This past week was Halloween, and it was so much fun to see folks in their costumes. The kids, of course, getting dropped off at school, their costume parades, trick or treating in the evening. But it wasn’t just kids. I saw a lot of adults wearing costumes as well. I went to a doctor’s office, and the entire staff was dressed like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I bet you can guess which character the doctor was. I went to the grocery store and I was checked out by a pirate.
Some of the people’s costumes had masks, although some didn’t. It got me thinking about the purpose of a mask. One purpose of a mask is to conceal. You might think about the masquerade ball in “Romeo and Juliet” that allowed them to conceal their identities so they could get close to each other and move that romance forward in a way their families would not have allowed. You might think about the great poem, “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, or the reworking of it by Maya Angelou in which they talk about a smile as a mask. Maya Angelou, in her reworking of it, said that she was inspired when she saw a woman on a bus, smiling. And she knew that the smile was a mask hiding all kinds of pain and suffering and little indignities that she had to go through. She goes on to talk about the mask that she and her people have been wearing for centuries, through enslavement, Jim Crow, discrimination, oppression, and how they have to wear the mask that conceals in order to survive.
Masks, paradoxically, also can reveal. Sometimes people have to put a mask on to be their true selves. I don’t have a good, high literary reference for this, so I am going to go to superheroes, go to the comics. Those superheroes put masks on so they can be their true selves, because otherwise people would not be willing to accept them. It isn’t just the superheroes who wear them. The villains sometimes have to wear a mask, and their true self is revealed, how awful and vicious they are.
I also think of the revealing mask of the anonymity of the internet. That mask has certainly helped a lot of people reveal their true selves, for good and for bad. Masks can reveal who we truly are.
Another thing a mask can do is transform. There is a short story written in the late 20th century called “The Happy Hypocrite.” It is about a man who is no good. He is a charlatan. The narrator says the only vice he does not have is smoking. He does every thing else wrong. He is a terrible man. Cupid strikes him and he falls in love with a woman who is good and righteous and pure and pious. He proposes marriage to her, and she turns him down because she will only marry a saint. He is devastated. On the way home he walks past a mask shop. He goes in and shares his situation with the mask maker, and the mask maker makes him a mask of a saint to wear. Wearing the mask, as the story goes on, he does all kinds of wonderful, good, saintly things. She falls in love with him and they get married. About a month after their wedding, the antagonist, who has been present throughout the story but I skipped that part for brevity in the sermon, comes back. They get into a scuffle, the mask is removed, and we discover the man looks exactly the same. He has been transformed over the time he was wearing the mask. That’s the “fake it till you make it” approach to life.
Masks can conceal, masks can reveal, and masks can transform. Today we are celebrating the Feast of All Saints when we remember all the saints. When we think about the saints, we normally think about them as amazing super Christians, that they are extra righteous and good and perfect. And I promise you they are not. If you read their histories, not their hagiographies, you will discover they are folks just like you and me, with all their quirks and foibles, all of their errors and yes, sins. What makes the saints different, I think, is that the saints have put on the mask of Christ. Sometimes they put that mask in order to conceal some things about themselves. I know we all love St. Francis, but if you read about him, I think he wanted to conceal some things about his life. Sometimes the saints put that mask on to reveal something about themselves. Here I think about the martyrs and how that mask of Christ gave them the strength to do the right thing when they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But they did the right thing because of that mask of Christ that revealed the strength within them that God gave them.
I think all of the saints put on the mask of Christ and were transformed. Day in and day out, as they put that mask on, they became evermore like Christ. Not perfect, but trying. The saints are there inviting us to put the mask on, too. They are handing you that mask today, inviting you to put it on. Maybe because you need to conceal a few rough edges. Maybe to reveal some inner strength. But in all cases to help you transform evermore into the likeness of Christ, evermore into the likeness of one who was the Incarnation of love in this world. They are inviting you to put that mask on today.
AMEN
