“Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.”
Jesus says, “I have come into the world to bear witness to the truth.
Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.” What does it mean to be
“of the truth”? What is it that allows us to hear Jesus’ voice...that
allows us to hear his witness? How do we become people of the truth?
Do we want to become people of the truth?
Truth can be a scary thing. It can be scary to speak the truth. It can be scary to hear the truth. After all, they killed Jesus for speaking the truth, for speaking the truth about the kingdom of God—for speaking the truth about the Law—for speaking the truth about his relationship with God—for speaking the truth about God’s relationship with each of us. Jesus paid the price for speaking the truth. And I know that every person in this room has had an experience of speaking the truth and then paying the price.
Do we want to become people of the truth?
We are born people of the truth, and we manage to grow away from it. Children know the truth. They see it around them. They speak it. They hear the truth in our voices even when our words speak something other than the truth. Children live in an awareness of truth which allows them to notice the real point to the stories they hear—to ask about the things that are important to them—to see things in a way many of us have forgotten we ever knew.
The hard part of this whole thing is that we can’t be people of the truth without telling our own truths. I’m not talking about telling everyone everything about our lives. I’m talking about looking inside our hearts and acknowledging our own secret truths to ourselves and to God. In order to look at The Truth, in capital letters, the truth that Jesus brings to us, we have to look at our own truths. Truth is never pure, and it’s rarely simple. Truth is not a set of fixed and immutable certainties that stands by itself in splendid isolation, ready to be measured by words and actions and numbers. Every one of us—every single person in our community—holds a part of the truth. When we come together in this place as the Body of Christ, bringing the knowledge of the truth of our own hearts, we begin to enter the larger truth of our community. One step at a time, we enter our truth. And the healing begins—the healing that lets us see the reign of God—the kingdom of God—right here, right now.
Healing begins when we immerse ourselves in truth. When we live in truth, we rediscover a sense of freedom and peace that many of us haven’t experienced since childhood. In fact, we can re-learn about living in truth by watching the children in our lives—by watching the children who ask difficult questions when we least want to answer them. We can re-learn by watching children who tell their own truth in such an unselfconscious way that we are delighted by their freedom to speak their hearts. We can re-learn about truth by watching children who haven’t learned to speak anything but the truth—even when they would really, really, really rather tell a lie. Jesus said that whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never receive it. And I can only believe that a child-like openness to truth is part of our path into the kingdom of God.
Now please don’t hear me saying that Jesus wants us to tell other people that their mothers have certainly dressed them funny today—or to remark on physical characteristics that we find interesting—or even to ask questions in the grocery check-out line about the mysteries of human reproduction. We have all experienced those connections with truth, and most of us aren’t eager to repeat the experience. But the immediacy of curiosity and the clarity of observation that we see in children are the beginnings of living the truth that Jesus brings. It’s the beginning of living in the freedom that God wants for each of us. When we combine those childlike gifts of curiosity and clarity with our own experience of God’s loving grace and compassion, we move a step closer to the discernment that helps us know the truth in our lives.
Our criterion for discernment of truth, the truth that Jesus was sent to speak, is God’s compassion for everything in God’s creation. We learn to recognize the hallmarks of that compassion through reflection on our own experience, through prayer that listens for God’s presence with us, through meditation on the scriptures, through listening to the community around us. Measuring our thoughts and deeds against that experience of compassion helps us to recognize the way which leads to compassion for others and for ourselves. Speaking the truth and hearing the truth can be difficult, but recognizing the truth can be the work of a lifetime. It takes a lot a practice to learn to see something that’s staring us right in the face.
And that’s where the good news comes into this story.
This is New Year’s Eve, the last Sunday in the church calendar. On New Year’s Eve, we generally look back over the year and think about the way we’ve spent our days. We celebrate the times we lived the truth of God’s compassion. We mourn the times we really didn’t even come close. We wonder about all those times in between—and we hope to get a little closer to the truth in the coming year.
This is New Year’s Eve and next Sunday is the first Sunday in Advent, the beginning of our church year. Once again we prepare to meet the Incarnation—to greet Jesus as a fragile infant—to celebrate the wonder of new life and promise—to begin our walk with Jesus through his ministry. Every year, we have a new chance to meet Jesus: in the manger—on the journey---on the cross—and in the resurrection. Every year, we have another chance to practice recognizing Christ—another chance to live the truth he speaks to us—another chance to live in his light. Every year, we have another chance to move toward being the people of the truth. Every year we have another chance and another set of days, each filled with choices to make.
And my dear friends, every day and every choice belongs to each of us.
Do we want to become people of the truth?