A sermon preached by the Dean of Melbourne, the Very Revd Dr Andreas Loewe, on the Second Sunday in Lent 2025:
Throughout Lent, we have been exploring ‘heart work’—the inward transformation that God seeks to bring about in each of us. From contrasting ‘heart work’ with ‘hard work’ on Ash Wednesday, to exploring Christ making God’s word accessible to our hearts last Sunday, to considering the courage to ask in prayer at our Corporate Communion—we’ve been journeying deeper into how God longs to transform us from within.
This morning, our journey into Lent and the invitation to consider our heart work continues. Our readings invite us to consider yet another dimension of that work: our transformation through trust in God. Each reading gives us an example of how trust in God’s good purposes can lead to incredible change. Each are based on a central premise that is also a promise: when we trust God with our deepest fears and greatest hopes, we open ourselves to a transformation that begins in our hearts and can extend to every aspect of our lives.
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Our first reading takes us to a moment in the life of Abram that’s so pivotal that it will lead not only to a changed man, but also a changed name: after this encounter God will name him ‘Abraham’. God had already called him to leave his homeland, promising to make him the father of a great nation. Now years have passed, and Abram still remained childless. Abram and Sarai have grown old, and so God’s promise seems increasingly unlikely to be fulfilled. At this time of uncertainty, the word of the Lord comes to him in a vision: ‘Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great’, God assures him (Genesis 15.1).
Abram’s response is strikingly honest. He doesn’t hide his doubts: ‘O Lord God’, he asks, ‘what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?’ (15.2). This is heart work at its most authentic—Abram laying bare his deepest anxieties before God. Abram doesn’t put on a brave face—or even a brave faith—but speaks to God from the heart about what troubles him most. God’s promise remains unfulfilled. What is it that God will give him?
God does not respond with rebuke but with reassurance. He takes Abram outside and tells him to open his eyes: ‘Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them’ (15.5). The invitation to ‘look toward heaven’ is more than a practical instruction. It is an invitation to Abram to let his perspective be changed; his horizon be expanded. Abram is invited to look beyond the immediate limitations of his situation to behold the limitless possibilities of God’s promise.
Looking up to heaven is a physical posture that reflects an inward reality. When we fix our eyes on the ground, we only ever see what is directly before us—our current circumstances, our present limitations, our immediate problems. But when we look up, we allow our vision to expand. When we look up, we may see beyond ourselves—and in Abram’s case may see something of the vastness of God’s creation and the boundlessness of God’s power.
This physical posture of looking up can be to us a symbol of the Lenten heart work of trust. Trust requires us to lift our gaze from what seems impossible to what God declares possible. It asks us to shift our focus from the emptiness of our present situation to the fruitfulness of God’s promised future.
Abram responds to God’s invitation to let his vision be changed by a simple—but incredibly important—act of trust: ‘Abram believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness’ (15.6). The Hebrew word for ‘believed’ here, הֶאֱמִ֖ן (he’emin), comes from the same root as our word ‘Amen’. It means to consider something as reliable, stable, and firm. Abram doesn’t just assent to God’s promise; he anchors himself to it. He stakes his life on God’s faithfulness. He says Amen to God’s promise.
And this trust, this heart work, is ‘reckoned to him as righteousness’. Before Abram does anything, before any outward action follows, his trust itself is counted as a right relationship with God. In a world where righteousness was typically measured by work, an outward observance of religious law, this is revolutionary. God sees Abram’s heart and faith—his willingness to trust despite evidence to the contrary—and declares it right work: ‘That trust and faith is what I’m looking for. This is what makes our relationship right’. That is heart work—opening our hearts in faith to right living.
What flows from that initial act of heart work is a covenant. God, who promised Abraham greatness and a people, pledges himself to Abraham in the same way in which Abraham had pledged himself to trusting God. The gift of entire nations to Abraham’s descendants all flows from Abraham’s trust in God’s vision for him; his Amen to God’s purpose for him.
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Our second lesson, from the epistle to the Philippians, adds another dimension to the transformative work of trusting in God’s promises. Paul invites his readers to imitate him as he imitates Christ. Imitation here does not mean superficial mimicry but again it means heart work—adopting the same inner orientation toward God and others that Paul himself has learned from Christ. It means taking on an attitude of humility, self-giving love, and trust in God’s purposes even in suffering. Imitating Christ means emptying oneself, making space in our lives for God, so that God can fill us with his grace. Earlier in his letter, Paul described it as having ‘the same mind that was in Christ Jesus, who emptied himself and took the form of a servant.’ (Philippians 2.5-7).
Like Abraham in our first lesson, Paul contrasts this attitude of self-emptying, of opening up space for God in our lives, with the attitude of those whose gaze remains resolutely fixed on the ground—whose ‘minds are set on earthly things’, as he calls it (3.19). In the same way in which Abraham is being invited to look towards heaven, Paul also invites us to lift our gaze to heaven: ‘Our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ’ (3.20).
Adopting such a heavenly perspective doesn’t mean disengaging from earthly life. Rather, it means seeing our earthly life through God’s promises. It means trusting that what we see now is not all there is; that the limitations and sufferings of our present existence have not got the final word. It means letting ourselves not be conformed to the ways of the world—‘the body of humiliation’, as Paul puts it—but instead be transformed into the promise of God’s glory—‘the body of his glory’.
God’s transformative power begins in our hearts and extends even to our bodies. Through our heart work of trust we open ourselves to a transformation so complete that it encompasses every aspect of our being—heart, soul and body—all can be changed when we engage in this heart work.
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In our Gospel reading we meet Jesus somewhere on his journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. Even though his disciples have not yet grasped this, Jesus knows well that the endpoint of his journey is the cross. When told to get away, because Herod wants to kill him, Jesus responds not by removing himself from danger, but with clear-eyed determination: ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work’, he tells (Luke 13.32).
Jesus knows that his path leads to Jerusalem, the city that ‘kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it’ (13.34). Yet he continues resolutely on this way to the cross. In setting his eyes to Jerusalem, Jesus is driven by a love that is so strong it is almost tangible: ‘How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings,’ he laments, ‘and you were not willing!’ (13.34).
For Christians redemption is never redemption at arms’ length. We are not set free from sin and death by a divine command—’let there be no more sin’. For Christians, redemption comes at a cost. The cost of the life of the Son of God on a cross. And so, as he sees the holy city, and knows it to be a place of resistance to God’s call to be transformed, Jesus’ heart breaks, and he weeps over the city.
In Jesus, we see human heart work made real at the deepest level: at numerous moments on the long journey to the cross, he is given opportunities to walk away. But at each point, with increasing cost, he makes himself more vulnerable for the sake of love. When faced with rejection and the certainty of suffering and death, he not only continues trusting in God’s purposes, but also seeks to gather his own under his wings, shelter them in his protective embrace.
The way in which God fulfils his vision for sinful humanity is costly. Jesus knows that at the end of his earthly life there stands a lonely cross. But by that self-emptying death, God’s blessing is brought to a broken world. By Jesus’s death on the cross, the narrow horizon of human existence is opened wide, so that when we step outside our own protective walls to stand at the foot of the cross, we may also, like Abraham, come to glimpse the bright canopy of countless stars that reflect to us God’s promise.
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What does all this mean for us? Like Abraham, you and I are invited to look up—to lift our gaze from our present limitations to the boundless possibilities of God’s promises. Like Paul, you and I are called to adopt a heavenly perspective, living as citizens of heaven while navigating the complexities of earthly life. And like Jesus, we are invited to trust God’s purposes even when faced with resistance and rejection.
This most challenging form of heart work—continuing to trust and remaining open to God when human experience suggests otherwise—is the way of the cross, the way of Christ. Yet with this challenge comes an incredible promise: ‘God will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory’ (Philippians 3.21). This transformation begins in our hearts, as we learn to trust God more deeply, love more freely, and hope more confidently.
This Lent, it is my prayer for you and for me that may we commit ourselves to the heart work of trust: looking up to the stars like Abraham, living as citizens of heaven like Paul, and trusting in God’s ultimate triumph, even when, as for Jesus, our path to life transformed and renewed leads through suffering and pain.