culture, and being a teenage girl, these last few weeks with the release of more of the Epstein files.

To be clear: I’m not saying enduring snide remarks about too much eyeliner and pass-the-chewing-gum purity metaphors in the stale-smelling youth room are the same as the atrocities girls faced at the hands of the Epstein class.

But we are kidding ourselves if we do not see how intimately connected patriarchal systems of violence are.

Because purity culture taught me, from childhood, taught all of us in these faith spaces, that girls should fundamentally — at minimum — expect violent and dehumanizing attitudes from men, if not outright be responsible for safeguarding ourselves from the most heinous expressions of this violence by adults against children. Purity culture taught boys they were inherently violent.

I feel physically sick when I think about what this class of people did to children. I also feel physically sick when I think about the ways God and the church have been bastardized to justify this kind of violence as divine will within Christian sanctuaries and homes.

Epstein himself wrote to the teenage girls he trafficked, reinforcing that they “deserved” unspeakable cruelty, and he did so by quoting James Dobson, a noted “Christian parenting expert” who openly advocated that parents beat their children into submission, and claimed women were inherently made to tempt men into sin.^⁠1

And this is why I think Lent is an essential season for us Christians.

I get it. It’s hard to move past the ways Lent, and sin and temptation and the devil et al, have been the costumes sexual violence and misogyny and white supremacy have worn to justify egregious evil. It’s hard to see how we can proclaim God’s love and profess the inherent dignity and worth and goodness of every human being, and also talk about being such sinners. I feel the choking weight of words like “temptation” being presented as a synonym for a wanton women — but it is this deep-seated and unrelenting cultural conditioning that I deeply do not think is of God that I, a woman of God, want to call out with clarity.

Beings a sinner and being a good person are not opposites.

But sin is real. Sin is not, as Mother Kelli Joyce says, “fun stuff you’re not allowed to do with your body.”

Sin rips us from God.

And my God, what sin and evil are at work in the world.

Y’all know I have my beef with how Eve is maligned,¹ but the story of the Fall that we heard today is a lot of things but one thing it illumines is how the humans behold a temptation: they think it would be good to be like God. They have everything they could ever want or need. A garden resplendent with food, soft beds of grass and endless leisure and the delight of each other, soul mates in body and mind. Purposeful work in naming the creatures of the earth.²

And for some reason, it’s not enough. What God has been freely and abundantly giving them, they seize, they grasp with their own hands, to consolidate their own mirage of power … only to find they are, ultimately, never going to be god, and therefore, vulnerable.

And in our Gospel lesson today, the devil does not tempt Jesus with bad things — he tempts Jesus with this exact kind of power over good things. A power that is seized, conquered, colonized and then lied about. Real temptation is not a slice of cake, it when when we try to have complete power over the world, and then to use that power for our own self-aggrandizing, enriching, or destructive ends, because the real secret is no amount of grasped earthly power can make you immortal or invulnerable to pain. All that power makes you terrified.

So when Jesus condemns temptation? Jesus is not condemning a child in a crop top, Jesus is condemning the adults who teach that child she deserves the evil they do to her. The evil Jesus condemns is when people choose to think of themselves as gods and other people as less than people. The evil Jesus condemns is systems of sexual violence upheld by religious and civic power because of idolatrous claims that this power is Godly when, in point of fact, it could not be further from the self-sacrificial, tender, effeminate love of Jesus.

And, if we’re really getting real, it’s the fact that temptation is not just for “bad” things that makes it, well, tempting.

Because the devil is — as we have established — tempting Jesus with good things: the power to throw over an oppressive and cruel kingdom. Bread. Healing. But the devil is tempting Jesus with systems of total domination, power, and control. This is the critical difference.

Because when Jesus feeds those thousands of people? When Jesus heals? When Jesus institutes the kingdom of heaven here on earth? He is not forcing his power on anyone. Jesus, scandalously, as God, creator and sustainer and redeemer, already has the authority to make nations bow before him. Jesus does not need us to build a Christian nation. He could do that ten times better than our horrific attempts.

The devil’s temptations to Jesus are the temptations all of us face: do we choose the kingdoms of this world, kingdoms built on fear, or the kingdom of Jesus?

I know most of us will not be tempted with the kind of power Jesus is tempted with here. But we are tempted, every day, to follow the whims and rules of people and systems trying to be gods … instead of remembering we are God’s.

Because Jesus categorically does not choose the kingdoms of this world, and their means of power OVER. Jesus chooses to have power with us and Jesus chooses to descend down from heaven through his mother’s birth canal in blood and water and anguish and hope, and weeps with us, walks with us, delights with us, and says: behold, I am doing something new.

My friend and friend to Jubilee, the Rev. Cameron Spoor, said in Bible study two weeks ago: “when someone is completely bound to another person, we call that slavery; when someone is completely bound to Christ, we call that freedom.”

This may feel jarring because slavery is categorically evil in the kingdoms of this world. Patriarchy and white supremacy and frankly, our agricultural system in the United States work by enslaving people, by so dehumanizing people, that they are treated as means of production or entertainment instead of children of God. I want to be clear, being a slave to Christ is one of those terms so many of these terrible theological systems used to justify their own harm.

And actually? Jesus calls us friends, not slaves. (It’s Paul who really goes off on being a slave to Christ, but I digress).

Jesus calls us into liberation which feels like adoration and worship and obedience to God because in the kingdom of heaven there is no violence or subjugation or scarcity or lack.

Jesus Christ desires for us only the feasting, the flourishing of the whole world.

Jesus’ kingdom is not forced by trafficking people or coercing conversion. Jesus kingdom is built by considering the lillies, by valuing children’s innate wonder and autonomy as divine gift, and looking to the most wounded places of the world and seeing, improbably, hope.

Jesus’ kingdom is built in real freedom. Not freedom to force our will on others, but freedom from a charming and entrapping violence that sees scarcity where God is actually giving abundance.

The freedom in and of Christ is the tender, terrifying underbelly of our interdependence on each other, it is the joy that can never be taken from us when the world is falling apart, because the world did not give this joy to us.

The kingdom of God is more powerful than empire because it will spring up in every crack, like daisies against asphalt, because the force of this love will never be bought, caged, or silenced.

I shared a few weeks ago that when Jesus tells us to repent because the kingdom of God has come near, the word repent is better translated as “be of a new mind” or “change your mind!”

Because Jesus is imploring us to see the kingdom of heaven — this wild, holy, improbable hope — that is all around us despite every attempt of these earthly kings to keep it from us. Freedom in Christ is knowing the things that scare us, and that scare the kings of this world? These things are actually scared of God.

So whose kingdom will we choose? The kingdoms of this earth that will stop at nothing in their insatiable greed to try and be our deity?

Or will we choose freedom?

Amen.

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If you liked this piece or it made you think, a wonderful way to to pay it forward is to support the ministry of my church (this does not go to me personally, it helps pay our rent and hourly staff) or snag a copy of my book.

¹ I am so grateful to the work of D.L. Mayfield for talking about these connections.

1. For more, see my book and specifically the chapter, “Eve’s Question.”

2. It is of GREAT NOTE to me that (1) sex is a part of life in the garden pre-fall; sex is not the sin and (2) of all the temptations Jesus faces, none are the subjugation or sexual violence of another person. Which is further evidence that all this heteronormative, purity culture patriarchy is just not of God.