SERMONS 

Masks and Ashes

Opening Words
Ecclesiastes 3

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal:
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together.
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.

Let this be our time for celebration, our time for Life.

Readings

from Luke 18:9-14

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: "Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, 'God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.' But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner!' I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted."

from The Medusa and the Snail by Lewis Thomas

We have evolved scientists . . . and so we know a lot about DNA, but if our kind of mind had been confronted with the problem of designing a similar molecule . . . we'd never have succeeded. We would have made one fatal mistake: our molecule would have been perfect. . . . The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.

Sermon

"For everything there is a season." This often used scriptural passage does not come from one of the earnest authors of material included in the Hebrew scriptures. Ecclesiastes is anything but earnest. Ecclesiastes challenges some of the easy orthodoxy offered up in other portions of scripture. The author is painfully honest in confronting the difficult realities of life, and yet still insistent about the importance of living fully in the face of it all. The ambiguity of Life, the inscrutability of God, and Life's vanity comprise an unexpected worldview for this author of ancient sacred scripture.

"For everything there is a season." For dancing, for laughing, for breaking the rules, and inverting the structures of power. In other words, for Mardi Gras. And this is the season. In New Orleans, and some other places, it's been the season of Carnival since just after Epiphany. But especially from today through Tuesday, perfectly respectable people are attaching little propeller thingies to hard hats, painting their faces beyond recognition, and wearing utterly ridiculous clothes. They march, or ride floats, and throw shiny coins and beads to people cheering them on. It's amazing what people will do, given the wisdom of Ecclesiastes-that for everything there is a season. A little permission, and just about anything is possible.

Witnessing this spectacle provides an important insight into human nature. We need to laugh. We need the freedom to let go every now and then. We can't, or perhaps we shouldn't, take ourselves quite so seriously, at least not all the time.

Carnival originates, of course, with a pagan celebration that came near the end of winter. When, at the Council of Nicea in 325, the date for the celebration of Easter was being set, it seemed prudent to make room for this celebration that the Christians were giving no sign of abandoning. So church leaders avoided the embarrassment of followers participating in pagan activities, by adapting the holiday and including it in their own liturgical year. It fell neatly near the end of winter and right before the solemn period of Lent, when believers could spend a period in fasting and prayer after their rowdy festival.

Mardi Gras came to New Orleans with the Creole people-the people of Spanish and French ancestries. Mardi Gras means Fat Tuesday. It is the biggest day of Carnival. The parties and parades begin with a ball on Twelfth Night, January 6th, and climax in the insanity of Mardi Gras.

The theme of it all is inversion. For this time, fools and idiots rule. All things and all folks are equal. Hierarchies inverted. Powers and pieties mocked. No one is above anyone else. Any previous effort at righteousness is suspended-the idea is not to achieve righteousness but to acknowledge the folly of such striving. There is time for striving. It comes soon. The next day, Ash Wednesday, the hungover faithful return to their real lives, with real responsibilities, set roles and rules, and many even go so far as to allow the priest to make the sign of the cross on their foreheads with ashes from last year's palm branches. They replace the gaudy masks of Mardi Gras with the solemn mask of ashes. And strive again for righteousness.

I believe in Mardi Gras. I need it. Because the striving comes naturally for me. I am sure I am not unique in this. Our precious work ethic discourages frivolity. Not surprisingly many Protestants have disapproved of Carnival as part of the church's liturgical year. I'll grant you there have been historical instances of great abuses during Carnival. And even today some of the excess is dangerous. But much of the celebration is safe, legal, and moral (by most standards at least). It's a good time. The really subversive thing about Mardi Gras is its inversion of hierarchy and value. The way it shatters our earnestness, demands we stop taking ourselves so seriously. Its acknowledgement of ambiguity in life. And its reminder that we do not achieve the piety, the righteousness, the perfection that we seek.

Every single year Mardi Gras offers an opportunity for us to lighten up. To let go of role and responsibility, at least for a time-especially if our role and responsibility ordinarily comes with prestige or power. In other words Mardi Gras is an invitation to humility. Not an oppressed, constricting, or submissive humility, but a liberating, life-filled humility. Humble like of the earth, like DNA, blessedly imperfect.

To call it an opportunity to lighten up makes it sound pretty unimportant. Or at least like an extra we can afford to forgo. I'm not sure this is so. From my experience not taking ourselves so seriously is not an optional exercise for the spirit. The alternative is to get caught in a self-important, self-righteous attitude that is (at least) ungenerous and (at worst) diabolical. Consider the man in the temple with his arms raised in praise, or is that self-congratulations?! His lack of humility is a strange and foolish wall he has constructed that prevents him from seeing that we are bound together in a common destiny. It leaves him room for pettiness, for standing above others, and therefore never truly with others. What a tragic condition. Surely we all recognize it well. Surely we can all remember times when we have gotten caught up in this kind of piousness. On the surface, it looks pretty good. In practice, it leaves us weighed down and isolated.

Unitarian Universalist minister and author Peter Fleck challenges us to lighten up by offering an alternate vision to the standard orthodoxy. Like the author of Ecclesiastes, Fleck does not shy away from the difficult realities of our existence. He does it, though, in a hopeful, life-affirming way, by describing the blessings of imperfection. In his book by that name, The Blessings of Imperfection, he recalls a story from his childhood:

It was the story of a gnome who lived in the forest under the root of a tree. He had one big wish: more than anything else in the world he wanted to own a green hunter's bag. He used to think about his green hunger's bag by day and to dream about it at night. He had visualized it a thousand times. Then, one day, it may have been his birthday, he received a beautiful green hunger's bag as a gift. His dream had come true; his ardent wish had been fulfilled. He owned his green hunter's bag. Now you would have expected him to be happy. But he said, "it is a nice hunter's bag, only it is not quite as green as I had imagined it.

Fleck says it was his initiation into the experience of how only the idea of something is perfect. As Plato taught, "its realization, its expression in material, worldly terms, [is] a mere shadow of that perfection."

And this is a blessing? Fleck uses biologist Lewis Thomas' work to help make his point. Thomas wrote that we humans "are built to make mistakes, coded for error." As is the rest of creation. It's built into the very DNA that is the foundation of all life. As Fleck writes:

Take the amphibians. The first one that crawled out of the water onto the land may not have done so because its feet were so strong, but because its gills were so weak.

Evolution, growth, transformation, possible because of imperfection. What's more I believe love is possible because of imperfection. Where would we ever connect with one another if we were perfect? Or even if we become so earnest about perfection. And why would we connect, or love one another? Imperfection… is a blessing. And still we fight it. We strive for perfection-admittedly we must. Somehow that is as basic to our being as our inability to achieve it.

Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday did not arise only because of the planning of the church hierarchy. They arose as they did because we human beings need them. We need Mardi Gras to remind us of and even help us celebrate our inability to ever be as good, or as righteous as we wish we were. And we need Ash Wednesday, or periods like Lent, to invite us into a time of striving for goodness and righteousness once again.

Lent gives form to our striving. It creates time and space for spiritual exploration, for self-examination, for renewed commitment. I like to give something up. Or at least to change something just a little bit. Even a subtle change in a day helps me remember to be mindful, to seek to live with compassion, to strive for righteousness.

And in my striving, I try to remember Mardi Gras. To picture otherwise ordinary people looking outrageous, throwing all inhibition to the wind, letting go of the urge to be so controlled, to be dignified, to be serious. I try to remember myself. My place. I try not to take myself and my strivings too seriously-because if there is anything that can inhibit spiritual growth…that is surely it.

In the Buddhist tradition there is a saying, "always maintain only a joyful mind." The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron describes what often happens to us. We hear this teaching, "always maintain a joyful mind," and we watch ourselves suspiciously, catching every instance of imperfection, judging our efforts harshly, "hitting [ourselves] over the head for never being joyful."

The key to feeling at home with your body, mind, and emotions, she writes, to feeling worthy to live on this planet, comes from being able to lighten up. This earnestness, this seriousness about everything in our lives-including [spiritual] practice-this goal-oriented, we're-going-to-do-it-or-else attitude, is the world's greatest killjoy. There's no sense of appreciation because we're so solemn about everything.

This attitude of lightness is what liberates us to live fully, and probably to achieve more compassion or righteousness than we would in a state of earnestness. If we are stuck in a place of striving, of deluding ourselves about what is possible, of setting ourselves apart, like the praying man in the temple, then joy will be hard to come by. If, on the other hand, we can learn to take ourselves lightly, to be humble, we will be free to experience joy. I love what G. K. Chesterton says about angels. "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly."

Perhaps for humans it could be "Human beings can dance because they remember who they truly are." We are not anaerobic bacteria. We have stumbled and blundered beyond that. We can make music. And we can strive for more. If there is a heaven, and I believe I've seen it a time or two, surely the way to get there is by dancing.