Ash Wednesday: March 5, 2025

The Rev. Nat Johnson

Readings: Isaiah 58:1-12 | 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10 | Matthew 6:1-6,16-21 | Psalm 103 or 103:8-14

Ash Wednesday. It’s a day on which we are reminded of our mortality: Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. It is also the day that begins our journey through Lent, a penitential season meant to remind us of our creatureliness, of our complicity in systemic sin larger than individual transgressions, of our human tendency to distort relationship and of our habitual self-seeking. Today, we turn our faces toward Jerusalem and, over the next six weeks, follow Jesus as he makes the final trek to be handed over to death. Today, we are bid to enter this holy season in a posture of prayerful self-examination with a commitment to engage in communal practices of lament, repentance and confession, and renewal of faith.

Each year on Ash Wednesday, we hear the same passage from the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus warns his listeners not to engage in the spiritual practices of giving, prayer, and fasting as the hypocrites do. These practices are not meant to be badges worn to inform onlookers of their piety but rather ought to be engaged as practices of faithfulness to be seen by God alone. Ironically, this seems to be a bit of a different word than the one Isaiah spoke to the people of Israel. Isaiah suggests that the people of Israel are engaging in their fasts to be seen by God – they hope their fasting and mourning will bring about God’s redemption, will bring about God’s promised restoration of prosperity. But the prophet reminds them that their fasting and ritual is inconsistent with their practices of justice. Jesus, on the other hand, seems more concerned with inward righteousness – a righteousness not seen by others but known only to God. How do we reconcile these two readings we hear on Ash Wednesday each year?

It should be remembered that the words we hear from Jesus tonight are part of a larger narrative. They come from the Sermon on the Mount, and in the previous chapter, Jesus charges his listeners to accept their designation as salt of the earth and light of the world; he implores them to let their light shine before others so that they would see their good works and give glory to God in heaven. And Isaiah is writing to a newly reunited people, half of whom have just returned from exile and half of whom were the remnant left behind, and between whom there was a great deal of economic disparity. Their rituals were condemned not because fasting in and of itself was bad, but because it was done in a self-seeking way and failed to form and inform their social practices. For both Jesus and Isaiah, the question is not about inward or outward practices of righteousness but about motivation, integrity, and faithfulness.

In our tradition, particularly here in Seattle and in the greater Pacific Northwest, we have a tendency to pit inward and outward practices of faith against one another. Our expression of Christianity tends to be political. It is easier for us to hear Isaiah’s words and take them as a clarion call to action. Isaiah’s words bolster our sense of faithfulness, validate our expressions of faith in our advocacy and activism. But what I have noticed is that we often respond to this call to the neglect of other practices like prayer and fasting. We point to Isaiah over Jesus to justify our faithfulness and in doing so we often fail to recognize the full charge that Isaiah brings. And in doing so, we often inadvertently pit the inward disciplines of things like prayer and fasting and anonymous giving against such things as caring for the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized. And the reality is that both are so intricately connected with one another that Isaiah can condemn the ritual of fasting when it doesn’t also include sharing their bread with the hungry, breaking the yokes of injustice, clothing the naked, and being available for the community.

Ultimately, what Isaiah is concerned with is not just pious action – whether inward or outward, but about healing. When our social acts of righteousness align with our inward disciplines, Isaiah tells us that our light will break forth like the dawn and our healing shall spring up quickly! Here is the explicit reminder that our internal worlds are directly connected with our capacity to engage the material world and the people who inhabit it. We cannot just “fix” the world – we cannot be repairers of the breach and restorers of the streets by neglecting the practices that tune our hearts to the God who continually guides us, and our capacity to offer food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted are sorely hindered if we do not tend to the healing we all need.

In their book, What it Takes to Heal, Prentis Hemphill suggests that social transformation is inherently connected to our practices of internal transformation. For Hemphill, internal transformation comes about when we tend to the healing we must do from our individual and collective traumas that we bear from the systems that form us. Things like racism, homophobia, misogyny, and xenophobia infect the very structures of our social systems, they press upon each of us – oppressor and oppressed – in ways that inflict harm, that wound our capacity for love, for belonging, for healthy relationship. Hemphill suggests that healing from these wounds is essential if we’re really committed to the vision that prophets like Isaiah cast. This is an important thing to remember, they say, “because we can mean well, be committed, have a vision for change that inspires, but if we are not actively and intentionally attending to our own healing or practicing a healing ethic, we unnecessarily limit what it is we can do.”[i] They go on to suggest, “As we attempt to reconfigure the world where it has been unjust and where our systems and beliefs have hurt us, so must we transform ourselves, our values, our cultures, our actions, and our spirits.”[ii]

Friends, Lent is a season of self-examination and preparation. The intent of this season is not self-punishment. It is not about denigrating ourselves. The reminder of our mortality on this day is not meant to make us see ourselves as unworthy, as inconsequential, as specimens of nothingness. Rather, the ashes we will bear on our foreheads are an invitation – an invitation to remember the limits of our finitude, to remember our dependence upon God alone. Today stands as an invitation to self-examination through disciplines that open us to the places we need healing so that we might be prepared to receive once again the transformation of new life.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

I was attending Seattle Pacific Seminary in 2014. This was the year that a gunman entered a building on campus and opened fire, killing one person and injuring two others. The incident rocked our community. Finals were cancelled, classrooms turned into prayer chapels, vigils were organized. Death stood at our door, and we had to find some way of navigating the shock, the grief, the trauma of violent loss – loss of life, loss of safety, loss of certainty. During one of the vigils held in the week following the shooting, I sat inside First Free Methodist church and listened to the prayers of the pastor as I thought about death, about the fragility of life, about how the tragic loss of such young lives – both there at SPU and across our nation – exposes the importance of community, of connection, of belonging. As the pastor finished his prayer, the worship team got into place and began playing the song “Beautiful Things” by Gungor[iii]:

All this pain

I wonder if I′ll ever find my way?
I wonder if my life could really change at all?
All this Earth
Could all that is lost ever be found?
Could a garden come up from this ground at all?

You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of the dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Let us embrace this reminder today as an invitation. Yes, it is a solemn invitation and the journey upon which we are embarking today is a solemn journey. But it is an invitation and journey into the very life-giving embrace of a God who meets us where we are, who desires to bring us healing, and whose Spirit transforms us into the likeness of Jesus Christ. Let us accept this invitation by engaging in practices of giving, prayer, and fasting – not as techniques to make us more spiritual, not as outward acts of piety, but as tools in the hands of a God who desires to heal us and to renew within us the life we have been given. Let us embrace the disciplines of self-examination and preparation as the means God uses to make beautiful things out of the dust!

Let me end by sharing with you a poem by Jan Richardson called “Blessing the Dust.”

Blessing the Dust by Jan Richardson[i]

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.

[i] Hemphill, Prentis. What it Takes to Heal. P. 26

[ii] P. 27

[iii] https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Gungor/Beautiful-Things

[iv] https://paintedprayerbook.com/2013/02/08/ash-wednesday-blessing-the-dust/