I always enjoyed Halloween as a child. It was fun to dress up as something you weren't. Once when I was around 10, I made myself a robot costume. A couple of boxes, some silver spray paint, and some antennae fashioned from household utensils, and I had a crude, but serviceable facsimile of a robot inspired by the Lost in Space TV series showing back in those days.
But whether the costumes were crude, home-made jobs or fancy, store-bought ones, everyone understood that the masquerade was fleeting. Other than the occasional very young sibling or family pet, no one was really fooled by these remodeled exteriors. Under the costumes, we were still the same. Nothing had really changed.
Yet despite knowing this, most of us still worry a lot about our costumes. Not our Halloween ones, but the costumes we put on every day. Sometimes these are literal, the clothes we wear to project just the right image. Sometimes that are a persona that we don, hoping it will make us look more impressive, attractive, sexy, knowledgeable, powerful, datable, and so on. But often they are not much more effective than Halloween costumes. Who we really are inside still shows.
Jesus goes after the Pharisees in today's gospel over their concern with the outside rather than the inside. Seems that nothing has change in 2000 years. And this isn't simply a personal thing. We church folks worry a lot about the outside of our buildings and our worship, sometimes to the neglect of deeper, more important things.
We all know that the Church is people, a communion of saints who together constitute the living body of Christ in the world. Yet very often we we mention "church," we are talking about our costumes.
What's beneath the costumes your church wears? And what sort of Jesus does that show to the world?
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