Bishop Susan’s Ash Wednesday Message 2026

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, the season of repentance and preparation for the gift of Easter. On this day, Christians pray litanies of repentance and receive ashy crosses on their foreheads with the sobering words: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” On this day, we receive a jarring reminder that we are mortals, not gods. 

Today, our Christian faith challenges the falsehood our culture tells us: that we can do anything, be anything, achieve anything our heart desires. As St. Augustine of Hippo declared, original sin is possible because of an original lie: we tell ourselves, “We can exist on our own without God, that we can do everything on our own.” In the end, however, our faith reminds us that our lives are held by God’s hands alone. The gift of God’s abundant life is free for the asking, but we must be prepared and willing to receive it.

In the Bible, the word used for “repent” is not a word that means “feel sorry or remorseful.” Jesus uses the Greek word “metanoia,” which literally means “to get a new mind from above.” William Temple, who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1942 to 1944, said, “We have lowered the term “repentance” into meaning something not very different from remorse…. Repentance does not merely mean giving up a bad habit; it is concerned with the mind: Get a new mind. To repent is to adopt God’s viewpoint instead of your own.” When we repent, we ask God to give us God’s mind, God’s way of seeing things, and God’s strength and courage to act with love in the world, as Jesus did and as Jesus commands us to do. When we repent, we enter a new life, a converted life, when we answer God’s call to walk in love, as Christ loved us. 

My friends, I look at our world today, and I see too many ways we have lost the eyes, the mind, and the heart of God. Instead of seeing Jesus in “the least of these” (where Jesus told us we would find him in Matthew 25), our society has chosen to terrify, oppress, and imprison the most vulnerable people in our world. Refugees, asylum seekers, children, US citizens whose skin color or language makes them look like migrants, and people who have suffered the ravages of poverty, oppression, and war elsewhere, are afraid to leave home, even to seek food or medical care. US citizens exercising their rights to monitor and protest have been killed. People have been denied due process and the right to representation. They are kept for indefinite periods of time. These are the beloved children of God, created in God’s image, and I can only imagine God’s fury at such mistreatment. 

When someone asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” hoping to limit the scope of God’s command, Jesus told a story about an ancient enemy, a Samaritan, acting as a neighbor (Luke 10:25-37). The implication is clear. There is no one who is not a neighbor. There is no one whom we can choose to revile and oppress. Every person is beloved in the sight of God. And we are commanded to love them too. 

Let me be clear, oppression and violence are sinful in the sight of the God whose primary commandments to us were to love God, and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. 

In Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe’s Ash Wednesday message, he invites us to notice how easily our hearts can harden in a world shaped by fear, division, and the pursuit of power. Drawing on the story of Pharaoh, he contrasts the small, constricted imagination of domination with God’s expansive imagination of liberation and love. He reminds us that Lent is a shared opportunity for conversion—for turning again toward God through prayer, fasting, and repentance—so that new and contrite hearts might be formed within us. Even in a season marked by violence and polarization, he calls us to bear witness together, trusting that God is still at work, reshaping our hearts and renewing our common life. He also invites Episcopalians across the Church to gather for prayer on Palm Sunday, March 29, at 8 p.m. Eastern via Zoom—and I hope you will consider joining him. It will be a chance to pause, pray, and enter Holy Week together, asking God to soften our hearts and strengthen our courage as we seek to love our neighbors and make Christ known in the world.

 As I pray this year for God’s eyes, God’s mind, and God’s way of understanding the world, the reading from Isaiah (Isaiah 58:1-12) appointed for Ash Wednesday compels my attention. Through the prophet, God invites the people to look beyond private acts of devotion and toward the wider life we share together. Isaiah reminds us that faith is not only about personal repentance, but about how we care for one another as a community. He paints a picture of the kind of fasting God desires–not empty ritual, but lives shaped by compassion: loosening the bonds of injustice, sharing bread with the hungry, welcoming the homeless, and tending to those in need. And with this call comes a promise: when we live this way, our light will break forth like the dawn, healing will spring up quickly, and when we cry out, God will answer, “Here I am.” 

On Ash Wednesday, God calls us to a holy Lent, “by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word” (Book of Common Prayer, p. 265). Let us begin this season on Ash Wednesday by confessing our limitations, our dustiness, and remembering that the God who created the universe is the one who calls us to metanoia: to seeing the world with God’s eyes. Let us spend this season of Lent praying and asking God for a new mind of mercy, compassion, and justice to descend on our land.

Let us pray:

…to grant us true repentance and his Holy Spirit, that those things may please him which we do on this day, and that the rest of our life hereafter may be pure and holy, so that at the last we may come to his eternal joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP, p. 209)