Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on Ash Wednesday 2024

A sermon on Ash Wednesday is a serious thing. This is a serious day—sin and repentance are serious subjects. You understand I am sure, we are here to be serious. The trouble is that today the world had just turned pink, been sprayed with prosecco, and is suddenly full of people saying something like, ‘snuffle-bunny loves huggy-bear’. Not everyone feels entirely serious today. It has happened just four times in the last century—when Ash Wednesday and the feast of St Valentine fall on the same day. Sitting down to write a sermon for Ash Wednesday, somewhere in the back of my mind, I could hear the late Tina Turner ask ‘What’s love got to do with it?’

St Valentine, a very obscure early Roman saint, would be bewildered by all this fuss. Valentine, whoever he was, was not famous for being a lover, he did not write romantic verse, scatter rose petals, or book restaurants he could not really afford. He actually got dragged into this carnival of cards by someone from round here. All this is Geoffrey Chaucer’s fault—Chaucer, the poet, buried here in the Abbey. In the fourteenth century, he wrote The Parliament of Fowls. It is a poem that describes a garden paradise; it is a place to find the great lovers—Dido, Paris, and Helen of Troy, even Venus and Cupid. There, in that garden, the birds gather to decide on a marriage. There is a question: Which of two suitors should an eagle marry? There is a comic debate, which why it is called a parliament of fowls: a lot of back and forth and fine fourteenth-century jokes. At the end, the poor eagle stays celibate, but other birds pair off happily and burst into a great song of praise directed to none other than St Valentine.

Saint Valentine, who art full high aloft—
Thus sing the small fowls for your sake—
Now welcome summer, with your sun soft,

All this fuss for Valentine simply because Chaucer chose this day, his day, as the moment that spring was round the corner. On Valentine’s Day, Chaucer believed that we would be thinking of flowers and dreaming of romance. 

So, Chaucer forged a link between sexual love and faith, and we ran with it. Poor Valentine has stood, blushing, by the bed ever since. Honestly, it has not gone well. Listening to Christians talk about sex has been tricky at best, deeply troubling at worst. The hostility that we have heaped on joyful encounter has been shameful. That said, occasional attempts to put it right in the sixties and seventies as theologians sounded eager about sex were just deeply embarrassing. My PhD supervisor once explained:

Somehow God had crept into bed…—one longed for the sanity of Charles Williams’ advice: ‘When you play, don’t pray, and when you pray, don’t play’.

It is from him, from Eamon Duffy, that I learned about St Valentine and Chaucer, and it is him that reminds me that Chaucer’s poem The Parliament of Fowls begins,

The life so short, the craft so long to learn,
The assay so hard, so sharp the conquering,
The fearful joy that slips away in turn.

That is Chaucer writing about love, that is Chaucer telling us that love is a fearful joy and it is a craft, it is a thing you have to learn. Chaucer tells us that love is a risk and a work for us all. And it is here, it is just here, that we have the answer to the question that bothered Tina Turner: What’s love got to do with it? Answer: Love is the fearful joy, because it is both our great temptation and our only redemption.

Today, on Ash Wednesday, we have to be careful what we say. When we start to talk about sin we get into trouble. Invited to talk about sin, I can very quickly start thinking about the bad things I have done, or that I might do. Or more likely, I might start to think about the wicked things you might do—other people’s sins are even more interesting than my own. Notice, though, that I will start thinking about some actions and activities and not others, doing this and not that. We think sin is something to do with the wrong sort of fun, it is money, or sex, or too many espresso martinis. Sin is just a careless action and, put like that, sin does not sound very serious at all.

That is not what sin is. Sin is the problem you have when you love badly. Sin is not a glass of claret, but when you love claret more than company, when you love claret more than your family, well then you are in trouble. Sin is not having money in the bank, but if money is what you think about every day, as you go to sleep, and as you wake up, well then there is a problem. Sin is what happens when love takes you in the wrong direction, when the thing that looks so good to you is actually harmful and destructive. It is not a thing out there that will destroy us—cash, fame, fine dining—it is the love within me that can be my undoing. It really is possible to love the wrong thing; in fact, it happens all the time.

This is why love is a fearful joy. Love has the power to lead us into possibility, hope, and joy. Love can teach us about the presence of God. Love can save us. But love can also leave us lonely and afraid, clutching a bottle, or clinging to broken dreams. Love is a fearful joy.

This fearful joy should be our study this Lent, love is the craft we have to learn. What’s love got to do with it?  Everything!