You must get rid of your mask!
(Isaiah 1:22, 25) “Your silver has become dross, your choice wine is diluted with water. … I will turn my hand against you; I will thoroughly purge away your dross and remove all your impurities.”
What happened in Aurora, Colorado at Century 16 Movie Theater last week shocked many people. During the new movie Batman III – “Dark Knight Rises”, 24 years old young graduate student came into the movie theater and killed 12 people and wounded around 60 people. According to the one of the news, he was wearing a gas mask and threw some sort of canister where some gas emerged and the gunman opened fire. Now because of this tragic incident, people talk about not only the gun control issue but also safety in theater. And I saw the CNN internet news that AMC Movie Theater will ban people from wearing masks in a theater. After I heard this new, I read Isaiah in order to prepare a sermon for Korean Ministry Morning Prayer. And this thought came into my mind: ‘What if we put sign in front of church or main sanctuary saying ‘Do not wear mask in the church’ how would people respond?’ I am sure people may think that pastor James is crazy. And maybe others think that nobody is wearing mask within the church. Maybe some will get angry at me because they are offended because of what the sign says about not wearing the mask. But the mask that I am talking about here is not the mask that you are thinking. Here, I am talking about ‘hypocrisy.’ I think many of us are pretending to be good Christians even though we are not.
When we look at the today’s passage Isaiah 1:22, 25, we see that the Lord is rebuking the Israelites for their sin against God (v.22) and then give them a promise of making them to repent their sin (v.25). In verse 22, the phrase “silver has become dross” and “wine is diluted with water” are figure of speech and they mean ‘hypocrisy (Dr. Park). God is rebuking the Israel leaders for their hypocrisy. Not only the Israel leaders, God is rebuking church leaders as well – pastors, elders and so on. Can you imagine how the church leaders will respond when they see the sign in front of the church or main sanctuary saying ‘Do not come in with your mask on’? We may be conscience-stricken. But after the Lord’s Day church service, we would go back to the same habit of not only disobeying God’s commands but also rebelling against God (v.2). And we would persist in rebellion (v.5). Then our heart is too hardened to respond to what the sign says in front of the church or the main sanctuary. You see, we have no hope in ourselves to change our life of hypocrisy. And our children and people around us will see our hypocrisy and say ‘He is hypocrite!.’ And that’s who we are. Why did we come this far? What happened to us? We try to pretend to be someone we are not too much that we forgot about who we really are. What if we keep on getting rid of our mask? What if we keep on peeling off our pretense, what would be real us?
Although there is no hope in us, we have hope in Christ. This is what the Lord promises to us: “I will turn my hand against you; I will thoroughly purge away your dross and remove all your impurities” (v.25). Like what God did to the Israelites, the Lord promises to us to make us repent our sin of hypocrisy even through affliction. God will remove all our impurities. As a result, we will enter into His temple and worship God without wearing any mask at all. We do not have to pretend to be someone we are not. We do not have to pretend to be holy and good Christian. We will be able to go to God just as we are, trusting what Jesus has done on the cross for us. And we will be able to be ourselves in front of our beloved brothers and sisters in Christ. May that blessing be upon you!
Wanting to go near to God without mask,
James Kim