Thanks to one of my favorite calendar coincidences, Ash Wednesday this year falls on Valentine’s Day! (Although sadly, unlike when we last had Valentine’s Ash Wednesday in 2018, this year is a leap year so we don’t also get the fun holiday crossover of Easter happening on April Fool’s Day. It does line up for the one remaining Ash Wednesday Valentine’s Day in 2029 though!)
Tonight’s sermon explores the common theme of love shared by these two holidays, proclaiming that God’s ultimate love triumphs even over death. The Scripture readings for this service are Psalm 51:1-17; 1 John 3:1-2, 14-24; and 1 Corinthians 13:1-13. I found helpful Mockingbird’s article The International League of the Guilty.
Here’s the sermon audio podcast and the worship livestream video from our combined service at Christ the King.
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Grace to you and peace from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
Happy Ash Valentine! Blessed Valentine Wednesday? I’m not sure what the appropriate greeting for today is. This crossover where Ash Wednesday falls on Valentine’s Day doesn’t happen very often. It happens today, five years from now in 2029, and then not until sometime next century.
So, we have to do what we can to take advantage of it, right? If you were here for dinner, hopefully you got your Ash Wednesday candy hearts, if not, grab some after service. There’s lots of Ash Wednesday Valentine’s day humor floating around too. I shared a meme that said “‘What are you doing for Valentine’s Day?’ ‘Rubbing dirt on people’s heads and telling them they’re going to die.’”
Christin sent me another one today while I was working on this sermon: “Roses are red, ashes are grey, we’re all gonna die, happy Valentine’s Day.”
And of course, remember you can’t spell Valentine without Lent!
The humor, obviously, is that a day of romance and love sounds very different than a solemn reminder of our mortality in church. Somehow, formal church services are not most people’s idea of a romantic date night.
But I want to suggest to you tonight that these two holidays have something in common besides just a coincidental calendar date, because they’re both ultimately about love.
In First Corinthians 13, Paul describes love with these famous words. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. How many times have you heard this reading at a wedding? It’s a beautiful picture of love.
But every time I’ve had a couple who wants this at their wedding, I’ve pointed out in the sermon that while this is very appropriate for a wedding, it’s not actually about any human couple’s love. This is a picture of God’s love. It’s something we want to live up to, something aspirational, but we’re never going to achieve it.
There’s a classic youth group Bible study activity where you read this and put your own name in place of love. Daniel is patient; Daniel is kind; Daniel is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Daniel does not insist on its own way; Daniel is not irritable or resentful. I wish that were always true!
But of course, it’s not. None of us can live up to this standard all the time. This is the way we are called to love, this is the way we are called to live, but we fall short of the mark. 1 John says “Whoever does not love abides in death.” And the standard for love is laying down our lives for one another. How can we say we love when there are brothers or sisters in need, and we fail to help them?
That’s what I love about Ash Wednesday. This service tonight is about admitting the truth about ourselves, being honest about the ways we fail to live up to God’s call to love.
We have a church word for that, right? We have a word for when we do the wrong thing, when we make selfish choices, when we harm our neighbors by our action or inaction. It’s called sin.
And Paul says in Romans 3, “the wages of sin is death.” Going against God—going against the Source of Life—leads to death. Sin separates us from God. Sin gets in the way of our relationship with our Creator.
So often, we try to go down our own path. We try to do enough good things to make up for the wrong we do. If I just try hard enough, maybe I can be that loving person all the time. Maybe I can make up for the times I insist on my own way, the times I’m resentful, or selfish; short-tempered, lazy.
Tonight, we have gathered to hear the message that all our efforts are in vain. You are dust, and to dust you shall return. No matter how much you do, you cannot stop being dust. You are going to die. You cannot save yourself. One article I read this week called Ash Wednesday “The most honest day of the year.” This is the day when we face the truth of our own mortality.
Instead of pretending we’ve got it all together, instead of trying to convince ourselves we can work out our own salvation, we come forward to receive ashes on our heads, to be marked by a sign of death. Because that’s what ashes are, right? They’re what’s left over after a fire, the remnants of what once was alive but is now dead.
That’s not a popular message in our culture. Jason Micheli points out:
“There’s no ‘Peanuts Ash Wednesday Special.’ Nobody grew up watching a stop-motion Burl Ives saying, ‘Hey kid, you’re a sinner and you’re going to die.’ Ash Wednesday doesn’t get anyone like Kris Kringle or Krampus. Starbucks doesn’t unveil any sin-themed soy lattes for Ash Wednesday…there’s no marketing, no media, no movie tie-ins or product placements for Ash Wednesday.
Nobody but Christians want anything to do with talk about sin and death, which is a shame because, as allergic as our culture is to the ashes, what Christians do with them has more to do with love than any Nora Ephron movie.”
One of the suggestions I saw a lot for the Valentine’s Day / Ash Wednesday crossover was to impose ashes in the shape of a heart this year. The intention is to remind people of God’s love. I’m not going to do that, though, because we have a more powerful sign of God’s love: The cross.
Hearts are a representation of human love, especially romantic love, and that’s wonderful. But the ultimate expression of love is God’s love, not ours. Many of you are familiar with John 3:16, which is a great verse. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
But First John 3:16 is just as powerful, in my opinion. It’s a definition of love: “We know love by this, that Jesus laid down his life for us—and that’s why we ought to lay down our lives for one another.”
The romantic love of Valentine’s Day involves laying down your life for another person, putting your partner’s needs before your own, at least some of the time. At its best, romantic love reflects God’s love. The Bible even uses romantic love as an analogy for God’s love, talking about the Church as the Bride of Christ. Song of Solomon is a love poem filled with romantic imagery. Romantic love can be a beautiful thing, but it’s not the ultimate form of love.
Of course, romantic love can let you down. It can be dangerous. I saw a Washington Post article this morning which began, “Let’s be honest. Valentine’s Day has more potential to hurt, harm, terrorize and traumatize people than anything Halloween serves up.” It went on to talk about fundraisers where some zoos will allow you to name a cockroach after your ex, then feed it to another animal as food. They’ll even send you a video of it being eaten. Happy Valentine’s day.
Ash Wednesday has nothing to do with how good you are at love. It has nothing to do with how hard you try, how good of a person you are, even how generous and pious and religious you are. Because none of that can redeem you from death. Only God can do that.
Ash Wednesday invites you—forces you—to confront your mortality, to face the brokenness and suffering in this world, and recognize that eternal salvation comes only from God. The hope of this broken world is Jesus Christ. And in letting go of our own efforts to save ourselves, we find freedom in Christ. Ash Wednesday is about freedom, about grace given to you by the One who laid his life down for you.
Our sin is not the end of the story. Our sin separates us from God, the source of life, but God refuses to remain separated. God refuses to be defeated by our sin. No matter what you’ve done, God loves you anyway, and God’s love is more powerful even than death.
God has entered this world in the person of Jesus Christ, who has suffered death for our sake—death on a cross. The cross shows us the extent of God’s love, how far God is willing to go out of love for us.
But the cross is not the end of the story, because the cross leads to the empty tomb. God’s love overcomes the powers of sin and death. God takes our dusty, mortal selves, and gives us new life.
Not because we’ve earned it, but out of grace. God does what we could never do. The God who in the beginning breathed life into dust and formed life refuses to give up on you, even when you turn away.
So tonight, remember you are dust. Receive the ashes as a symbol of your death, the wages of your sin.
And receive the sign of the cross on your forehead—the sign given to you at baptism, the sign of God’s love for you. Receive the promise of God’s grace and forgiveness. And believe that God has defeated death. God is in the business of transforming death into life.
God loves dusty people, and God makes beautiful things out of dust.
Amen