Standing at the Cross this Lent

As we stare down these first two weeks of February we will be bombarded with the deep reds and bright pinks of St. Valentine’s Day. This year, our holiday of love lands on a holy day within the Christian calendar, Ash Wednesday. There is both a deep dissonance and a profound connection in celebrating these two days together.

On the surface of things they are absolute opposites. Valentines Day celebrates a surface level, romantic love ideal that is expressed through flowers, hearts and chocolate. Ash Wednesday is the day we remember our mortality. We will eventually die and return to the dust from which we formed. If that is as far as we go into either of these holidays a dissonance, a deep divide indeed resounds, but if we push a bit deeper…Valentine’s day is a celebration of love. Yes, usually romantic love, but if we push deeper to a love that asks something of us, that expects something from us, that changes and transforms us, then we are starting to talk about a love like that we see in the person of Jesus Christ. Ash Wednesday does mark our mortality, but also, if we go a little deeper, the love God has for us mere mortals who do die so quickly in the widest scheme of things and who still merit God’s love in the person of Jesus Christ.

We will gather as a worshiping Christian community this Ash Wednesday and on the surface of many things we might disagree, divide and disconnect, but when we go deeper, we stand on a common ground, the person of Jesus Christ. As one Southern Baptist pastor, Dean Inserra put it, “We are still trying to figure out what it means to live out our faith in our world and in our country. We have things we’re still wrestling with. We’re trying to wrestle with those questions and let Jesus be first.”

This Lent we will be having hard conversation during our Lenten Study time on Wednesday nights, but I pray we come to them knowing first where we stand together, in the person of Jesus Christ who came to show us the extent of God’s love for this beautifully dusty creation.

We make the road by walking…together,

Pr. Hannah