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Summary: AI-assisted (Claude) from transcripts

Summary

Belong Together: Ash Wednesday and the Commemoration of Valentine

It is a rare convergence when February 14 falls on Ash Wednesday—the solemn entrance into Lent, when the church closes the word Alleluia in her heart, dons purple, and begins the forty-day walk toward Easter. On the surface, the somber imposition of ashes seems an awkward partner for a day the wider culture has given over to Cupid and sentimental romance. Yet from the perspective of the church's own calendar, the pairing is not strange at all. February 14 is also the commemoration of Valentine, and Ash Wednesday and Valentine, rightly understood, belong together.

Lutherans receive commemorations as a salutary practice. Our confessional writings commend the remembrance of faithful people who have gone before us because such remembering gives occasion to thank God for His work in their lives, to grow in faith by their example, and to be encouraged in our own callings. The calendar is full of such names—Silas the companion of Paul on February 10; Aquila and Priscilla, the husband-and-wife team who opened their home in hospitality to new Christians, on February 13—and on February 14, the priest and physician Valentine, martyred for the faith in 270.

The traditions surrounding Valentine cannot be verified in every detail, but the substance is sure: he died confessing Christ. The stories tell of an emperor who banned marriage, thinking unmarried men would more readily go to war, and of Valentine secretly marrying Christian couples out of compassion until he was caught and imprisoned. From his cell he is said to have reached through the bars to violets growing outside, painstakingly piercing into each petal the message, Remember, your Valentine loves you, and dropping them to the street below. On the day of his execution he wrote a final word of encouragement to the jailer's child. One writer rightly observes that Eros has hijacked Valentine's Day; the church, however, has never forgotten the martyr whose love was shaped by the love of Christ.

Valentine knew his Scripture. 1 John 4:9 declares, "God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him." This is the incarnation—the enfleshment of the second Person of the Trinity, true God and true man, whom we celebrate every Christmas. And 1 John 4:10 presses deeper: "In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." By nature our hearts are stone, cold toward God, born with a heart disease that only He can cure. We do not climb up to Him; He comes down to us. The cross is the supreme manifestation of love—agape, self-sacrificing love—where Christ atones for every sin of thought, word, and deed, and for the very condition of our sinfulness, winning forgiveness for us all.

Scripture tells us further who this God is. 1 John 4:8: "God is love." 1 John 1:5: "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." Hebrews 12:29: "Our God is a consuming fire." His light exposes the depth and breadth of our sin as His law lays us bare; His fire consumes those sins without destroying us. That is amazing love.

So on this day the ashes are traced upon the forehead in the sign of the cross. They are black, reminding us of our sin and our mortality—ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But the same ashes also sing a song of joy, because the shape they take is the cross, the very sign first made over us in Holy Baptism. They proclaim that God has called us His own, redeemed us, opened heaven to us, and now looks at us and sees the perfection of Christ, who clothes us in His white, righteous garment. Valentine knew that love, and so do we. Ash Wednesday and the commemoration of Valentine—the call to repentance and the witness of a martyr who loved because he was first loved—belong together, sending us out in word and deed to proclaim the love of God in Christ Jesus.

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