Christ Church Sermons Ash Wednesday February 18 2026

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weekly worship at Christ Church in Bethl

Park, Pennsylvania. We're a United

Methodist congregation with the mission

of building inclusive community, sharing

Christ's transforming love. To learn

more about the church, including how you

can join us for worship online or in

person, visit christyouumc.net.

Thank you for listening.

You may be seated.

Our scripture from this evening comes

from Psalm 103:es

13 to 18.

As a father has compassion on his

children, so the Lord has compassion on

those who fear him. For he knows how we

are formed. He remembers that we are

dust. The life of mortals is like grass.

They flourish like a flower of the

field. The wind blows over it and it's

gone. And in its place, and its place

remembers it no more. But from

everlasting to everlasting, the Lord's

love is with those who fear him. And his

righteousness with their children's

children, with those who keep his

covenant and remember to obey his

precepts.

The word of God for the people of God.

>> Thanks be to God.

>> In the general scheme of history, human

beings don't live very long. While an

average lifespan of about 72 years seems

like a pretty significant amount of

time, when you compare that to the

entirety of humanity, it's really very,

very tiny. In fact, if you were to

compress all of human history down into

a 24-hour period, one person's life,

yours or mine, lasts only about 1 half

of one second.

We are here for just the briefest of

moments.

And every spring, for every year of our

short lives, we are given the recurring

gift of this remarkable season of Lent.

It's a time to reflect, to ponder God

and how God is at work in our lives.

Lent, I think, gives us permission to

slow down and to hold the weight of

Jesus's death in our hearts. To feel his

expectation as his time to die drew near

and to comprehend even just a little bit

how all of the suffering that he

experienced was done for each one of us.

For Christians, Ash Wednesday, of

course, marks the start of that Lenton

season. And we commemorate that

beginning by being marked with ashes. We

receive this mark as a way to remember

our mortality, to remember that we were

created from dust. And one day, in the

not very distant future, we will be dust

again.

But I think we also do it to remind us

that in the in between time between the

first particle of dust and last, that's

when we get to live. And that's when we

get to experience relationship with the

God who gave everything for us.

So it's fitting that we read this

portion of Psalm 103 as part of our Ash

Wednesday service tonight. The 103rd

Psalm is a song of praise to God as an

acknowledgment of everything that God

has done. The part of the psalm that we

just heard Shawn read teaches us both

what we should be grateful for and how

that gratitude can and should shape our

lives.

In those verses, we learn that God knows

everything about us.

In the New Living Translation of the

Bible, Psalm 103:14

Psalms 103:14

says, "For he knows how weak we are. He

remembers we are only dust."

God created us. God knows us intimately.

Even scripture tells us down to the

number of hairs on our head. He knows

who we are. He knows our sins. He knows

our strengths. He knows our weaknesses.

He knows that we came from dust and that

one day we're inevitably all going to go

back to that. The challenge for us is to

never forget how mortal we are, to never

forget how short our lives are compared

to how long God has been at work in the

world. We're also challenged not to

underestimate our worth and our purpose

just because our lives are so short.

We also learn from Psalm 103 that we are

living a borrowed life. I found that

sentence while I was doing research for

this sermon and it kind of grabbed on to

me immediately. I've heard the phrase

borrowed time before, but never the

phrase borrowed life. But that's exactly

what we have. We are living borrowed

lives lent to us directly from God who

orchestrated us into existence. And we

have this one short, sometimes difficult

and yet incredibly beautiful life to be

in relationship with God and with one

another and to make disciples for the

kingdom.

And finally, we learn from Psalm 103

that God's love is forever. It never

ends. It never changes. It's for all of

us. And yet somehow it feels very

personal and very unique to each one of

us. It was here for our ancestors before

we ever came into the picture. It's here

for us now and it will be here for our

children's children's children's

children and even beyond that. It is

from everlasting to everlasting and

nothing can take it away. It bookends

time itself.

A little over a year ago, at the

beginning of January 2025,

you may remember watching on your

televisions as much of Southern

California burned.

The combination of very dry land and the

powerful Santa Ant winds, Santa Ana

winds com um combined to reignite embers

from a previous fire, sparking the

horrific Palisades fire. When that fire

was finally extinguished at the end of

January after burning for about 3 weeks,

it had killed 12 people, destroyed 6,800

buildings, including homes, businesses,

and churches, and consumed approximately

23,500

acres of land, leaving in its wake a

charred landscape covered in ash.

The affected area, when you saw it on

television, appeared apocalyptic and

hopeless.

But even in the midst of what appeared

to the naked eye to be total ruin and

devastation, all hope was not lost.

In the spring of that year, so a few

months after the fire, something

incredible happened.

Through the black landscape, where it

seemed that all forms of life had been

lost to the fire, green shoots started

to peek out from the ashes. They were

sprouts of a plant called fire poppies.

This is what fire poppies look like.

They are part of a unique type of flower

called a fire follower. According to

wildlife experts, these firefall

flowers, say that five times fast, only

bloom during the spring after a

wildfire.

Before that, their seeds lie dormant in

the ground just waiting for a fire to

happen. The fire serves two purposes.

The first purpose is it destroys the

shrubs and other uh plants that grow low

to the ground. Those low-lying plants

can take keep new vegetation from

growing up. And so when they are

destroyed, there is space for new life

to happen.

The second thing that these fire

follower flowers are waiting for is a

signal from a fire to start sprouting.

Some members of that species need the

intense heat of the fire to crack open a

seed pod.

Others need the chemicals that are only

present in the charred soil in order to

come to life.

Fire poppies need the smoke from the

fire. There is something in that smoke

that triggers in the seed of that

particular flower that it is time to

start germination.

And then after that they burst to life.

Their bright orange petals and yellow

centers sit on top of vibrant green

stems, bringing splashes of brilliant

color and new life, as you can see, to

an otherwise dark black and barren

landscape.

You would think that after waiting so

long for just the right conditions for

life that fire poppies would stay in

bloom for a while, sharing their beauty

with the world for at least a few weeks.

But after all that time of being

dormant, all that time of waiting, lying

buried in the ground, fire poppies only

stay in bloom for a maximum of 48 hours.

That's it.

Then the bloom is gone and they slowly

wither and die, returning to the earth.

Their life is extraordinarily brief, but

the impact of their beauty rising up

from the ashes and the hope that they

bring after such destruction is

immeasurable.

Scripture tells us that God knew us when

we were dust. That there is no part of

our frames that is hidden from God when

we were woven together in the depths of

the earth. that God knows every little

thing about us.

Scripture tells us that God's ways are

perfect. In essence, that God does not

make mistakes.

Therefore, we can derive from that that

it is not an accident that all of us are

here in this place, in this time for a

reason.

We were created to bloom right now,

given these borrowed lives when we were

for such a time as this.

Scripture tells us that no matter how

short our lives are, no matter how

quickly we bloom and then vanish back

into the dust in the ground, God's love

is always present.

It creates us. It nurtures us. It gives

us what we need to shine as our uniquely

knit selves and then ushers us back to

the earth when our time is up.

And so the question becomes, what are we

going to do with the short time that we

have? What are we going to do to bring

hope and color and the message of Jesus

into a dark and scarred world?

The word Lent comes from an old English

word meaning springtime.

Because this season of the church's

lurggical calendar roughly corresponds

for us with the start of spring, it's

appropriate to call it that.

But understanding that we are given this

very short amount of time to really live

and to really make a difference, I think

we can look at the meaning of Lent in a

different way.

What if Lent also reminded us of our

borrowed lives?

What if it reminded us that God did

indeed lend to us these lives that we

have?

What if we remember that because they

are lent to us, we have a responsibility

to use them well, knowing how perfectly

God created us with the gifts that God

gave each one of us.

So, here is my Lenton invitation for

you. Or maybe it's a challenge. You

decide.

I invite you to take these 40 days to

remember how uniquely important you are

to God.

Take these six weeks to consider the

brevity of your life and what changes

you can make in your life to draw closer

to God.

Use this time between now and Easter

Sunday to ponder what things you can

give up that are preventing you from

doing what God created you to do and

what things you can add to your life

that will help you become who God

created you to be.

Like the fire poppies after a wildfire,

God created you from the dust with a

purpose of bringing light and life and

reminders of his love and hope to a

devastated world.

Will you use this Lenton season to

remember his gift of your life?

Remind remember his sacrifice for your

sake and remember his commission to use

your one brief and beautiful life to

make a difference for the kingdom.

Let's pray.

God, I give you thanks for the lives

of each person here, of each person

worshiping as part of this service

tonight. And I pray for this Lenton

season that it may be a time where we

realize how wonderful you created us to

be, how uniquely you created each one of

us. That you might empower us to shine

brightly, to shine so that we are hope

and we are love and we are your

ambassadors ambassadors in a world that

just desperately needs to know you.

Help us to use this season to become the

disciples you are calling us to be in

Jesus name. Amen.