The Masks We Wear

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.27.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Luke 18:9-14

This is a week for masks.  On Thursday, on All Hallows Eve, my neighborhood fills with people pretending to be things that they are not.  Ninjas and princesses and pirates, Jedi and clones and astronauts, all of them come moving in little clusters through the early evening darkness.  It’s a time for community, as neighbors circulate and talk and remind each other that there are really other human beings living around them.

For children, it’s also a time of sweet magic, a evening in which every neighbor’s house is a fountain of candy, when you heave that bag back to your room and dump a cubic yard of Twizzlers and Snickers onto the floor.  “I’ll save some for later,” you said when you were a kid, and you meant it, because the volume of your stomach even at full capacity wasn’t a match for that mighty mound of corn-syrup and sugar.

As the boys drift into their teens, that time is increasingly fading into my past.   They’re busy now, with school and life.  My eight grader, in the last year when trick-or-treating would be not-awkward, has a rehearsal that evening.  So it will go.  I miss it already.

But it’s not just the candy and the community.  It’s a time to pretend we are something else, to wear a mask that for one evening makes us seem like another thing.  What that is depends on our aspirations, on our sense of what is interesting or frightening or powerful or beautiful, on what is meaningful to us as a person.

Like, say, the first costume either of our children picked out themselves.  On that first All Hallows Eve, when my oldest son wasn’t a sophomore in high school but a bright-eyed member of the twos class at his preschool, he had a very very specific costume request.  “What do you want to be for Halloween,” we asked.  “Harry Potter?  Ron Weasley?”  “I want to be a tuna,” he said.   “A what?”  “I want to be a tuna!”  “A can of tuna?”  “No, Daddy, a tuna!”

The mighty tuna is, for some reason, not one of those costumes you can buy at Toys R Us or Party City.  Suffice it to say, this ended up being a home-made costume.  The tiny guy was delighted with it, although he grew increasingly frustrated with all of the clueless grownups around him as the evening wore on.  “What a scary shark costume!”  “I’m not a shark.  I’m a tuna!”

It took a little while to figure out precisely why he wanted to be a tuna.  It was, my wife and I finally realized, because of a Magic Schoolbus book we’d read to him, and that he’d begun to read on his own.  He wanted to be the tuna he read about in the book, the Atlantic Bluefin, which in its natural form does not come packed in a small can.  It’s fifteen feet long and over a thousand pounds, a ferocious pack hunter, an apex predator, huge and fierce.

So maybe being a tuna makes sense.  We want to think of ourselves that way.  We want to have a sense of ourselves as powerful and mighty and important, and we want the whole world to see that same person that we desire to project.

Playing that role is a big part of what this week’s festivities will be about, but it can also be a significant part of the way we live our lives on days we’re not dressed up like someone else.

That can be fine, in so far as it makes us more confident and certain of ourselves.  That’s a good thing, right?  We’re constantly told that it’s a good thing.  Be the person you want to be, right?  

And yet here, in today’s passage from Luke, we have Jesus telling us a story about two individuals, both of whom have gone up to the temple to pray.  It’s a story told with a purpose, or so the author of Luke’s Gospel tells us.

The two characters inhabit entirely different portions of the human spectrum.  On the one hand, we’re shown a Pharisee.  The Pharisees inevitably get a bad rap in the Gospels, but there’s every evidence that the reason for this wasn’t because they were automatically terrible, impossible people.  Instead, they were the ones who were most interested in talking with and debating with Jesus.

What we encounter in the story, though, is the Pharisee who made Pharisee a bad name.  It’s an individual who has complete confidence in himself and in who he is.  The Pharisee is praying, and his prayer is that of a content and confident individual.  He looks out at the world around him, and he is utterly confident in himself and in his goodness.

What makes him particularly confident in his own goodness is looking at a world that is filled with people who just don’t make the grade.  His list isn’t exhaustive, but he knows he’s better than others.  Thieves, rogues, and adulterers?  He’s nothing like them.

He looks around, and he sees a tax collector.  “Even this guy,” he whispers in his fervent prayer.  “Thank you so much that I’m not that guy.”  Then, like you’d need to tell God this, he lays out the reasons why he’s so amazing.  He fasts, and he gives a full ten percent of his income to the temple.  He’s righteous, and he knows it, clap your hands.

Jesus then presents us with another soul, this one standing rather father off and away from the temple.  It’s a tax collector, and that means in all likelihood we’re talking about a guy who is not exactly in good standing with the community.   If he was responsible for taking taxes to support the power of the Roman Empire, then he was the next thing to a traitor in most folks books.

Worse still, most tax collectors had the reputation for lining their own pockets by tacking on an extra percentage here or there.  If you didn’t pay up, you could expect a visit from some nice men in Roman uniforms.  It was a remarkably negatively viewed profession, and for good reason.  Tax collectors were not like the civil servants charged with gathering revenue in a constitutional republic, held accountable by both the law and civil servants.  They were, in many ways, just plain ol’ predators.  Their business was extortion, and charging excessive fees was their business.  

This is an important thing for us to grasp.  We’re not being presented with a simple, binary equation, as much as we like to think of the world in that way.  Jesus is not saying to his listeners, “Here’s a good guy and here’s a bad guy.”  He’s saying, both of these guys are a mess.  Neither of them is good.

But only the tax collector seems to know it.   He’s a wreck and a ruin.  Here he is at the temple, and what we hear is that his interaction with God is one of lament and sorrow.  There’s no confidence, there’s no naming it and claiming it.  He’s just a mess, and everyone around him holds him in contempt, including himself.  

Jesus calls these two characters out, and establishes them as examples of how we are and are not to stand in right relationship with our Creator.

The tax collector is aware of himself, deeply aware of how he and his profession have impacted those around him.  He hides behind nothing, and knows that he and his life are broken.  He knows how deep and wide that chasm between his reality and God’s call on his life truly is.  He has no masks, and he sits there, raw and broken and honest. 

The Pharisee, on the other hand, is deeply focused on his image.  He is the righteous one, and he knows it, and everyone around him knows it.  He wears that identity as proudly as if it were a Dolce and Gabbana suit.  He is utterly confident in it.

The Pharisee in this story is typically presented as a hypocrite, someone who says one thing and does another.  This ain’t quite so.  There is nothing in this story that Jesus is telling to suggest that he does not fulfill the requirements of righteous religious practice.  He checks every box, every box but one.

That “box” is the one where you understand that who you are depends not on your own estimation of yourself, but on how you express yourself towards the world around you. 

It’s just a mask, though, just a role he plays.  But it is not the world that he is deceiving, as he prays there smugly to himself.  What this parable shows us is that the most dangerous masks are not the ones that hide our identity from others.  The most dangerous masks are those that hide our identity from ourselves.

They allow us to imagine that our contempt for others is justified.  They allow us to tear others down.  They allow us to hate, and to express even our faith as bitterness.

Each of us has such a mask, sometimes more than one.  We present them to the world, and in so doing, are as dishonest to ourselves as that Pharisee.  And worse yet, we can turn those masks inward, allowing them to justify all sorts of darkness, allowing our image of ourselves to be as disconnected from reality as if we really and truly believed we were the mighty tuna.

God knows us better than that, and so should we.

Wherever those falsehoods lie, wherever you’ve allowed yourself to cast up a mask of contempt towards others that prevents you from showing love to those around you, set it aside.  

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.