Rend Your Hearts

Ash Wednesday: Isaiah 58:1-12; Psalm 103:8-14

2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

February 18, 2026

https://vimeo.com/1168701515

Ash Wednesday can feel like a day of contradictions. Or at least, the readings assigned for today, together with the arc of our worship, can. On the one hand, we hear God observing through the prophet Isaiah how the people feel invisible to God, as though God does not see their fasting, the ways they humble themselves, seeking God’s affirmation. “Day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways,” God reports, while at the same time the people lament a sense of disconnect, which God hears. “Why do we fast, but you do not see?” they ask. “Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?” (Isaiah 58:3) But the problem is not that God is failing to see them. To the contrary, God does notice and is, frankly, frustrated, we hear. Where is the disconnect? That the people are putting the cart before the horse. The people have come to believe that the outward and visible signs of their repentance are the point, rather than the state of their hearts. God does in fact see them. God sees their struggle, their falling short even as they strive to show otherwise. God sees the disconnect between outward piety and inner state, and calls the people, calls us, to attend to that.

Our passage from the Gospel of Matthew pushes this critical edge yet further. Jesus warns, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:1). The words “in order to be seen” seem to be the key phrase. In other words: No performative piety. Later in the passage that sentiments is underlined when we hear, “when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may [not be] seen by others” (Matthew 6:17).  Meanwhile, some of us have been walking around all day with ashes on our foreheads (or may have washed them off). Others of you may escape either the knowing look or (more likely) the stares of strangers because this service comes at the end of the day…

So what are we to do with this seeming gordian knot, these messages and practices that can feel like they cut in different directions?

First, I come back to a line from the prophet Joel, an alternate first reading that we heard at the 7:30 AM service. “Rend your hearts and not your clothing,” God says through Joel (2:13). Rend your hearts. Rend them as if they were clothing in recognition and response to the ways we fall short, miss the mark, sin as human beings—individually and collectively, personally and systemically, through what we have done and what we have left undone, and through what has been “done on our behalf” as well.^[1] It is right to rend our hearts in recognition and acknowledgement of this truth.

But that rending is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of a larger process known as repentance. Turning from the sorry state of affairs we see and know, and seeking to be transformed, members of a wider body that is meant to change and be changed, that is called out to reflect God’s justice, peace, and compassion.

Hearts rent are hearts opened to God, the God whom Jesus describes in Matthew as one who “sees in secret” (Matthew 6:4, 6, 18). What is all this secrecy? I see it not as a quality meant to be bound up with shame or guilt, but rather as an inner chamber of our hearts, the seat of our being as humans who are made in the divine image, called to grow up into the full stature of Christ over the course of our lifetimes, urged to reflect the mind of Christ (Ephesians 4:13-16, 1 Corinthians 2:16, Philippians 2:5). This is the place from which our true actions emerge: in the best-case scenario, a place of inner and spiritual grace from which the outward and visible signs of our lives show forth God’s glory. A glory made manifest in the healing of brokenness, the uplifting of those cast down, the recognition and upholding of our fellow human beings and creatures of this precious earth that is so damaged by our greed and disregard.

A rent heart is an open one, an honest one, a heart committed to truth, to repair, to healing. It is a place for our journeys to begin anew, day by day, season by season. 

What does God long for to come from that heart? For our practices, our actions to flow from hearts rooted in God’s vision for creation, God’s call for justice, compassion and peace. That “being righteousness” (2 Corinthians 5:21) that Christ makes possible by somehow “be[ing] sin,” taking that on, inviting us to reflect God’s justice.^[2]  “Is not this the fast that I choose,” God declares in our Isaiah passage: “to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” (Isaiah 58:6) This loosening has concrete attributes: the sharing of bread, assistance to those without shelter or clothing. It entails critique and resistance, recognition of the ways that the world, the various contexts in which we live and participate, create haves and have-nots. It involves ideas for how to resist and transform those structures, and living into those ideas. It also has qualities of restraint: the refusal to point a finger and speak evil of others, to dehumanize them (58:6-10). This loosening of unjust bonds is both relational and transformative, seeking to join in the re-creation of this world that it might come closer to what Verna Dozier calls – drawing on the prophetic visions and the preaching of Jesus – God’s dream.^[3]

Today we are called to rend our hearts, not for the purposes of remaining broken but open, inviting God in afresh to inspire our turning. We recognize our mortality in our worship today through ashes imposed in acknowledgement of our creatureliness, our limitation, and all the ways we seek to cover over and compensate for that reality – the reality that we will one day die. We remember that we are dust, created for life and love, for beauty and transformation, indeed for resurrection life. We recommit to that life and the grace of its growth, as an intentional and lifelong goal and practice. And so this evening, at the start of Lent, my question for each of us, myself included, is: what barriers do we need to clear away from around our hearts that they might be opened to God? How might we seek God afresh from the very core of our being, so that the freshness of God’s dream might emerge anew, might direct us, working together to transform this beautiful, broken world?

^[1] Enriching Our Worship I (New York: Church Publishing, 1998), 56.

^[2] The sentence from 2 Corinthians 5:21: “God made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the [δικαιοσύνη] the righteousness [or justice] of God.”

^[3] Verna Dozier, The Dream of God: A Call to Return (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1991)