"Ashes Tell the Truth"
Homily for Ash Wednesday 2026
Well, if you were hoping for a gentle flight into Lent, I got news for you, Ash Wednesday ain’t it. It’s a turbulent jolt, the kind of rough air that keeps the seat belt sign on the whole way. With a smudge on the forehead and words we cannot so easily spiritualize away:
Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Repent, and believe in the Gospel.
By themselves, these words would be too heavy to bear.
And maybe that's the point.
Because the truth is, we already know we are dust. Aren’t we told that in Genesis? Just animated dust into which God has breathed life.
Our bodies know it, too. And the older we get, the more aware we are of it.
Long before theology names it, the body knows it. We all carry wounds. We bear the scars of traumas of many kinds; wounds lodged in muscle and memory, in breath and bone. And history has demonstrated how trauma can be generational.
As Bessel van der Kolk writes, "The body keeps the score."
Boy, does it ever. What we carry in our bodies is history.
In experiential somatic therapy, when we check in, we are asked to name a feeling we are experiencing. But more than that, we have to identify where in our bodies we feel it. You see, feelings don’t merely exist. They take up residence.
You’re anxious? Where do you feel it?
In the chest? The gut? The jaw? The back?
Where do those feelings that pop up in those "dark nights of the soul" reside? Where time meant for rest and renewal is spent spinning in worry or regret. The tightened shoulders. Or when the fight, flight, or freeze response arrives unaware, leaving us to react out of survival rather than responding.
To be sure, our human frame is not the only thing that keeps the score.
The Body of Christ does too. Jesus, the One whose way we follow, bears trauma's scars.
Congregations bear scars.
Institutions do, too.
Maybe even a seminary? I have one in mind!
Communities, like ours, absorb shock and sorrow, bearing the marks of grief and gratitude.
Healing requires telling the truth about what we have carried together. If the body keeps the score, then grace has to go where the score is kept.
That's what Ash Wednesday does.
It doesn't reveal something new.
It tells us what is true. It dares to say out loud what all can see but will not acknowledge.
And it tells that truth in public.
Ash Wednesday brings with it familiar texts for the day: Psalm 51, Joel, 2nd Corinthians, and this reading from Matthew in the heart of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus is forming a community learning to live faithfully under pressure from other influences to do certain things certain ways.
Disciplines like prayer, fasting, and generosity are all means of grace to draw us closer to making real what the “kingdom of heaven” looks like. But with them comes the warning: “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them.”
Turns out, being seen tends to shift something in us, and we start managing what we’re projecting rather than tending to what is happening within us. It’s the difference between being formed and letting performance stand in for the work of the heart.
I wonder if in the Matthew reading, Jesus is asking his own version of “what do you feel?” and “where do you feel it?” When you pray, when you fast, when you give, where is your heart? Where is your attention?
Curious, isn’t it? Given that we're about to line up and receive a mark visible to everyone, what are we to make of that? And in this social media age, it has become common to post pictures of our ashes online; a forehead marked with dust, framed and filtered, offered to the world.
Maybe it's a witness.
And maybe sometimes it is something else.
I suspect Jesus cares little about who sees the ashes. But Lent's question to us is: why do we want them to be seen? Are we bearing a sign of repentance, or are we curating an image of devotion?
And maybe the most honest question is “Can it be both and that be ok?”
Look, being seen is not the same thing as being faithful, as we are reminded in Matthew that we are already seen by the One who knows our hearts.
Faithfulness begins deeper than visibility. It begins in the quiet turning of the heart, in the body, in the mind, before anyone else notices.
Ashes help us tell the truth about that turning.
Ash Wednesday strips away the illusion that faith is about impressing God or one another. These ashes do not flatter or signal achievement or spiritual success.
They level us.
Ashes remind us that we are mortal, vulnerable, and we will never outgrow our need for mercy.
But ashes also proclaim, “You are still here.”
Still breathing. Still loved. Still called.
The church marks us with ashes as a sign of truth and mercy. They remind us that our bodies are fragile and deeply loved.
Ash Wednesday starts Lent by calling us to repentance, turning, reorienting. Telling the truth about where we have been living and where life is actually found.
Joel says, “Return to the Lord your God, for [God] is gracious and merciful.” Paul says, “Now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation.”
Not later. Not once things are fixed. Not when we feel more certain. Return. Now.
Ash Wednesday insists that the spiritual life happens in real time, in our bodies, and in community, carrying real grief and real hope.
And it matters in a particular way for us here, doesn't it?
Because Lent does not arrive in a vacuum at MTS this year. It comes to us in a season where endings, discernment, gratitude, and grief are braided together, and loss, uncertainty, and the ache of unfinished stories feel so heavy.
Ashes have a way of honoring that.
They tell us we do not have to pretend that everything is fine in order to be faithful. Ashes mark our lament as a necessary part of faith's journey. They tell us that fear, anger, and sadness may be the very places where God meets us most truthfully if we have the courage to stay.
Lent pulls us back to what is most true with the words:
“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Ash Wednesday asks us, gently but firmly, What have you been treasuring? What have you been clinging to as if it could save you? What has been asking too much of you?
And what, quietly, has been waiting to be tended, healed? What in our lives is it time to let go of and put down?
Ashes do not answer those questions for us. They simply give us space to sit with them over these forty days to make meaning of them as we pray, fast, give, and listen together in the disciplines of the faith.
We live at a pace that pushes us to hurry, to produce, to perform. Ash Wednesday says,
Stop.
We are shaped by voices that measure our value by success and visibility. Ash Wednesday says,
Remember.
In the words of William Sloane Coffin,
"We are not loved because we have value, we have value because we are loved."
And when we are tempted to numb ourselves or rush toward resolution, Ash Wednesday says,
Stay.
So do not rush past the ashes. Let them tell the truth. Your truth. Our truth. Let them soften what has hardened. Let them help you notice what you have been holding most tightly, what is worth putting down, and what is worth picking up instead.
Let these ashes remind you that your life, finite and wondrous, still matters, and what you do with it still does, too.
Amen.
