Ash Wednesday 2026

Sermon: Ash Wednesday 2026

Texts: 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10, Matthew 6:1-6,16-21

Grace, Peace, and Mercy from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

One of the greatest advice my pastor, the Rev. Robin Lütjohann, taught me while I was learning how to lead worship was to remember that when I’m up here, when anyone is up here really doing any part of the liturgy, to remember that “it’s church, not theater or performance”. How freeing were those words that reframed the whole dynamic of standing in front of you all, not as an act where I’m being judged, but as a place where we can be ourselves together and instead be led towards God, to focus on God. Which includes me as the pastor to not focus on how I look, or how perfect I say things, or trying very hard to not commit the inevitable faux pas so I don’t feel embarrassed, but to earnestly be with all of you focusing on Jesus, for He is the reason we are all here together.

Such is the instruction that Jesus gives to His disciples for our gospel reading this Ash Wednesday: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before others in order to be seen by them”. Interesting enough, the Greek word used by the gospel writer in this phrase referring to “in order to be seen” is theathenai (θεαθῆναι), the root for the word “theater”. Jesus is warning of making the practice of your faith an act of theatrical spectacle, a play you do for the spectators in the bleachers. Let your faith, Jesus says, be a genuine disposition that is rooted stronger in your hidden moments, extending then to your public witness. When faith is theater, it becomes difficult for such faith to be authentic. When faith is theater the unimportant factors take precedence over the essentials. An actor plays a part, he can portray verisimilar

feeling and action, but the actor can never be the person they portray. They inevitably will leave behind their role to assume who they actually are. Thus is the same with faith. Live, explore, inhabit your faith to the very root of your existence, the place where it belongs. Be faithful, be righteous, be loving, be merciful, be prayerful. But do not be these things so that the world may praise you. Do not be these things in a transactional and theatrical way, do not be these things in order that your ego may be exalted. Be faithful because it is right. Be these things because they’re the good life itself. A good and faithful life does not need the spectators to confirm it’s validity. It acts in the same way a tree stands in a forest. It stands where it is rooted, it cannot be anything other than what it is, it will exist there for the glory of God even if no human eye sets its gaze upon it. As Christ followers, if we are rooted in Christ, then we also cannot help be anything other than what God has made us to be in Christ. As the tree that silently lives among the forest with no sense of shame or discomfort in hiddenness among the many, we are called to such a life lived in love and faithfulness to God, existing for the simple glory of being who we are called to be. God Himself hides in the hiddenness of those not seen by spectators. Perhaps in an age of social media and ravenous amusement, we need this message from Jesus that commands us to live faithfully in those spaces of our lives where no eye has seen nor ear has heard. The temptation is right there where we are pulled to sell and monetize our image, where everything becomes spectacle, even our most simple and basic acts of charity. In our age they have become almost a necessity, but I think Jesus is trying to safeguard us from the temptation’s grasp, reminding us that our charity and our faith

cannot exist for the image, it cannot exist for the spectacle, it must be an ingrained habit, something that becomes part of our lives as roots are to trees.

This week I had the chance to see the film Train Dreams, based on a novella by the American author Denis Johnson. It is the film about the quiet and hard life of a man named Robert Grainier, who mainly worked as a logger in the pioneering days in the Pacific Northwest. He accrues meaningful treasures in the earth, a loving wife, a beautiful daughter, and the house they both built. However, after coming back from one of his months-long working season, he comes back to the death of his whole treasure, a great fire had ravaged his land. He was like Job, a man from whom every treasure on earth was taken away. He spent the rest of his life trying to understand the outcome of this loss. What did it all mean for him to suffer loss this way? He became a kind of well-meaning hermit who did odd jobs on the side. He was sequestered by his grief and his long wait for an existential answer. In the 1960’s, an older man already, he ventures one day to the city from his forest hermitage. He finds how the world has changed, his place in it as well. He contributed to this strange developed world, but also was left behind by it, his whole love and grief unrecognized by the world. Nonetheless, his whole life and grief was a part. Or he played his part, although the world did not witness it. The film concludes with him trying out the miracle of flight on a plane, and his sense of what is up or down is disoriented, he sees the world from above, and then receives a kind of spiritual insight to his whole life-ordeal. A kind of peaceful acceptance of everything that was, is, and will be. The gift of having loved, being loved, of even having grieved, and understanding himself to be part of the greater whole, both in his living and his dying. No one witnessed his death,

no one exalted the life of Robert, there was no spectacle to his goodness and dedication. Yet his life was just as glorious, if not more, than as the most renowned. Nothing of the Earth’s God-given glory was lost to him. He was part of it.

To accrue treasure in heaven, perhaps looks something like Grainier’s insight. To see oneself rightly in the gaze of God, to put everything under the God-perspective. One begins to see that when we put our treasure in God’s hands, to seek what is eternal, then God will allow us to see the value of what is finite. For we do not strive in a frantic way for what is perishable, we see it as a gift. And the gift comes from God, in whom all things have their worth and sacred dignity. In God, we do not measure the perishable things for which is more worthy. We measure them according to their unique value in the wholeness of God’s Creation. So we can be all good things genuinely. We can aspire to goodness as a fruit in itself, without having to figure out some kind of utilitarian value for it. We can say like the character in the film, Arn Peeples: “It’s beautiful. All of it.” Because it all exists not for theater, but to be what God called it to be: beautiful, all of it. Because it just is, by God’s grace.

So as we ponder the meaning of Ash Wednesday and the beginning of our Lenten journey, let us not reflect upon it as something grim. The ashes and the spiritual disciplines of Lent are there to remind us to make space for the reality of God, which in turn defines the reality of our lives. It is to disabuse us of the many illusions our society constructs, and instead focus on the true things that matter, to make space for the kind of life that respects the inherent sacred dignity with which we were created, no matter which spectator, or none, might be around. As the Apostle Paul wrote in his 2nd Letter to the Corinthians: “Be reconciled to Christ…Look, now is the acceptable

time; look, now is the day of salvation!” Now is the time we can begin to understand our place in God’s world; now is the time we can cultivate the habits of our liberation from sin and the things that separate us from the oppressed; now is the time we can make space in the soil of our hearts and plant the love of God, for it to take root in our lives; now is the day we can begin, as Pope Leo XIV suggested, to “disarm our language, avoiding harsh words and rash judgement, refraining from slander and speaking ill of those who are not present and cannot defend themselves.” Now is the day to heed the prophet Joel: “Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love”. Let us then pray with confidence for a fruitful Lenten journey as we abstain from those things that separate us from not only from our true life, but especially from the one who gives it ultimate meaning: God, the Giver of Life. Let us pray: