2-14-18 - My Funny Valentine

You want ashes with that chocolate? Here's our mash-up of two incompatible holidays, Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday. Yet it's a great reminder that Lent is really all about going deeper into the love story of our faith, the story of our relationship with the God who made us, and how we drift away or walk away or storm away, and are drawn back through the sacrifice of love. In this love story God does all the sacrificing; Jesus leaves home, lays it all down. We do all the receiving, until we are loved into being able to respond.

We celebrate that sacrifice and triumph of love supremely in Holy Week and Easter – a mystery so big, so vast, we take five weeks to prepare for it. In Lent we draw near to God, are drawn near by the One who made us, loves us, and will not let us go, who wants passionately for us to be close.

One of our earliest sacred stories speaks of temptation and primal rebellion against the goodness of God in the mythic tale of the first man, first woman, a snake and an apple. That fateful bite, as our ancient forebears described it, resulted in four fatal breaches in relationship:

• between humans and their Creator – suddenly they hide from God;
• between man and woman – they start blaming each other;
• between humankind and the natural world – animals are killed to make covering for the humans, newly aware of their shame.
• within the human psyche, as shame creates a divided self.

Our Good News asserts that these four breaches were healed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As we experience that healing, we become a people of restored relationship, of reconciled and reconciling love. Repentance and reconciliation can be hard work, shining the light of Christ into dark corners in our psyches and our world.

But this is healing work, love work, which we do not do alone. We do it with the power of God’s love running through us as sap through a vine. “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you," said Jesus. “Abide in my love.” Keeping his commandments, living a life of integrity and authenticity and holiness – that is how we abide in his love.

And that love spreads out. In God’s love story, the love cannot be contained between two. It spills over to encompass the whole community of love. “Love one another,” Jesus commanded, “as I have loved you.” The reconciliation we experience becomes shared, as we keep expanding the circle of love.

The beautiful hymn, “Come down, O Love divine,” keeps floating through my mind – in particular these words:
O Comforter, draw near, within my heart appear, and kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing.
O let it freely burn, till earthly passions turn to dust and ashes in its heat consuming;
and let thy glorious light shine ever on my sight, and clothe me round, the while my path illuming.

As we allow the fire of God to burn away everything in us that is passing away, as we embrace the ashes and the dust, let’s remember that we do this work in the glorious light of the One who showed us what it means to truly empty oneself. Lent is a season of sober reflection, not of stumbling in the dark. God will illumine our path, in love.

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