Ash Wednesday: What is your next step?
Sermon for Ash Wednesday, 2023, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10 , Matthew 6:1-6,16-21 In August of 1993, I started an intense year of study in Medical Technology School that changed me in many ways, and I was a different person when I graduated. I had to quickly figure out how to put together and master a large amount of information and then apply it, and whatever academic or analytic weaknesses I had were exposed from day one. The director and instructors of the program were sympathetic and supportive, but we as students had to confront our successes and failures on our own, and take responsibility for them. Lent has been a somewhat similar experience for me, not that I have a huge amount of material to learn that I’ll be graded on, but that it is a time of discovery of who and where I am. It is a discovery of my weaknesses and gifts and where they are leading me. Traditionally, Lent has been focused on sin: our brokenness an