298 Putting the Lent in Valentine

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Putting the Lent in Valentine”, originally shared on February 14, 2024. It was the 298^th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent. It’s also St. Valentine’s Day. Today, we’re going to put the Lent in Valentine!

   Roman Numerals are fun. Did you watch the Super Bowl last Sunday? It was quite a game. It went V quarters. It was Super Bowl L-V-III, or 50+5+III, or 58.

   If you hold up two fingers you can make a V for 5 or two digits for 2.

   Like in the old joke, “A Roman walks into a bar, holds up two fingers, and says, “Five beers please.”

   Today is the beginning of Lent, the beginning of the Easter Cycle in the Church Year. It’s the beginning of the serious season of preparation for Holy Week and Easter Sunday, like Advent is the season of preparation for Christmas in the Christmas Cycle.

   Today is also Valentine’s Day, as in “V” for Valentine.

   It’s a Christian holiday known as St. Valentine’s Day, but our culture has long abandoned it as a religious celebration. Instead, it celebrates romance. There is some basis for that too, though, in the Christian origin of the holiday, or “holy day”.

   Who was St. Valentine, and why is he considered a saint?

   We have no record of a single historic figure called St. Valentine, but several Christian martyrs named Valentine or Valentinus have similar life and death stories that have combined to provide common ground ever since the late 300’s.

   Those elements include doing secret weddings for Roman soldiers and their fiancés when the Roman empire thought that single men made better soldiers and forbade marriage, imprisonment in a nobleman’s home and the healing of his daughter resulting in the whole household converting to Christianity, being sent to prison as a result and sending the girl a letter saying that he had no regrets which he signed, “Your Valentine”, and being tortured and then decapitated on February 14th.

   Red, the color of St. Valentine’s Day, is the liturgical color for martyrs.

   It is a martyr’s holiday for a saint who healed and loved selflessly, and it was so until the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer connected it with romantic love in the late 1300’s. And that’s how most people in our culture celebrate it in our time.

   Today, we’re going to associate it with something else:

   The Gospel reading for today that will be read in the vast majority of churches in the world is from the words of Jesus to the crowds in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21,

   The reading begins with these words, in verse 1,

“Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven. 

   Jesus then warns against giving alms (“alms” is money given to the poor after your offerings) to make yourself look good, and against praying in public to make yourself look good, and against making a suffering-face when you fast for religious reasons in order to make yourself look good. He warns against trusting in your accumulated wealth but instead advocates for giving it away to send it to heaven so that your heart might be in the right place. As in the saying, “You can’t take it with you. But you can send it on ahead.”

   We read and hear these things, and then we put ashes right on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday and wear them in front of each other!

   Now, most of us will be going straight home after an evening service, but some of us will get our ashes earlier today and wear them everywhere we go. Either way, we wear them in front of each other, right after we have heard Jesus say,

Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven. 

   But wait a minute. Let’s look a little closer at those verses.

   Each one of Jesus’ warnings is not about our actions, but about our motivation for those actions, not about what we do but about the “why’s?” that are behind them.

   When we act “in order to be seen by them”, or “so that they may be praised by others”, or “so that they may be seen by others”, or “so as to show others”, we are acting to serve ourselves.

   Is it wrong to give money, or pray, or deny ourselves, or even to accumulate wealth? Yes, when we do it for ourselves, and not to glorify God. We are spiritually poor when we are not materially rich toward others.

   You may remember the news reports about the spy balloon sent to float over our country by the Chinese government last year. I saw many responses online later.

   I saw a sign in a parking lot right after the balloon was shot down that said, “Balloon rides cancelled until further notice.” I saw a meme that showed a flying cow balloon being sent aloft with the text, “Wisconsin has just launched its spy balloon over Minnesota.” I saw a picture of the Goodyear Blimp showing the message, “DON’T SHOOT!” And I saw a photo from inside a car that said, “I followed the spy balloon for two hours until I realized that it was just bird poop on my windshield.”

   We can’t always tell what a thing is by looking at it. Seeing is not always believing, but sometimes believing is a way of seeing. And sometimes believing is the only way to see what is real.

   Our Gospel reading for today reminds us that appearances are not what the Christian life is about. Faith is what the Christian life is about.

   Faith can only be received as a gift from God. And sometimes we can be the means of the Holy Spirit when we exercise our credible witness that leads people to receiving faith from God. Study after study for decades has found that 80-85% of Christians come to faith through the influence of a friend or relative, someone whose is seen has having nothing to gain personally, whose words are credible to them.

   Sometimes, I have put a sheet over a chair before a worship service and placed it someplace where it can be seen. During the sermon, I ask for a volunteer to come forward. I say that I’m looking for someone who is willing to risk public humiliation and personal injury while getting no reward at all. A volunteer comes forward. I tell them that there is a chair under the sheet. I ask them to sit down. Eventually, they do. They do so because I am a credible witness to them.

   We are the first Bible some people will ever read. God doesn’t see us that way. But people do. How will people read you?

   Lent starts today. Lent is the 40 days between Ash Wednesday and Easter, excluding Sundays, which are like little Easters. Lent is a season to reflect on living the Christian life, and in being led to repentance and to turning that reflection into faithful action.

   Some people give things up for lent, and others add certain things, as Christian spiritual practices. How will your faith be shared during Lent? It’s a season to focus on our faith even more than usual.

   What we learn in Lent is that the Christian life does not consist in acting in the right way; that would just be stepping back and living under the religious Law. Guilt. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.  :-/

   The Gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, is that we are set free from the Law to live in response to the love that God shows us in the death of Jesus Christ, who was fully God and fully a human being, on the cross. The paradox of the Christian life is that we truly keep the Law when it defines who we are, not in what we do. The religious law is written in our hearts. When we live as a new Creation of God, motivation is everything.

   How do we act as the new Creation that God has made us to be? One way is by doing justice. “Justice”, in the Bible, doesn’t mean doing what people at your place on the political or social spectrum tell you to do. “Justice” means doing God’s will. That way of doing justice both reflects our culture and opposes it. It is guided by our relationship with God, not what is popular or expected in your group.

   Jesus even warns us not to “store up for yourselves treasures on earth.” Why? Isn’t that the responsible thing to do?

   Jesus warns against accumulating wealth because we tend to put wealth at the center of our lives and put our trust in it and not in God. We tend hoard it and to not be generous. And, in Jesus’ day, many people believed that if you had a lot of money, it was because you were a good person and God was blessing you, so you wanted to hang onto your money.

   Jesus says that the Christian life is about a living relationship with the one true living God, lived out in response to the great grace God has already given us in Jesus Christ.  We don’t live to impress others with our goodness. We live freely as the new creations God has made us to be.

   We are blessed, but we are blessed to be a blessing, not to show off our righteousness or to serve ourselves.

   That’s why Jesus can also say, in Matthew 5:16, after talking about how we light our rooms by putting our lamps on a lamppost and not under a basket,

“In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

   It’s not the actions that Jesus condemns, it’s their motivation. In the Christian life, faith produces and defines our actions. We don’t do what we do to impress others with our spirituality, we do them because that is who we are. It is as natural for us to do them as it is natural for an orange tree to bear oranges.

   Speaking of oranges, we’ve had some chilly weather in Southern California this past week. Snow is continuing to accumulate, but it’s mostly in the mountains. You can go there if you want to, or you can just look at it and enjoy it from a distance.

   I swam on a competitive adult Masters swim team before health issues and the pandemic put an end to that, and we swam all year ‘round. One winter, one of my teammates got a text from his brother in Minnesota that said, “-15 in Minneapolis.” He sent a text back that said, “SPF 15 in Southern California.” 😊

   Though, what we think of as “cold” depends on what we’re used to.

   I grew up in Wisconsin where it’s said that there are four seasons: Almost Winter, Winter, Still Winter, and Road Construction and I used to go jogging outdoors. I would dress in layers and run through the winter as long as the temperature outside was above 20 degrees below zero.

   When I came to my first church in California and winter came, a member asked me if I was still running outside now that it had gotten so cold. It was 60 degrees outside!

   It just depends on what we’re used to.

   And, as the Norwegians say, “There’s no such thing as bad weather. There’s just inadequate clothing.”

   Ash Wednesday is a reminder to us that we live in a different environment than the world does, but that we have put on Christ. We live in an environment where we can hear the words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” and be filled with a sense of faith, and not fear. We live our lives in response to the transformative work of the Holy Spirit, which Paul describes in Galatians 5:22-23,

22 By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.

   We see in the ashes of Ash Wednesday creation and decomposition from Adam and Eve, humility from Abraham before God, and sorrow from Jeremiah over the coming destruction of Jerusalem.

   But we also see in ashes a sign. The ashes are placed on our foreheads in the sign of the cross, a sign of our salvation, on the same spot and with the same shape placed on our foreheads at our baptism, that come with the declaration that we have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever.

    The world may see destruction and death in ashes, but we see something else: the restoration of life as it was intended to be lived from the very beginning. The victory of the cross over everything that defies God.

   The world may celebrate its version of romantic love today, but we celebrate life as an expression of selfless love, the love seen most clearly on the cross.

   Today, on Ash Wednesday, we have the sign of the cross drawn on our foreheads in ashes. From nothing comes everything: the cross of Jesus Christ given for the hope of the world.