Rising in love on St. Valentine s Day
By Bruce Bradshaw
Zion Mennonite Church, Elbing
I was preparing a sermon this past week for Valentine's Day and referred to one of my favorite books about love, "Love that Works: The Art of Giving" by Bruce Brander, a person who became a good friend because our names are so similar.
When a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor asked Bruce why he wrote this book, he said; "I wrote it out of compassion for the many people who are falling in love." I hope the book will inspire them to rise into love. We might be able to rise into love if we know something about how St. Valentine's Day began.
St. Valentine's Day, like many of our holidays, is rooted in the Roman Empire. It was the day of Juno, who was the queen of the goddesses, and the goddess of women and marriage.
On the day of Juno, the Romans had a great feast. The feast was celebrated by placing the names of young women in a jar and young men drew the names from the jar, hoping they would find the right girl, not only to celebrate the feast with, but also to marry. Their love was a testimony to the power of Juno.
Around 270 AD, the feast of Juno took a different turn. Claudius, the Roman Emperor, was building his empire and he wanted to have a huge army; his problem was no young men volunteered to join his army. Claudius thought men were not joining his army because they wanted to get married, so he passed a law against marriages. No one in the Empire could get married until Claudius built his army.
As we know, love stops for no one, not even Claudius. It continued when a lowly priest named Valentine protested the ban on marriages by performing secret wedding ceremonies. Many young couples came to Valentine each night, and he performed their weddings, in secret.
Claudius learned of Valentine, and the Roman soldiers caught him performing a wedding ceremony. The young couple escaped, but Valentine was arrested and condemned to death; he stayed on death row until Feb. 14, the day of Juno, when he could be appropriately executed for defying the will of the emperor.
As Valentine sat on death row, many people left flowers and notes at the prison, testifying that love will conquer the empire. When Valentine was executed, he left his cell and wrote his own name on a paper, and gave it to the daughter of the prison guard, who sympathized with his cause. On the card he wrote: "Love, from your Valentine."
In 496, St. Valentine became a saint, but in 1969, he lost the official standing as a saint. The major concern was whether he was a real person, or simply a romantic legend.
No one seemed to notice or care that St. Valentine lost his sainthood; he continued to be the saint of the people and we still give cards, flowers, and chocolates to those we love, celebrating our ability to rise to the challenge of loving each other, an effort to show how we, who bear the image of God, express finite expressions of God's infinite expressions. God is love.
