Wednesday • 12/22/2021
Wednesday of the Fourth Week of Advent
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 72; 2 Samuel 7:1–17; Titus 2:11–3:8a; Luke 1:39–56
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 11 (“The Third Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 60:1-3,11a,14c,18-19, BCP, p. 87); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 16 (“The Song of Zechariah,” Luke 1:68-79, BCP, p. 92)
I love Tootsie Roll Pops! I loved them as a kid! I love them now! I love slowly sucking the sweet hard candy shell nearly through, and lightly crunching through to the soft chocolate center, making sure not to bite all the way into it, so I can savor sucking the chocolate inside all the way to the stick. Oh my! I love the outer/inner duality of Tootsie Roll Pops!
Israel’s outer core: hope for humanity. I love Israel’s story of a coming human king who will deliver humanity from lawlessness, false religion, poverty, depression, and despair. I love the sweet hard candy of humanity’s hopes for salvation through a son of David. I love today’s promise to David in 2 Samuel of a perpetual line of righteous human kings. I love the way Psalm 72 celebrates the embodiment of that kind of rule under David’s son Solomon. I love Mary’s paean of praise to the God who has graced her womb with the king that David and Solomon had prefigured.
Israel’s inner core: a taste of divinity. And I love that all along there had been the hints of an inner core of a deeper, different kind of sweetness, the taste of divinity. It would take, for instance, the appearance of more than a man for David’s throne to “be established forever” (2 Samuel 7:16). A Solomon who will “live as long as the sun and moon endure” is more than a mere mortal (2 Samuel 7:16; Psalm 72:5). Mary’s song comes from a heart overwhelmed with the realization that she is mother of no less than her own Lord (Luke 1:43).
Christmas Day’s inner core for Crete. Israel’s story always carried within it the promise of a Tootsie Roll Pop dual sweetness. More, it seems, than any group the New Testament addresses, the Cretans need a taste of the inner sweetness. Cretans’ predisposition to elevate humanity to deity prompts Paul to compose some of the most thrilling verses in the Bible, and they have to do with the wonder of Jesus’s divinity, the core and the center of the Bible’s promises to us.
Titus 2:11-3:8 contains verses that have rightly asserted themselves as Christmas Day passages in the lectionary. Here Paul exults in the great “epiphany” of God that took place at the Incarnation. Jesus is not human ego projecting itself into the heavens, but divine humility pressing itself into the stuff of our lives. Jesus is the divine sweetness at the core of Israel’s and all of humanity’s story.
“But when the goodness and loving kindness (philanthrōpia) of God our Savior appeared…” (Titus 3:4). Jesus came to show the gracious, kind, and loving character of God. This is Paul’s way of saying what Jesus says in John’s Gospel: “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father” (John 14:9).
To too many people, God looks sinister like J. K. Rowling’s Voldemort; predatory like Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Kreuger; or unbendingly judgmental like Les Miserables’ Jabert. It’s not a new problem. Zeus punished Prometheus for having too much philanthrōpia, that is, for acting too much as though the gods had loving kindness towards humans (Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 11,28).
But when God himself appeared among us, says Paul, he showed us that God’s face turned towards us is a face of kindness and affection. “He it is who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own…” (Titus 2:14ab) and “so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life…” (Titus 3:7).” Here Paul explains the significance of the cross on which the Son of God and our Savior died. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son,” John tells us (John 3:16). Here, Paul tells us that Jesus the only begotten Son loved us so much that he gave himself to purchase us from sin, and to make us part of his Father’s family and citizens of the kingdom of heaven.
“[H]e saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy, through the water of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. This Spirit he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior…” (Titus 3:5ac,6). Here Paul explains the significance of Christ’s resurrection and ascension. Jesus has made us new by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on his church: humans’ ascent by divinity’s descent. We know the confidence of justifying grace and the security of our place in God’s family here and in eternity through the Spirit of Jesus within us.
“For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all, training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions, and in the present age to live lives that are self-controlled, upright, and godly…” (Titus 2:11–12) and “who are zealous for good deeds” (Titus 2:14c). Jesus came to teach the way of life: godliness rather than religious lies, justice rather than cruelty, and self-control rather than self-indulgence. With God alongside us and among us and in us, we are no longer servants of ourselves (subject to no authority but our own, hating one another, slaves to various passions and pleasures—see Titus 3:1–3). With Jesus’s teachings codified in the New Testament and with his personal presence in us via the Holy Spirit, he causes us to burn with a passion to make life beautiful for others.
May you, this Advent and Christmas season, taste the dual sweetness of your own very human life being graced with the very presence of God.
O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray;
cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+