Ash Wednesday

For most of us, February 14th has only ever been a day associated with heart-shaped candies and chocolates and paper cards with sweet words printed on them. The last time it coincided with Ash Wednesday, in 1945, Franklin Roosevelt was in his fourth term as President and the end of World War 2 was in sight.

So, it probably comes as a surprise that Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday are a mash-up that works.

Tonight as we gather, we recall the immense love that God has for each one of us.  From the first creation story that tells how God breathed the very breath of life into the dust of the earth to form the first living being (Genesis 2:7), we hear all through Scripture about God’s love for God’s people.

But words were not enough. God’s people rebelled and insisted upon their own ways, returning to God only when they failed. Gracious and merciful, God relented from punishment.

And then, God’s love for the world comes to us with skin on it, in the person of Jesus Christ, in what Joy Cowley calls in her poem “Incarnation” “a miracle of love made by love.”

Divine love isn’t the stuff of the Romantic poets, fluffy teddy bears or bouquets of flowers. It is the love of a parent when their child’s heart is hurting and Mommy and Daddy can’t make it better. It is the love that sits at a hospital bedside waiting for danger to subside. It is the love that holds a person’s hand when death is near. It is the love that sees the Son of God spat upon, beaten and executed.

And in Jesus’ life, crucifixion and resurrection, we witness the unbounded love of God given for the world, that we might know God and experience the freedom of forgiveness that is offered to us.

In giving us Jesus, God places relationship before judgment, and offers us forgiveness for our sins — our errors and mistakes and all the ways that we have turned away from God.

On Ash Wednesday, particularly, we are called to repent, not to just “feel bad” about our sins and resolve to “do better,” but to look into our hearts and actually change direction, to go about being in the world and with God differently.

Instead of red roses, God asks for our lives, that we would live, freed from sin, in relationship with the God who loves us.

Lent gives us a whole season – forty days – to fall more deeply in love with God.

Do you remember your first crush? Now, you can pass notes to God, praying and listening for God’s Word for you, while you journal your hopes and your desires, your fears and your confessions.

But first crushes fade and like short-lived New Year’s resolutions that are forgotten by Valentine’s Day, shallow attempts to change our patterns of living and thinking fail.

So Lent calls us, in the words of Joel, to rend our hearts and return to God, to enter into a life of discipleship that lasts a lifetime. Just as the waters of baptism wash us clean and give us new life, the ashes we receive tonight remind us that God breathes life into the ashes of our lives, and we live a new life in Christ, marked by the cross as belonging to God.

Let us pray…

God of love,

Through the prophet Joel, we hear your cry to return to You “with all our heart”;

By your transforming Word and Spirit, provide us with clean hearts.

That in this Lent and this life, we might follow your Son Jesus with a heart set on heaven.

Amen.