Ash Wednesday 2026

Nothing makes you ponder your own mortality more than when sickness comes knocking at your door. This week in caring for my oldest daughter, it has become an endless cycle of refilling iced water, gathering cold packs for her head, delivering food and meds, and of course answering the existential question of “am I gonna die?”

Enter Ash Wednesday. The ashes that we will smear on our foreheads and the mantra “you are but dust, and to dust you shall return” has an answer to that question. After we have eaten our fair share of Valentine’s hearts and king cake, Ash Wednesday comes along and marks the beginning of Lent with a harsh dose of reality, reminding us that we are human, fragile and made with limits. The black ashes across our forehead might as well say “handle with care.”

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

Rev. Allison Burns-LaGreca says this “is not meant to diminish us. It is meant to sober us. To locate us. To remind us that we are mortal, finite, accountable, and that our time here is not infinite. What we do with our days matters. What we tolerate matters. What we normalize matters.” She goes on to say that ashes are not some cosmetic display of our faith. In the Old Testament time and again ashes were a sign of grief, lament, and “a protest against the lie that everything is fine.”

We know all too well that everything isn’t fine. Ash Wednesday doesn’t sugar coat the frailty of human life or the gravity of sin. It doesn’t offer a get holy quick scheme or a 40-day plan to fix all of your problems. The ashes don’t just mark our mortality, but smear our faces with God’s grace. Lent comes not to resolve but to invite. What kind of invitation. Consider the invitation from tonight’s passage.

Jesus is at a dinner party and notices how everyone is vying for the seats of honor. Where you sit at the table reflects where you land on the social scale. Then someone remarks “blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God.” And so Jesus tells this story about the dinner party where the host invites all the well-to-do’s to attend but they all reject the invitation. They all have other things to attend to: land, oxen, and a newlywed. So then the host casts the net wider and invites the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame. Even after all of these poor in, we are told there is still room. And so finally the host cast the net to the far ends of society, to all roads and highways and byways of life , so that the house and the table may be filled.”

This is a radical invitation. Radical inclusion. Radical welcome. Radical comes from the latin word radicalus which means grounded or rooted. Our series for Lent this year is Tell Me Something Good: Grounding ourselves in good news. Tonight as we are invited into Lent we remember the good news that all are invited to God’s table. Not just those you like or deem worthy or who enjoy the presence of your company or who can return the favor. Blessed is “anyone” who will eat bread in the kingdom of heaven. And if the host is going to cast the net far and wide for the table to be filled, then anyone must really mean anyone.

Where do you find yourself in this invitation? Ready to go and invite others? You send your regards but you just can’t make it? Are there certain people you would have trouble inviting to the table? Or do you struggle to sit down in places you don’t feel welcome at? Rev. Sarah Speed was sitting with a young adult who had been visiting church but just wasn’t sure she could really commit to any of it because she said “as a queer person, for most of my life, the gospel has not been presented as good news that includes me.”

“Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God.”

Rev. Dr. Brian Blount says “The season of Lent reminds us that God has extended such an extraordinary welcome. To us. In Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, God, holy beyond all human standing, invited us, in all of our brokenness, into the community of divine presence. Not because we earned a place, but because God created space. Lent offers us the opportunity to remove all the distractions and focus on the invitation.”

This season of Lent, might we remember that we still have good news to share? Is it possible to be people of good news in a world burdened by the weight of bad news? This kind of vision is what early Christians in the Eastern Orthodox churches would practice during Lent. It was a season of preparation for baptism for new converts, a preparation for Easter focused on capturing the true vision and essence of the kingdom of God. In Eastern Orthodox traditions, Lent actually began two days earlier on what was called Clean Monday. They would fast from rich foods, clean their house, and go outside and have a picnic. And then, they wold fly kites, representing lifting their spirits to nature and to the skies. These acts of clean Monday were focused around a full preparation to be face-to-face with God’s community and God’s people. Diana Butler Bass describes the purpose of purification as not to wallow but to wonder, to clear our eyes so we can see the glory of God’s goodness all around us, to feel it and embrace it and let it shine through each one of us. I don’t know about you, but I could handle a kite or two during Lent, or any ritual that grounds me in God’s goodness. What might that look like for you?

Nadia Bolz Weber has a similar hashtag for Lent this year essentially saying 40 days of the good stuff. She says “Perhaps more than anything, I should give up the failed notion that what I read and see on the internet is a complete and accurate depiction of the world—and instead actively look for how beautiful it can be.” Nadia talked about how she resisted this. How she had to make herself notice. Are we any different?

Over the next 40 days, I want us to consider these 4 prompts:

Good news I have heard and received:

Moments when I have enjoyed the goodness of God:

I have shared the good news by:

Everyday rituals that ground me in goodness:

Every day I get a report from Adalyn about her day. I have no idea what she is actually learning half the time, because that isn’t her measurement of a good day. In a child’s eyes, a good day is measured by the quality of your recess. The goodness of the day is measured by whether or not one was invited.

Rev. Sarah Speed wrote a poem about this called The Gospel According to Mrs. Farnell’s pre-K Class. It goes like this:

“In Pre-K the whole class gets an invite to Tommy’s birthday.

He places the paper invites in our cubbies. There’s a helter-skelter sticker

sealing each one, proof that tiny hands did the work. So we,

the members of Mrs. Farnell’s Pre-K class, arrive at the park on Saturday.

We arrive whether or not we’ve ever built a sandcastle with Tommy.

We arrive whether or not we’ve ever shared half of our PB&J at lunch.

We arrive at the park on Saturday, with pigtails and balloons,

because we were invited.

And together we play tag, and we eat birthday cake, and we run barefoot in the grass.

Together, we sing Happy birthday to youuuuuu, so excited we can barely stand still.

Together, we momentarily forget that Chloe never gets picked for Red Rover and that Quinn cried in

class last week, because the park is not the playground and everyone was invited.

And when we load into our cars at the end of the day, with grass-stained knees, chocolate frosting

on our faces, and the awareness of inclusion, we say to our parents, This was the best day of my life.”

Yes, we are mortal and finite creatures. Smeared with reminders of our frailty and God’s limitless grace. But in the meanwhile, might we lift up what is good, might we handle one another with care because life is precious, and might we sit around the table and say again and again “There is still room. There is still room. There is still room.”