Six years ago the calendars aligned in a similar way that they do today: Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday fell on the same day. A day of celebratory romantic love and a day of somber reflection on death coinciding.

When it happened six years ago, I just so happened to be in a preaching class during my last year of seminary. I jumped at the opportunity to try writing a sermon that somehow spoke to this double-booked holy day. Below is the sermon I shared with my classmates on February 14, 2018 — Ash Valentine’s Day.

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As I thought about today, I recalled a scene from growing up when my mom and dad would sit down at the kitchen table to “touch base,” as my dad used to say. My mom would pull the calendar off the wall, hanging next to the phone with its long, tangled cord. My dad would thump down a massive, padded binder filled with calendar sheets that had been printed off from Microsoft Outlook. Together, they would arrange and align their calendars.

Today is quite an interesting alignment of calendars. It is Valentine’s Day—the day our culture celebrates love and romance. But it is also Ash Wednesday—the day the church enters into a season of lament by remembering our own mortality, and the suffering of the world.

The alignment of these two days feels strange at first—the bright pinks and reds of Valentine’s Day don’t compliment the grey of our Lenten ashes very well. But on closer look, these two days together draw us to consider their two themes together: love and death. The passage I’ve chosen to read is from the end of the Song of Songs:

Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.
If one offered for love all the wealth of his house, it would be utterly scorned.
(Song of Solomon 8:6-7, NRSV)

The Song of Songs is a series of deeply felt, intimate, poetic exchanges between lovers. They often express their deep longing for one another.

In this passage the woman calls to her lover, expressing desire for connection and permanence. Her unmet desire for intimacy and companionship are communicated with vivid imagery: death, the grave, fire, flood. This longing is strong and painful!

In addition to painful desire, there is also a fear of shame expressed in the passage. There is a fear that offering oneself to love might be met with “utter scorn.”

Here we witness an intersection of love and death.

I would venture to say that we are all familiar with this intersection in some way or another.

Most of us have experienced or witnessed love go all wrong. The reason my parents sat at the table to “touch base” is because they were divorced. That’s the home I grew up in. After swearing that would never happen to me, I ended up living through the pain of my own divorce during my first year here in Seattle. Love is not as it should be, and so we are broken, shamed, and often longing for something we do not have.

Love is not only broken, but also badly perverted. While the passage read, “Love is strong as death,” our world often expresses it, “Lust is violent as death.” Indeed, Love and Death have become Lust and Violence for us. Stories of lust and violence echo through our history from early chapters in Genesis to Greek mythology to recent days in headline after headline. And only now is there beginning to be movement toward justice on this front in which powerful white men are losing their positions because of their lust and violence.

There is a long way yet to come for unjust power dynamics to topple, and the cycles of abuse to be broken on both individual and systemic levels. Meanwhile, we wait, longing with the speaker in this passage for a kind of love and belonging that is safe and certain.

Some may not have had their loved tinged by the taste of death. They have had the gift of belonging. Or perhaps are simply positioned in a place of privilege. For these, the call of our Lenten season is one moving toward awareness, solidarity, and acknowledging the ways in which we have contributed to the problem.

I want to turn attention back to the passage and reconsider a couple of things.

First, there is this curious language of a “seal.” Throughout the Song of Songs the woman speaks freely, boldly, and truly – which is how things ought to be. Here she not only speaks boldly but acts boldly. Her words of longing do not play into the patriarchal love story of “damsel in distress” or “princess looking for prince charming” that our culture has often churned out. She is not asking to have his seal on her, but rather to be the seal on him! Here we see an autonomous woman with agency. But we also see that autonomy does not mean isolation and agency does not mean apathy. We see a love that is strong and autonomous and yet wildly connected and intimate.

I would also like to reconsider the images we see there: grave, fire, and floods. Though these images evoke scenes of natural disaster, trauma, and despair, they might also remind us of the movement of the Spirit who flickers in flames of fire, hovers over the face of the waters, descends upon the waters of baptism, and rose Christ from the grave. These images of despair are also images of hope. Such it is with God. Where there is despair, there is the Spirit. When we have heard the groans of our hearts, we have heard the rumblings of the Spirit of God.

On second glance at this passage, we can actually see a brilliant subversion at play. “Love is strong as death… Love is strong as death.” Though death may be imminent and inescapable, love is all the more. Though death may bind with its cold grip, love warms us all the more. The reality of our own despair and trauma is a subversive reminder of Christ’s presence with us. And this is the season we enter into today.

But it isn’t where we end up. While marriage vows declare, “Until death do us part,” baptismal vows declare that “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” (Romans 6:5 NRSV) While marriage vows anticipate the imminence of death, so our Lenten journey anticipates life. God’s love led him to join us in our suffering and death so that we might also join him in resurrection and life.

Though today we enter into a season of death, it is not where our story will end. But it is where we are right now. And Christ is here with us with “love as strong as death.”