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In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

            Ash Wednesday is kind of a confused thing. It’s two different things coming together in one day. Ashes is, of course, one of the things. Daniel, Job, and the people of Ninevah all use ashes with rough sackcloth as symbols of their repentance. They fast and pray and cry out to God in the recognition of their sin and unworthiness.

So ashes is one thing, but when the ashes are applied to your forehead, we don’t say “you are ash and to ash you will return.” Instead, the words are “you are dust and to dust you shall return.” I suppose, then, we could say, “ashes, ashes, we all fall down.” Because that’s what happens: everyone dies. God forms Adam from the dust of the earth, Adam sins, and God says, you will return to the dust, because out of it you were taken. Solomon in Ecclesiastes 3 knows it: everyone dies; “All are from the dust, and to dust all return” (3:20).

That is the fundamental point of those ashes on your head, that you will die. Ashes aren’t fun or nice or happy or glittery, because death is none of those things. And death marks out for us the fundamental limits to our attempts to recreate ourselves, or exercise complete independence, or the idea that anything is okay as long as you’re not “hurting” anyone else. Death is something that has gone completely out of style, because it no longer confronts us the way it did some previous generations. We prefer to keep it as far away as possible from our consciousness. But here it is, in black and gray on your forehead and on the foreheads of those around you: memento mori, remember that you will die.

So why would you allow me to do that, to put those ashes on your head? Why would you come here and let some guy in funny clothes tell you that you’re going to die? Now, of course it’s possible that you don’t know why you let me do that. Maybe because everyone else was doing it. Maybe because you’ve done it a lot of times before. Or maybe you’ve dealt with death in your family or among your friends; maybe you’ve been confronted with it, and you can’t avoid it by pretending it doesn’t exist; or, maybe, you’ve thought about dying because of how things are, or because they never seem to get better, or you just don’t know how you’re going to deal with the burdens you’re bearing on your shoulders.

Death, in all its forms, is because of sin. It may be your sin, or someone else’s sin; it may be the sin that entangles you like vines, and trips you at every turn. Though it’s just as out of style and unpopular to talk about sin as it is to talk about death—even in some churches—I know that everyone is a sinner because everyone dies. The only exceptions have been at God’s discretion, with Enoch and Elijah. But that’s it. No escape from death, and there never will be, regardless of what the futurists tell you. The death rate is holding steady at 100%. And you can feel the constraints. You cannot do anything you want to do. You feel the bondage and the lack of freedom, even though everyone is telling you you’re free. And what’s more, when you exercise the so-called freedom, you feel nothing but emptiness. It’s a joke and a false promise. The limit of death as it daily saps our vitality is unavoidable and unyielding.

And God knows it. Look, the man has become like one of Us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken (Genesis 3:22-23). Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language so that they may not understand one another’s speech (Genesis 11:6-7). The limit is not in front of you, but behind you. But there is no going back. God has made sure of it, because He does not want you to live forever like this. As evil as death is, not dying would be worse.

Since death belongs to sin, and the knowledge of good and evil is the sign that we refuse to be satisfied by the good and eternal gifts of God, only the One who does not know sin can undo the attempt to live forever without God, which is impossible. Only the one who cannot die can die and undo death. He does it by entering the sin-filled and dying creation, which He made, but which refused to thank and praise, serve and obey Him. He does it by taking on flesh that can die, but which, like Adam without sin, would not. What then? If His works are not sin, then death will not pay out its wages. So the one who did not know sin was made sin for us. All sin. Every evil thought, every evil word, every evil action. Every time you’ve put your trust anywhere but in God. Every thought where you’ve despised another human being, created by God. Every word you’ve spoken, dripping with bitterness or venom or hate. Every action where you thought of yourself before everyone else, and let others fend for themselves. Things that other people know, because they’ve been wounded by you; and things that no one knows, because you nurture them in the darkness of your room, or the darkness of your mind. Jesus was made all of it. And He was made that on the cross because the curse of the Law pays out death only to sinners. If He didn’t just overlook sin, or excuse it, or pretend it’s all good, but was made sin, and because of it, He might as well be the only sinner who ever lived. That death on the cross was not like our death, because it was all death. He didn’t sin or acknowledge a general idea of sin; God made Him sin. Everyone who is hanged on a tree is cursed of God. And so with all sin, Jesus died all death. He went to the unavoidable and unyielding limit of all human life as a man—and He broke it open. Even that death is nothing for us if He stayed dead. If He met the limit of all humanity and it swallowed Him up the way it swallows everyone, His death is irrelevant, and we are wasting our time here. Then the ashes on your head are just a grim reminder of what everyone already knows.

But we don’t put ashes on our heads simply to remind us that we will die, but to remind us that we have died in Jesus. He was made sin not because it’s a good reminder, or because He wanted to set a good example for how we should live in this world. In that case, we might as well be Stoics or Buddhists. He was raised from the dead so that He might give us that death and resurrection in place of our death; and give us the righteousness of God instead of our sin. So ashes are fine, but they’re just a symbol. What you and I need is something more than a symbol; we need the life of God to be given back to us by a new and greater Adam. And that’s what He gives us: don’t you know that whoever has been baptized into Christ Jesus has been baptized into His death? You were buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised with Him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised Him from the dead. You were dead, but God raised you together with Him, having forgiven you all your sins. Canceled, done, dead, buried.

So the cross of ash bears witness that you—and everyone else, for that matter—will die. But there is a better cross with which you’ve been marked, and it’s not just a symbol: baptized into the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, you’ve been marked with the cross of Christ, the crucified one, and it is the seed of your resurrection. It contains the entire plant: tree, branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit. We just haven’t seen it yet. The more important thing today is not that you will die, but that you have died with Christ, and if you have died with Him in a death like His, then you will certainly be raised with Him in a resurrection like His.

So go home and wash off the ashes. Death is defeated. We are dust and ashes, but in Jesus, dust and ashes have been joined to the God and Creator of all things. Make the sign of the holy cross, and remind yourself: I belong to that Jesus, the crucified and resurrected one; now, tomorrow, every day of Lent, and always, until this Lenten life comes to its end in the limit set for it by Christ’s death, and we are brought past that broken limit of death into resurrection, new creation, and eternal life.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7, ESV). Amen.

– Pr. Timothy Winterstein, 2/17/26