Ash Wednesday 2025

​There are a lot of clergy and church people among my in-person friends and my Facebook friends, and this week I’ve noticed a lot of them sharing the same meme, which says, “This Lent, keep the chocolate and give up Bigotry, Judgement, Misogyny, Hatred, Bias, & Divisiveness.  Love God, Love your neighbour. No exceptions!”  In theory, this sounds wonderful!  Nobody cares whether you eat chocolate or not, and what we need to deal with are the big harmful sins that are causing so much damage in the world.  I get it.  I’m sympathetic to it in a lot of ways.

​The problem is with putting it into practice.  I could decide, with all the best intentions, that I’m going to give up Judgement for Lent, but before I know it, bing! A judgmental thought has popped into my head. It could be toward anything: a relative, someone who might be lying, someone critical, someone saying something I disagree with on the internet, and politics—don’t get me started.   I could decide, with the purest of ideals, that I’m going to give up Hatred for Lent, but it doesn’t take long before one of those grumpy little hatreds pops up.  I could decide, with the noblest of aspirations, to give up Divisiveness, except that there’s no way to know for sure exactly where the line is between being divisive and speaking up for what’s right, because everyone disagrees about what’s divisive.  It seems like I could decide to give up Misogyny for Lent, with great conviction since I’m a woman, but if I wasn’t a misogynist before, then I’m not really giving anything up during Lent.  And since I’ve grown up in a world with all sorts of unfair expectations about women’s looks, and parenting roles, and access to power, and emotions, I too have absorbed expectations with some misogyny mixed in.  I could decide to give up Bigotry and Bias for Lent, with high-minded goals, but biased assumptions and bigoted attitudes slip into my reactions without my noticing them.  

​While I’m a big fan of Love God, Love your neighbour, and I preach on it often, I do not manage to love God with all my heart and all my soul and all my mind and all my strength for even one day, let alone 40 days.  And my neighbours sometimes get on my nerves.  

​My point here is that there are a lot of sins we humans simply are not capable of giving up, even though we wish we could.  They just keep popping into our heads, or popping into our hearts, or popping into our reactions before we’ve had time to make a conscious choice.  I don’t mean that we should stop trying.  It’s valuable to try to do what we can.  Still, even when we try very hard, we are fallible creatures, and we always need God’s mercy, and we will continue to need God’s mercy throughout our earthly lives.  Ash Wednesday reminds us that this is part of the human condition, and it’s good to remember that when we are mired in our own self-recrimination or shame or guilt.  Ash Wednesday reminds us that this is part of the human condition, and it’s good to remember that when our response to our neighbours’ sins is that we think uncharitable thoughts.  

​And when we go a little deeper, what Ash Wednesday reminds us of is not simply the human condition.  Ash Wednesday, like the good news of Jesus Christ, reminds us of the divine condition.  The divine condition is that Jesus is merciful.  The divine condition is that God is eager to have mercy, like the father who goes out hoping to see the prodigal son come home, like the shepherd who goes out in search of the lost sheep, like the woman who’s searching for her lost coin with so much devotion that she’s willing to do any amount of housework to find it.  It is God’s joy to forgive you.  There are angels rejoicing in heaven when one sinner repents.  

​There are things we can choose to do or not do during Lent, and our liturgy invites us all to “observe a holy Lent by self-examination, penitence, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, and by reading and meditating on the word of God.”  You can choose to do this in whatever way ishelpful for you.  You may choose to give up chocolate or alcohol or Facebook.  You may choose to read a spiritual book or to add a new form of prayer.  You may add a daily Bible reading or a daily time to look honestly at where you have fallen short that day and confess that to God.  You may take the money you normally spend on something non-essential and give it to the poorinstead.  These are practices that are doable.  They are very often helpful, and I encourage them.  

​Still, even the good we do is not immune to temptations of its own.  As our passage from Isaiah and our passage from Matthew teach us, there is the tendency for a sense of superiority over other people to pop up even in our attempts to be closer to God, even in our religious practices, the sense that we are more spiritual than other people, or morally superior, or better Christians.  When our neighbours’ sins are really obvious, the sense of superiority is immediate.  When our neighbour’s sins are really big and visible, our own sins can hide behind them so much more easily.  But our neighbours’ sins do not change the fact that our own sins are still there.  We want to look better than them, to ourselves, and in the eyes of others.  This sense of superiority turns out to be the sin of pride.  It involves looking at someone else as less than. It pops up faster than we can catch it, because we sin just like everybody else.  It is why Jesus is willing to be crucified not only for those whose sins are obvious and well-known, but Jesus is willing to be crucified for all of us whose sins are hidden, often even hidden from ourselves.  They are not hidden from Jesus, who sees everything about us that we don’t want to see, and loves us still.  Jesus welcomes us and embraces us and rejoices in us like a precious coin, a valuable sheep, a cherished son.  We can bring all of who we are to Jesus, the good, the bad, and the ugly.  We can confess, and receive God’s mercy.  Even when we fail at giving up our sins, even when we fail to love God and love our neighbours, the good news of the Gospel is that God loves you.  No exceptions.