Ash Wednesday: Isaiah 58:1-12; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Why do we humans so love to fake goodness? Year after year Lent brings another shout-out to the soul. Year after year we find ourselves dragged forward against the grain of our pretensions of religiosity, through the vulnerability of hearts tender with shames and fears, so that God may find us and make of us transmitters of a light other than our own.

After the November 2012 election there was considerable amazement in the press at how completely the losing party’s leadership had been fooled into believing its own alternative reality. The other side was able to say, “Told you so!” The phrase “epistemic closure” was bandied about—meaning locked into a self-flattering bubble instead of rubbing up against reality.

Yet what is harder than to be self-critical when it comes to our own sacred goodness—to be critical of what gives us belonging, holds those like us together, allows us to think we are innocent, on the right side? The prophet Isaiah gives voice to God, who is amazed at our “epistemic closure.” He is not denouncing people who are doing things that they know to be bad. He is astounded at how those who are doing good things cannot see that their own goodness is a cover-up job. Our conviction of pleasing God is being ridiculed. What we call holy, God calls kitsch. The prophet points the way out of a delusion. There’s nothing passive about this pathway to a broken heart: it involves actively loosening patterns of desire that contribute to our cover-up. It involves actively reaching out to and giving cover to real people—the precarious, the poor, the outsider—in short, to all those whom our cover-up goodness has left uncovered.