Ashes and Oil
Sermon — February 18, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings
Our preparations for Ash Wednesday really begin on Palm Sunday, when we wave green fronds and leafy branches and sing the ancient song of longing and hope for the arrival of the Messiah: “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord—Hosanna in the highest!” “Hosanna,” we say on Palm Sunday, which means in Aramaic: “Save us!” and we certainly need saving. The palms symbolize the hope of salvation: the hope that maybe this year, the Messiah will set things straight. Maybe this year, we’ll see God’s kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven. Maybe this year, we’ll see the dawn of a new world of justice and peace. Maybe this year, Christ will deliver us once and for all “us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.”
Eleven months later, our palms are mostly forgotten. We’ve stashed them in the junk drawer, or on a sacristy shelf. They are dry, and yellow, and crackling. And in the days before Ash Wednesday, we take the last remnants of our palms, and we gather them together in a bowl. We set them on fire, and light a match, and we watch our Palm Sunday hopes for a better world burn down to ash once more.
There are no smooth factory ashes here. No finely ground black powder in a bag sent in the mail from Almy Church Supplies. These are the real deal: gritty, smoky, burned-up palms, still fresh enough that you can smell the fire. Palms aren’t easy to burn, as any of the kids can tell you who watched me do it after church on Sunday. They’re fibrous. They’re tough. But once they get going, they make quite a smoky blaze, and we mash them up and sift them into a bowl of ash.
These ashes symbolize repentance. Covering your head with ashes was in ancient days a symbol of mourning and penitence, a public and visible sign of humility and prayer. Sometimes too public and too visible, as Jesus would point out, reminding his listeners that what truly mattered was a humble heart, not humbled hair. And the ashes symbolize our mortality: they remind us that, as God said to Adam, we human beings “are dust, and to dust [we] shall return.” (Gen. 3:19) They remind us that we are stitched together from ordinary atoms, and that in the grand molecular scheme of the universe, humans and palms and ashes aren’t so very far apart. Our bodies aren’t made of that much more than dust, and after our deaths, to dust we will return.
We’re not much more than dust, and yet, we are much more. Adam is formed not only from dust, but from the breath of God. Human beings are not only matter, but spirit. And while, from a certain point of view, you could say that all our consciousness and conscience, beauty, ethics, love, and art are nothing but ephemera arising from the collisions of atoms in our brains… the most common phenomena are still miracles that boggle the mind. Right now, networks of neurons are firing in my brain, and they coordinate to tell the muscles in my throat and mouth to flap around with such precision that I shape the air and send it forth in sound waves that then crash onto your ear drums in waves with such specific varied frequencies that you, in turn, can reconstruct precisely what it was I had to say in your own mind—and we do this without thinking, thousands of times a day!? That’s just one difference between me and a bowl of ashes.
Yes, we are dust, and to dust we will return; and yet we are also something so much more.
And so are the ashes, as a matter of fact. I’ll mark your foreheads with the sign of the cross, but dry burned palms just don’t stick on people’s faces without help. And so we mix, into the ashes, a tiny bit of holy oil, the “chrism” with which we mark each person’s forehead after baptism, when we say, “N., you are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ's own for ever.” It only takes a tiny bit of oil to do the trick—not even a whole drop—but it’s essential to the service. The oil binds the ashes together. It helps them keep their form. It infuses them with just a hint of something more—behind the smoke and fire, the scent of incense and oil.
And this is practical, of course: it allows the ashes to keep their form. But it conveys a more important truth as well. We are dust, but we are never only dust. We are mortal, but we’ve been invited to receive immortality. We live imperfect lives in an imperfect world, but there is nothing in this world that can ever separate us from the love of God. At the very moment that we are told that hope is lost, that our dried-up palms of salvation have been burned, that we are dust, and to dust we shall return—we are reminded, once again, that we have been marked as Christ’s own for ever.
And then we go home and soon enough, we wash the ashes off. Perhaps because this is what Jesus says that we should do, so that our fasting “may not be seen by others,” but by God. (Matt. 6:18) Or perhaps simply because this is an evening service, not a morning one, and we don’t want to get ashes in our beds. But sooner or later we wash our ashes off, and even this simple act becomes a symbol of how God’s redeeming love interacts with our frailty and imperfection: the water of Baptism simply washes it all away.
The Ash Wednesday service is a heavy one. It’s somber and sobering. It forces us to reckon with the reality of sin and mortality: with the truth that not one of us has been perfect, this past year; that not one of us will live forever and never see the grave. And yet, at the same time, it’s a service of great relief. Because Ash Wednesday denies despair. Ash Wednesday refuses to tell us we are dust without reminding us that we are sealed with the Holy Spirit. It refuses to let us reckon with our sins without reminding us of God’s unending forgiveness. It asks us to acknowledge the truth that we have fallen short—that we have failed to love God with our whole hearts, and our neighbors as ourselves. But at the very same time, it proclaims that God’s unconditional love is strong enough to look at every one of us in our worst moments, and to see us as we truly are, and to love us and to mark us as Christ’s own, forever. Ash Wednesday is a day of great relief, a reminder that God “is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.” (Joel 2:13) That God “is full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and of great kindness.” (Ps 103:1) And that God’s compassion for us comes, not despite our imperfection, but because of it: “For he himself knows whereof we are made; he remembers that we are but dust.” (Ps 103:14)
