Name: Ash Wednesday at Grace Church: Holy Eucharist with Imposition of Ashes
Start: 2026-02-18T16:00:00-05:00
Location: Grace Lutheran Church, Easton MD

Ash Wednesday at Grace Church: Holy Eucharist with Imposition of Ashes

-There will be music at this liturgy-
From some of the earliest points in written Scripture, we hear of “sackcloth and ashes,” used as symbols of mourning, humiliation, and weakness in time of danger. In Genesis 37, Jacob puts on sackcloth and ashes as he mourns for his son Joseph, whom he thinks is dead. The ashes themselves were the remains of burnt wood – a symbol that the human body is formed from earthen elements and to the earth shall the body return.
In the ninth chapter of Daniel, the prophet turns to God, begging for the Jews to not be taken into captivity in Babylon. “I turned to the Lord God, pleading in earnest prayer, with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes” (Daniel 9:3). Likewise once God’s message has been preached through Jonah to the city of Ninevah, even the king of Ninevah covers himself in uncomfortable sackcloth – a rough, dark goat hair fabric—and ashes as a sign of repentance, or dying to the old way and self.
Jesus makes reference to repenting in sackcloth and ashes in both Luke’s and Matthew’s gospels, saying that if the unrepentant and wicked cities of Tyre and Sidon (himself referencing Ezekiel 26-28) had seen the miracles he had recently performed in Chorazin and Bethsaida they themselves would have, and rightly so, repented in sackcloth and ashes. Chorazin and Bethsaida, however, did not, provoking Jesus’ curse on them: “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida!” (Luke 10:13).

We must remember in this Lenten season what repentance is and what it is not. Repentance is not a mere “sorry” for breaking some rule. We have not repented when we are simply sorry for telling a lie, spreading gossip, or hurting another person. Repentance means a complete turnaround. During Advent, we heard of John the Baptist baptize people for repentance, and the word used in Mark 1:4 is μετάνοια (metanoia), which Treadwell Walden, in his 1896 work The Great Meaning of the Word Metanoia: Lost in the Old Version, Uncovered in the New, describes as a "change of Mind, a change in the trend and action of the whole inner nature, intellectual, affectional and moral." In other words, it is not just about being sorrowful for the ways in which we fail God and our neighbor, but a literal turning away from those things which we allow to draw us into that failure in the first place. We turn from those and turn our hearts back to God.

Early generations of Christians maintained the use of ashes as an outward and tangible sign of inward turnaround, or repentance. Both historians Tertullian (third century) and Eusebius (fourth century) recall persons who were publicly repenting of notorious sin or apostasy did so in ashes, as was prescribed by the Church. By the 700s, a ritual had developed in which a dying person would be laid upon sackcloth and sprinkled with ashes, hearing the words from Genesis 3:19: “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Also by the 700s, the use of ashes to mark the Christian’s Lenten journey of repentance made its way into the official liturgies of the Church. William Saunders, former dean of the Notre Dame Graduate School, in an editorial on the use of ashes reminds us of the words of the Anglo-Saxon priest Aelfric, “"We read in the books both in the Old Law and in the New that the men who repented of their sins bestrewed themselves with ashes and clothed their bodies with sackcloth. Now let us do this little at the beginning of our Lent that we strew ashes upon our heads to signify that we ought to repent of our sins during the Lenten fast."

This Ash Wednesday, February 18th, we gather and continue the ancient tradition of signing ourselves with ashes as a symbol of our turn back to God.