2026-02-18 Ash Wednesday

Scripture Readings

Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father and our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen!

Some friends of ours went on a Roman Catholic pilgrimage known as El Camino de Santiago. It’s an 800km hike that takes you from France to Santiago de Compostela on the Spanish coast, the place where St. James’ remains are said to be buried. That is Big James, the son of Zebedee. It is said they brought his relics or bodily remains to Spain from Jerusalem after he was martyred. Our friends who did this trek were not Roman Catholic, but they still got their 500 years out of purgatory certificate for completing the pilgrimage! They hung it proudly on the wall - more as conversation piece than a display of misguided Roman merit and spiritual achievement. But for hundreds of years, people have been walking this same path along the El Camino de Santiago.

Christian Pilgrimages came about as a way for people to leave behind the hustle and bustle of everyday life to go on a journey. They were times dedicated to prayer and contemplation, of literally walking with God someplace where a person had never been. They forced out distractions and caused people to be present in the moment, in the here and now. They made a person dependent upon God, just as Abraham was all those years ago when God called him. Many of God’s people throughout the centuries had travel and journeys as part of their story. Even Christ our Lord with His disciples did not stay in one place very long but were constantly journeying and travelling all over the holy land.

The season of Lent is very much like a journey. It is truly a pilgrimage. It is a journey to the cross. It is a pilgrimage that anyone can go on because it doesn’t require us to physically travel to Europe or Israel or wherever. Instead, it is a spiritual journey. It is a journey that takes place inside of us as we embark upon the Lenten pilgrimage of repentance. Like any journey, we must prepare ourselves. After our friends did the El Camino hike, I was researching it and I came across an exercise guide that helps people prepare their bodies for walking 40km per day, everyday, for 20 days. How many of us could go on such a trip without preparing for it!? Somedays I can barely make it from kitchen to the living room! Without proper preparation, our bodies would quickly revolt against us with such a difficult and exhausting trip. But if they are prepared, it can be done much easier.

Lent, as our spiritual pilgrimage, is no different. It does require some preparation on our part to prepare our hearts and minds for our Lord’s Passion. Over the years the church has focused on three Lenten disciplines to help assist us in our spiritual journey. They all focus on repentance and the remission of self in exchange for focus on Christ our Messiah. I talk about them every year but they are prayer, fasting and almsgiving. These are the things that Jesus our Lord did in His earthly life and ministry.

When we think about prayer, we often see examples of Christ our Lord going off by Himself to pray (MK 1:35, MT 14:23, LK 6:12). This kind of prayer is more than just “asking God for stuff.” I jokingly refer to this as like ‘Wal-Mart prayer’ or ‘Amazon Prime prayers.’ “God, give me this, this, this and this, thanks buh-bye!” If we look at the Lord’s Prayer, we recall that only one of its seven petitions has to do with “daily bread.” And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with asking God for stuff that we need or even want. But if this becomes the only kind of prayer we have, then we kind of miss the boat. The prayer that Jesus would do when He went off by Himself was communication and conversation with God. We say words that God can hear and listens to and in turn, we are quiet and we listen for God to respond.

This quiet, contemplative nature of prayer is far different than simply treating God like a vending machine, keying in our every request. Can you imagine how your spouse or your friends would feel if you talked to them like we often talk to God. “Ya honey, go get the kids, get the groceries, make supper, clean the house, brush the dog and have it all done by 5:30PM, Ok,? Thanks bye. Amen.” It’d be a terribly one-sided communication. Instead we see Jesus seeking the Father in prayer, being present with God in the moment. Seeking the spiritual help and support He needed in the face of hardship and difficulty. We recall His prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. We think about the Lord’s Prayer where He teaches us how to pray and seek the Lord for the strength that we need.

From prayer we move to our friend fasting. Martin Luther thought fasting was fine ‘outward training’ for the Christian. But it has fallen out of use for most, if not all, Lutherans. “Refrain from eating!?” we think, what Tom Foolery is this?! We just ate our weight in pancakes yesterday at Shrove Tuesday! If you research fasting, you will find that its health benefits are actually incredible. After 36 hours of no food, miraculous things start happening. Glucose in the body gets completely gobbled up and your body flips a metabolic switch and you enter into Ketosis, with your liver producing big beautiful ketones for fuel. Insulin levels plummet, promoting fat release and lowering inflammation. You can actually completely reverse type-2 diabetes with a ketogenic diet and I know this for a fact because I did it myself. Another miraculous thing happens as your body enters autophagy which comes from the Greek for ‘self-eating.’ It is a ‘self-cleaning’ mode where your body can clear out damaged proteins and all the junk that builds up in your system. Weight loss, blood pressure improvements, hormonal balances, mental clarity, the list goes on and on. And this is just the physical benefits!

Just think about Jesus. When He went into the desert for 40 days and nights He ate nothing. He was completely fasting from food. This is the complete opposite of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. How were they led astray? Through eating. “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate” (GN 3:6). When the Devil tempted Jesus in much the same way, saying command these stones to become bread, Jesus was victorious for He fasted and was filled with the Word of God which says “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (MT 4:4). Through eating, Adam and Eve lost paradise. Through fasting, Jesus reclaims paradise for us!

Fasting for us as followers of Jesus provides much the same victory over sin and the temptations of Satan. We see that our life and strength isn’t found in food but rather in the Word of God. It is in Christ alone that we are made conquerors and as we embrace bodily fasting we may find that our spiritual fasting from sin increases as we seek the fullness that only God can provide.

Lastly, of the three great Lenten practices, we have almsgiving. Or we could just simply say giving. Christan charity. We consider that everything we have and often take for granted has come from God to us by His merciful hand. Countless Bible verses assure us this is the case. St. James writes “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (1:17). Or we think of the Good Samaritan who richly gave of his own resources to help the poor man who was beaten and left for dead. “But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back’” (LK 10:33-35). Giving of ourselves is the most Christlike thing we can do. It’s the whole point of Lent and our Lord’s Passion. St. Paul says “And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (EPH 5:2).

St. Augustine described fasting and almsgiving as the two “wings of prayer” because they were signs of the virtues of humility and charity. They all come together as our Lenten focus because they give way to repentance. They cause us to quit gazing into the mirror of self, of looking towards our own needs and agendas and put others before ourselves. As we participate in and engage in these Lenten disciplines, we truly deny ourselves, pick up our own cross and follow after Jesus our Lord (MT 16:24). For this journey is the way that Jesus walked all of His life, right up to the cross where He laid down His life for His friends.

Treat Lent like a pilgrimage. Treat it like a spiritual journey. Let the deep purple hues of this season truly be a different time than the rest of the year. Make it set apart for focusing on the disciplines that lead to Christ. Prayer. Fasting. Almsgiving. These things centre us on Christ our Lord, His life, ministry, teachings, miracles, death and resurrection. These things open the door for us to show love to our neighbours, friends and even enemies. May our prayer be ever filled by the Holy Spirit. May our fasting be a full dependency on God. May our giving be selfless and for the life of the world just as was the Cross of Christ our Lord. And may our ashes tonight remind us of our mortality. We begin this journey as poor miserable sinners, mortal and in need of life. We complete this journey as forgiven children of God, washed clean in our Baptism and rising to immortality and the life that never ends. Thanks be to God now and forever more. Amen!