Telling All the Truth by The Rev. Bennett A. Brockman
Posted on
Christmas Eve 2014
Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford, CT
The Rev. Bennett A. Brockman
Telling all the Truth
Merry Christmas! We can say it at last. Advent is over, it’s Christmas and Christmas is merry, because Christmas plain and simple is Good News: Jesus is Emmanuel, God with Us. Christ is born. God is indeed with us. And that’s the happy truth.
But it’s not a very obvious truth. I don’t need to remind you just how troubled our city and our nation and our world are, or how far from perfect each of our lives are. It certainly was the same way, only worse, 2000 years ago when those shepherds beheld that glorious angelic choir. They were likely watching sheep they were too poor to own themselves. It was cold and dark, and they were probably complaining that their chapped hands hurt. They probably spoke bitterly about landlords who gouge tenants and powerful people who exploit weaker ones. They had every reason to complain about taxes. Like then, like now.
So if all that’s the same, what difference does the story make? Why keep on telling it? What makes the difference is what happens after the shepherds hear the angels. They honor the possibilities in what they have heard. Maybe, just maybe there’s something to this vision they’ve just seen. That hope inspires them to set their fear aside and get moving. They trudge off to Bethlehem and show that they have taken to heart the angels’ words by worshipping the newborn child as just what the angels said he was, God’s own son. That was an astonishing act of brave faith.
Now look around you, at all of us gathered here tonight. We are here because we also have—or someone close to us has--bravely taken to heart the angels’ song: “Glory to God, and peace to God’s people on earth.” Our hands may be chapped; the pain of old hurts may linger; injustice, exploitation, and violence disfigure our society; our aches and illness and fears are real.
But like those long-ago shepherds we have taken to heart the vision of peace. In this parish, last fall, we joined the campaign against Ebola. Then, Advent focused on our year-round ministries of hope and reconciliation: Church by the Pond and Feeding in the Park; Loaves and Fishes and Food Share and Church Street Eats; gifts offered through Covenant to Care; and our on-going involvement with our Asylum Hill neighborhood and sister churches, especially through Trinity Academy and our Choir School. We open our door to musical performances by more and more school and professional groups from the city and region. My list could go on and on.
When we open our heart to the angels’ message, we live it out like this; and we thus become a small-scale edition of the Good News that is Jesus Christ. In the great poet Emily Dickinson’s phrase, we become “slanted truth”—slanted because we cannot completely BE God’s Truth. We cannot leave our humanity behind any more than Jesus could leave his divinity behind. Jesus merged the human and divine with perfection—and at a cost—that we cannot match. Indeed, we can be grateful that we are not able, much less required, to pay that price.
As Emily Dickinson said, we have to “tell all the truth,” but we have to tell it slant. “Truth must dazzle gradually, or very man be blind,” she said. Like looking at the sun. It’s just too dazzling to hold in mind the whole truth of God incarnate in Jesus. The little child of Bethlehem did not retain the innocence of infancy, but rather lived into the full Truth of God’s own Self. It was not the innocent child who got himself nailed to a cross, but God’s Truth who confronted the worst that the world could inflict and showed that God’s Truth triumphs over the most powerful evil the human imagination can construct.
Even the saints among us don’t get beyond being a slanted version of God’s truth. Every Christian makes mistakes. We get it wrong. We hurt each other. We fail to intervene when we should. But holding this Christ-vision in our hearts empowers us to live the God’s truth with a deeper measure of wisdom, forbearance, patience, urgency, hopefulness, tenacity, and resilience when we meet all those situations that need the peace, and justice, and love that are the hallmarks of God’s truth.
Writing to Christians who had only just begun to follow the Way of Christ, Saint Paul described the God’s Truth revealed in Jesus as God’s way of reconciling people to God and to each other. Living that reconciliation, and inviting others to join us, makes us ambassadors of Christ, he said.
So we’re not afraid to keep on trying to get better at it. That’s the angels’ first message, remember? “Don’t be afraid!” Don’t be afraid to behold the God’s Truth. And don’t be afraid to live that Truth, slanting though it must be. And don’t be afraid to live it a little more upright, day by day.
Hands may still be chapped. Shoulders still sore. Scars still creating painful memories. Wounds still healing, hearts still longing for a world where the content of one’s character always matters more than the color of one’s skin.
But honoring the possibilities in the angels’ message empowers us to receive the gift of the Christ Child, and that makes us, one and all, ambassadors for Christ, ministers of reconciliation. We become Christmas presents to a world that needs the gift of God’s reconciling Truth so much. Even when we’re at best Truth told slant.
We care for the households we live in, and the community around. We feed the hungry and we provide shelter and clothing for the homeless and provide lotion for their chapped hands. We confront and engage the institutions that make mistreatment part of the culture, and try to change them. In Sunday worship and in daily prayer, we return to the source, this vision of peace, and draw strength and courage anew, encouraging one another, and inviting others to share this ministry of reconciliation.
Embracing the hope. Committing to the vision of peace, being ambassadors of reconciliation. That is the gift of the Christ Child. Taking it to heart, living it, makes us, one and all, Christmas presents to a world that needs the gift of God’s reconciling Truth so much, even when we’re Truth told slant.
Amen.