Ashes in an An Age of Anxiety
Observing Ash Wednesday in a World Obsessed with Control
I didn’t grow up with Ash Wednesday. Or Lent. Or any of the rhythms of the liturgical calendar. We were members of the Church of God, a Pentecostal denomination which began as a noncreedal movement that emphasized four points:
Freedom from man-made creeds and traditions.
Willingness to take the New Testament as the only rule of faith and practice.
Giving one another equal rights and privileges to read and interpret the Bible according to the dictates of conscience.
Willingness to sit together as the Church to transact business.
As such, many of the rituals and traditions of creedal churches were abandoned. Moreover, as Pentecostals, we didn’t feel as though we needed the seasons of the church because we lived in the constant expectation of breakthrough, of power, of fire falling from heaven.
We did love Easter though! There is nothing more exciting than a dead man coming back to life, dealing a death blow to Satan's kingdom, and bestowing the keys of "death, Hell, and the grave" to the church. Pentecostalism, at its best, is a tradition of resurrection people—of revival and renewal, of Spirit-filled expectation. But resurrection isn’t resurrection without death. Power isn’t power without surrender. And the Spirit doesn’t fall where we aren’t willing to be broken.
Why Lent? Why Ash Wednesday?
Lent is the season where we make space for our own undoing. It is the Spirit leading us, like Jesus, into the wilderness for 40 days—not for punishment, but for purification. For Pentecostals, this might sound familiar. If we want to be a people of the Spirit, we have to be a people who make peace with the wilderness. And with exile.
And who hasn't felt like they have been in some form of exile lately? We find ourselves in unfamiliar landscapes—culturally, politically, and spiritually—navigating a world that no longer looks the way it once did. Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon remind us in Resident Aliens that the church is not meant to be at home in the world; rather, we are called to live as a people in exile, a colony of heaven in a foreign land. To be in exile is to lose the comforts of familiarity, to feel displaced, and yet, to find that God is still present in the wilderness. It is to recognize that our true citizenship is in the kingdom of God, not in the fleeting structures of this world. And perhaps, this moment of disorientation is exactly where we are meant to be—learning, like our spiritual ancestors, to trust in the God who meets His people in the unknown.
Exile is one of the great themes of Scripture. God’s people have always been a people who learn to encounter Him in displacement—whether it was Israel wandering in the desert, the exiles in Babylon, or the early Christians scattered under persecution. Exile strips away illusions of control and forces us to confront our dependence on God. It reveals where our trust truly lies.
Pentecostalism, for all its power and expectancy, often struggles with this. We want revival, but we don’t want to sit in the wilderness. We want the upper room, but we forget that before the fire of Pentecost, the disciples spent forty days grappling with uncertainty, fear, and the absence of Jesus. We want the Spirit, but we don’t always recognize that the Spirit’s first work is often to lead us into places of surrender, not strength.
Ash Wednesday forces us to sit in that tension. It marks us with the reality we spend most of our lives trying to avoid: We are dust. We will die. And we are not in control.
This is a hard word in a world obsessed with power, control, and the illusion of permanence. We watch leaders rise and fall, nations make their war plans, the powerful cling to their dominance. We live in an age of grasping—whether for political control, economic security, or ideological supremacy. But the way of Jesus is the way of relinquishment.
The Wilderness of Our Times
In Matthew’s Gospel, the Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness where He faces three temptations: to turn stones to bread, to test God’s protection, and to seize power over the kingdoms of the world. Each temptation strikes at the core of human anxiety: security, certainty, and control.
This week, we are watching world leaders wrestle with these same temptations. The war in Ukraine grinds on, with its leaders desperate for aid, for power, for control of their independence. In Gaza, the suffering of the innocent continues, as the world debates who should wield power and what kind of justice is possible. Just last night, President Trump stood before Congress, delivering a speech in a moment of global instability, as the world order shifts beneath our feet. His words carried weight, not just for those in the chamber, but for the watching world. Markets responded, allies recalibrated their expectations, and adversaries took note. Some heard reassurance; others heard warning. Some heard order; others heard chaos. But beneath the policy prescriptions and rhetoric, the deeper reality remained: the world is changing, and none of us are in control of the outcome.
If Lent teaches us anything, it is that we are not immune to the desire for control. We want to fix our lives, our children, our nation. We want to secure our futures. And when we can’t, we rage, or despair, or numb ourselves with distractions.
But Jesus shows us another way.
The Way of Surrender
Now when the tempter came to Him, he said, "If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread." But He answered and said, "It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God’" (Matt. 4:3-4, NKJV).
Then the devil took Him up into the holy city, set Him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to Him, "If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down. For it is written: ‘He shall give His angels charge over you,’ and, ‘In their hands they shall bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone.’" Jesus said to him, "It is written again, ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God’" (Matt. 4:5-7, NKJV).
Again, the devil took Him up on an exceedingly high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to Him, "All these things I will give You if You will fall down and worship me." Then Jesus said to him, "Away with you, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only you shall serve’" Then the devil left Him, and behold, angels came and ministered to Him. (Matt. 4:8-11, NKJV).
The wilderness disorients us. It challenges not just our physical endurance, but our faith and our sense of control. The temptations Jesus faced address these struggles in order: first, the temptation to satisfy His physical hunger, then the temptation to test God’s faithfulness, and finally, the temptation to seize power apart from God's way. The wilderness forces us to recognize that life is more than the body, that God’s word is trustworthy, and that true power and authority come from God alone—not through scheming, but through suffering. Or as Zechariah said, "Not by human might, or earthly power, but my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts."
Jesus refuses to turn stones into bread because life is more than the body and its needs. He refuses to throw himself from the temple because God does not need to be tested—His faithfulness is already sure. And He refuses to take the kingdoms of the world by force because the path to true authority is through the cross. There are no shortcuts to the kingdom. The wilderness is a call to long-term trust, to walking with God even when we cannot see the way forward.
The cross is what stands between us and Pentecost. Life in the Spirit is cruciform— the Spirit of God does not lead us around suffering but through it, shaping us in the pattern of Christ’s own surrender.
This is why we need Lent. Not because God demands our suffering, but because we are already suffering—and we need a way to walk through it that doesn’t make us less human.
Ash Wednesday is the great reckoning with reality. It is the moment we acknowledge that we are dust. That we will die. That we are not in control. And it is only in embracing this reality that we find our freedom.
Losing Control and Finding Life
For me, the loss of control isn’t just a theoretical struggle. As my daughters enter adulthood, I am learning what it means to let go. I can’t make their choices for them anymore. I can’t protect them the way I once did. And I have to trust that the God who has been faithful to me will be faithful to them, too. This is its own kind of wilderness. Its own kind of dying.
But this struggle is not unique to me. We all lose control of different areas of our lives—our health, our careers, our relationships. The plans we made shift, the things we once held with certainty begin to slip through our fingers. We watch our parents age, our children grow up, our own bodies begin to fail us in ways we never expected. The loss of control is not just a possibility; it is an inevitability.
As a chaplain to seniors, I see this reality every day. Independence wanes. Simple tasks become difficult. Friends pass away. The world outside moves faster than they can keep up with. The loss is real, and it is painful. And yet, in these spaces of loss, I also witness deep wisdom—an acceptance that life is not about control, but about trust. A surrender that is not defeat, but grace.
Jesus once told Peter, “When you were younger, you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go” (John 21:18). Peter was a strong and often defiant man, a leader who was used to forging his own path. But Jesus was preparing him for the reality that, one day, he would no longer have the same strength, no longer be in control of his own destiny. Tradition tells us that Peter was crucified upside down, refusing to be executed in the same manner as his Lord. He had to learn the hard lesson of surrender—the same lesson we must all learn.
We live in a moment where many of us feel we are being led by those we do not trust, where we fear the worst about the future. But Lent reminds us that the worst has already happened. The Son of God was killed at the hands of men. The greatest injustice, the deepest suffering, the most profound loss—has already come to pass. And what did God do in response? He answered with resurrection. The worst thing that could ever happen has been swallowed up in victory. And if that is true, then we have nothing left to fear.
Beauty for Ashes
The promise of Lent is not that suffering disappears. It is that it is transformed. The ashes we bear on our foreheads today are not the final word. The beauty that Isaiah promised comes only after the ashes. He spoke to a people in exile, a people who had lost everything, proclaiming that God would give them 'beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness' (Isaiah 61:3). This is the great reversal of God—the ability to take what is broken, lost, and burned to the ground and bring something beautiful out of it. The resurrection that we long for comes only through the cross. And the Spirit that Pentecostals seek moves first in the wilderness by Jordan before the fire falls in the upper room of Jerusalem.
So today, we wear the ashes. We remember that we are dust. And we refuse to numb ourselves to the wilderness of our moment. Because we know that, in the end, beauty is coming.