Wednesday, February 14, 2018

When Calendars Collide: A Homily for Ash Wednesday 2018

It makes for a strange year when two calendars collide. On the one hand, you have the secular calendar – all the civic holidays, all the patriotic and cultural occasions, all the rhythms of our day-to-day lives. On the other hand, you have the church calendar – all the great fasts and feasts, all the days that bear explicit witness to deeper truths. Most of us have different levels of loyalty to both. And let me tell you, navigating that can be a big headache for a pastor! Balancing a congregation's thirst for the secular calendar's patriotism against the church calendar's witness to another kingdom – that's a doozy. Wrestling with how to integrate Mother's Day and Father's Day into or around a sermon series – that can trip up the momentum. And the Feast of Christ the King always seems to sit uncomfortably close to Thanksgiving – what a show!

And then there are years like this year. Oh, I'm sure you've already had a laugh when you realized that Easter Sunday will fall on April Fool's Day this year. There's a direct collision, and it may well lead to some quirky preaching! But before that big crash, there's this little one, which may not have occurred to you until today. From the church calendar, Ash Wednesday – the inauguration of the season of Lent, a time of fasting, of penitence to purify our hearts and lives as Easter approaches. But from the secular calendar, though originally cribbed from the church calendar, is the feast of St. Valentine – which in the modern secular calendar is a day, not for doom and gloom, not for sackcloth and ashes, but for cheer and sentimentality, for sugar and rejoicing and lightness.

Doesn't that make for an odd collision? What have chocolate and candy hearts to do with fasting? Or bouquets of roses with the grave threat of their wilting? What have pink balloons and teddy bears to do with prostration and lament? What have candlelight dinners to do with smears of gray ash? What have cooed words and the warmth of clasped hands to do with the chirping stillness and bitter chill of the graveyards in winter? What has “I love you, darling” to do with “To dust thou shalt return”? Crash. Crash. Crash. What do we do with that?

But perhaps the two are less unalike than we're prone to think. Perhaps this coinciding overlap of the ecclesiastical and the secular calendars is less pain and more providence. After all, what is Valentine's Day? Look beyond the outward shows, beyond the commercialistic mumbo-jumbo, beyond the twirl of inane advertisements and the mythologies of modern romance. What is Valentine's Day?

On days like this, you might hear the more cynical sort complain about the notion of a day set aside to celebrate love – as if we have so little love to give that we can limit it to a day! As if we need showy displays to communicate it! As if we need a reminder to reveal love to those whom we truly do love! I have been one of those cynics, in some years. But what if that's not what Valentine's Day is for at all? What if Valentine's Day is meant, not to compartmentalize love, but to renew it – to repent of its lack, its insufficiency, in the interest of a love that slackens not? What if Valentine's Day is the hope of new creation?

What do a man and a woman, romantically involved, do on Valentine's Day? They openly confess their love for one another. They give one another cards with sappy sayings and praiseful poetry – finding the best words to express what they ought to feel, ought to think, ought to do, every day of the year, but often fall short – sometimes a little short, sometimes far. They exchange gifts as tokens, symbols that represent their time, their energy, their resources, their very selves, for the sake of the other's use and enjoyment. They enjoy one another's company, and strive for deeper and more meaningful forms of intimacy; they cherish the opportunity to find delight precisely in their togetherness, in the experience of one another as man or as woman. They remind themselves of earlier times. Though time's advance leads the forms of feeling and the peaks and plateaus of passion to shift and change, on Valentine's Day, lovers refresh themselves and each other by drawing fresh water from that well – marking an occasion when they must return, must devote themselves anew, must wipe away former faults and begin again. And so all the gestures and symbols of Valentine's Day are efforts to rekindle the flame, recapture the spark; they seek to recommit the couple's lives to one another, to give and receive grace that not only forgives but refuels and renews. In short, Valentine's Day is a day in relationships when we return to the love we had at first – one might dare say, a day of repentance.

Spiritually, we have just as much need – no, more – of a renewal of love. Our tendency to let love go cold, to become sidetracked and apathetic, is every bit as damaging, but with vaster consequences, in our cosmic love story as in our earthbound ones. The prophets of old, and apostles of more recent but still ancient vintage, saw the relationship of Yahweh and Israel, and its further denouement in the relationship of Jesus Christ and his Church, as a betrothal – as a cosmic love story. We heard about that in the writings of Jeremiah and Paul, twin souls separated by centuries. The prophets looked back on Mount Sinai as a wedding ceremony, when the elders of Israel went up on the mountain to eat and drink in Yahweh's presence. Jeremiah recalled it as when Israel walked with Yahweh as a bride with her husband, when she followed him through the wilderness. That, he said, was the devotion of Israel's youth, her love as a bride.

But the love story was not an untroubled one. In ever-more graphic language, the prophets condemn Israel's unfaithfulness – her adulteries, her harlotries, her dalliances with idols and with political alliances with pagan protectors, as betrayals of Yahweh's love. All the gifts he gave her, she throws away on her many lovers. Hosea lived it out as a parable in his marriage to the harlot Gomer. Jeremiah spoke of Israel's relentless lust for anyone but the God who'd wed her, and her forgetfulness of her rightful husband. Ezekiel portrayed her adulteries as worsening time and again, becoming more and more flagrant in her betrayal of Yahweh. We might be tempted to think that, under the New Testament, the Church can never be unfaithful. But we know better. We might be tempted to think that, under the New Testament, we can never be as lacking in love for God as rebellious Israel was then. But we know better. Jesus himself reproached the Ephesian church for having “abandoned your first love,” and needing to repent and return to it.

Jesus Christ aims to present the Church to himself as a bride “without spot or wrinkle or any such thing,” but we seem so very eager to besmirch, smear, fold, crumple, tear ourselves in our fleeting, lackluster, and prone-to-wander love. Our love, even at its best, never equals his; and how often is our love even near our best? How often are we attentive, appreciative, affectionate, faithful, and true to Christ? Left to our own devices, we can become so oblivious of how far we miss the mark of loving him with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind and all our strength, and to love proportionately all neighbors who bear his image, out of delight in his precious and beautiful image. We have a word for missing the mark of love: 'sin.' And left to our own devices, we not only sin more flagrantly, but become oblivious of it.

So to stop our natural obliviousness from running away with us and letting our love get too lukewarm, we build special wake-up calls into the calendar. Like today. Ash Wednesday calls us back – calls us sharply, calls us darkly, but calls us back all the same – to our 'first love.' It's the day where we confess our lovelessness – all the times we've taken even a foot down the adulterous and unloving path Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel saw Israel treading. It's the day where we repent of it, recommitting to our relationship with Christ. It begins a season of heart-cleaning through prayer and fasting; it shocks us back to the hearth from which we've wandered; it urges us to rekindle the flame, to recapture the spark, to re-surrender to the Spirit.

We love because he first loved us,” we read. And because he first loved us, we must love. Because he wined us and dined us, because he opened his love to us, because he dared to be our protector, because he showered us with gifts and dotes on us daily and whispers his love in our ears every minute, but most of all because he is who he is: the Lover who sees in us his Beloved, even at our most spiteful, even at our most ungrateful, even at our most unfaithful. His love is life, is better than life; estrangement from him only sickens and kills us, and so, out of love, he woos us daily back to him. Ash Wednesday hits us hard, I admit, but it hits us hard only to knock the stuffing from our ears and the scales from our eyes and the crust from our hearts. It reminds us that we are dust – “such an earthquake as the image of God in dust,” certainly (as Chesterton quipped), but dust all the same – precisely to humble and reprove us for our offense, our coldness, our adulteries and harlotries and vain imaginings.

Today is that day. And the collision is just the jolt we need, and a fitting one: Done right, Ash Wednesday is always our heavenly Valentine's Day. Done right, Ash Wednesday is always our day of repentance back to our first love, to the devotion of the Church's youth. And on this Ash Wednesday Valentine's Day, we enjoy this promise. From dust we are; to dust we shall return; but the story does not end there, for “love is as strong as death” (Song of Songs 8:6), and stronger still. The Lord of Love proved it; 'Dust' will nevermore be his name, for death no longer has any hold on him!

Tonight, this Jesus of love and mercy has invited us out on a date: back once more to his table where he'll wine us and dine us and let us fall in love with him all over again. On the way there, he offers us his sign, the cross, as we might offer one another rings and roses. Though we receive his sign in ash as our sign of repentance, let us receive it as a gift, as the seal of a pledge and a promise, from the One who loved us first and loved us to the last – and to whom all our love is due. For us he died. For us he rose. For us he's coming again. Hallelujah. Amen.

No comments:

Post a Comment