Ash Wednesday 2025

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“Receive the sign of the holy cross on both your forehead and your heart to mark you as one redeemed by Christ the crucified.”

These words from the liturgy of Holy Baptism should be on our hearts this night, when we are marked again by the sign of the holy cross, and reminded of our own impending death.

Yet aren’t we doing the very thing Jesus condemns? In the Gospel for Ash Wednesday, Jesus tells us not to disfigure our faces, not to appear to men to be fasting, and that we should wash our faces. Are we the hypocrites Jesus warns about?

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On Worthy Reception of the Lord's Supper

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If we charted the history of the age for admission to communion, you would see it be very low for well over a thousand years, then rise sharply in the ages of rationalism and pietism, until the mid-to-late twentieth century when it begins to come back down. There are a number of factors involved in this, but underlying it all is this question: what makes a person ready to receive the Eucharist? …

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Invocabit (Lent I) 2019

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What we see in the account of Jesus’ temptation is the One Man who does not succumb to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. He is the One Man who does the will of the Father. And He does it under the harshest conditions. Jesus redoes, relives, recapitulates the whole history of Israel, and passes every test they failed.

And this means that He has endured every suffering that you know, and has resisted and overcome every temptation you experience. How does He overcome temptation? By means of the Word. Jesus is confident that the Father will be faithful to Him, that He will not go back on His Word, that He will not break His promise.

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