Sermon: Ash Wednesday, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

February 14, 2024
Pastor Jonathan Linman
Faith-La Fe Lutheran Church

Ever since I learned a few months ago that Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day would fall on the same day this year, I’ve been looking forward to this sermon. On a day when we celebrate romantic love and also remember our morality and sin, I thought, now that will preach! When it comes to sermon preparation, I love a good challenge.

So, let’s jump right in. Valentine’s Day is the day to commemorate St. Valentine, about whom little is confidently known. Tradition says he was a 3rd Century Roman saint who came to be associated with courtly love. Valentine is believed to have been martyred for his belief in Christ during one of the early persecutions of Christians. There’s a legend that he wrote a note to his daughter shortly before he was executed which was signed, “From Your Valentine.” There’s also a legend that St. Valentine cut hearts from parchment to give to persecuted Christians to remind them of God’s love for them, which may be the precursor to our practice of giving heart-themed cards to loved ones on this day. So, those are the Christian origins of Valentine’s Day.

Ash Wednesday, of course, is a day when the appointed readings call us to repentance for our sinful ways. Here’s what we heard from the prophet Isaiah: “Shout out; do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet! Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins.” (Isaiah 58:1) So we’re beckoned to confess our sins on this day, but also to call to mind our mortal nature – “remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

Well, all of this stuff about our sin and our mortality puts a damper on any romantic impulses, doesn’t it? Or does it? Let’s look more deeply…. I’ve joked with other pastors that maybe on Ash Wednesday 2024, we should surround the smudged cross on your foreheads with the outline of a smudged heart!

Well, that’s essentially what Martin Luther did in crafting his coat of arms, the so-called Luther Rose. Here it is. [Reveal the Luther Rose] In the center is a black cross, not unlike that which we mark on you on Ash Wednesday. This black cross signifies the saving death of Christ on the cross, an atonement for the stain of sin. The red heart suggests Christ’s blood shed for us, but also the truth that the believing heart receives the gift of Christ’s grace and redemption by faith. Surrounding the heart is a white rose, suggestive of our life in Christ, and our having been cleansed by his gracious love. Then there’s the blue field representing heavenly joy. All of this is surrounded by a ring of gold, signifying the precious gift of eternal blessedness in Christ. Some say that the Luther Rose pretty much sums up all of Martin Luther’s theology.

So, when it’s all said and done, the themes of Ash Wednesday and St. Valentine’s Day actually combine pretty nicely, for it’s all about love on this day. Not just courtly, romantic love that we have for each other – not the filial love among siblings nor the erotic love of partners. Rather, agape love, that is, the unconditional love of God in Christ for us.

That’s what St. Valentine sought to communicate by giving parchment hearts to persecuted believers – the unconditional love of God for them, that even if humans persecute them for their beliefs, God doesn’t persecute them, but rather God loves them beyond measure and seeks their well-being.

You’ll soon be invited to make your confession with a rite that is longer than usual, a rite that gets pretty specific about our sinful shortcomings. Here’s the thing: when you name the names of your sins tonight, imagine not just a dirty smudge on your forehead, but that smudge of your sinful self being enveloped by a heart that shows forth God’s intimate, specific, personal love for you.

It's as if the love of God in Christ in the shape of a heart surrounds and embraces our whole being, thus taking the edge off our “woe is me, what a horrible sinner am I” moments. Imagining an ashen cross surrounded by a loving heart gives this solemn day a little bit less of the burden of gravitas.

Moreover, when you come forward for the imposition of ashes to remember your mortality that one day, we all will return in death to the dust of the earth from which we are made, imagine again that the earthen smudge on your forehead is surrounded by the heart of Jesus, a heart that stopped beating when Jesus died on the cross, but a heart that was revivified in Christ’s resurrection from the dead on the third day.

And remember that what happened to Jesus is going to happen to us when our divine lover Christ will lift us up from our own graves in new resurrected life on the last day.

Imagining the cross surrounded by a heart, a remembrance of the victory of love and life over sin and death, we come to see the truth of Paul’s wisdom expressed in this evening’s second reading: “We are treated…. as dying and look – we’re alive, as punished and yet not killed, as sorrowful yet always rejoicing, as poor yet making many rich, as having nothing and yet possessing everything.” (2 Corinthians 6:8b-10)

In fact, that last phrase pretty much sums up everything about this day and all of Christianity, when the divine love of Christ surrounds the smudge of our sin and mortality: We are regarded as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

In Christ, by his mercy and grace, we do indeed possess everything, for nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (cf. Romans 8:39).

So, in 2024 when the day that is Ash Wednesday coincides with St. Valentine’s Day, it’s not so much of a Debbie Downer after all, is it!

Moreover, because of Christ’s abiding love for us, we can now better obey Jesus’ instruction to us that Matthew records as we heard in today’s gospel reading: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Our treasure is Christ and his loving heart made known and real to us through the gifts of grace embodied, concretized in the word, in the waters of the sacramental bath, in the bread and wine of the holy table. These means of grace give us more willing hearts to treasure Christ, our savior, our divine lover.

And in Christ and by his mercy and grace, we can come to treasure the dustiness of our own mortality, and become more compassionate towards ourselves and our own sinful shortcomings.

And by grace, we also find ourselves more willing to convincingly treasure others as well. And in our words and deeds we come closer to fulfilling the kind of holy devotion and fast about which the prophet Isaiah prophesied: “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them and not to hide yourself from your own kin?” (Isaiah 58:6-7)

By God’s grace known in the loving heart of Jesus that surrounds and envelopes and embraces our sin and mortality, we can also keep Jesus’ other instruction about the nature of fasting and holy devotion: “Whenever you fast, do not look somber [or dismal], like the hypocrites…” Somber and dismal ultimately don’t have a lasting place when Christ in the Spirit embraces us and anoints us with oil and washes our face and indeed our whole bodies in the waters of baptism.

Thanks be to God for the fruit of these holy reflections helped along by the coinciding of Ash Wednesday with St. Valentine’s Day. See, this holy coincidence does preach, doesn’t it? Amen.