  We summarize recent evidence, both from lattice QCD and chiral perturbation
theory, that suggests that larger-than-expected excited-state contamination
could be the reason for the tension between phenomenological determinations and
previous direct lattice-QCD calculations of the pion--nucleon sigma term
$\sigma_{\pi N}$. In addition, we extend the $\chi$PT analysis by calculating
the corrections due to including the $\Delta(1232)$ resonance as an explicit
degree of freedom. This correction is found to be small, thereby corroborating
the excited-state effects found in the $\Delta$-less calculation and the result
for $\sigma_{\pi N}$.
