Ash Wednesday, 2025

Having spent several years of my priesthood serving as a hospital chaplain — caring for patients, families, and staff as they confront the frailties of our human nature — there are certain faces I will never forget.

One was a woman about my age who had lived her entire life with a serious, life-limiting illness. From childhood she had been told to expect an early death. Mortality was never theoretical for her. It was always there.

And yet she loved life.

Despite her limitations, she earned a bachelor’s degree. She worked in a professional career for as long as she was able. She traveled. She had what seemed like an army of friends. Somehow, when her body allowed it, she even went skiing. And she loved intricate, colorful tattoos — each one layered with meaning.

On the back of her hands she had two phrases.

On her left hand, in Gothic script: Memento mori.

Remember death.

On her right hand: Memento vivere.

Remember to live.

She had been told all her life to prepare for death. And yet she refused to waste the life she had been given. She understood something many of us spend years avoiding: life is a gift. However long or short it may be, it is not to be squandered.

In the burial office in the Book of Common Prayer, we hear the stark words: “In the midst of life we are in death.”

Ash Wednesday asks us to face that reality honestly.

But I think it is also true — and just as necessary to say — that in the midst of death there is life.

In a few moments, I will invite you to come forward. I will mark you with the sign of the Cross in ash and say, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Those words are not meant to terrify us. They are meant to ground us.

They remind us that our lives are fragile. That we are not self-sustaining. That everything we have, even our next breath, is gift.

Genesis tells us that God formed Adam from the dust of the earth and breathed into him the breath of life. Our existence — then and now — depends entirely upon the love of the God who created us and continues to sustain us.

That we are here at all is not inevitable. It is grace.

And more than that: the same God who breathed life into dust has breathed new life into us through Jesus Christ. Out of the dust and ashes of our sin and mortality, Christ recreates us. In the midst of death, he brings life.

This past year has confronted many of us with loss in ways that feel immediate and personal. We do not need much help remembering death.

But we do need to remember that death does not have the last word.

Our deaths have been redeemed. The One who formed us from dust has entered into our dust, and from it has brought forth resurrection.

Lent is about return.

It is not about impressing God. It is not about religious performance. It is not spiritual self-improvement.

It is about turning back to the God who made us and who loves us.

Saint Augustine spoke of the “interior life” — the hidden life of the soul. Lent invites us there. Into the quiet place where our true loves are revealed. Into the place where we learn again to depend upon God.

We fast not to earn something, but as an offering of love. We pray not to prove ourselves, but to return our hearts to the One who first loved us.

In the General Thanksgiving we pray:

“We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ…”

That is what we are doing tonight.

We bless God for creating us from dust.

We bless God for sustaining us in this fragile life.

And above all, we bless God for redeeming us through Jesus Christ.

So tonight we remember.

We remember that we are dust.

We remember that we will die.

And we remember that life itself is a gift.

We remember death.

And we remember to live.

And we return — in gratitude and trust — to the God who gives us both.