"In a couple of weeks we will mark a Christian holiday called Ash Wednesday. For some of you this might be a new experience. For others, it might be deeply familiar. But whether this is new for you or a long-established habit, Ash Wednesday confronts us with a truth we have worked hard to forget. “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
It’s a stark and sobering reminder. And we don’t only hear these Biblical words, we feel them. We experience them as they are marked onto us in the sign of an ashen cross on our foreheads. Our mortal bodies are marked with the sign of Jesus’s cross. And it’s a reminder of a truth that our hearts so deeply need.
We need it because some of us are sick and dying, and we need to know that Jesus has gone ahead of us. We need it because it helps us make sense of the ridiculousness and tragedy of the world around us. We need it because it reminds us to live for the eternity that lasts and not for the trivia that fades. We need it to remind us that earthly power is so often corrupt, but God’s power is infinitely different and greater. In this and many other ways the Holy Spirit applies the truth of the cross to each of us individually, applying the same profound truth to each different moment of need in each of our hearts.
We need this reminder because we never really do forget. Our mortality and deep need will not always be at the front of our minds, but the ache is always there. And Ash Wednesday speaks to us with merciful candor. The crosses on our foreheads are there to name the problem we know we have. But crosses are not just crosses. They are Jesus’s empty cross. They are the sign of the death which has been put to death, so that life might triumph and go on forever and ever and ever." Senior Pastor Steve Turnbull, Upper Arlington Lutheran Church, Feb. 5, 2026.
I will be rereading this many times.
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