Masquerades in Search of Grace
A Communion Meditation

Psalm 25: 1-10
Mark 1: 9-15
By the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart
Epworth United Methodist Church

We wear masks … to hide feelings …or express them, … to protect identity… or assume a new one, to play a role… or just to play. Sometimes masks can be bridges, sometimes barriers, sometimes just plain confusing.

In Paris this week, the startling trend in the fashion shows of several top designers was that the faces of the models were completely obscured by masks.  Opinion on the phenomenon ranged from:  “misogyny of the industry;” “it was social commentary;” to….”who knows what it means?” Masks can be bridges, sometimes barriers, sometimes just plain confusing.

I remember when our oldest son Josh was a senior in high school.  He said that he had too many Joshes … one Josh with family, another in class, another with friends…. He had so many Joshes that he couldn’t tell which one, if any, was real.

We want to be known.  We want to be loved for who we truly are.  (If we could only figure out who that is.)  But we fear that if others really knew who we are… they would not love us.  We long for blessing and languish at the lack of it. So we seek approval, mistaking it for love.  We put on masks to please or pretend, or gain power over others, forgetting the call and claim of a deeper pleasure and the power of a truer self. 

May Sarton begins a poem with these words,

Now I become myself.

It’s taken time, many years and places.

I have been dissolved and shaken,

Worn other people’s faces…

In his autobiography, C.G. Jung commented, “The world will ask you who you are, and if you do not have an answer the world will give you one.”

Faced with the mystery of human be-ing the world sells masks and other people’s faces.

Our evening Lenten series, Passion Play, begins tonight as we embark upon an exploration of spirit as a community.  We will use masks and players -- to celebrate identity, examine reality, and trust mystery in the Passion of Christ.

In just six verses in the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark Jesus is baptized … the heavens are torn open with blessing… Jesus is filled with the Spirit, thrown into temptation, … and then begins his public ministry.   In six short verses we learn who Jesus was, how he struggled in the wilderness, and what his life was about.

Jesus’ baptism was an unmasking … revealing deeper reality and truth about this human being who was known as son, neighbor, carpenter, and teacher.

 “Just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens break open and a Voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’”  Divinity, destiny and delight named Jesus as God’s Beloved.

Still dripping wet from blessing and baptism, Jesus was thrown into the desert. The text says, “The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.”  Jesus didn’t just move on to the next right action … the spirit “drove him out.”  It’s the same word used to describe Jesus’ actions when he “drove out” the moneychangers from the temple.  God’s blessing didn’t gently “lead him not into temptation” … it threw him immediately into the thick of it.

Mark calls the tempting power Satan … and doesn’t tell us more.   Matthew and Luke suggest particular temptations of food, and power, and acclaim.  Satan offers attractive new roles, new masks … to reshape and redefine the identity God already named and claimed in Jesus.  “Put this one on.”  “Try this one.” … “Use your power this way.”  “Rescue them.”  “Rule this world.”  “Save yourself.”

Peggy Ann Way, Pastoral Theologian at Vanderbilt once said, “The greatest power you have is the power to choose to whom and to what you will give the power to define who you are.”

Jesus chose to give that power to God alone.  His struggle with temptation deepened his trust in God. Then he began his public ministry.

Coming to God’s table this morning, where bread is blessed and broken and given, our task is both simple and challenging … to give the power to define who we are to God alone.

We claim the freedom of blessing.

We learn from struggle.

Through it all, we live into the premise and promise of trust.

Parker Palmer describes the impact in the world of those who claim, learn and live trusting God and their true selves.  He writes,

…the people who plant the seeds of movements make a critical decision:  they decide to live “divided no more.”  They decide no longer to act on the outside in a way that contradicts some truth about themselves that they hold deeply on the inside.  They decide to claim authentic selfhood and act it out –and their decisions ripple out to transform the society in which they live, serving the selfhood of millions of others.  P.32

So let us remember that beneath every mask we wear is the face of a beautiful and beloved child of God.   Beneath every fierce and fearful face we see is a wounded being who is blessed and beloved.

God is in the blessing.  God is in the struggle.  Thanks be to God.

I close with these additional lines from May Sarton’s poem that began

Now I become myself...

...

All fuses now, fall into place

From wish to action, word to silence,

My work, my love, my time, my face

Gathered into one intense

Gesture of growing like a plant.

As slowly as the ripening fruit

Fertile, detached, and always spent,

Falls but does not exhast the root,

So all the poem is, can give,

Grows in me to become the song,

Made so and rooted by love….