Tag Archives: ash wednesday

Ash Wednesday 2025

Isaiah 58:1-12       Psalm 51:1-17       2 Cor 5:20b-6:10             Matt 6:1-6,16-21

So much that is beautiful has been written about Ash Wednesday and I am grateful for the wisdom and riches from the prophet Isaiah, the psalmist, Rachel Held-Evans, Jan Richardson, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Anna Woofenden and Sara Miles who have written the words I am about to share. So, for the next few minutes, I invite you to close down your eyes, allow these words to seep into your soul, like oily ash, and remember you are dust.

[RHE]

We are made of stardust, the scientists say—the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, and the chlorine in our skin forged in the furnaces of ancient stars whose explosions scattered the elements across the galaxy. From the ashes grew new stars, and around one of them, a …cluster of dust coalesced to form the earth, and life emerged from the detritus of eight billion-year-old deaths.

[And then…] Once a year, on a Wednesday, we mix ashes with oil. We confess…  We tell the truth. Then we smear the ashes on our foreheads and acknowledge the single reality upon which every … believer and atheist, scientist and mystic can agree: “Remember you are dust and to dust you will return.” It’s the only thing we know for sure: we will die.

Remember you are dust…

Is not this the fast I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice and let the oppressed go free…? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?  Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly;… Then you shall call, and the Lord …will say, Here I am

Remember you are dust …

[NBW:]

If our lives were a long piece of fabric with our baptism on one end and our funeral on another, … then Ash Wednesday is a time when that fabric is pinched in the middle and the ends are held up so that our baptism in the past and our funeral in the future meet. The water and words from our baptism plus the earth and words from our funerals have come from the past and future to meet us in the present. And in that meeting we are reminded of the promises of God: That we are God’s, that there is no sin, no darkness, and no grave that God will not come to find us in and love us back to life. The ashes we receive on our foreheads are a reminder that we are dust. But they are also a reminder that we are loved and forgiven by the One who made us.”

Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return…

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; …
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
   and put a new and right spirit within me.
The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;
   a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return …

[Sara Miles]

[On Ash Wednesday, the Church] asks you to face the truth about yourself—that you are mortal, broken, and in need of love. It offers the reality of human failure, but also the grace that meets us there. The ashes mark us as dust, but also as beloved dust—dust that God has touched and loved, and will one day raise up. The cross we receive on our foreheads is not only a reminder of our mortality, but also a mark of belonging to a God who doesn’t leave us in the ashes.”

Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return, turn away from sin…

[Anna]

Each time I pressed the slightly oily ash onto someone’s forehead, I felt—even if just for that moment—a dissolving of the things that separated us from each other.

Ash Wednesday is the connecting thread that takes us from the hopeful waiting of Advent to the new birth of Christmas, walks us through Epiphany and into the depths of Lent, then goes with us all the way to the death on the cross, and finally, to the new life of resurrection.

Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return, turn away from sin…

[Blessing the Dust For Ash Wednesday, by Jan Richardson]

All those days

you felt like dust,

like dirt,

as if all you had to do

was turn your face

toward the wind

and be scattered

to the four corners

or swept away

by the smallest breath

as insubstantial—

did you not know

what the Holy One

can do with dust?

This is the day

we freely say

we are scorched.

This is the hour

we are marked

by what has made it

through the burning.

This is the moment

we ask for the blessing

that lives within

the ancient ashes,

that makes its home

inside the soil of

this sacred earth.

So let us be marked

not for sorrow.

And let us be marked

not for shame.

Let us be marked

not for false humility

or for thinking

we are less

than we are

but for claiming

what God can do

within the dust,

within the dirt,

within the stuff

of which the world

is made

and the stars that blaze

in our bones

and the galaxies that spiral

inside the smudge

we bear.

Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return, turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ, Amen.

Ash Wednesday 2024

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

I met someone in the grounds yesterday, who was looking for a venue for a contemplative event he is planning. Quite incidentally, as we chatted, he mentioned, in an off-hand kind of way, ‘relationships are everything. At the end of the day, relationships are all we have’, he said. And the greatest gift we have in our faith journey is those people who walk it alongside us, regardless of how long they stay. One such gift is my dear friend Anna, an episcopal priest in the states. Earlier this week she sent me her sermon for today – something we do, often. Parts of it made me catch my breath, because I found it so beautiful and, with her permission, I am sharing some of her thoughts this evening.

Every year, on Ash Wednesday, churches gather around the world and hear the same scripture from the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus starts with this warning: “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.” And then it says, don’t sound trumpets and don’t stand and pray on street corners. In fact, the gospel writer goes on to say, “whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray in secret.” 

So, it is a strange juxtaposition on the day, kind of the only day really, where we collectively mark ourselves with the symbol of Christianity, the cross, and then go out onto the rest of our days literally marked as a religious person. 

Often, I just ignore this complication in the passage and move onto the ashes, and the dust we come from, and the dust we will return to. But for some reason this year I heard it anew and I heard gospel, good news, in this reading from Matthew. And it made sense to me in a new way, why we would read this passage right before smearing ashes on our forehead in this most visible way.

Let’s go back to that passage for a moment again. 


Jesus said, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven…. And do not sound a trumpet before you, so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. 

Rewards, rewards, rewards…. And suddenly it struck me. This isn’t about public displays of religion or not, this is about what we think we need to do to make God happy. 

Jesus is setting us straight and reminding us that God is a God who loves us because of who we are, not because of what we have. God is a god who wants to be in relationship with us, in communication with us, not one who requires we pray in a way that proves our piety. God is not a god who only loves us when we do things a certain way, think, act, believe, within a particular box. God doesn’t need us to prove our worth, either spiritually or to one another. And God certainly isn’t a god who holds the values of consumerism, capitalism, consumption and power.

Jesus goes on to urge us not to store up our treasures on earth, because that’s not what’s important. Instead, store up our treasures in heaven, put our attention to a heavenly, loving way of being, because where our treasure is, our heart will be also. 

So on this Ash Wednesday, we come together to remember that we are dust and from dust we come and to dust we shall return. We can hear the good news in that.

Our lovability, our worth, does not come from the religious acts we participate in or from the earthly things we amass.

Our worth is not based on the grades we get or how much money we earn.

Our worth is not grounded in how we appear to others or how many likes you get on social media.

Our worth is not even dependent on how many good things we do or how we recycle. 

Our worth, our belovedness, comes from the very fact that we were created out of the dust, the soil, the very particles of earth, and that our loving God is holding us in and amongst all these things of life and will hold us throughout eternity, even after our bodies go back to the dust, to the earth from which we came. 

Maybe it is no mistake that Christians press ash, and dust, and dirt, into our foreheads as we enter Lent. We long for this symbol of death, and mortality, endings and crumbling… because we know that within it, there is something so deep and comforting. As we acknowledge that the endings are the stuff of which the new beginnings are made, we see that our dust is what makes soil for growth.

The God that created us is the same God that is blowing into our dust, like God did of primordial Adam, creating us anew. That God is the same God who is holding the breadth of the cycles and assuring us that even what is crumbling is being cared for, and that love is being infused at every stage.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, dirt to dirt, remember that you are dust and to dust you will return.

Seeing those ashes on each other’s foreheads reminds us how we’re all in it together, in this messy, dirty, beautiful, interconnected web of life. And it’s as if in that moment, the dust dissolves that which separates us, as if the ash burns through the illusion that we are anything but fellow humanity, and part of creation. In that moment, we’re all in it together, mortal, human, non-human; creation, created, creator; lover and beloved; dust, dirt, heart, and spirit; all mixed together on this sacred day.

Amen.