If we were to exchange Valentine’s Day candy hearts this evening, they might bear strange messages on them. Instead of “sweetheart” or “be mine” ours would say “you’re dust” or “repent.” We might as well own the oddness of the 2024 calendar as we begin Lent on Valentine’s Day.
But we would also do well to pay attention to the intersection of God’s time, kairos time, with our calendar time, or chronos time. A martyr’s feast day has become a secular day celebrating romantic love, and a as the world celebrates romantic love, the Church enjoins fasting and repentance. There’s a glaring irony in the Ash Wednesday liturgy as we come forward to have ashes imposed on our foreheads just minutes after we hear Jesus’s warning against practicing piety in public. It might be tempting to justify not being here today because to kneel before God in repentance and to receive ashes and to refrain from a celebratory dinner on Valentine’s Day would seem to draw attention to our piety. And this begs the question of what we might be tempted to run away from.
But perhaps the greatest paradox of all on this Ash Wednesday is that by not coming here in repentance, we would show ourselves to be the most flagrant hypocrites of all. To avoid the ritual intentions of Ash Wednesday, we would implicitly admit that our sinfulness must define us and our future. It would be, in some sense, to deny our deepest identity as beloved children of God.
On a day where people exchange candy hearts with meaningless messages on them, we recall that there’s a greater message that God is sending to us in in our fasting and penitence. It comes to us not stamped on a little candy heart, but underneath the confessions of sin and imposition of ashes and starkness of tonight’s Mass. It’s a message written on our very hearts themselves, a message straight from God: you are mine.
Despite our fickleness and spiritual amnesia, despite our sullenness and ingratitude and hardheartedness, despite our complacency and malaise, that message is still written on our hearts. You are mine. We always have been, and we always will be God’s beloved, no matter what we do. It’s hypocritical to pretend otherwise.
It’s hypocritical to live as if we were never washed in the waters of baptism and cleansed of sin and marked as Christ’s own forever. It’s hypocritical to live as if we’re estranged from God when God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. It’s hypocritical to look for true love in worldly pleasures, or shallow friendships, or in our careers, or in self-affirmation. We’re God’s, and we have always been God’s, and we will always be God’s. And if we’re looking for true love, we need to return to the very beginning to find it.
The ashes that will soon be imposed on our foreheads remind us of our mortality, that we are dust and to dust we shall return. But they also remind us that the dust from which we were made was called good, and that the dust to which we shall return will one day be raised in glory. You are mine, God says. You have always been mine, you are mine now, and you always will be mine.
Tonight, God wants not affected piety or manipulative prayers or groveling before him. God doesn’t need our guilt or over-scrupulosity. There’s no material thing we can give God to gain anything, and God doesn’t trade in transactions. We already have everything we need because God has already given it to us. God simply wants our hearts, and nothing less. God wants to transform our cold hearts of stone into warm hearts of flesh and put a new spirit within those hearts. And because God is already dwelling in our hearts, God really just wants us to sift through the clutter and shame in our souls to see him way down at the bottom, looking at us with great love. And God longs for us to echo back to him what he’s always been saying to us: you are mine.
The bizarre realization of Ash Wednesday, and indeed of Lent itself, is that the more we run from our sins, the more we run from love itself. Awareness of our sins is a profound grace that calls us away from a life of hypocrisy and towards our true identity as beloved children of God, released from sin and meant to be free. Jesus’s warnings against making overt displays of piety in public could just as well be applied to the excessive self-shaming and self-abasement common among many Christians. Such grotesque reveling in our unworthiness is, above all, hypocritical because it’s full of pride. It’s a proud thing to refuse God’s love and forgiveness. It’s a proud thing to ignore the eternal message God sends us on this Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday, and, indeed, every day: you are mine.
To boldly acknowledge that we are dust and to dust we shall return is to receive God’s eternal gift of love. It’s to know that even the dust itself came from God’s gracious hand, and that the dust itself will not be wasted on the last day. To say we’re sinners and ask for forgiveness is to own the hypocrisy of living as if we haven’t been claimed as Christ’s own forever. To perversely relish our unworthiness is to refuse the astounding gift of God’s unending love, mercy, and compassion. To reject such love is to tell the greatest lie of all, that we belong to the deceiver who, night and day, prowls around like a roaring lion and constantly tells us that we are his instead of God’s.
But today, we reject that lie by being here to have our heads marked with ashes, to confess our sins, and to receive Christ’s healing in the Eucharistic bread and wine, all despite our own imperfections. And in showing up with all our imperfections, we’re not hypocrites but as utterly honest with ourselves as we could ever be. We’ve chosen to receive God’s precious gifts of mercy and forgiveness that mark our truest identity as his beloved children, redeemed and loved. And in those gifts, God reminds us: you are mine, you always have been, and you always will be.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Ash Wednesday
February 14, 2024