Put Down the Mask

 

Just as the season of Lent lingers, so does the season of exploring and experimenting with being an Easter-ing people.  Lent is forty days from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday (February 18-April 5 this year, not including Sundays.  If you are wondering why, it's because we live on the other side of the first Easter; so we do not count Sundays in Lent.  Every Sunday is supposed to be Easter Sunday, even in Lent.)  Lent lingers like a house guest that hasn’t caught on to the social cues that you’d like them to leave.  Even when you turn off the lights and start cleaning up the kitchen, Lent comes in and has the gall to start drying the dishes, patiently/persistently waiting for you to listen to your shy soul.  Lent prepares us to roll back the stones that block and barricade our lives.

 

We live in a culture where vulnerability is seen as a liability.  We deny and dismiss our own biases and brokenness.  We don’t like to admit that, like Lazarus, we are bound by the wounds and wants that keep us up at night.  And lest you think that you are beyond shadow boxing with yourself; lest you think that you have dealt with your own demons that make every day Halloween; I want to invite you this week to listen to the stories you tell about yourself to others.

 

Do you tell stories about how you have it all figured out, and people just need to listen to you?

Do you tell stories about how someone else has done you wrong, and your life is always singing the blues?

Do you tell stories about how you continue to succeed even when others are out to get you?

Do you tell stories about how you are such a bumbling, stumbling idiot that, amazingly, you can dress yourself?

Do you tell stories that cause you to puff out your chest or hang your head or maybe you find yourself on the sidelines silently praying that people will notice you, and at the same time hoping they don’t see you, because you don’t know what you’d say?

 

We are complex, contradictory, and compartmentalized people.  We often think that we should be further along than others in our comparison-addicted culture.  Then, in the stillness of the night, when all the words we say to someone else, or we replay the words we absorbed from others, we wrestle with our shadow. 

 

Easter lingers even longer than Lent.  Easter is fifty days.  Easter began a month ago and still has a month to go until Pentecost on May 24^th.  At the halfway point, can you and I listen to the words that fall from our lips and the ones that we think but don’t dare say aloud?  Sometimes we can put on the mask of kindness while in our minds we are fuming and frustrated.  Sometimes we let loose our tongue with anger and judgment, thinking we are prophetic or righteous.  Sometimes we don’t know what to think, say, or do, or be in this world today. 

 

Pause and breathe in.

 

You are the beloved of God.  Full stop.  Period.  This claim was affirmed at your baptism and can be celebrated with every splash in the ocean, washing of your hands, and sip of cool water as the weather turns warmer.

 

How might you live as God’s beloved Easter-ing person this week?  Let that question interrupt and intercede in your life this day and in the days to come.  Amen.