Tomorrow will be my dancing day[1]

Tomorrow shall be my dancing day;
I would my true love did so chance
To see the legend of my play,
To call my true love to my dance;

Sing, oh! my love, oh! my love, my love, my love,
This have I done for my true love.

Then was I born of a virgin pure,
Of her I took fleshly substance
Thus was I knit to man’s nature
To call my true love to my dance.

In a manger laid, and wrapped I was
So very poor, this was my chance
Betwixt an ox and a silly poor ass
To call my true love to my dance.

Then afterwards baptized I was;
The Holy Ghost on me did glance,
My Father’s voice heard I from above,
To call my true love to my dance.

These coinciding dates: an opportunity to explore one of Scripture’s recurrent metaphors, to observe Ash Wednesday attending more to the carrot than the stick. The following set of readings—one of many possible sets—together with the sermon: this year’s response to the opportunity.

Hosea 2:14-20

¹⁴ Therefore, I will now allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her.
¹⁵ From there I will give her her vineyards,
and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
There she shall respond as in the days of her youth,
as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.

¹⁶ On that day, says the LORD, you will call me, “My husband,” and no longer will you call me, “My Baal.” ¹⁷ For I will remove the names of the Baals from her mouth, and they shall be mentioned by name no more. ¹⁸ I will make for you a covenant on that day with the wild animals, the birds of the air, and the creeping things of the ground; and I will abolish the bow, the sword, and war from the land; and I will make you lie down in safety. ¹⁹ And I will take you for my wife forever; I will take you for my wife in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy. ²⁰ I will take you for my wife in faithfulness; and you shall know the LORD.

Song of Songs 2:8-13

⁸ The voice of my beloved!
Look, he comes, *
leaping upon the mountains,
bounding over the hills.

⁹ My beloved is like a gazelle
or a young stag. *
Look, there he stands
behind our wall,
gazing in at the windows,
looking through the lattice.

¹⁰ My beloved speaks and says to me: *
“Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away;

¹¹ for now the winter is past, *
the rain is over and gone.

¹² The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of singing has come, *
and the voice of the turtledove
is heard in our land.

¹³ The fig tree puts forth its figs,
and the vines are in blossom;
they give forth fragrance. *
Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away.

Revelation 19:1-9a

¹ After this I heard what seemed to be the loud voice of a great multitude in heaven, saying,
“Hallelujah!
Salvation and glory and power to our God,
² for his judgments are true and just;
he has judged the great whore
who corrupted the earth with her fornication,
and he has avenged on her the blood of his servants.”

³ Once more they said,
“Hallelujah!
The smoke goes up from her forever and ever.”

⁴ And the twenty-four elders and the four living creatures fell down and worshiped God who is seated on the throne, saying,
“Amen. Hallelujah!”

⁵ And from the throne came a voice saying,
“Praise our God,
all you his servants,
and all who fear him,
small and great.”

⁶ Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the sound of many waters and like the sound of mighty thunderpeals, crying out,
“Hallelujah!
For the Lord our God
the Almighty reigns.
⁷ Let us rejoice and exult
and give him the glory,
for the marriage of the Lamb has come,
and his bride has made herself ready;
⁸ to her it has been granted to be clothed
with fine linen, bright and pure”–
for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.

⁹ And the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.”

John. 3:25-30

²⁵ Now a discussion about purification arose between John’s disciples and a Jew. ²⁶ They came to John and said to him, “Rabbi, the one who was with you across the Jordan, to whom you testified, here he is baptizing, and all are going to him.” ²⁷ John answered, “No one can receive anything except what has been given from heaven. ²⁸ You yourselves are my witnesses that I said, ‘I am not the Messiah, but I have been sent ahead of him.’ ²⁹ He who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. For this reason my joy has been fulfilled. ³⁰ He must increase, but I must decrease.”

Sermon 2024

This year Ash Wednesday falls on Valentine’s Day, which may put us in the right frame of mind to enter into this year’s Lent.

How so? To help us begin to get our heads around a relationship with the absolutely unique God, Scripture uses metaphors from a variety of relationships: parent and child, lord and servant, and lovers. The texts we just heard: a small sample of the texts using the metaphor of lovers.

How might these help us to enter into Lent? Perhaps in a variety of ways.

First—we’ll get the hard stuff out of the way, eat the vegetables first—this metaphor of lovers brings sin into focus. Lovers can hurt each other in ways hard to match in other human relationships, and much of the book of the prophet Hosea explores the pain God suffers from our sin. Among the people of God sin is betrayal, the breaking of promises, whether made at Sinai or at Baptism. This is where the language of adultery comes in. James, Jesus’ brother, thunders “Adulterers! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you suppose that it is for nothing that the scripture says, ‘God yearns jealously for the spirit that he has made to dwell in us’?” (4:4-5) So if we’re having trouble sensing compunction, sorrow for our sins, the lovers metaphor can help us.

Adultery, by the way, can signal THE END (all caps) of a relationship. Our Bible could have been a much shorter book. The Northern Kingdom’s adultery (recall Hosea) led to its destruction by the Assyrians in the 8^th Century (B.C.); the Southern Kingdom’s adultery (recall Jeremiah, Ezekiel) led to its destruction by the Babylonians less than two centuries later. End of story? The depth of God’s love is nowhere seen more clearly than in God not letting even that unfaithfulness be the end of the story. God will start again—as we heard in Hosea: “Therefore, I will now allure her, / and bring her into the wilderness, / and speak tenderly to her.”

Facing our sin it’s easy to conclude that the story’s effectively over—which is precisely when we need Hosea. If there’s our sin, there’s our Lover’s stubbornness. Or, closer to home—since we’re at St. Peter’s [the parish where this sermon is shared]—three times that night Peter was asked about Jesus. “I do not know what you are talking about.” Again, this time with an oath, “I do not know the man.” And a third time, this time cursing and with an oath: “I do not know the man!” But even that, no match for Jesus’ stubbornness. So that’s the second thing this lovers metaphor can help us with, encountering our Lover’s stubbornness. There’s a whiff of it in that best-known but oddly translated psalm: “Surely your goodness and mercy shall pursue me all the days of my life.” Paul highlights another dimension to this stubbornness: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). Turns out we’re not a cheap date.

There are many things we might notice from our reading from Revelation. Perhaps what the reading uniquely contributes is a sense of the communal stakes. There’s the great whore, that symbol of political, military, and economic empire in which everything can be monetized, in which wealth can be continually extracted from the periphery to serve the insatiable appetites at the center. The great whore…and the bride, “clothed with fine linen, bright and pure.” The contrast is something like Mark’s contrast of the two banquets: Herod’s, at which John the Baptist is beheaded, and Jesus’, at which the five loaves and two fishes feed thousands. Which banquet—Mark asks—are we at? Which are we trying to get tickets to? So in Revelation: the great whore, the bride: with whom do we want to be found? Not a question we answer just once, hence one of our confessions: “We repent of the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” Lent’s an opportunity to pay attention to that.

Finally, most importantly, the picture of mutual delight in the Song of Songs. There is, of course, a still unresolved argument about the actual subject matter of its poems. The readings I’ve found most convincing have the poet talking about horizontal and vertical love from the start. Recall the beginning of Genesis. The man moves at virtual lightspeed from “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” to “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree.” Is that the trajectory on which we’re stuck? And the man to God: “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” Is that the trajectory on which we’re stuck? Song of Songs thinks not. John’s visions provide a sort of “Amen;” we’ll get the final “Amen” when our dress rehearsals for the Lamb’s marriage—pointing to the Table—are replaced by the real thing.

The mutual delight pictured in the Song of Songs: that’s the endgame. Lent: that’s for cleaning the glasses to give our imaginations a better shot at keeping it in view. C. S. Lewis nails it: “Joy is the serious business of Heaven.”[2]

So: joyous Valentine’s Day. Joyous Ash Wednesday.

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[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_Shall_Be_My_Dancing_Day (accessed 2/9/2024).

[2] From Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. In context: “Dance and game are frivolous, unimportant down here; for ‘down here’ is not their natural place. Here, they are a moment’s rest from the life we were placed here to live. But in this world everything is upside down. That which, if it could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is likest that which in a better country is the End of ends.  Joy is the serious business of Heaven.”