One of the worst features of my generation is our obsession with how we present to others. Yet this is an issue that has gone on for ages in one guise or another. Today, at its worst, you see this with social media influencers whose lives are often either dull or falling apart behind the scenes, but who look - in photos and videos posted to tiktok instagram or youtube - as if their lives are exceptional. But you see this too in how shallow so many of our conversations are: oh, how’s the weather. Or how much people put homes and cars and clothing or technology on credit that they simply transfer to another credit card. Or how people fail to get to know one another in any depth so that every interaction - whether at church or any other volunteer organization - feels more like attending a function than hanging out with friends whose depths are plumbed.
The reality for all of this - much like Keat’s poem, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” - is that these are frozen fragments shorn of what gives them life: these people’s concrete relationships and interactions with one another that give shape to our individual and collective values, beliefs, intellectual and emotional capacities to work through challenges with resilience rather than attacks or walking away.
What you get in these videos and images, in so much of our modern life, is much like what you get with the Sadducees and Pharisees praying on the street corner with drawn faces demonstrating earnest fasting, hoping to convince the world that they are worthy of not just attention, but admiration, perhaps even notoriety, value, and of course, power.
Jesus says to these people of his day and so to our own: don’t pray or fast to prove your worth or value to others. In fact, do not seek the recognition or affirmation of anyone but God.
Seeking the affirmation of others will cause you to go astray: hoarding your wealth, your gifts, your resources, cutting off those who don’t meet your standards and judging them while missing the log in your own eye; you’ll cast the first stone and shatter the glass house of presumed righteousness in which you live so that you are left exposed and alienated from God and others by the lack of humility that sustained your glass house. You will be swallowed up by the need to consume and produce more as if all you are is a tool to be used by someone else rather than a child of God valuable because you are simply, you: not the you that you project to others, but who you are at the core, in your room, that is, in your heart.
When Jesus says to pray not on the street corner but in your room, he means, to allow God to whittle away our outward defenses that trap us; to journey from without to within, so that our whole life, including our relationship with God, is not reduced to mere outward show but is born from within and reflects the movements of our heart, our deepest desires, our thoughts, our feelings, the very core of our person.
This Lent we are to examine ourselves: what do we really believe and why; to whom do we belong and do our thoughts, words and ways of engaging in relationships, the way we spend our time and our resources, reflect a belief that we are secure, loved, desired, and moved by God? Can we remove the masks we so often wear, slow the pace of our lives and allow God the time to reach into our core and transform our hearts so that we are moved by him and not by the latest demands we think surround us? Or will we allow ourselves to be swallowed by our perception of what others demand of us?
This is why, this evening, we receive ashes on our foreheads. We are being reminded that our lives are temporary. That nothing that we store up, that no image we create remains. If we are going to nurture anything in our lives that will remain at our deaths, we best turn ourselves to God’s voice; to his Word to his calling.
The ashes placed on our head invite us to rediscover God. They tell us that we must not hide ourselves in seeking recognition and power here and now for this will leave us empty and arid within; dry bones that will be blown away when Christ returns. Instead we are to seek God; to search for where God is calling us through the lives of other people; to ask what God is calling us to retreat from, or to give to so that we can hear his voice and his direction. For then when we sit in our room to pray, in humility, naked as a babe newly born before God, we will find him holding us, cradling us, feeding us, filling us with everything we need to love others as we have been loved; to find in that a hope and so a light that is not extinguished. AMEN
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