St Margaret's Church Prestwich

Rev Sue preached this sermon on Sunday 23 August 2026. Here it is for you again:

The Netflix show Lucifer is based on the premise that the Prince of Darkness comes to Earth in Los Angeles to run a nightclub. Of course, the whole setup is nonsensical. But like many fantasy programmes, it can be a vehicle for truth. Lucifer becomes a member of a homicide team, and his unique contribution is that he can hypnotise people and ask them what their deepest desire is. They always speak the truth. A favourite episode of mine is when Lucifer is interviewing a murder suspect, Dave. He has every appearance of being a hardened criminal: muscular, dressed in leathers, and very dangerous-looking. His deepest desire turns out to be to open a bakery and spend his days making and selling pastries.

Today’s collect focuses on desire. Alongside the readings, one of the things that changes in our services every week is the collect – a short prayer that gathers up our own intentions and the theme of the day. At this time of year we’re not in any particular season, so we’re free to use some of the very best collects the Church of England has to offer. This one goes right back to Thomas Cranmer, the author of our first English prayer book, and it comes to us today in modern language. It’s one of my absolute favourites: “You are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than either we desire or deserve.” It’s a mind-blowing statement of faith. The implication is that our desires are too limited, too pedestrian. We should be asking for more – and even then, God will give us more than that.

That’s the thread I want to follow this morning: not whether desire is good or bad, but what happens when we bring our desires – all of them, the shallow ones and the shameful ones and the barely-admitted ones – honestly before God.

Christians have traditionally taken two different approaches to desire, and two saints stand as examples of them: St Anthony the Great and St Ignatius of Loyola. The first way is to look honestly at our desires, acknowledge that many of them really are sinful, and go to battle with our temptations. We see ourselves as fundamentally broken, and ask God to put that right. Anthony went to live in the desert to meet his temptations head-on, and he’s often depicted in art surrounded by devils attacking him and whispering in his ear.

But many people find it too hard to look their own desires in the face at all. So instead of battling with them, they pretend they’re not there. That doesn’t make the desire go away – it just drives it underground. And suppressed desires can cause havoc, the way a river dammed without any outlet backs up: the pressure builds until the dam bursts, and there is flooding and erosion.

We see exactly this in the book of Genesis, in the story of Cain and Abel. Cain was bitterly jealous because he felt his offering had not been accepted by God the way Abel’s had been. It’s an extreme case, but that is exactly what makes it useful: it shows us, in the most dramatic terms possible, what an unexamined, unspoken desire can do if it’s left to fester. God challenged Cain, asking him why he was angry – giving Cain the chance to open up and be healed. Instead, Cain let the feeling grow until it ended in murdering his brother.

The other way dates from the sixteenth century and the teaching of St Ignatius of Loyola. He taught that instead of battling with our desires, we should learn to acknowledge them, permit ourselves to actually feel them, and then talk to God about what we find – honestly, without editing. This is no easier path than Anthony’s; self-knowledge always means admitting things about ourselves we would rather not see. Both saints, in their own ways, are trying to stop us doing what Cain did – burying a desire instead of bringing it into the light. But where Anthony’s path is about combat, Ignatius’s is about honesty, and it is Ignatius’s path I want to walk with you this morning, because it leads most directly to what the collect promises: finding ourselves loved and approved by God, not despite our desires, but through being honest about them.

Which brings us back to Lucifer. Later in the series, his therapist turns his own power on him, and Lucifer is left sobbing, confessing that his deepest truth is that he hates himself. What he wants, more than anything else, is acceptance and unconditional love.

That’s not so different from what Ignatius asks us to uncover in ourselves. God created us in his image and declared us good. We have marred that image through our sin – but God still sees the real us underneath it. Psalm 139 puts it like this: “O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.” God sees the sin. But he also sees the desire to do better, however faint. He loves us all – whether we’re sinning or not, whether we’re even trying or not. Paul puts it starkly: “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners, Christ died for us.” The love comes first. The transformation comes later.

So far, we’ve been talking about the desires we’re ashamed of – the ones we bury or battle. But there’s another problem with our desires, and it’s almost the opposite one. It’s not that our desires are too strong. It’s that they’re too small.

C.S. Lewis put this better than I ever could: “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

So when we start examining our desires, we often find something surprisingly shallow underneath. Take someone who really, really wants to look as they did at twenty-five. Why? Perhaps what they actually want is to be seen as beautiful. But what if they already believed that, in the sight of God, they were truly lovely? Or take someone who wants to be rich. What do they really want – security, freedom from anxiety? Recognition, a sense of status? Control? God’s answer is simple: trust me, and you will have no anxiety for the future – and I will give you a recognition worth more than anyone else’s approval. Unpack a desire for wealth far enough, and it tells you exactly how to pray.

We heard in this morning’s reading from Romans that we should not be conformed to this world, but transformed by the renewing of our minds. When we start learning to pray, we may begin with the same preoccupations as everyone else – our health, our relationships, our wants and needs, our hopes and fears. There’s nothing wrong with bringing those. But if we bring them in a spirit of opening our hearts before God – not presenting a shopping list, but telling him what actually lies heaviest on us, and inviting the Holy Spirit into that conversation – then gradually, over time, the Spirit sifts through all of it. And what’s left, underneath everything else, is our deepest longing: to love God and to feel loved by him, to be forgiven, to learn to trust him, and to have our lives guided by his Spirit. That is when our bodies genuinely become a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.

So here is the invitation for this week. Somewhere underneath your desires – the ones you’re proud of and the ones you’re not, the shallow ones and the shameful ones – there is something God already knows and already loves. You don’t have to sort them out before you bring them to him; that is the Spirit’s job, not yours. Just bring them, honestly, the way Dave, the hardened criminal, under hypnosis, finally admitted he just wanted to bake.

As we tentatively bring our own desires to God – not because we deserve to be heard, but because of his love and mercy – we will find those desires stretched and purified, until God gives us the very thing this morning’s collect promises: more than we ever dared to ask, and infinitely more than we imagined possible.