Roses are yours, violets are mine, St Valentine died in 269….

Jeremiah 17: 8-10, Psalm 1, Luke 6: 17-26 (The sermon on the Plain begins…)

Roses are yours, violets are mine, St Valentine died in 269.

Or did he?

I’m sure you all know that it was Valentine’s Day this week. This is the week when roses are twice as expensive as the rest of the year, restaurants are hard to book, and you learn that most things from chocolates to toilet roll can in fact be made in the shape of a heart. And all because of St Valentine, who might have died in the year AD 269.

I say might because the details about Valentine are sketchy. The first account of a life of someone called Valentine appears about 200 years later. There is a story that he might have been a priest and a doctor who was martyred by the Emperor Claudius II because he refused to stop converting people to Christianity, including his jailor’s daughter to whom, so later stories go, he wrote a letter, signing it, ‘from your Valentine’.

There is another story that he was a bishop from Terni, in Italy, who was martyred in Rome, at least partly because he refused to stop marrying Christian couples against the wishes of their pagan families.

And the possibilities don’t end there. There are at least 9 saints called Valentine, or a name like it, identified by the early church and recorded in lists of martyrs about whom not much else is know except that they were put to death for their faith. The roses, cards, and novelty menus didn’t put in an appearance until much later. But in a sense it doesn’t matter which Valentine we celebrate on the 14th of February, whether they were a Bishop or doctor, or anything else. What we do know is that there were plenty of Valentines who lived up to their names, Valens meaning strong, robust, courageous. There were plenty of Valentines who lived up to their names and held to their faith even to the point of death.

By chance this Sunday we are given one of the more appropriate readings in the whole year of readings to accompany the remembrance of these Valentines, from Jesus’ little section of teaching often called the ‘sermon on the plain’;

“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.”

This passage has a much more famous cousin called the sermon on the mount- that’s the one St Matthew wrote in his Gospel. In that version Jesus goes up a hill, and teaches the crowd assembled below. Here in Luke’s Gospel Jesus has just been up a mountain, choosing the 12 disciples, and comes back down to sea level. Then he teaches not the whole crowd, but just the disciples. There are other differences too: This is a more immediate, punchier, shorter sermon, and each of the blessings is counter-weighted with an accompanying ‘woe’ or ‘sorrow’. ‘Blessed are you poor – woe to you rich. Blessed are you who are hungry – woe to you who are full. Blessed are you who weep – woe to you who are laughing. Blessed are you when people hate you – woe to you when all speak well of you.’

At first glance this sermon is a council of despair for most of us who are not made of the same stuff as those early Valentines. Am I rich? Well, in most global terms however you cut it, yes. Am I full? Yes, mostly too much so. Do I laugh? Often. Am I spoken well of? Far more than I deserve.

But- we might have wanted to ask our Lord if we were there on the plain with him- is poverty something to aspire to? Is famine a moral condition more worthy than being nourished? Is misery to be commended above joy? Or seeking notoriety for the sake of being disliked? When all is said and done, what sort of misanthropic mission is being encouraged here?

I fear that faced with these questions Jesus would say we haven’t understood what he’s saying at all.

Like so much of St Luke’s Gospel, what is being held up is a contrast between present and future; the illusion of present reality, verses the reality of God’s future kingdom. If we think back to Advent, before Christmas had arrived and the turkey was still in the freezer, we heard the Magnificat, the song of Mary, Luke chapter 1 verse 46 and onwards. This song is Mary’s manifesto for her manifestation of the mad message of the angel saying ‘you will bear a son and you will call him Emmanuel – God with us’. The Magnificat sets out what we are to expect God’s kingdom to look like. The humble raised up, the mighty cast down, the hungry filled with good things, the rich sent empty away. Jesus’ sermon is true to this vision. But it is not just a pipe dream for some time in the future. You see, along with this contrast between the present and the future runs a contrast between human values and the values of God.

What is the recipe for happiness? A reasonable person would surely answer, ‘prosperity, comfort, peace of mind, and popularity.’ But Jesus didn’t come to be reasonable, and ‘=]]]]]]]]pronounces his blessing on those who fail to find their satisfaction in these goals. What Mary sings for, what Jesus teaches his new disciples to seek, is not the settled wisdom of a world too often satisfied with injustice as long as it applies to other people. Christ invites us to be citizens of a new world that begins in him where the poor are not cheap, and the hungry are not ignored.

The real St Valentine, whichever one was celebrated this week, heard these same words of Jesus that we hear today. He knew that this king does not promise a way of wealth, or glory, or even personal fulfilment; only a road to afflictions and trials. But, like Mary, Alban, Amphibalus, and countless others after them, Valentine found in Christ the reality of a new way of living, a way not driven by fear but hope; hope that the rich promises of the beatitudes are fulfilled. Hope that praying ‘thy kingdom come’ will mean nothing less than a new heaven and a new earth.

Roses are red, violets are blue, but the life of God’s kingdom is offered to you.