A Sermon preached on Ash Wednesday February 14, 2023 at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden
Joel 2:1 – 2, 12 – 1 7, 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10, Matthew 6:1-6,16-21
Recently my social media feed has been filled with comments, concerns, and memes around the juxtaposition of Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day. I’m not particularly worried myself. It’s not the first time that these two events, one a fast, the other a feast coincide, and it is not the first time that the secular calendar on the church calendar offer interesting combinations: Just think of having Good Friday or Easter Sunday on the 1st of April, April Fool’s Day, and what a preacher can do with that!
One suggestion I saw for today, was to use the ashes draw a heart on peoples’ foreheads instead of a cross, but to be honest, the blob you get from me could be almost anything anyway. Another FB friend commented that you can’t have “Valentine”, without Lent, because it’s part of the word, and I saw one suggestion that we expand the little prayer we say when imposing ashes, adding “remember that you are loved, and to love you will return” to the traditional “remember that you are dust, and that to dust you will return.” I won’t.
I do think there are connections to be made between the two. If you look at the Gospel reading for today, we find Jesus calling us to sincerity in our relationship with God rather than superficiality: "Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them.” (Matthew 6:1) At least in England, as I remember, the tradition was that the Valentine cards were anonymous, that they were a secret or private sign of affection, just as Jesus encourages his listeners to give alms, to pray, and to fast in secret. It is all about intention and motivation. Am I giving flowers and chocolates just because everyone does? Am I giving them, so people see me giving them? Or are they a genuine sign of my love for my partner, and perhaps even an act of repentance ….. in my case that would be for forgetting to give flowers at any other time.
The passage from Matthew’s Gospel asks the same questions, am I giving, praying, and fasting for public effect … or even to buy God’s love?
Jesus certainly wants his listeners – we are in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount – to work on their relationship with God and with one another, to “store up for yourselves treasures in heaven … For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." (6:20-21) That too is a work of love. But all the acts Jesus describes – generous giving, fervent prayer, faithful fasting – do not earn us God’s love, for that is already sure and certain as we are created by God in and for love. But these acts do help transform us and are part of living lives of love, lives focused on God and all of God’s children.
The love that Valentine’s Day usually focuses on is romantic love or desire – eros in Greek. But, to quote poet Malcom Guite, “in marriage, there is room not only for eros, but also for philia, deep friendship, and for storge, too: that comforting familiarity, that sense of home.”[1] And, he goes on to say, “sometimes, by prayer and grace, these three lesser loves are transfigured and together become agape: the love that is ‘patient and kind, that keeps no wrongs, that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things’.”[2]
It is this transformation, this becoming a signal and example that we hope for when we pray in our Marriage Service that God will “Make (the couple’s) life together a sign of Christ's love to this sinful and broken world, that unity may overcome estrangement, forgiveness heal guilt, and joy conquer despair.”[3]
At the heart of Ash Wednesday, Guite says, “is repentance, a turning and returning: a turning from self, with its incessant demands, a turning towards love with its grace in giving and forgiving.”[2] Ash Wednesday and the Valentine’s Day celebration are not the same, but they are compatible. In both of them we turn towards love and in doing so, if it is real love and not just for show, we also turn towards God who is love’s ultimate source and our ultimate goal.
Amen.
