A couple of years ago there was a letter in
the Daily Telegraph from a father, who described a day when, while helping his
teenage daughter with her homework, the girl’s studies were interrupted by a
text from her mother.
“What do you want from life?” it read. This
query was rendered even more bewildering as the mother had just popped out of
the house to go shopping, and had made no reference to her spiritual anxiety
before getting into the car. The father and daughter, while concerned and
bemused, decided they’d better prepare some answers as Mum was going to come
back from the shops needing some answers. They decided they wanted “love and
acceptance.”
Mum got home and wasn’t in a state at all,
apart from wondering why her text hadn’t been answered. She texted at the
supermarket, and due to predictive texting, her query had been mangled from the
original: “What do you want from Lidl?”
We all want love and acceptance. Lidl has
some fab stuff in it. Do you shop in Lidl? It’s not a shopping experience is
it, as they chuck the stuff at you at the till. But Lidl doesn’t sell love and
acceptance. We find that in the refuge of God.
We are not
exactly sure who St Valentine was. There are two possibilities - one a priest,
a Roman priest who was killed on the Flamian Way in 364 AD, a martyr to the
cause, the other the Bishop of Tierney who was taken to Rome and there became a
martyr, two people who gave up their lives for the love of God thus proving to
us not the strength of human love but the sureness and attraction of divine
love. So we first today honour them, and the strange thing in history is that
although they were different people, their stories have become interwoven, so
that probably there is one colonel of truth, there is one story behind the two
people, and that is the way love works at its best, the two become one and we
thank God today for every human bond of true love.
I heard on the radio this morning as I woke
up someone speaking about Valentine’s Day and the pressure of it, and those who
do not get a card or flowers or chocolates and so on. She said we need to use
this day to remember especially if relationships are hard, or we are on our
own, or we remember loved ones departed and wish they were here with us today,
that it is about the heart, and there is a bit of our heart that God wants to
fill with his love. I liked that a lot. God loves us no matter who we are, he
doesn’t send us a Valentine card on one day a year, he loves us to the uttermost all
the time.
Christian love means that we are loved beyond measure and we need to
remember that every day. Jesus is God’s love in flesh but he also needed to
know he was loved as he faced difficulties and temptations and struggles. Today
is not only St Valentine’s Day, it is the first Sunday of Lent, when we
remember Jesus being driven by the Spirit into the desert, to work out his
calling and while perhaps we have had our “desert moments” we cannot really
imagine what it was like, the heat, the loneliness, the “where is God”
question, “does God love me here” conundrum. There are, pastorally, people who
do not feel they are loved today because of the circumstances they find
themselves in, “different”; unwanted; abandoned; alone; mentally unwell,
believing they are worthless.
I’ve been on a psychiatric ward with people
who have been sectioned. It isn’t a nice place to be. I have spent time with
people, , believing they
simply cannot be lovable. Others feel worthless because they have been left.
If you’ve ever been told by someone “I
don’t love you anymore” it is hard to pick yourself up. Jesus maybe for a time
felt what on earth is going on – the devil comes when we are at our lowest
making us believe there is no love from any divine being and so there is a
better way – for the people I’ve known with mental anguish it is self-harm, or
worse. When Jesus is at his most hungry he is given the possibility of food.
When Jesus is light-headed with low blood sugar, he is given dangerous
alternatives to decide about. How hard was it for him to believe he was loved
in that moment? Surely he had to remember God’s words of before: you are my
beloved Son.
We need to remember we are okay as we
are, God loves us, so many people want to change us. We are God’s gift created,
loved and sustained by him. We need to be more confident in ourselves. Jesus
came out of that period of questioning, confident in his call and his
uniqueness. He would wobble again, as we will, but his
whole ministry was to share this amazing, un-judgemental, unstoppable, amazing
love with everyone, including you and me today.
I hope for most people Valentine’s Day is a
bit of fun to say thank you for love. We do need to remember that love beyond
measure. I enjoyed in Monday’s paper a
quote from Claudio Ranieri, the manager of Leicester City Football Club, who
find themselves at the top of the Premier League. “It’s important
for us to concentrate and keep our feet on the ground. It’s the first time in
our lives we are doing something special. So it’s important not to look down or
behind you. Like a climber you need to look up. “
