A Note from Pastor (February 2024)

For the first two weeks of February, we will celebrate the pre-lent Sundays of Sexagesima and Quinquagesima as the Word reveals how God works through Grace alone, Scripture alone and faith in Christ alone.
Then, on February 14, we will officially begin the season of Lent with Ash Wednesday.  As we are all aware, Ash Wednesday helps us remember that we are dust and that, like Adam and Eve were warned, to “dust we shall return.” This year, Ash Wednesday falls on the same day that we remember, Valentine’s Day.
We learn from the Treasury of Daily Prayer (CPH, 2008, p.1208): “Valentine became one of the noted martyrs of the third century. The commemoration of his death, which occurred in AD 270, became part of the calendar of remembrance in the early Church of the West…Valentine left a note of encouragement for a child of his jailer written on an irregular piece of paper.”
While we no longer know what Valentine’s note read, or exactly what sort of encouragement he might have shared with his captor’s child, we do have God’s message of His love and encouragement for us.  As St. John wrote in his first epistle, “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.  In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
May the love of Jesus and His unchanging Word encourage you at all times.