Davison's Doodle

Ash Wednesday Words: Mark that place

I don’t lead worship or preach very often on Ash Wednesday. One of our congregations seeking a minister asked me to lead their service. It was my honor to be gifted the trust of the pulpit and the ashes. This ritual is a relatively “new” part of my denomination’s expression of Christian faith. Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, (Disciples of Christ) congregations my family attended didn’t do Ash Wednesday. Somewhere in the early ’90s, this historically Catholic tradition found its way into the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). My companion, the cradle Disciple, calls it “ecumenical creep.” So, I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve been called upon to preach and to smudge ashes on people. We read Jan Richardson’s “Blessing of the Dust” before people came forward, and I reminded them, “You are blessed by God. You are dust.” Here is my homily for Ash Wednesday.

Mark That Place
Isaiah 58:1–12 / Matthew 6:1–6, 16–21

In the book A Walk in the Woods, travel writer Bill Bryson returns to America after living in Europe for many years. Restless in his new, old surroundings, he decides to hike the Appalachian Trail — all 2,000 miles of it. Concerned about going alone, he reaches out to friends. The only one who responds is an old high school acquaintance, Stephen: considerably overweight, with a mild drinking problem, who eats only junk food and insists he must eat every hour to prevent seizures.

They buy all the gear they believe they need. Backpacks, tents, sleeping bags, bear repellent, the right boots, the right socks. They study the trail maps. After a final dinner surrounded by other, more convincing-looking hikers, they set out. What follows is a journey full of low points, wrong turns, unexpected beauty, and mountain vistas that neither of them could have found any other way. They don’t hike the whole trail. But they are changed by the part they do. Lent is something like that.

Advent is one end of the Christian trail, which has many entrances and exits. From the first notes of  “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” through the baptismal waters of the Jordan, past temptation and a first miracle, and straight on through to the empty tomb — some Christians sprint from “Silent Night” to “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” without ever slowing down. Lent is one of the side entrances along the Christian trail and journey with Jesus. It’s a path that takes forty days or longer to hike before you reach the main trail.  It’s a choice.  You have to decide to take it.  Not everyone does. Not everyone can.

We live in a GPS world. Our inclination in this busy, fast-paced, social-media-fueled culture is to punch Jerusalem into Google maps and take the fastest route — straight to Hosanna, and to the stone rolled away. Lent is a reminder that a journey with Jesus meanders. We want the certainty of a quick, direct trip, even if it includes a toll called “giving something up.”

The map for this journey has marked trails, arrows, landmarks, bridges, and a few written directions. Places are marked: wells where strangers meet and draw water for one another, waterfront property that becomes a teaching space, dusty roads where Samaritans live out the commandments better than I do. Around the edges of this incomplete map are notes scribbled in the margins — how to avoid sinkholes and dangerous passages, where to find safe shelter, and who the helpers are.

The words of Isaiah are trying to shake us from a comfortable fasting routine. Speaking to the people returning from Babylonian exile, Isaiah doesn’t say the rituals are wrong — he says they have become self-serving. The people are going through the motions, wondering why God isn’t listening.

Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high. (Isaiah 58:3–4)

Isaiah’s words are for anyone returning from exile — whether from Babylon or from burnout, from disillusionment or from distance — thinking the old ways are by default the right ways, the only ways, or the good old days.

Author and activist Jim Wallis tells of meeting young adults and college students who are tutoring inner-city kids in Washington, D.C. He says they volunteer far more hours than any resume would require. And when he asks them why, the two words he hears most often are meaning and connection. They are looking for meaning. They are looking for connection.¹ In a sermon, Wallis reflected on Isaiah’s vision.

The prophet’s call is as contemporary as if it were written yesterday. Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, to bring the homeless into your house, when you see the naked to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh? And this is the key: ‘Then will your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily.’ (Isaiah 58:8). Isaiah understands that it’s not the healing of those poor inner-city kids that’s at issue here — it’s our healing. And the college students are finding that the way to get your life together is to do something for somebody else. This is two people being changed. It’s a transformation. Everybody gets different in the process. Everybody gets healed.²

That is the movement Isaiah is pointing toward: not performance piety, but participation in healing. Not a ritual that makes you feel better about yourself, but a practice that makes someone else better, whole, healthy, fed, changed for the good — and in the process, makes you different too.

And that’s a struggle in America right now for Christianity, left-right-center: how to heal from a politicized pop-Christian faith.  It requires confession, repentance, and a grace that allows someone to “save face” and be forgiven in the age of cancel culture.  What are you willing to do with someone else, or for someone else, that might transform their life and yours? When that happens — mark that place.

Here is where the journey gets interesting. Isaiah calls us outward — toward justice, toward neighbor, toward healing in the world.  Matthew’s Jesus calls us inward. That may feel like a contradiction, but it is the “both and” of scripture and the good news of God.

The Gospel of Matthew casts an edgy Jesus. Sometimes his words sound more like John the Baptist than a humble table host. Matthew’s Jesus says:

Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your God in heaven. (Matthew 6:1)

This is where Christians have gotten into trouble throughout the centuries — making a spectacle of outreach, worship, evangelism, morality, or political reach. It is rare these days not to hear a nod to God after a sporting victory, a Grammy acceptance, an election win, or an escape from tragedy. Gratitude matters. But the implication of that public piety is that God chooses winners and losers.

President Lincoln must have wrestled with this. In his Second Inaugural Address, he said:

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.  It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.³

As we meander with Jesus, he asks us to reconsider our piety.  Is it a religious statement for you, for the public, or fashionable pop culture?⁴ Isaiah and Jesus hold the same thing in tension: do justice, love your neighbor, feed the hungry — but do it because it is right, not because it makes you look right.  
Don’t do it out of fear.  
Don’t do what is right to seek favor, gain power, or virtue signal.

Matthew’s Jesus might paraphrase like this today:

Whenever you give, give quietly. Use the QR code. Whenever you pray, find a room. When you fast, don’t walk around looking dismal so others know you’re fasting. God in heaven already knows why you give, pray, and fast.  (Paraphrase Matt. 6: 5-7)

The question Jesus is asking: What’s the why?

Are we seeking approval? 
Are we comparing ourselves to other believers, trying to measure our portion of the Spirit? 
Are we looking for influence, or hoping to become influencers? 
These are worth sitting with quietly — self-reflection and communal reflection are part of the journey.

For me, it helps to think of faith as practice — not in the sense of pretending, but in the sense that a musician practices scales, or an athlete trains.  No one becomes a musician, an artist, an athlete, a pilot, or a decent human being without practice.  My mother’s advice can be difficult even today: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”  Practice won’t make you perfect, but it helps you become proficient.  It helps you improvise when the journey gets hard.  It can calibrate disappointment.

Diana Butler Bass encourages us: “Give, pray, and fast. Sing, forgive, do justice. Love your enemies, turn the other cheek, keep Sabbath. Offer hospitality, serve the poor, care for the planet.”⁵
She suggests that, “By practicing our faith, we actually become all the things we promise to be in our baptism vows, we become citizens of the Kingdom of God, the radical followers who embody the beloved community that Jesus proclaimed.”⁶

Bill and Stephen didn’t hike the whole Appalachian Trail. They got tired, took wrong turns, and eventually left the path before the end. But they didn’t come back the same. The walk changed them. The low points and the vistas both did something to them that comfort never could. Lent is like that. You may not reach the end of this path before Easter morning. You may find yourself tired, off-trail, looking for helpers. That’s all right. The path is still the path.

Treasure can be many things — dollars and cents, stocks and real estate, family, friendship, church buildings, even eternal life. What treasure helps transform your heart so you can see the image of God in other people? Lent may help you discover meaning and connection. Meaning and connection can illuminate what you treasure most. Mark that place.

If this is your first journey, you may not know where the path begins. Look for the helpers. They will show you a map and point the way. You may have walked this way before but forgotten how difficult it can be. Isaiah is a good marker of the path.  So is Matthew.  And so is the memory of a time when something cracked open in you, and you were different afterward.  You may not have been changed for the better, but might have been changed for good.

The journey through Lent may help you discover that, contrary to conventional wisdom and some traditional Christian interpretation, you are originally blessed.  And there — there — your heart will be also. Mark that place.

Someday, you may pass by this way again and need the reminder. 
Someday, another person may pass by this same stretch of path — lost, tired, looking for a sign that someone has been here before and found their way through.

God’s grace doesn’t require reciprocity. 
You have to choose to accept it. 
You have to be willing to be changed by it. Again and again and again.

When you experience it, mark that place.

1. Paraphrase of Wallis, speaking to a session at the Society of Biblical Literature conference, November 2006. ↩︎
2. Jim Wallis, “We All Get Healed”, 30 Good Minutes, Program #4416, November 21, 2000. ↩︎
3. President Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address. March 4, 1865. The Avalon Project accessed February 17, 2026: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln2.asp ↩︎
4. I do not wear my religious symbols in public.  The fish necklace I wear is my reminder of my call to ministry, my discipleship as a follower of Jesus, and the obligations of my belief in God. ↩︎
5. Diana Butler Bass, “Practicing Lent.” 2014. The Cottage Substack, February 14, 2024. https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/practice-the-cross. ↩︎
6. Bass, “Practicing Lent.” 2014. ↩︎