A reflection for Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent

Pastor Michael Lippard, St. Andrew, Franklin, TN.
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Psalm 103:8-14; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

With the possible exception of Halloween and All Saints’ Day, probably no two consecutive days on the calendar are more opposite one another than yesterday and today. Shrove Tuesday, Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras is all about fullness, feasting, carnival, revelry and costume. Like Halloween, it is a day for masks, pranks and parties

What a contrast with Ash Wednesday, a somber, sober day to get real with ourselves and with God. Like the day after Halloween, All Saints’ Day, on the day after Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, the masks are put away. The scripture readings appointed for the day confront us with some cold, hard facts about what it means to be human beings. As ashes are applied to our foreheads, we remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. Instead of a colorful party mask, we wear a black smudge of a cross, a stark reminder of our mortality.

This is the prophet Joel’s message: now is the time to get real, now is the time to unmask: “Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning.” Joel realized that our outward expressions of returning to God in worship might themselves mask a very different internal reality: so “rend your hearts and not your clothing,” he cautioned. Worship, too, can become a sham, a bit of play-acting.

Jesus addresses the same issue in today’s gospel. Both Joel and Jesus challenge us to move beyond the behaviors of fasting, weeping and mourning. They call us to shift our focus from what we are doing so we can see what God does and who God is. We are invited to stand without masks, without defenses in God’s presence because God is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” This affirmation about God’s friendly attitude toward us occurs throughout scripture. It is repeated in the 103rd Psalm, a portion of which we also read today: “Lord, you are full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” God’s love reaches out to the real you and the real me, inviting us to shed the masks we all wear.

While Joel talks about fasting, weeping, and mourning, Jesus speaks of almsgiving, prayer, and fasting. These three traditional Jewish spiritual practices were adopted by both Christianity and Islam. The three great monotheistic religions that originated in the deserts of the Middle East all encourage almsgiving, prayer, and fasting. Speaking about each of these spiritual disciplines, Jesus cautions against hypocrisy. If you look up the word hypocrite in a dictionary, you’ll discover that it originally meant an actor. The purpose of giving, prayer and fasting is not to show off our faith or piety, but to deepen our relationship with God.

Fr. Thomas Keating speaks and writes about the false self system. The basic idea is that all of us present a false self or a mask to the world to protect ourselves in interactions with others. Of course, we normally do not talk about someone’s false self; instead, we talk about their personality. Our words person and personality, like the word hypocrite, derive from a term that originated in Greek theater: the masks the actors (or hypocrites!) wore were called personas. The actors often played multiple roles in a play, so they wore different masks, different personas, depending on the part they were playing.

The work of Lent is to seek to become more open to God’s presence and action within us. We invite God to remove our masks, our personas, the persons we pretend to be, so that we can become more real and authentic, so that God’s image can become more deeply imprinted upon us.

God knows what we’ve got, the baggage each and every one of us carries, and the guilt and shame we try to hide. On Ash Wednesday, we are reminded that God is not out to get us, but is compassionate and merciful. Even if it was possible, there is no need for us to hide from God. We are free to deepen our friendship, trusting that God accepts, forgives and covers every sinner, actor and hypocrite with the image of God’s own Son, Jesus.