Sermon for Wednesday, February 18, 2026 || Ash Wednesday || Isaiah 58:1-12

Out of all the feasts and fasts of the church year, Ash Wednesday is the one most liable to be misunderstood. We engage in the (admittedly strange) ritual of scraping soot on our foreheads to remind us of our existential limitations. We participate in this ritual because we humans have the troublesome habit of casting ourselves as the stars in the universal drama of God’s Creation. But the ashes tell a different story: one of transience, of fleetingness. And this makes sense, considering that if the history of the universe were a calendar year, humanity would make its appearance a second before midnight on December 31st.

And yet, we humans persist in centering ourselves in the story of Creation, simply because we have a type of awareness that other creatures don’t have. We might call this tendency “Human Supremacy,” and recognize it is to blame for the environmental catastrophes plaguing our world. Human Supremacy is the collective result of each human acting as if they are the center of the universe. In any given moment, we have to work hard to imagine our way into any other experience other than our own. We spend our whole lives in our own heads, and so we normalize our experience and live our lives as if our experience is the definitive one.

We have to work actively against this self-centeredness in order to embrace the people God created us to be – not those who dominate creation, but those who live within it as part of creation. And this brings us back to the ashes. We participate in the yearly scraping of two lines of soot on our foreheads to place ourselves within, rather than above, the story of creation. We recognize that we are here today and gone tomorrow. Still, in our God’s wonderful divine foolishness, God loves us into being just as God loves all of creation into being. And so the ashes, properly understood, help us to accept our place within God’s story, our place of being loved by God no matter how short a time we appear in the tale.

But remember, I said that Ash Wednesday’s ritual is the most liable to be misunderstood. And that’s because we can draw the wrong lesson from the ashes. We can go forth from this place wearing the ashes proudly on our foreheads, as a sign that we are better than everyone who didn’t get the ashes. We can look down on people who have clean foreheads. We can decide we are holier than others, set apart for a special dose of God’s love.

The challenge here is that drawing this wrong lesson dovetails so perfectly with the human tendency toward self-centeredness. So the ritual of ashes can end up reinforcing the very thing it was designed to counteract. And this is why we read the readings we did today. Our readings today warn us against the self-centered, performative understanding of the ashes.

First among these is Jesus’ warning not to be like the hypocrites who disfigure their faces to show people they are fasting. Their reward is to be seen and celebrated by others, Jesus says, rather than any true change of life that authentic fasting entails. And while Jesus’ warning is stark, it is the reading from the Prophet Isaiah that stands out to me. Isaiah stands in a long line of prophets who level the same critique against the nation of ancient Israel. The prophets accuse their nation of going astray, of eroding the foundations of a just and merciful society in order to enrich themselves. The people still engage in fasting, Isaiah says, but the fast is nothing but a farce because it accomplishes none of the lifechanging behavior of a true fast.

“Look,” Isaiah says,

“you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high.”

The prophet then indicts the people for fasting only in outward display:

“Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?”

You can hear Isaiah’s derision, his anger that a ritual designed to bring people back into right relationship with God and one another had fallen so short of its goal. But he doesn’t stop with derision. Next, Isaiah offers a corrective, and now the prophet’s voice sings with the clarity of God’s justice:

“Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?”

In each of these actions, God invites us to de-center ourselves and lift up those whom we have pushed to the margins. The true fast, then, is not soot on the forehead or abstinence from food (though, properly understood, these can help). The true fast is the conscious practice of self-emptying, of consciously remembering that we only seem like the star of the show because we have normalized our own perspective.

Living into this true fast means reaching beyond ourselves to care about the needs and the rights of others. For example, because I’m a white, English-speaking U.S. citizen, I might not yet be targeted in immigration purges done by an unchecked, militarized arm of the federal government. I might not be on a list to be sent to a so-called “detention center,” which the government is spending $38 billion to build around the country. And yet, the fast that I choose, that God calls us to choose, compels me to stand up and speak out against this abuse of power. As Isaiah says at the beginning of todays’ reading:

“Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet! Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins.”

Our collective sin as a nation is the sin of devaluing the lives of whole swaths of society in order to enrich the lives of the few. If the fast we choose today does not lead us to shout out against this, to shout out and not hold back, then we wear our ashes in vain. Today, join me in wearing your ashes as a sign that we have chosen “to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke.”

And the good news is this: we do not take this stand alone. As the prophet says,

“Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.”

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Banner image: Photo by Zach Lucero on Unsplash.