This sermon was preached on February 14, 2016 for the First Sunday in Lent. The texts for this sermon were: Deuteronomy 26:1-11 , Romans 10:8b-13 , Luke 4:1-13 , and Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16 . “I haven’t been to church in a long time,” two men admitted to me sheepishly on Wednesday. One of them, an older gentleman on his way to drop off his dry cleaning, said it had been thirty years. The other, slouched in his nursing home chair, looked above his head and joked about the ceiling tiles falling in on him. “That’s okay,” I said, and I reached up and reached down to smudge dark ash across two grateful foreheads. “This was meant to be,” said the man with his dry cleaning. “Amen,” said the other. For two hours this past Wednesday I stood on the sidewalk with Cindy, offering ashes to stranger after stranger. We were struck by a startling observation. It was often the most reluctant folks, the ones most determined not to make eye contact or the ones most asleep on two feet, who, surprised out