Ash Wednesday 2026

As Lent begins again, James preaches on the dust to which we return — and the breath of God that first animated it. A sermon on mortality, mercy, and the strange freedom of knowing how small we are before a God of inexhaustible grace.

Transcript

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And so may I speak in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit? Amen. Have you ever tried to remove snot from a baby's nose? That's my question for this evening. Just in case you didn't hear me, have you ever tried to remove snot from a baby's nose? I have tried quite a few times in the last three years. It's not an enjoyable experience. The thing that you have to realize about babies and toddlers is they auto-generate this stuff at industrial quantities. It's quite extraordinary just how much gunk can come out of a two-year-old or three-year-old's nose. It seems endless at times. And here's the other problem: a baby cannot sniff. Children don't know how to do this. It's extremely difficult for them to do. And so the result is that it all gets stuck up there for hours, days at a time, impossible to remove, and makes it extremely hard for babies to breathe. So parents get given incredible contraptions like this. This is something you can buy at the shops if you so desire. And you stick this end up the baby's nose, and the loving parent has to suck up this tube, and then all the snot gets caught in the middle here, and there's a tiny little piece of foam in the center that hopefully stops it from getting into the parent's mouth. Have I made this evening disgusting enough for you yet? This is my offering to you for Lent this year. What Christ does, what God does in inviting us to a holy Lent is invite us to a series of disciplines and practices that are designed to remove the gunk out of our lives. Now the thing is, we, like toddlers, cannot remove the gunk on our own. And we, like toddlers, will not enjoy the experience of having the gunk removed for us. No toddler thanks their parents for engaging in this contraption. It's in a painful experience for all involved. There's an awful lot of writhing and crying involved. But the end result is a child that can breathe. And the reason we do it is because we love them and we know what's best for them. Jesus starts our gospel reading like this. Beware of practicing your piety before others. That's an extraordinary thing to say. Beware of practicing piety. I thought piety was a good thing. I thought it was good to pray, good to fast, good to give to the poor. But of course, Jesus is not warning us against being too devout. He's reminding us that even the good things that we could do are able to be twisted and tainted by the sin, by the gunk in our lives. Let me offer this evening a definition of sin. Sin is the pervasive residue that we auto-generate at industrial quantities that clings to all of the motives and all of the actions and all of the relationships in our lives. We're so tempted to imagine that sin is describing individual practices or behaviors. That is sinful, or when you did that was sinful, and it's used as a way to condemn certain actions. But a much better definition of sin, I think, is to describe it as the sort of auto-generated gunk that just clogs up every aspect of our life. The consequence being that even the good things we do, we have to beware the way we practice. We have to be careful of the way we do our piety in case it gets twisted and broken and gunked up. Our modern culture doesn't understand this definition of sin, doesn't really understand sinfulness at all. And so it lives in this duality of denial and despair. Either it pretends that there is nothing wrong, that people haven't done anything wrong, it's simply just uh um, you know, people are just naturally good, or it's utterly desparic. There's no way to forgive, just guilt all the way down. People, once they are this defined as bad, are bad completely. And in an alternative vision for either of those two options is the Christian practice of confession, where we stand up and say, to use the language of this evening, I auto-generate gunk too. I am a sinner, I make mistakes, I get things wrong. Even the things I do when I'm trying to be good turn out broken sometimes. And so confession is a practice that happens within communities of truth in the presence of mercy, where each of us get the freedom to say, Yep, me too. I'm part of the problem and I need help. So if you need to say that this evening, I've got good news for you. You're among friends. In a moment, we're about to engage in a symbolic action where we confess to one another the gunk of our lives, and we ask the Holy Spirit to come and remove it. And by the way, as I've been describing sin as this thing that is able to turn even our good things bad, on the opposite side of the coin is God's grace and his mercy and the acts of redemption, where even the broken things in our life can be turned for good in the economy of God. So Jesus in our gospel reading offers us this piercing analysis where he shows how even the good things, even our piety, can be covered in the gunk of sin. So our care for the poor can get mixed up in the pride and the self-congratulations and the moral superiority of caring for other people. In our caring for other people, we can find those motives inside ourselves. Well, Jesus points to our prayer lives and says, you know, even prayer can become performative, it can become like a kind of spiritual theater where carefully curated words are not deep because they're meaningful, but they're flowery because we want to look good. And fasting can become a status symbol, a way of showing how seriously we're taking this thing. And we find ourselves getting proud even about that. Do you feel yourself writhing like my toddlers do in the presence of the gunk extractor? Do you find yourself feeling a bit uncomfortable in your chair? Because the Holy Spirit is trying to do a work in each one of us tonight and through the rest of Lent, inviting us to submit to a process where he clears our airwaves. So, two invitations. Firstly, lean into an uncomfortable Lent this year. Submit yourself to God's cleansing work. It is not an performance, it's not even really self-improvement. This is submitting yourself to God's improvement in your life, consenting to his work of naming the gunk in your life and drawing it out. I hope this will be uncomfortable for you. I invite you this evening, as you're driving home or walking home, to reflect, maybe with the person you came with or on your own, what's the most uncomfortable thing I could do this year to put myself in a place where God can draw out the sin of my life? What's the thing that you're clinging to right now that you say, okay, anything but that? What's the thing that you use to manage the anxiety in your life or to provide you some security that helps you feel safe? The discomfort of Lent isn't the goal, of course, but it's often a symptom that the real problems in our life, the real gunk, is being addressed. So that's my first invitation this evening. Lean into an uncomfortable Lent. And then my second invitation, lean into some radical honesty. And this is where we turn towards the next act in our service as we will come forward and bear ashes on our forehead. You might want to think about that the moment they're about to have like this. You are putting on the outside so that everyone can see, including yourself, the reality that's on the inside all the time that you might be tempted to pretend isn't there. We're going to put some dirt on your forehead. And in so doing, you are saying to yourself and everyone around you, this dirt lives inside me all the time. And I have to bear the consequences of it, and the people in my life have to bear the consequences of it. This is an outward sign of an inward truth. We auto-generate gunk at industrial quantities. And we need someone, we need the Holy Spirit to draw that out of us. So I invite you, secondly, to a lent of radical honesty. Will you say with us? I am not self-made, I am not clean by my own effort, I require God's mercy. Now why? Why would it why would anyone engage in this sort of thing with a toddler? Use this sort of terrible contraption to remove the snot out of their noses. It's the love that comes from a father. And it's for the sake of the child that they might breathe freely again, to live in freedom, to live with less constriction in their heart. And that's why God invites us into Lent. Because He is a father who loves us, who wants us to be fully alive, that we might shine with His glory. Amen.