Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

If you were here for dinner back for dinner, you may have gotten a candy heart.  You know the typical kind.  They say things like “Be Mine,” “Hug me,” or “XOXOX.” We ordered our own a few weeks ago.  They’re all purple, the color for Lent, and they say, “URDust,” “Repent,” “Return to the Lord.” Unfortunately, the typeface is very small, so one person thought his Ash Wednesday love message said “USBank.”

The irony of the day is not lost of most of us.  St. Valentine’s Day–the day of love: chocolate hearts, little cards passed out in a second grade classrooms–falls on Ash Wednesday, when we come forward, raise our heads, and are reminded that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.  Ashes, ashes we all fall down.

I suspect there are many today who did feel they had to choose.  Tonight was the romantic dinner; the lunch hour a feverish race to the grocery to buy flowers, a card, and little package of chocolates run home, put on the kitchen counter before our beloved gets home, as if we planned the whole thing ahead. OR set cupid and the big retail push aside for a pastor’s ashen thumb.  A friend of mine, who often finds the ways of Christianity strange, said after asking what we were doing for Valentine’s Day, “Well, that’s depressing.”

I suppose if the message is simply, “You need to remember that you’re going to die,” or worse, “Remember just how sinful you are,” IS the message.  He’s right. It is a macabre, sketchy thing.  I have to say, however, as one who has, year after year, pushed the hair back from your foreheads (those of you, at least, who have hair; others with an artist canvass for crossing), looked into your eyes, marked the ashen cross, the moment is filled with more love than despair, more sacredness than fear, more hope than despair.

It’s such an honest and raw connection that it feels like living on the inside of God’s heart.

Sometimes I think we get Lent backwards.  Christianity on the street or in the movies says that grace or forgiveness can only come if we’re feeling appropriately yucky about ourselves or been sufficiently honest about all our mess-ups. The discipline (and really feels like that) of Lent is to be better by Easter or that final moment when we meet God face to face.

Frankly, that’s the message that so many of us have received.  In the television series, “The Bear,” a world class chef comes home to run the family restaurant after his older brother ended his own life.  In one flashback scene, at the Christmas table, the horribly dysfunctional family cannot shop shouting at each other. The mother’s second husband stars into the eyes of the older brother, and shouts, “You are nothing.  Do you hear that.  You are nothing.”

The words are played over and over again.  You can’t tell if he’s saying it again and again, or if those words are being repeated in the son’s head over and over.  Either way, there’s a moment, when you see a shift in the brother’s eyes.  He goes from fighting back, to taking it in; to believing it.  That message becomes part of him, and his life will not survive it.

Maybe today we pick up the fight to hear something different.

On our deepest wounds, our biggest fears, our most awful failures, on top of the wreckage of hatred, and eventually at the grave, we make the sign of the cross, just as if we are a baby held at the baptismal font, a whole new life ahead of us. You, child of God, have been sealed with the Holy Spirit, and marked with the cross of Christ forever.  For the next forty days, we’re going to repeat our own version of the scene at the table, “The body of Christ given for you.  The blood of Christ shed for you.”  Until maybe we can take it in deeply to enough to trust that it’s true.

When we were moving from Atlanta to the Twin Cities, we had to stage our condo so that it our stuff wouldn’t get in the way of seeing the home. Too many chairs.  Too many things stacked on the surfaces.  And, oof, the kitchen counter had become the appliance graveyard, some of the gadgets likely even given on a long-forgotten Valentine’s Day.

The irony is that we felt more at home, just as we were moving out.  Lent is really just staging for Easter. Get it all out of the way, so that people can experience the home that was always there.

When Jesus says go into the closet to pray, or moisturize your face so that you don’t look stuck and grumpy, or slip your offering into the plate without the ego part of you realizing what you’re doing, he’s not telling us to skip those practices, but to find the ways they connect to the heart.  We can certainly do them all for show, and we’ll get the reward we want.  But, truly, that’s not the reward that our aching, lost, fearful, shamed heart really wants.  What we really want is to be part of that which flows from the heart of God.

What is that we just have to move out of the way to find that treasure?  For where your treasure is, there your Valentine will be also. That’s the invitation of Lent.  Come home.  You are in God, today and even at the hour of your death.

In all the things that are falling apart, in all the things that aren’t right or good, in all the things that we’ve done or haven’t done, in the malignancies that grow in our society and in our cells, in yet one more mass shooting numbing our system, Christ reaches for us to say, “Hey, I’ve been here all along  Peace be with you.”

We all get what we’ve always had, a heart, marked with the cross of Christ forever.