The Continuum of Sincerity

“...When such people...can break down and weep at their deaths and use language of personal bereavement to describe their feelings, then true mourning and grief and bereavement has been reduced, if not to nothing, then certainly next to nothing. What is worse, because they did not know the bereaved, then whatever the rhetoric they use, the bottom line is that their mourning is all about them and not about the one who has died or about those who are truly bereaved and left distraught at the graveside. If relationships with others are to be at all meaningful, then they need to embody levels of privacy, and concepts of decency and modesty. To be truly bereaved requires that one is first intimate or connected to the person.... For them, everything changed; and then, two days later, it was back to business as usual. In my mind, however, I remain standing by my father’s coffin” (Trueman, pg 180-1).

This chapter, I feel, was especially personal for Trueman to write. Speaking from personal experience, he discusses the false emotion that people express for selfish/thoughtless reasons. There are obvious applications to how this plays out in our lives in regard to the death of celebrities and even friends of the campus , but I wonder: If we look at this in application to the birth and death and resurrection of Christ, where we might find ourselves on Trueman’s continuum of sincerity?

There are those who are sincerely excited and awed over Christ’s birth, truly grieved by His death, and genuinely celebratory at His resurrection. And then there are those who go through the motions as a matter of course and make a show of displaying their emotions. the same emotions as a matter of fact, so drastically different from birth to death and His death to the resurrection.

These two contrasts are at complete opposite ends of the continuum. Where do we find ourselves? Surely, we would always wish to be found at the genuine, sincere end of it all, but are we? Does the joy of Christmas and worship consistently penetrate our daily routines in such a way as to move our hearts with each remembrance?