Ash Wednesday Homily: 2026 St. Alfred's Episcopal Church

Ash Wednesday 2026 

The Rev. Dale C. Hathaway

Liturgy of actions

We begin a season of liturgies that convey as much through our actions as through our words. Today is one of two days the Prayer Book stipulates as fast days. Just two days, Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, we’re asked to fast. Some of us will. Some of us won’t.

This beginning to the season of Lent, Ash Wednesday, of course means ashes, ashes on the forhead. We do that even though the gospel reading seems to say, “Don’t do that.”

At the end of Lent we will wave palm branches, branches we could have pruned from our own trees at home. Traditionally on Maundy Thursday we would wash feet, at St. Alfred’s we wash hands, not in private but quite publicly.

One of the illustrations for how powerful our actions can be is a clear memory I have. On an Ash Wednesday more than 40 years ago, my oldest son, then about 3, was so upset by seeing the ashes on people’s foreheads that he immediately walked out of the service.

Each Sunday we eat little pieces of what we call bread – though they don’t look like bread – and we claim that it is the flesh of Jesus. Similarly, wine that tastes like wine, we say is blood.

The things we do are often very strange at first glance.

 Grammar in the invitation

Back in January I read the lessons and liturgy for Ash Wednesday. They were, of course quite familiar to me, but it was a kind of meditative preparation for preaching today. As if in a flash, I had an insight and a breakthrough.

What more could one want? Such “aha moments are just the kind of thing a preacher is trying to bring about among the listeners.” Perhaps to learn something. Perhaps to wrestle with an idea. Perhaps to get a distinctive image. All these are examples of hearing the gospel with new ears.

For over 40 years, every year when I have read that invitation, I felt like there was a grammatical mistake in the text of the Book of Common Prayer.

You may wish to turn to page 4 in your bulletin

We will hear in that invitation that Lent was the time of preparation for baptism. Baptisms then were done at Easter unless there were extenuating circumstances to schedule them some other time. The preparation for baptism included in partiular a time of self examination and repentance.

There we read:

It was also a time when those who, because of notorious sins, had been separated from the body of the faithful were reconciled by penitence and forgiveness, and restored to the fellowship of the Church. Thereby, the whole congregation was put in mind of the message of pardon and absolution set forth in the Gospel of our Savior, and of the need which all Christians continually have to renew their repentance and faith.

I have thought all these years that that there was a missing “comma”, or perhaps too many “commas.” I wondered if, could it be, the Episcopal Church had printed a run-on sentence in the BCP? It sounds like a silly observation of mine, but that’s where the revelation was for me.

Suddenly, when I read this text in January, it was clear to me. I had been mistaken. The commas were correct. If I took out the words between the commas (because of notorious sins) it made perfect sense. The commas were functioning normally.

The source of my aha moment had to do with that phrase – notorious sins – that is the real source of my insight. We suppose that we all know what that would mean: “notorious sins”. But really the word, notorious, is very much in the eye of the beholder. In this audience alone, I am certain that there are a variety of opinions as to what is regarded as notorious.

What was notorious in the year 800 is no doubt different from what it is today. And in these divided times, what one person regards as notorious sin another person might count as courageous or even laudable.

As we look around, our community is broken by many different views of what is notorious. It’s not enough to say what is notorious to you, or me, or any of us individually. We are called to ask what is it that we as a community regard as sin. The call to a Holy Lent for me this year has to do with listening with new ears. Hearing with fresh ears.

 My insight this year:

Taking stock is not a private individual thing. Taking stock is a we thing.

I hear it as directed not only to me personally, but more powerfully directed to us. There is, in fact, no solitary “I” – there is only “We.”

No surprise! We are not alone. John Dunne wrote it centuries ago, "No man is an island, entire of itself, … " We are connected to an uncountable number of other people, past and present, to an impossibly rich and varied set of circumstances and environments.

We are so accustomed to hearing this call to repentance as an inward-turning, individual-oriented call. I am convinced that the call is something different. I am convinced that we need to heed the call with new ears.

The long-standing sense that Christian faith is a solitary, personal, concern is a peculiarly modern sensibility.

The question for us today is not what I individually might think is notorious sin. It is what do we understand as sin. Not me but us.

For a long time our culture has been shifting from we to me. Perhaps more in this country than elsewhere. But across the globe. For centuries, really, there has been an ever-growing importance placed on the individual. The I, at the expense of the we.

Back in the 80’s I heard a marvelous illustration of the shift. (Noel) Paul Stookey – yes, that one from Peter Paul and Mary – introduced his “Wedding Song” with a monologue about how society has moved from “we” to “I”. He used the illustration through a series of publications that we are all familiar with.

• once there was a magazine called Life
• then a new publication People
• then one called Us
• “any day now,” he said, “I expect to find a magazine with the title Me. It would be a bound booklet with aluminum foil pages so you could just look at yourself.”

 Is Politics best kept out of the church?

Some may resist my suggestion that our Lenten self-examination be directed at us and not me. They might say, “Politics should be kept out of church.”

In responding to that sort of claim, one of my mentors from Notre Dame made the distinction between “issues” and “politics”. He said that what most people mean when they say, “Keep politics out of the church,” is something like, “keep political issues out of the church.” Politics is everywhere, he argued – as have many people, myself included. It’s in the church and everwhere there are human beings. As another of my teachers said, “Whenever 2 or 3 are gathered together, there you have politics.” Politics is an essential part of any gathering of people, including the church. Silence is a political statement. Not to look at “we” and instead focus just on “I” is a political decision and action.

Jesus himself was immersed in politics. Jesus died accused of a sin against the state. To the rulers of his day Jesus was clearly perceived as political. Politics is just our human effort to live together.

So the call to self-examination and the keeping of a Holy Lent is, for me, about “we.” Jesus was concerned with individuals to be sure. When he healed a person, for that moment, he was totally focused on him or her. But Jesus was also focused on the whole of creation, on all of humanity within that creation. He was concerned about the whole web of relationships around him. And the web surrounding us is vastly greater than we can possibly imagine.

And we have gone astray, it seems, by focusing so much on the individual and not enough on the community.

 Raising the question

Who is my community? Who is my neighbor?

Is the child in an interment camp any less a neighbor than the widow who lives next door to us? Did Jesus not feed the multitudes without asking first for an ID? Jesus didn’t ask, “Are you of this political party or that one.”

What is my community? Is it St. Alfred’s? Is it just Christians? Jesus looked to his wider world and saw Greeks, Romans, Samaritans, Egyptians, and more. How much more do we look at a world filled with an incredibly rich array of neighbors from countless cultures and languages. We have billions of neighbors where Jesus had maybe a few million.

We have fallen so woefully short in our appreciation of who “we” is. This Lent is a time for taking stock of that.

 What do we seek?

There is a very old tradition, stretching back centuries, of asking those who come seeking baptism, “What do you seek?”

Someone I count as a neighbor, a friend, yet never met, was a Buddhist. He wrote about how Jesus and Buddha were so very similar. Thich Nhat Hanh was his name. He was a Monk, a Poet, and a Peacemaker (1926–2022). He knew that “we” extended far and wide and that we are all neighbors on this planet. He said,

“We don’t need to wish our friends, ‘Peace be with you.’ Peace is already with them. We only need to help them cultivate the habit of touching peace in each moment.”

That is the same Peace that Jesus offers us and each Eucharist we extend to one another. We seek Peace. But that’s not the only thing we seek. We seek Fairness. Three year olds are developing a sense of fairness and they’ll call out a playmate if they’re not being fair. We seek Love to be sure. But as with many of the words we commonly use in church, Love is not easily defined or limited. The love we seek from the creator of all is not the same love I sought from a parent or family member. We seek, in the end Glory. To be in the presence of the creator of all.

To say what that is like, however, could be a life-long project. But I can say quite easily, that for each of the things we seek, we have fallen short. Peace, Fairness, Love, Glory. Whether we look at we as St. Alfred’s, we as a citizen of the US, we as a member of the wealthy class of humans, we as a human being, … we have fallen short.

We will not yet have arrived at the place we seek by the time we are but dust and ashes. Ash Wednesday is a time to put things into perspective.

 Let us trust that it will be sufficient.

I have made a few copies of this prayer available at the back of the church.

Let us pray with Thomas Merton in this Lenten journey that we undertake today:

My Lord God
I have no idea where I am going.
I cannot see the road ahead of me
and I do not know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I know myself,
and the fact that I think I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe
that the desire to please you
does in fact please you.
And I hope
that I have that desire in all that I am doing.

I hope I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this
you will lead me by the right road,
though I may know nothing about it.

Therefore I will trust you always.
Though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death,
I will not fear,
for you are ever with me,
and will never leave me
to face my perils alone.