So it’s Valentine’s Day today, and this tells you a lot about my friend list, but my Facebook page has been crowded this week with funny remarks about the overlap of Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday. A couple of my favorites include a picture of Ryan Gosling with the words “Roses are red, violets are blue, I can’t wait to contemplate my mortality with you.” And another one from a colleague that is a red background with pink and purple hearts and the words “What are you doing for Valentine’s Day? I’ll be working and telling people that they’re sinners.”
It is a weird overlap at first, this secular holiday of romance, chocolate and flowers, and this liturgical holiday of confession, repentance, ashes and mortality. The bishop remarked in his Take One video this week that someone even asked him if we could move Ash Wednesday this year because it didn’t fit with Valentine’s Day. This is, the bishop remarked, the epitome of hubris, to move this remembrance that we are dust, because it interferes with this commercialized celebration of romantic love.
If we think of this overlap of Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day as this clash of the secular and the sacred, of romance and death, then yes, today is pretty jarring. But if we think about love, then maybe there is no better way to reflect on the fact that we are loved by God than to celebrate Ash Wednesday on Valentine’s Day.
The dissonance in these holidays comes because we often make the same mistake with love that we make with grace, that is, we mistake love with niceness. Niceness is passive. Niceness allows things to go along as they were. Niceness is hearts and teddy bears and the fairy tale romantic comedy ending where everyone lives happily ever after and no one ever gets their feelings hurt, or struggles with anything, or has to take out the trash. Niceness is a temporary good feeling.
Love on the other hand, is active, it is transformative. We often describe love too as a feeling, but it isn’t. I tell couples in weddings, love is an action, it is a decision, it is a choice we make. Which means love does not always feel nice. Because love changes us, it forces us to look at how we might be contributing to whatever problem we are dealing with, and prods us to address the only part of the equation we have control over, our own part. Which means love can hurt, because love is honest.
On Ash Wednesday we remember that God is divine judge, and we are mortal and broken. It is not, at first read, a particularly uplifting day, with extended confession reminding that we are sinners, that we are mortal, that we are but dust and to dust we shall return. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not wallow in my own shortcomings. I’d rather we jumped right over the confession part and got right to the forgiving. I’d rather a day where God was like, yeah, here’s some bad stuff that happened, but it’s totally not your fault, and there’s definitely nothing you could have done about it. Or, it’s cool, don’t worry about it, forgive and forget, you know. I’d rather that God was a little bit nicer, and this extended confession, being forced to come face-to-face with my own shortcomings, well, it just doesn’t feel all that nice.
It doesn’t feel nice, and it isn’t nice, because God isn’t all that interested in niceness. Nice is passive, nice ignores problems in favor of comfort and ease, nice allows us to stay at a comfortable distance, not having to engaged in the real work of relationships. And God isn’t interested in niceness, God is interested in love. God is interested in the hard work of relationship building, of being with us in hard times, of transforming us to be more than we thought we were, to be the people God created us to be. The fact of the matter is, God loves us too much to be nice. God loves us too much to be passive. God loves us too much to let us be content with not being as full, devoted, committed, loving, and strong as we can be. Growing hurts, transforming hurts, taking a long, hard look at our own failings and realizing where we need to change, these are not fun activities. But the God who formed you, who knit you together, who knows you thoroughly, your every going out and coming in, that God loves you too much to walk away from this project of redemption that God has started in you. God is in this, God is fully committed to you. And God will not stop pursuing you until you are fully transformed in God’s own image, that in God you, as Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthians, become the righteousness of God. That, my friends, is what love looks like.
And so I invite you this day, and throughout this whole season of Lent, to open yourself up to be loved by God, to be transformed by the love of God. Use the long confessions, the somber tones, to do some soul searching and see where God is calling you to attention. Because on Ash Wednesday we remember that God is the divine judge, and that we are but dust. And we also remember that from the dust of the earth God formed us in God’s own image. And the project that God created, that God called good at the birth of creation, God will not leave until we are fully transformed into God’s image. Yes, God is judge, and God judges with love. Amen.
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