To Die, Rise, and Fully Love

Ash Wednesday
Sermon for February 18, 2026

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Good morning, Epiphany. If this morning feels off to you because of our silent entrance, because of less singing than we usually have on Sundays, because it’s a Wednesday and not a Sunday, well, yes. It should feel a bit off. Thank you for being here, together, anyway. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the season of Lent, as probably all of you know; this is one of the few holy days in our year where we meet for a midweek service, where Christians around the world are gathering together even though it is not a Sunday morning. And they are not meeting to celebrate, not really. Ash Wednesday is not known as a joyous occasion. I will not try to convince you this morning that it is.

But I did find it interesting over these last few weeks as we were preparing for this service how I kept wanting to confuse Ash Wednesday with our Good Friday service, the one that specifically focuses on the crucifixion of Jesus, on suffering, on brutality, on death, on power, on sacrificial love. Father Jeff and I even spoke yesterday about what to wear today; both of us briefly confused this service with that one. Do we wear our black cassocks? I had briefly thought about dimming the lights this morning, about candles.

But this is not that solemn service, this is Ash Wednesday, following Carnivale or Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday, however you might have celebrated yesterday. This is the service that begins the penitential season of Lent; it is one that reminds us not specifically of Christ’s crucifixion, but of our own mortality, our own sin, our own brokenness, our own need for repentance and God’s abounding grace. Remember the collect with which we began our service today… God hates nothing God has made… we are here simply asking for new and contrite hearts, having lamented our sin and having acknowledged our own wretchedness…  again, maybe not a feel-good service, but one we all recognize we need.

See, Ash Wednesday is rapidly becoming one of the most popular liturgical services celebrated outside of liturgical traditions: “Ashes-to-Go” are being offered over at the Methodist Church today and by other Episcopal Churches around our diocese, but even evangelical and non-denominational churches are joining in. In part, I think, this is because of social media, where people continue to post photos of themselves with ashes on their foreheads, photos that Jesus might have something to say about, if you actually read this morning’s gospel passage from Matthew 6…. No judgment here, I’ve posted photos like that myself in the past, but I likely “already received my reward” when I did.

Really, though, I think and pray that Ash Wednesday is connecting more across traditional lines, bringing visitors into the church, bringing former attendees back into worshiping communities, because it speaks to something we know deeply. The world these days, well… it is not perfect. This world, it is full of struggle, it is full of sin and brokenness. We surely see it when we look at the news, at the world around us, but we can see it when we see our own brokenness too, our own families, our own relationships, our own need for healing, for grace. We know we need not only talk about the positives around us, about love, about all the good this community in particular is doing in the world and all the good we want to do in the coming year… we also must fully recognize this imperfection, this struggle, this brokenness… this sin… and talk about our part in it.

Now, sin is a loaded word, one that often carries images of judgmental preachers or angry elders telling you what you need to do to make God happy, to get to heaven… it is a word that can carry oppressive guilt and shame. Our tradition in this Episcopal Church finds love far easier to talk about. I preach about love basically every Sunday, it is foundational to the gospel of Jesus. But if you look around you, either at the world we see on TV or the one we live in daily, we all can surely see a profound lack of that love, we know situations where Christ-like love would make such an enormous difference.

May I label that lack of love, today, as sin.

And, as Jesus preaches elsewhere in this Sermon on the Mount, if we only see this lack of love elsewhere, friends, in the lives of others, well… let us take today to look for it in ourselves as well. This is not a sermon of condemnation nor guilt, but it is one that echoes the collect for Ash Wednesday, that prays that God will create and make in all of us new and contrite hearts, to help us see the ways we fail each other, our own sins, and lead us, in this season, toward a life marked by the love of God.

How do we get there? Well, our gospel for today has three specific suggestions on how we might use this Lenten season to draw closer to God, to find the brokenness in our lives and offer it up for grace and forgiveness. Jesus starts with giving, to the church and to the poor, freeing yourself from the bondages of ambition, production, and financial security. Then, Jesus suggests praying, quietly, spending time with God in scripture, in meditation, in self-examination. And then the passage today concludes with fasting, our tradition has called it self-denial, finding ways to disrupt our patterns of self-care and self-indulgence to put our love of God and love for others at the forefront of our lives. Each of these is a suggestion from Christ that centuries of Christians have taken up in their efforts to “store up for themselves treasures in heaven,” to try to bring their hearts closer to God’s.

And we know what God’s heart looks like thanks to the service we hold on Good Friday, the somber one where we wear black and dim the lights. We know that God’s heart is one of unending love, without qualification, without our deserving it, love even to death on the cross.

Today though, on Ash Wednesday, here at the beginning of this season of Lent, may we all use the ashes in this service and the suggestions of the Messiah, who himself will die and rise again, to make and hold space, to take time, time remembering our own mortality. May we use them to find our way to true repentance of our own sins, and then, may we move toward a new life so joined with the Holy Spirit that we might participate with God in making all things around us new and full of God’s overwhelming love.

Amen.