Loading...Public Service Announcement: Valentine’s Day is this Thursday. I mailed Bruce a card. Remember to send one to me honey.
I never appreciated Valentine’s Day until I was given the opportunity to host Mrs. Gentry’s second grade Valentine’s Party at Potter Gray Elementary School.
Someone made the mistake of asking me, “Wasn’t Valentine a saint?” The truth is there is only a small and sketchy amount of information about the historical figure of Valentine. I took the question seriously and gave it a healthy dose of silly.
I filled a crystal pitcher with 2% milk and a crystal jelly jar with strawberry flavored Nestle’s Quick, which is 50 % red food coloring and 110% sugar. Patching together bits of legend from wikisaints (made up). I crafted a story about a man named Valentine who was jailed because he wanted to care about people the way Jesus cares about people: that means caring about people even if it feels really hard to care about them.
Valentine gave a rose to the daughter of the jailor to say he cared about her the way Jesus cares about everyone and that rose was the very first Valentine. My story gets sillier. Every year on the anniversary of his death tears fall from the rose and anyone who drinks the tears (strawberrry Quick) will be given the ability to care about someone if even they are really hard to care about.
This story was met with the same interest I might feel for being given a stuffed teddy bear as a romantic gift; meh. As I poured milk into each student’s cup I could tell the magical power of the rose’s tears was not going to help me empty the crystal jelly jar. No one wanted to care about people who are hard to care about and I did not want to bring home strawberry Quick. I took the dropper filled with red liquid and holding it high adjusted my story: Some say these tears can even prevent kisses from those you do not want kisses. Immediately every hand went up: Me! Me please! Everyone wanted a dropperful of magical kiss-preventing tears in their 2%.
There is about as much confirmed data about the historical person of St Valentine as there is confirmed data about the nature of Love. Today, we get to patch together the best bits of God’s Love story as it’s told in Holy Scripture.
The first bit of love story we are given comes from the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah loved his nation and his king, his God and his Temple. And lost them all. Uzziah was king for a whopping 52 years — the longest reign of any king of Israel. And after he died, well, things just were never the same again.
Isaiah’s glorious vision of seraph’s wings and the hem of the Lord’s robe was about as well received as the original story I made up a crying rose. Meh. Israel wasn’t so interested in what Isaiah had to say. If I had to speak about the nature of Love as found in Isaiah I would say that even where ears reject the words, the heart still speaks them. At least that’s how Love works for Israel and the prophets during the reign of the kings and their subsequent exile.
Another bit about Love is from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. Today, it’s from a passage that comes shortly AFTER the famous Love-is-patient-love-is-kind-love-never-ends bit in chapter 13. Chapter 15 is a bit less romantic and more practical: Love is giving to others what you have been given. In this case Paul gives to the Corinthians his confidence that Jesus fulfills all the promises God makes. Confidence in Jesus is what Paul was given. He gives it away and he asks others to give away the same confidence. That is what Love looks like in Corinth.
The last bit about Love comes from today’s readings in Luke’s Gospel. There’s a lot of material to work with here. The nature of love as made known in Luke 5 could fill many crystal pitchers. Let me invite you to taste one bit: Where there is Love there is leaving and vice versa. Jesus leaves the crowds to get into the boat so he can speak to the crowds. He tells Simon to go to the deep and Simon leaves aside his doubt to obey. Although the net is full, the fisherman leavea it to follow a fishing legend, and they all leave the lake from which a miraculous catch of fish has just been made.
Just a little while later, on Good Friday, Jesus will leave life and earth and take sin with Him to death. When He is raised from the dead He leaves death in the dust. When He ascends to heaven he leaves his power in the hands of those silly enough to claim it. Describing the nature of love is complex isn’t it?
Even the finicky and ambiguous second graders may know more about love than they are given credit for. When they decline kisses — whether from their adoring mother or perhaps from a fast runner (my son Joseph would come from home from second grade and say “Abby tried to kiss me today but I ran faster than she runs.”)
If second grade is too silly for you let’s read about Love’s complexities expressed most poetically by CS Lewis when he writes:
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you give it to no one, not even a pet. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the coffin of your self-centeredness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change it will become hard, unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
So faith hope and love abide these three. As little as we can say about Love, the greatest of these, the greatest of all, is Love.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/3058-to-love-at-all-is-to-be-vulnerable-love-anything
