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| A cheesy picture to let you know that God loves you! |
ã2024 The Rev. Seth Olson
Holy God, let my words be your words and when my words are not your words, let your people be wise enough to know the same. Amen.
Happy Valent—wait, that’s not right. My beloved spouse, Kim, first thing this morning told me, “Happy Ashentine’s Day!” This confluence of Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day happened back in 2018 and it will happen again in 2029, but that will be it for this century. So, soak up this strange merger of a day when we say, “I love you,” and a day when the Church reminds us, “You are dust and to dust you shall return.”
All joking aside, there is a connection between these two occasions, and it is love. Although, it is not the type of love that most often gets bantered about today. The world around us—from Hallmark card designers to restaurant staffs to chocolate companies, all of them want us to spend today in a sappy love haze. This isn’t the love that Ash Wednesday is about.
Now there is nothing wrong with romantic love. C.S. Lewis in his wonderful work, The Four Loves, describes this Valentine’s Day-type-of-love utilizing the Greek word eros. Although often derided as merely puppy love, a feelings-based love, or even lust, in its rightful place of a committed relationship, eros lends itself to us understanding something much larger than ourselves. God’s yearning to woo us, to beckon us deeper into a larger love. Go read Song of Solomon if you want a taste of this love.
At my household, Valentine’s Day is not only about romantic love, as our older child presented multiple cards to the rest of his family. Lewis would describe this love as storge love, or the love that we share as a family. Desmond Tutu described this by saying, “You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.” This love which we share within our family reminds us that God is our Heavenly Father, a loving, divine parent who cares for us as a doting father adores his children.
A third love we see less often displayed on Valentine’s Day Lewis describes as philia, brotherly or sisterly love. If you celebrated Galentine’s Day with your best girl friends or if you are involved in a bromance, this is philia, a fraternal love. In it, we understand a sort of connection that unites us with friends who are more like family, or at least the family of our choosing. When Christ Jesus on the night before his death called his disciples friends, he was expressing philia. He was also leaning into the fourth type of love, which is truly where Ash Wednesday and this preparatory season of Lent leads us.
The fourth love is agape. A love so powerful that it allows one to sacrifice for another. Agape is what all the other loves point towards, and it is the foundation on which all other love emanates, for it is the love God harnessed in Creation. This is the love we experience in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus! What greater love can one have than this, than to lay down one’s life for another. And, on this penitential day, agape is what we experience all around us.
In Joel, the trumpet blast and the day of darkness are serious. And yet, in God’s agape love the people are spared, as God pours out love upon us as we turn back to be embraced like a prodigal son running into a loving father’s arms. In our Psalm, we discover that God is full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and of great kindness. Compassion means to suffer with us. Although God is infinite, beyond our understanding, in Christ Jesus God comes to be with us, to suffer with us, and to walk alongside us—again, agape love. Paul in his letter preaches agape to those in Corinth—Jesus took on our sin even though he himself was sinless. This is laying down one’s life, this is sacrificial agape love. Finally, in our Gospel lesson we are reminded, that even when God leads us into self-sacrificing love—whether through alms giving, praying, or fasting—we are not doing these things to be seen for our acts of love. Rather, we are loving because our treasure is not praise from others, but the glorification of God who is the source of all love.
In just a few moments, I’ll invite you to the observance of a holy Lent. I’ll ask God’s blessing on these ashes. And, I’ll pronounce some difficult words: “You are dust and to dust you shall return.” Even here in this sobering realization that we are mortal, that we are fleeting, that we are finite, even here agape persists. It is good and right for us to recognize our human nature, our sinful disposition, and our need for reconciliation. This is what we do on this day.
And yet, in the same place where we receive an ashen cross, we also received a cross of chrism, holy oil during Holy Baptism. There in that initiation into the Faith—in that moment when we are adopted into God’s family, joining Jesus our friend and brother—there we hear, “You are marked as Christ’s own forever.”
Today is a rare day—both Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday. What binds these unlikely days together? Love! And, all good, healthy love points to the all-encompassing agape of God. Happy Ashentine’s Day—God loves you to death, and beyond!
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