Ash Wednesday
Texts: Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21;
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; 2 Cor 5:20b-6:10
REFRAMING ASH WEDNESDAY AND THE LENTEN JOURNEY
I need to be honest. I’m not really in the mood for observing Ash Wednesday. In fact, full disclosure is that Ash Wednesday has long been my least favorite day in the Church Year. And in recent years, if anything, my mood has lessened for a couple reasons. One is that, as I age, I don’t really need a day to be more aware of my mortality. My body is cluing me in on that on a daily basis! More aches and pains. Parts of the body that decline in their functioning. No, I don’t need a special day in the Church Year to be reminded of my mortality.
But another reason involves what I’ve always felt is an over-focusing on personal sinfulness. We all need to be aware of our personal sins, of course, but I’m talking about an over-focus on them to the point that we see our situation as irreversible. I’ve talked about this before1 — namely, that Lutheran theology has seemed to give up on sanctification, that we can actually become better people, that we can actually be part of the solution to sin and not just a problem.
My experience of this has become even more pronounced in the current climate of rising Christian Nationalism. I don’t really need to be told to do a whole lot of repentance or self-examination this year. I look around, and, frankly, I’m not the problem. I know that the church won’t like to hear me say that, but that’s the truth. I’m not the problem. The problem is the systems and structures in which we live have given rise to horrible sin and evil. And I have spent so much of my energy trying to stop that in the last few years and especially in the last 15 months. I’m not the problem. I definitely don’t need to be told that I’m the problem right now with the fact that the world is full of sin and evil. No, I’m trying to be part of the solution. I’m part of the love that is coming forth from the heart of my own faith and saying no to the evil. Ash Wednesday just seems ridiculous to me this year. Absolutely ridiculous. I’m kind of mad at it, to be honest.
And so I’ve been thinking about how in the world to reframe it. And that’s when I started reading Diana Butler Bass again, who I featured in my sermon on Sunday. You might remember I mentioned she’s an historian. She also is sharing some of my same feelings about Ash Wednesday.2 So I was glad to read about her reframing it as an historian.
When our Lutheran liturgy speaks of using ashes on the forehead, it gives you the impression that on the very first year after Jesus died, people went to a church and got ashes on their forehead. That did not happen. It was something that didn’t begin to develop until the third and fourth centuries. And the first practice of it was predictably imperialistic. Ashes on the forehead marked only a minority of church members. It marked only the supposed worst of sinners, those who the church deemed to need extra repentance in order to fully rejoin the church community. Empires are constantly finding ways of marking who’s in and who’s out. Placing ashes on only some people’s foreheads on Ash Wednesday was one of those ways.
Over the next 500 years or so it slowly became a practice undertaken by everyone, so it didn’t really become the common practice in the Western church until about the year 1000, when the church was in full-blown Christendom mode. So, as someone suspicious of the church in alliance with Empire, I might ask: is the overfocus on personal sinfulness and penitence part of a strategy to have us overlook the evil being done in the name of both Christ and Empire? We’re kept so busy obsessed with our own personal sins that we never become aware of the nationalistic sins being done in Christ’s name — sins, it should be said, that we are called to oppose. Well, for centuries we’ve been woefully remiss in opposing them. Is it because the Christendom church has successfully gotten us to overfocus on our personal sense of sinfulness? In this current climate of nationalistic evil, I need to not focus so much on how I’m personally the problem but rather on how I might be part of the solution. I believe that that’s more faithful to Christian piety in the first centuries of the church, when Jesus, the apostles, and the early Christians were putting their lives on the line to nonviolently resist the evils of empire.
Let’s take a look at today’s readings. Today’s Gospel Reading from Matthew 6 follows immediately after the breathtaking moments in the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus is teaching us the way of turning the other cheek and loving our enemies. The last verse of Matthew 5 reads, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt 5:48). Perfect! We can never hope to be perfect as our heavenly Father if we’re overfocused on our sin. Instead, we need to learn the proper humility of pieties that can lead us into focusing on God’s loving forgiveness empowering us to seek God’s reign above all else. If we treasure the coming of God’s loving reign coming into the world, then that’s where our hearts will be, too.
In our Second Reading, Paul calls us to seize the day! The time of salvation is now! Paul is not even remotely calling us to navel-gaze upon our own sins. He’s calling us to join the nonviolent fight for God’s saving reign that’s coming into the world right now. He uses his own ministry as an example. He sets forth this terrible list of hardships he endures, not as punishment for his sins, but rather because in the Holy Spirit he is able to live by values of God’s reign in the midst of oppressive human reigns.
He gives a second list, this time fruits of the Spirit, so that he is able to live, “in purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God.” What does this get him in a world still dominated by nationalistic reigns? It gets him the paradoxical third list of being “treated as impostors and yet are true, as unknown and yet are well known, as dying and look — we are alive, as punished and yet not killed, as sorrowful yet always rejoicing, as poor yet making many rich, as having nothing and yet possessing everything.” Paul is calling us to trust in the power of the Holy Spirit to help us live in ways that seek the coming God’s reign — in the face of considerable resistance. He’s not focused on his own sin as the problem. He’s focused on living in the Spirit in such a way as to be part of the solution. The salvation of God’s reign is underway! Let’s be part of it today!
Another aspect of Diana Butler Bass’s reframing Ash Wednesday historically is to point out that portions of the Christian traditions have never observed Ash Wednesday. The Eastern Orthodox traditions do observe Lent. Their season of Lent has begun already on what they call Clean Monday. Lent is a time of purification, of getting ready to greet the Risen Lord on Easter. It includes things like flying a kite rather than placing ashes on one’s forehead.
So here’s my proposal for Lent. After Matthew’s story of Jesus triumphing over temptation in the First Sunday of Lent, the Gospel Readings in the last four Sundays of Lent are from the Gospel of John, climaxing with the raising of Lazarus in John 11. I plan to use this book [holding it up] as a guide for our Lenten Journey.3 It proposes the story of raising Lazarus as a peak moment in John’s Gospel before it climaxes in the cross and resurrection.
It’s by peace activist John Dear, a person who does what I’ve been talking about the past couple weeks.4 He takes the Sermon on the Mount as his chief guide in living his call to follow the teaching of Jesus. The title gives the focus to the story of John 11: Lazarus, Come Forth is the title. But the subtitle describes how I plan to frame our Lenten journey which we begin today. The subtitle is, How Jesus Confronts the Culture of Death and Invites Us into the New Life of Peace. I reframe the sign of the cross in ashes on my forehead not as a reminder of my own mortality, but as a reminder of how I have participated in human cultures based on death. But then also that the God of life in Jesus is calling me to stand against those cultures, inviting friends and neighbors to come out into God’s new reign of peace and life. Here. Today. “Look, now is the acceptable time; look, now is the day of salvation!” Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, February 18, 2026
Notes
1. See, for example, the sermons the last two sermons for Lent 3: Lent 3B (2024) and Lent 3C (2025).
2. Much of my sermon is inspired by, and borrows from, Diana Butler Bass’s “Lent Begins: Go Fly a Kite,” from her Substack space “The Cottage”: https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/lent-begins-go-fly-a-kite
3. John Dear, Lazarus, Come Forth: How Jesus Confronts the Culture of Death and Invites Us into the New Life of Peace (Orbis Books, 2011).
4. See especially the sermon from ten days ago for Epiphany 5A.
