February 18, 2026 – Ash Wednesday
I Timothy 1.12-17
’Tis the Season To Be Sorry
Ash Wednesday 2026
Here’s a little something to get your Lent started right:
“First, we are so vitiated and perverted in every part of our nature that by this great corruption, we stand justly condemned and convicted before God… this perversity never ceases in us, but continually bears new fruits, just as a burning furnace gives forth flame and sparks, or water ceaselessly bubbles up from a spring… For our nature is not only destitute and empty of good, but so fertile and fruitful of every evil that it cannot be idle… Obviously (therefore), humanity’s ruin is to be ascribed to humanity alone; for having acquired righteousness by God’s kindness, we have by our own folly sunk into vanity.”
Well then… Anyone planning to go out and celebrate the beginning of Lent with a visit to the Pattaconk’s Bloody Mary bar will probably be happy with dry toast and water after this! The words belong to Swiss Reformer John Calvin from his second book of The Institutes of the Christian Religion, and you can’t get much more Calvinist than this; but as a reminder of how serious the church was about the meaning of Lent, you cannot find much that is more apt.
When I was in middle school, my neighborhood buddies and I had a Saturday afternoon ritual we rarely missed: the neighborhood football game. There were four of us: Jack Peczynski, Dave Hanson, Tom Garvey and I were always on one team; we always played in Jack’s back yard; every member of the opposing team was older than we were; and we always lost. But the important thing was the ritual: unless the parents of one of us had the audacity to take us to a relative’s or worse, shopping, we were in Jack’s backyard every Saturday afternoon, almost religiously.
Even more religious though, was our post-game activity, which we also did every Saturday afternoon, right after the four o’clock warning as given by Jack’s parents. The Peczynskis were Catholic, and five o’clock every Saturday afternoon was Confession at St. Rose Church. So as soon as the 4:00 warning came, the game was over, and Jack, Dave, Tom and I went into the most important huddle of the day: we had to plan what Jack was going to tell the priest at 5:00 confession.
It wasn’t that easy. We were faithful friends with one another, and we could not let Jack go into confession unprepared. What to say though? Certainly, we would never dare let Jack reveal the things we really did, because we would all go down together. Still, it had to be believable. A few swear words were good for starters – everyone did that. And usually Jack could say he was mean to his older sister, which we figured was all right since the priest knew his sister was older than we were and Jack could probably get off lightly for that. “Thinking impure thoughts” was something Jack had learned from the older boys, and it was so wonderfully vague that he got a lot of mileage out of that one. And so Jack went off to St. Rose armed with a catalogue of sins that would get him believably through confession, but, we hoped, without having to say too many ‘Hail Marys’.
The Church of Rome has changed in the intervening years. What was once called Confession is now the Sacrament of Reconciliation – that is, the emphasis is more on the forgiveness than the sin, but the practice is still mostly the same, although the church now also offers the option of a shared, or group reconciliation, for those who find strength in numbers.
Still, the twin ideas of sin and forgiveness generally resonate more in the Catholic communion than in the Protestant one. Unless, of course, one remains a dyed-in-the-wool Calvinist, of which I have occasionally been not entirely unjustly accused. I recall one Lent preaching on the idea of sins of Omission. Practically all of us are familiar with what are called sins of commission, those things we do that we ought not to do. Sins of omission are the flip side, those things we do not do that we really ought to be doing. It is probably the parable of the Good Samaritan that offers the best illustration of the sin of omission, the story of an injured man on the side of the road, and a priest passed by, crossed the road to avoid him, and a Levite did the same. They both sinned by not providing help for the Samaritan. Well, after the sermon on sins of omission, one of my Deacons came up to me after church and said, “Alan – let me get this straight: not only do I have to keep track of the things I do that I should not do, but I now also have to keep track of all those things I should do but don’t?” I said, basically Yes, pretty much. Granted, that seems like a tall order, but it is part and parcel of Lent. Some of the classic confessions of Lent, and you’ve likely heard these before, include the phrase, “We have sinned by what we have done and by what we have left undone.” Or again, “We have done those things which we ought not to have done; and we have left undone those things which we ought to have done.” Or to boil it down to the minimum, sin finds its way of overtaking us, and the season of Lent is the time to recognize it, to name it, and to place ourselves in God’s forgiving embrace. As Paul wrote to Timothy, “Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners – of whom I am the foremost.” Remember, this is the apostle Paul we are talking about here, who crisscrossed much of Asia Minor sharing the gospel of Christ and establishing strong congregations in places like Corinth and Ephesus and Colossae. The King James Version puts an even finer point on Paul’s words, “I am the chief of sinners.” At the start of Lent, Ash Wednesday invites us to try on Paul’s words, “I am the chief of sinners – we are the chiefs of sinners – in order to stand in the light of the gospel and to confess and receive the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ.