Color Added - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Thursday • 1/4/2024 •

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd. Thanks for joining me. We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days, as we consider several aspects of worship: corporate and personal. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader Magazine a few years ago. We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office this next Monday. 

“COLOR ADDED” 

Some of us serve in a building that is an unadorned, multimedia-accommodating “box” that we are able to treat as a canvas for telling God’s story. We can fill it with lights and sights and sounds any way we wish, any time we wish. I have spent many of my ministry years in such a setting. It’s a delight to play with visual and aural textures, and to take on the challenge of imagining anew the Christian story week after week.  

Some of us serve in a building that is clearly and intentionally designed for “church.” I am spending the present phase of my ministry in this sort of setting: a cathedral of Gothic Revival design. Stained glass panels encompass the worship space with a rehearsal of the biblical story. An altar is both the visual and liturgical focal point of the room. Pulpit to the side, but elevated and extending out toward the congregation. Pipe organ. Pews with kneelers. A lingering scent of incense. I am learning that fixed features can bring their own delight.  

Permanence… 

The New Testament portrays the Church as something that is both dynamic and changing, on the one hand, and solid and immovable, on the other. To be sure, the Church is made up of “living stones,” and is constantly growing (1Peter 2:5; Ephesians 2:21). At the same time, Christ’s Church is also “the pillar and foundation of the truth” (1Timothy 3:16). It’s as though we need “wings to fly” and “feet firmly planted.” Opposites? No, not really.  

I am appreciating the way the building I’m in communicates the solidity of our faith. Twelve massive pillars – each bearing the shield of one of the 12 apostles – surround us as we worship. Stained glass panels depict Jesus’ life and ministry on the lower level, and Old and New Testaments saints on the upper level. It’s marvelous to be surrounded by such a great “cloud of witnesses.”  

… But Not Perfection 

No other entity on earth will last beyond the Lord’s return – no government, no economy, no relationship – only Christ and his Bride, the Church. Nor, even in this age, it seems to me, is there any more compelling an argument to be made for the truth of the faith than the existence of the Church itself. As Cardinal Ratzinger (before becoming Pope Benedict XVI) offered: “The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.” 

What speaks so profoundly about the Church’s existence is that we are a community of people who are forgiven and know it. Flawed and owning it. Loved in spite of ourselves, thus under compulsion to love in response.  

A Mystery 

Early in my days at the cathedral after a worship service, I was surveying the Old and New Testament figures portrayed in the stained glass panels around the top of the building. It was no small help that the names of the saints were part of each panel. But there was one panel that nearly stumped me. It was a panel of Moses, but from my vantage point below, it looked like the name “Moses” was upside down and backwards, and indeed it was. 

A number of people I asked had the impression it had been done that way on purpose to “remind generations that only God is perfect.” Anne Michels, the Cathedral Archivist, had heard that account for years, and called Willet Studios in Philadelphia to confirm the story. (They created our stained glass … as well as the stained glass in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.) According to Willet Studios, when the Moses stained glass was installed in the late 1980s, the panel with his name was inserted upside down by accident. The letters (as you can see) are stylized. Nobody seemed to notice the mistake until the work was finished. At that point, they were left alone. And as such, they stood as a reminder that only God is perfect, or in Anne Michels’s words, “they are for us a message of the futility of works. If we try to work our way to perfection, we’ll never get there.” 

The mistake was allowed to stand until we had it corrected in 2020. Whenever I look up at Moses, I am reminded, as a friend put it to me, that “the most beautiful of our creations this side of glory are still fallen creations. We are forgiven people, living in hope.” People who talk that way let me know I am where I need to be. Those are the kind of lives that commend the faith. This is the kind of art that grows – by a combination of inspired purpose and providential accident – in the womb of the church.  

Symbolic East …  

Early Christians were known for praying facing the east. That’s because, notes Gregory of Nyssa (central Asia Minor, 4th century), East is the birthplace of humankind and the earthly garden of paradise. As Thomas Aquinas (Italy, 13th century) was later to observe: East is the place of our Lord – his life and death, and the direction from which he will come on judgment day.  

Jesus’ incarnation, death, and resurrection is the dawn of new creation. That’s what John the Baptist’s father, Zechariah, anticipated when he sang about “the rising Sun” visiting us (Luke 1:78 NJB – the term is anatolē, lit., “east,” a term that was understood either to refer to the morning star, Venus, or to the rising sun itself). That’s what early Christians recalled when they noticed that the Greek Old Testament had translated the messianic promise of a “Branch” (Heb. tsemaḥ) as “Dawn” (NET – again, anatolē; Zechariah 3:8; 6:12; Jeremiah 23:5). 

Accordingly, when Christians began building church buildings, they put them on an east-west axis when they could – the door of entry to the west, and the pulpit and Table to the east. We came from Paradise … then lost Paradise through a bad exchange and are being reoriented to Paradise through our Second Adam’s mission of love to regain his Bride. That cosmology – that symbolic shaping of our world – alone gives us our bearings in a world that has no bearings.  

To reinforce that symbolic reshaping of space, my church is laid out on an east-west axis – except for this: it’s backwards. So the architectural plans show literal east as “Symbolic West” and literal west as “Symbolic East.” I love that! Getting true directionality is clearly not about literalism. That means it doesn’t especially matter whether you have stained glass or screens, pews or cafeteria chairs, an organ or a band, you can point “east,” as long as you know what you are looking for. 

… With “Color Added” 

I’ve served urban and suburban churches, and churches in university towns and in beach towns. I’ve appreciated the way each has acknowledged and embraced the place of its setting. Orlando, Florida, was a small town in the 1920s when the cathedral was built. Back then Central Florida was awash in citrus groves, not tourist attractions. To honor its city’s roots and to help to tell its “story,” the cathedral frames one of the stained glass panels – one that places Jesus among his disciples – with stained glass oranges. In letters barely large enough to see, one of the oranges bears the characteristic citrus industry stamp: “COLOR ADDED.”  

“There are no unsacred places,” offers Wendell Berry, “there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” The Lord has given each of us a place to sanctify. Whether with technology that is dazzling and electronic or that is simple and acoustic, whether across a canvas that constantly evolves or within a fixed environment that stolidly invites you to discover its nuances, may we embrace, enhance, and redeem local “color.” 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+ 

A Holy Restlessness Part 3 - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 1/3/2024 •

We’re taking a two-week detour from the Daily Office readings. Instead, we’ll be thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.   

Holy Restlessness:  
Using the Past to Innovate Your Service of Worship,  
Part Three of Three 

In the first two installments of this three-part series on “Holy Restlessness,” we have looked at the life of the medieval peasant monk who became Abbot of the Cathedral of St. Denis near Paris. We’ve noted the way his discovery of a “theology of light” gave him a holy discontentment with the dark and gloomy spaces in which Christians worshiped up until his day. We saw the way his audacious imagination inspired by that theology of light led him to take risks that wound up reimagining how churches could be refashioned in such a way as to bathe worship in light.  

In today’s final episode, we learn valuable lessons from Suger about the creative use of available resources and about how to exercise innovative wisdom.  

Use of “The Available” 

Part of Abbot Suger’s remarkable success lay in the fact that he did not so much scrap the Romanesque architecture that the Western churches had been using for nearly a thousand years before him, as much as he creatively adapted it. Moreover, to the extent he could, he used materials he found at hand. He did so fabulously. At first he thought he would have to import stone for the building. However, as he was later to write: 

Through a gift of God a new quarry, yielding very strong stone, was discovered such as in quality and quantity had never been found in these regions. There arrived a skillful crowd of masons, stonecutters, sculptors and other workmen, so that – thus and otherwise – Divinity relieved us of our fears.  

Searching the local woods for building materials, he believed God personally led him to the exact timbers he needed to support the church building’s ceiling.  He saw God’s provision locally at every step of the construction process. 

As Gothic architecture spread across Europe, it had a number of common features. But each region gave it its own signature, depending on local materials and tastes. French used fine white limestone because it was available, English used coarse limestone and red sandstone for the same reason; Germans and Dutch and Belgians and Poles built from brick because stone was unavailable locally.  Taking advantage of resources at hand made cathedral building realistic and achievable far beyond Suger’s monastery north of Paris.  

Innovative Wisdom 

Innovation happens when you inhabit a world that gives you a holy restlessness that sparks an audacious imagination. Innovation happens when you have the authority to effect a change, and the discernment to recognize what you can actually pull off. And finally, innovation happens when you creatively use the resources that are available to you.  

It is not innovative to force round pegs into square holes. It is not innovative to throw out an entire repertoire and bring in something that will feel like “strange fire.” It is innovative to ask: “At this moment, what is missing that people would appreciate as ‘value added’?” And, more importantly, what do we have the resources to do well?”  

An ancient voice persuaded Abbot Suger that worship could be enhanced, and more, reflect the character of God, if the worship happened in a place filled with light and lofty space. Suger’s ideas permanently changed the way worship spaces are created. Even if not “Gothic cathedral” in style, church designs continue to echo those concepts. 

As we sense in ourselves a “holy restlessness” we may discover that it is not the latest, newest thing that will add value to our ministry, but something older. It might be as simple as introducing an ancient practice, like chanting; or it may be as profound as taking an idea, like “God is light”, and transforming forever the worshiping world. 

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

A Holy Restlessness Part 2 - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 1/2/2024 •

We’re taking a two-week detour from the Daily Office readings. Instead, we’ll be thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.   

Holy Restlessness:  
Using the Past to Innovate Your Service of Worship,  
Part Two of Three 

Yesterday, we considered the way the French medieval peasant monk Suger discovered a theology of light. Today, we explore the way his audacious imagination inspired by that theology of light led him to take risks that wound up revolutionizing worship in his day.  

Audacious Imagination 

Sometimes it helps to be an amateur. Because Abbot Suger had not had the blinders of formal architectural training, he was innocent of the principles that dictated thick walls and small windows.  

Happily, Suger lived in a time of much experimentation with church architecture. However, no one before him imagined bringing as many innovations together in one building, because no one had yet become so driven to implement a fresh vision of height and light to worship.  

He imagined displacing weight from the walls themselves onto faux walls that would run perpendicular to the actual walls –what we now call “flying buttresses.” Working with his masons, Suger combined several fresh architectural features that allowed a tall skeletal structure to support wide windows: the flying buttresses, a revolutionary arch system, and clustered columns.  

Suger’s chief contribution was the concept of a ribbed vault, or arch system, using slender diagonal ribs of stone, to support the ceiling and roof. This configuration allowed modification in the construction of walls. Instead of the earlier massive and unyielding masonry, the walls of the chapels that surrounded Suger’s chancel area consisted of sixteen wide/large stained-glass windows that told redemption’s story and beamed multi-colored light onto a polished mosaic floor. It was dazzlingly beautiful, as Suger himself noted: “The entire sanctuary is thus pervaded by a wonderful and continuous light entering through the most sacred windows.”  

Abbot Suger’s building project at Saint-Denis marked a decisive beginning for a whole new movement in architecture,  eventually named “Gothic.” Historian Daniel Boorstin summarizes: “The new luminous skeleton of stone proclaimed a Church no longer on the defensive, but reaching prayerfully up to God and triumphantly to the world in an architecture of light.”  

Free to Fail 

Innovations can fail to occur for one of two reasons. Would-be innovators try things they don’t have the authority to do. Non-innovators fail to try things they could have accomplished if only they’d had the courage.  

Many years ago, a wise pastor told me: “Reggie, when it comes to authority, people mess up in one of two ways. Either they try to use authority they mistakenly think they have – for which they eventually get themselves fired. Or they don’t understand how much authority they actually do have, and they play it way too safe. They don’t have the audacity to try anything that could get them fired, so they just wither, even if they keep their job. Your temptation will be to play it safe and wither. I want you to try things that could get you fired.”  That pastor encouraged freedom and flexibility, opportunity and openness, for the staff at his church. Risk-taking in an environment with this kind of permission was an awesome and unforgettable experience. 

Abbot Suger’s story provides a worthwhile study in understanding what is possible to achieve in one’s own setting. It was Suger’s happy providence to have attended the same school in the monastery of Saint-Denis alongside the future king Louis VI of France. Later, he served the King well on a number of diplomatic missions, and he received free reign to think boldly about what he could accomplish, and he had access to any resources he needed.  

That’s just not going to be the case for most of us. Few of us have access to unlimited funds, or a personal relationship with someone as powerful as an earthly king. But we all have some measure of authority and relationship with a heavenly King. And therefore, discernment is an essential element in the employment of that authority in the service of “kingdom” innovation. 

Go … or Let Go? 

In basketball, one of the most difficult things for a player to acquire is the intuition to know when to pass the ball and when to take the shot, when to make an attempt and when to let it go. How do you know if something is a good idea or a bad idea? Go or no-go? 

Scripture redounds with wisdom for discerning what innovations you ought to attempt. For example, Saul did not have the authority to offer sacrifice, but David did have the authority to eat the showbread. Simon Magus did not have the authority to use the Spirit to turn a quick buck, but Jesus did heal on the Sabbath.  

The Gentile gift for the Jewish church, conceived by the Apostle Paul in a difficult year of consensus-building, was perhaps the single most innovative project of the entire New Testament: a concrete symbol of Gentile and Jewish oneness in the gospel. Even then, Paul knew he was taking a calculated risk, and that things might not come off smoothly (see Acts 21:10-14; Romans 15:30-33). It was a good thing that Paul factored in the possibility of “failure”: he was arrested in Jerusalem and wrongly accused of allowing Gentiles to defile the Temple.  

Paul understood the limits of his authority and the extent of the risks involved in this innovative enterprise. Yet it was a “failure” only in a short term sense. Theologically, his arrest led him to some of his richest reflection on Gentile and Jewish oneness (Ephesians 2). Missiologically, his arrest provided him the opportunity to demand an audience with the Emperor.   

Today, in this second installment of “Holy Restlessness,” we’ve considered important lessons on worship leadership from Abbot Suger’s life: how discernment requires assessing accurately your authority, ascertaining the appropriateness of your idea, recognizing resources and risks, and estimating the effectiveness of initiating an innovation. In tomorrow’s third and final instalment, we will explore the way creative and successful worship leadership works with what resources are available and exercises innovative wisdom. Meanwhile, … 

…be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

A Holy Restlessness Part 1 - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 1/1/2024 •

We’re taking a two-week detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we’ll be thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.   

Holy Restlessness:  
Using the Past to Innovate Your Service of Worship,  
Part One of Three 

Much of what insulated me from the toxic secularism of modern biblical scholarship in graduate school were the texts of the first half millennium of the church’s life. I came to recognize that across the centuries and across our cultures I shared much more with the likes of Ignatius of Antioch (d. 117) and the anonymous writer to Diognetus (early 2nd century) and Clement of Alexandria (ca. early 3rd century) than I did with the modern secularists who had come to set the agenda for modern biblical studies.  

When, many years later, Robert Webber invited me to consider not just the ideas of those ancient church writers but also their worship and their prayers and their songs, I came to realize that they thought so well because they worshiped and prayed and sang so well. 

When I realized how chanting brought “head and heart” together, I began to introducing chant to my students. We practiced the basics of plainsong chant in the “Sacred Stairwell,” and returning students tell me they continue to chant during their personal devotional time. Among my students, there’s an excitement in learning to worship using these practices of the early church. As one student exclaimed on Facebook recently, “Chanting the Nicene Creed in Greek! How I love New Testament Greek!” I appreciate taking something old and making it new. 

We are a creative bunch, we worship folk. Not only can we take ancient traditions and re-introduce them in new settings, we can also take ideas, and sculpt, chisel, mold, paint, project, pen, imagine, build them into something no one ever dreamed before. 

A Peasant Monk 

Enter one 12th century French statesman-abbot, known only as Suger (1081?-1151), abbot of the monastery of Saint-Denis, a suburb of Paris. Abbot Suger was a small man of small beginnings. Born in northern France, his peasant family handed him over at age ten to be raised by the local monastery. Suger felt orphaned, and came to think of the monastery as his true family. He latched on to the “upward-leading” theology of his monastery’s patron saint: St. Dionysius the Areopagite, one of the two converts Luke names from Paul’s ministry in Athens (Acts 17:34).  

In legend, Paul’s Athenian convert had brought the gospel to northern France. In reality, it had been a third century namesake who had done so. In legend, Paul’s Athenian convert had written several books of theology, with the theme of “God is light.” In reality, it had been a fifth or sixth century anonymous writer who had done so using Dionysius as a pen name.  

Regardless, “Saint Dionysius” (shortened to “Saint Denis”) was a voice from the ancient church who shaped Suger’s whole being: Saint Denis gave Suger an identity, an inspiration, and a mission.  

Though the pauper boy would eventually rise to become the monastery’s abbot, he was always conscious of his lowly origins: “I, the beggar, whom the strong hand of the Lord has lifted up from the dunghill.”  

Suger responded wholeheartedly to the generally “upward” lift of Dionysius’s theology, and especially to the theologian’s description of God as pure and creative light.  

Out of Darkness 

By the year 1200, churches in the West had been accustomed for a thousand years to worshiping in the dark. First it was because of persecution. Before Constantine’s conversion, the church was – both metaphorically and literally – an underground movement. Churches had to meet in secret, sometimes in homes by night, often in catacombs by candlelight. After the Roman emperor’s conversion in the 4th century, the church moved above ground and experienced rapid – almost alarming – growth. The church’s success meant the building of larger and larger spaces for worship. Rather than private homes and small secret places, churches convened in large public spaces. But believers still worshiped in relative darkness because big buildings required strong thick walls to support the roof. Because windows would weaken the stability of the walls, windows were small and permitted very little light to enter the worship space. Thus, the bigger the building, the thicker the walls, and the tinier the windows.  

“There’s got to be a better way.” A voice from a different time and place might alert you to a biblical value that is missing from your own time and place.  The biblical value won’t leave you alone. There’s a gap between your reality and your vision. Great seeds of innovation often develop by rooting yourself in another reality – one that can give you a holy restlessness with what “is,” and the mental and spiritual space to imagine what “can be.”  

So it was with Abbot Suger.  

When, at the age of about 40, Suger was elected abbot of his monastery, he inherited a church building that was in ruins. For years he had meditated on the leading ideas of his theological hero, Dionysius. If, as the Bible teaches and as Dionysius had expounded, God is light and in him there is no darkness (1 John 1:5), why does our worship have to be done in the dark? And why in such a dismal and dilapidated building? 

It seemed to Suger that a church ought to have a beauty and a loft to it that took us “from the material to the immaterial.”  Its interior should be filled with light so that the worship space would itself remind us that God is “the Father of the lights” and that his Son is “the first radiance” who reveals the Father to the world.  

Was there a way to rebuild the dim and deteriorating building? Could it be done in such a way that brought into worship the light and resplendence of which he had been reading? 

Today, we’ve considered the way this peasant monk discovered a theology of light. Tomorrow we’ll explore the way an audacious imagination inspired by that theology of light led him to take risks that wound up revolutionizing worship in his day.  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Jesus Offers to Fix What’s Broken - Daily Devotions with the Dean

• Sunday • 12/31/2023 

New Year’s Eve Day, Year Two  

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 46; Psalm 48; 1 Kings 3:5–14; James 4:13–17; 5:7–11; John 5:1–15 

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 10 (“The Second Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 55:6–11; BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (“A Song to the Lamb,” Revelation 4:11; 5:9–10, 13, BCP, p. 93) 

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd, and it’s a joy to be with you today, the Seventh Day of Christmas, which also happens to be New Year’s Eve Day. Happy New Year, in advance!  

Turning towards a new year, I think less in terms of resolutions, and more in terms of requests from the God from whom every good gift comes. God’s Word commends four worthy requests: 

1 Kings 3: Solomon and a wise and discerning heart. King Solomon represents an elevated phase in God’s plan to restore the human race to its fundamental mission: to tend God’s garden, to exercise dominion over creation, and to make the earth redound to his glory.  

I daresay none of us has quite the governing responsibilities of a Solomon. But every one of us does have some realm to rule or space to oversee. It may be a kitchen to keep clean and productive, a lawn to tend, a store to manage, a spreadsheet to keep balanced, maybe even, I dunno, a rocket to help launch.  

The greatest gift we can seek from the Lord is that which Solomon sought: a grasp of the reality we face, its opportunities and its challenges; and the wisdom to discern how to further God’s beautifying and redemptive purposes for the creation he loves.  

 Prayer for Guidance: Direct us, O Lord, in all our doings with your most gracious favor, and further us with your continual help; that in all our works begun, continued, and ended in you, we may glorify your holy Name, and finally, by your mercy, obtain everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP, p. 832) 

Image: iStock photo 

James 4: Circumspection in planning. James 4:13–17’s wisdom is an expansion of Proverbs 16:9, “The mind of a person plans their way, but Yahweh directs their steps” (my translation). I can’t help but think of the semi-irreverent adage: “We plan. God laughs.” He may not laugh at us, but perhaps we should laugh at ourselves when we think we have life all planned out. The past couple of years have called upon every person I know to be flexible, adaptable, and nimble. It’s been a time to reckon much more seriously with passages like this one. We are fragile, and our days on this earth are fleeting. James cautions us against smugly over-planning: “Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that” (James 4:15).  

It’s not a bad thing to have been put in a position where we are virtually forced to pray along with the psalmist: “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12).  

James 5: The ability to wait out hard times. As if you need to be told, crazy abounds. Miami Herald columnist and novelist Carl Hiaasen was once asked how he could expect his readers to accept his utterly bizarre scenarios about life in South Florida. His answer was (I paraphrase from memory): “Every time I write something that seems over the top, and tell myself people will think I’ve lost my grip on reality, I read something crazier in the newspaper. My imagination isn’t big enough to capture the crazy.” That’s our world. A once-in-a-century killer disease rages. The corridors of power ring with incivility. News agencies pick sides. People in everyday life do the stupidest things, and keep the 24/7 news cycle cycling.  

James says, “Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord. … You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts…” (James 5:7a,8a). To some extent, what we are called to do (besides calling out what craziness we can!) is to outlast it. Yes, crazy comes in waves. Those waves will crest and crash and eventually exhaust themselves. We must simply keep ourselves from being swept under or away. God, give us grace.  

Prayer for Quiet Confidence: O God of peace, you who have taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength: By the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray you, to your presence, where we may be still and know that you are God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP, p. 832) 

John 5: The willingness to accept healing from Jesus. Jesus offers to fix what’s broken, in this case, non-functioning legs, for a man he encounters by a healing pool in Jerusalem. And Jesus winds up healing him over his excuse-making: “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me” (John 5:7).  

It may not be our legs that don’t work. It may not be that we have seen opportunity after opportunity to address our brokenness pass us by for 38 years. But we all have reservoirs of hurt or secret obsessions or masked pretenses that one day will have to be purged. And it may be that this next year is when Jesus will come up to us and ask, “Do you want to be made well?” (John 5:6b). May God give us the grace to say “Yes!” to Jesus.  

Prayer for Trust in God in Time of Sickness: O God, the source of all health: So fill my heart with faith in your love, that with calm expectancy I may make room for your power to possess me, and gracefully accept your healing; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP, p. 461).  

Be blessed this day, and every day in the year ahead! 

Reggie Kidd+ 

God Comes to Heal - Daily Devotions with the Dean

• Bonus Track • Saturday • 12/30/2023 
The Sixth Day of Christmas, Year Two 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 20; Psalm 21; 1 Kings 17:17–24; 3 John 1–15; John 4:46–54 

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 8 (“The Song of Moses,” Exodus 15, BCP, p. 85); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94) 

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd, and it’s a joy to be with you today, the Sixth Day of Christmas. Merry Christmas!  

Elijah’s widow in 1 Kings: God comes to heal the nations. 1 Kings 17 recounts a non-Israelite widow receiving a revived son at the ministration of Yahweh’s prophet Elijah. For Jesus, this healing is a picture of Israel’s mission in the world: to be the source of healing for the world (Luke 4:25–26). Israel incubated God’s love for the world to the end that his love would eventually break out and flow everywhere.  

Image: iStock photo 

The royal official in John: God comes to heal all sorts of people. In Cana of Galilee, Jesus is approached by delegates of a “royal” (tis basilikos), presumably an official or member of the house of Herod Antipas. It’s notable that someone of such high rank would “beg [Jesus] to come down and heal his son” who is at the point of death (John 4:47). Jesus heals from afar. Though there are several matters worthy of attention in this account, here at Christmas and in conjunction with the other passages in today’s readings, what strikes me is the way this royal personage shows how upper-crust people are not beyond the reach of God’s love. In Jesus, God comes for the non-privileged (shepherds and deplorables) and for the privileged (royalty and influencers [like Nicodemus, one chapter prior]) alike.  

3 John: missional hospitality. God is intent on reaching all the nations for all kinds of people. Some of us go. Some of us stay behind and help others go. That’s what makes the inclusion of 3 John in the canon of Scripture so intriguing. 3 John is a letter about hospitality, especially hospitality for the sake of the mission of God in the world. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believes in him would not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). To the end that word of God’s astounding Son-giving love would get out to the whole world, the resurrected Jesus has breathed the Spirit upon and into his disciples (John 20:21–22). Bearing that Spirit, some of Jesus’s disciples carry the mission, and some of his disciples host the mission.  

What prompts the writing of 3 John is that, on the one hand, John wants to commend Gaius and the members of his church for hosting emissaries of Christ; and on the other hand, he feels compelled to denounce a certain Diotrephes, who “prevents those who want to do so and expels them from the church” (3 John 10). We don’t know whether Diotrephes is motivated by pure personal animus against John or whether he is one of the antichristian promoters of heresy John refers to in 1 and 2 John. The point for John is that Diotrephes’s pride and arrogance are blocking the mission of God’s love for the nations.  

When he sees ego and lovelessness at play in the church, John’s hackles get raised! John describes Diotrephes as one “who likes to put himself first” (philoprōteuōn), which is precisely the opposite of the quality of leadership Jesus says he is looking for.   

John, you may recall, has come by this lesson the hard way. One of the “Sons of Zebedee,” John and his brother—and their mother!—had made a play to get themselves moved up the ecclesiastical escalator. Jesus disabused them of confusing the Kingdom of God with some sort of Game of Thrones: “Then the mother of the sons of Zebedee came to him with her sons, and kneeling before him, she asked a favor of him. 21 And he said to her, “What do you want?” She said to him, “Declare that these two sons of mine will sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom” (Matthew 20:20–21). Jesus responds by assuring them they are not prepared for the “baptism” and the “cup” that lie before him. Moreover, he says, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first (prōtos) among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:25–28).  

Catch that one phrase? “Whoever wishes to be first (prōtos) among you must be your slave” (Matthew 20:26 

John could have been Diotrephes, “he who likes to put himself first” (philoprōteuōn). No, John was Diotrephes. Except that following the rebuke of Matthew 20, Jesus’s teaching about servant leadership in that context, his modeling of servant leadership at the foot washing in John 13, and Jesus’s giving himself up on the Cross, the John who writes 3 John is a different person.  

On the plus side: generosity makes you a missionary. “Therefore we ought to support such people, so that we may become co-workers with the truth” (3 John 8). Some are missionaries by going. Some are missionaries by staying and supporting. That’s not mere rhetoric. It’s the stone cold sober truth! I praise God for those I know—and they are many!—with the heart of the generous Gaius (“my dear brother whom I love in truth”—3 John 1) and Demetrius (who “has been testified to by all, even by the truth itself”—3 John 12) whom John commends in this brief gem of a letter as counter-examples to egotistical Diotrephes.  

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+ 

Don't Move Beyond - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 12/29/2023 •

The Fifth Day of Christmas  

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 18:1–20; 2 Samuel 23:13–17b; 2 John 1–13; John 2:1–11 

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 10 (“The Second Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 55:6–11; BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (“A Song to the Lamb,” Revelation 4:11; 5:9–10, 13, BCP, p. 93) 

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd, and it’s a joy to be with you this Fifth Day of Christmas. If you are a follower of Daily Office Devotions, you may recall these observations from 2 John from the 3rd Week of Easter. I think 2 John’s cautionary words are worth listening to again.  
“Progress” ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. “Everyone who does not abide in the teaching of Christ, but goes beyond it, does not have God” (2 John 9a). The New American Bible translation brilliantly captures the sense of this verse: “Anyone who is so ‘progressive’ as not to remain in the teaching of the Christ does not have God.” The NAB editors explain their translation: “Anyone who is so ‘progressive’: literally, ‘Anyone who goes ahead.’ Some gnostic groups held the doctrine of the Christ come in the-flesh to be a first step in belief, which the more advanced and spiritual believer surpassed and abandoned in his knowledge of the spiritual Christ. The author affirms that fellowship with God may be gained only by holding to the complete doctrine of Jesus Christ (1 Jn 2:22–23; 4:2; 5:5–6).” 

The biblical portrait of Jesus’s incarnation cannot be improved upon; and those who try to do so create a profound distortion. Some lose his full humanity. Others lose his full deity. Still others insert disharmony between his humanity and his deity. For four centuries the church fought back various attempts to “progress” beyond the biblical portrait of Jesus. Arians diminished his deity. Gnostics deprived him of his humanity. Nestorians made his divinity and his humanity into virtual rivals within him. Apollinarians envisioned Jesus’s divinity absorbing his humanity. In the end, the church’s way of not “going beyond the teaching of Christ,” but rather of locking it in, crystallizing it, and anchoring it was the Chalcedonian formula of AD 381: “Christ, Son, Lord, Only begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.”  

Image: Pixabay 

If I may offer an opinion. Today’s church is not in peril because it doesn’t have the right answers about gun control, border control, reparations, marriage equality, or planet warming. Not that those questions don’t matter. They do. But every policy issue raises pre-political, pre-policy questions. Questions about fundamental values of human flourishing and well-being underlie each issue, as Jonathan Haidt offers in The Righteous Mind: sanctity, authority, loyalty, fairness, freedom, generosity, care.* Without a clear conception of how God’s coming in the flesh in Jesus Christ shapes us at the pre-policy level, we are blowing smoke when we pontificate as though we were policy experts.   

In other words, the church is imperiled because it doesn’t know how to answer this question: Who is Jesus Christ? For knowing Jesus Christ is the first order of business in being able to say anything about anything else.  

It doesn’t matter whether our sense of “progress” moves us to refashion Jesus as a merely mortal moral example, a nearly divine champion of our cause, or an otherworldly Being who swoops in to rescue us for heaven. To move beyond the Bible’s and the ancient church’s Christology is to step into a void.  

Was he born of the Virgin Mary and of the Holy Spirit, to preach good news to the poor and inaugurate God’s Kingdom? Did he die in the flesh for our sins? Did he rise bodily for our justification before God’s law court, for our adoption into the family of God, and for our sanctification into the image of Christ? Will he return bodily in power and splendor to glorify the church and transfigure creation? These are stunning truths—verities not to “progress” beyond, and foundational premises for working out any of life’s challenges.  

May God give us the grace to “remain in the teaching” about Christ, so that we do not “progress” our way right past it. May God therefore give us grace to pray well and act effectively on behalf of Christ in every area of blight and brokenness and suffering and sorrow.  

“Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us from God the Father and from Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son, in truth and love” (2 John 3).  

Be blessed “in truth and love” this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Adapted from Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Vintage/Random House, 2013).  

Life Is Holy - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Thursday • 12/28/2023 •
Feast of Holy Innocents, Year 2 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 2; Psalm 26; Isaiah 49:13–23; Matthew 18:1–14 

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) 

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd, and it’s a joy to be with you this Fourth Day of Christmas.   

Feast of the Holy Innocents.  

The third panel in our “Christmas Triptych” is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, a remembrance of “martyrs in deed if not in will,” and a reminder of the church’s resolute embracing of life as holy. The lectionary offers passages in the Psalms, Isaiah 49 and Matthew 18 for today, presupposing we know the story of Herod the Great’s murder of Bethlehem babies in a vain attempt to kill a rival newborn king (Matthew 2). “It’s a bloody story,” notes Professor Esau McCaulley, “out of which hope fights its way to the surface.”  

Psalm 2: the folly of opposing God’s Anointed. Psalm 2 begins with these pointed questions: “Why are the nations in an uproar? Why do the peoples mutter empty threats? Why do the kings of the earth rise up in revolt, and the princes plot together, against the Lord and against his Anointed?” Upon the release of John and Peter from prison in Jerusalem, the church lifts these very words in praise of God’s saving acts (Acts 4:25–28). King Herod the Great had tried to kill Jesus as an infant. His son Herod Antipas had been party to the conspiracy that put Jesus on the Cross. But the grave couldn’t hold Jesus. As Psalm 2 had said: “He whose throne is in heaven is laughing” (Psalm 2:4). All that the evil conspiracy had accomplished was to effect God’s predestined plan to inaugurate the good news of the world’s true king, the crucified-resurrected-ascended King Jesus.  

Professor McCaulley’s words are true not just for the incident of the Holy Innocents, but for all the savagery, injustice, and callousness of the human story. In all of it God is at work in the “bloody story, out of which hope fights its way to the surface.”  

Image: Pixabay 

Matthew 18: “Let the little ones come to me.” The murdered children are a reminder to us that Jesus entered a world full of “Herods.” Jesus said, “Let the little ones come to me.” And so, from the beginning of the church’s history, Christians have declared their solidarity with “the little ones.” 

For instance, the early Christian catechism, the Didache, forbids both the abandoning of the newborn and the aborting of unborn children (Didache 2.2). Clement of Alexandria laments the “aborting of human feeling (philanthōpia)” that comes with such practices (Pedagogus 2.10.96.1). Bishop Augustine of Hippo writes of “holy virgins” rescuing unwanted and exposed babies, nurturing them, and preparing them for baptism (Epistle to Boniface). Christians gained a reputation for being on the side of life.  

May our homes and our churches be places of safety, peace, truth, and love—places of life for “the little ones.”  

Isaiah 49: God’s love never quits. 

Even as Isaiah was delivering the bad news to Judah about the upcoming Babylonian Captivity, he promised that Yahweh’s love would push through and ultimately win the day. The St. Louis Jesuits’ song “Though the Mountains May Fall” asks and answers the musical question: 

Could the Lord ever leave you? Could the Lord forget his love? 
Though a mother forsake her child, he will not abandon you.  

Though the mountains may fall and the hills turn to dust, 
Yet the love of the Lord will stand 
As a shelter for all who will call on his name. 
Sing the praise and the glory of God. 

One thing we can hold onto in this life is that the love of God never quits, no matter what baggage we carry, no matter how laden with guilt and in need of forgiveness we are, and no matter how weary and in need of strength we are.  

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+ 

Make the Mystery of God’s Loving Nature Visible - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 12/27/2023 •
Feast of St. John, Year Two  

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 97; Psalm 98; Proverbs 8:22–30; John 13:20–35 

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 13 (“A Song of Praise,” BCP, p. 90); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (“A Song to the Lamb,” Revelation 4:11; 5:9–10, 13, BCP, p. 93)  

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd, and it’s a joy to be with you this Third Day of Christmas!  

Feast of St. John . In the tradition of the Christian Year, December 27 is a day to celebrate the life and ministry of St. John, Son of Zebedee, Beloved Disciple, and author of the Fourth Gospel, 1,2,3 John, and Revelation.  The Feast of St. John is the second panel in our “Christmas Triptych,” comprised of the Feasts of St. Stephen, St. John, and the Holy Innocents. 

In last year’s reflections on the Feast of St. John (Year One), we focused on the unparalleled way in which John portrays the unambiguous divinity of Jesus all the while presenting poignant cameos of his humanity. The readings for this year, Year Two, cause us to ponder John as “the Beloved,” and what his being “the Beloved” says about Jesus as the embodiment, the bearer, and the messenger of God’s love. 

For John, God both has and is relationship. That’s the only way to explain the Word being “with God” and “being God”: “In the beginning the Word was with God and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Jesus (the Word) can associate with God (the Father), and that means that God can have relationship. But if Jesus also is God in the same way that his Father is God, then that means relationship constitutes the very being of God.  

Image: The St John Altarpiece, Hans Memling (ca. 1479), Memling Museum, Bruges, Belgium, Pixabay.  

Proverbs 8: sweet anticipation. It takes the Incarnation itself to put that mystery before us so starkly. But that mystery had already been strongly hinted at in the Old Testament. In Proverbs 8, Solomon imagines “Wisdom” personified, and as accompanying God at creation—indeed, as being a “master worker” in the laying of the foundations of the earth (Proverbs 8:29c,30a). Christians understandably look back on the language of a personified “Lady Wisdom” in Proverbs (see the contrast between Dame Folly and Lady Wisdom in Proverbs 7–9) as a tantalizing preview of the Wisdom and Word of God taking human form in Jesus Christ.  

Especially intriguing is the love that flows between Wisdom and the LORD: “…then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight” (Proverbs 8:30). It becomes the Eternal Son’s mission—he who is quite literally, not merely literarily, the personification of Wisdom—to bring all the way to us the love that has always characterized God’s own self.  

John 13: Divine love at the table.  

By washing his disciples’ feet, Jesus quintessentially displays the love that is God’s nature. Today’s verses extract lessons from that event. They unpack for us the “So what?” of the foot washing.  

Intimacy eclipses authority. “One of his disciples—the one whom Jesus loved—was reclining next to [Jesus]; Simon Peter therefore motioned to him to ask Jesus of whom he was speaking” (John 13:23–24). Notice: Peter (the bearer of the keys) knows to come through John (the beloved at Jesus’s breast) to ask the hard question about who the betrayer is. Love precedes leadership. That’s why we will find Jesus asking Peter three times if Peter loves him before Jesus charges him: “Feed my sheep” (John 21:17). John teaches us to love Jesus first; then we’ll find out what we need to know and what he wants us to do. I repeat: Love him first.  

Jesus insists on offering fellowship, even when it’s certain to be rejected. Love is who Jesus is. Even after Satan “puts it into the heart” of Judas Iscariot to betray Jesus (John 13:2), and even though Jesus knows full well that this is the case, Jesus washes Judas’s feet along with everybody else at that table.  

Knowing also, as he no doubt does, that Judas will slink off “into the night” (John 13:30) to commit the most horrific act of cosmic treason and personal betrayal the world has ever seen, nonetheless, Jesus offers Judas the dipped morsel of fellowship and friendship. I’m hard pressed to think of a better illustration of a love that never quits, or of the veracity of C. S. Lewis’s saying, “The door of hell is locked from the inside.”  

Jesus calls upon us to make the mystery of God’s loving nature visible and believable. Jesus tells his disciples in a straightforward way what to do with the tableau he has painted for them: do likewise. “If I your Lord and Master have washed your feet, you too ought to wash one another’s feet” (John 13:14). Nothing less is at stake than the world’s being able to see in the disciples’ love for one another that they belong to Jesus: “…by this, the world will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). Beyond the authenticity of their discipleship, Jesus’s followers’ oneness will open a window for the world onto the very oneness within the Godhead: “…that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:23).  

That is a staggeringly wonderful prospect. You and I may not know the ontological argument for God’s existence (the idea that existence itself points to a Maker). But we can display God’s being and attributes by loving one another. We may not be able to articulate the teleological argument for God’s existence (the idea that the design of nature suggests an intelligence behind nature). But we can show that the design for human flourishing is creativity not destruction, harmony not disharmony, truthfulness not prevarication, kindness not cruelty—prompting the question even among nonbelievers, how is it we all intuitively know that’s what we were made for, regardless of how well we live up to the design? As the Beloved Disciple is later to write, “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:12)—in other words, the closest the invisible God comes to becoming visible is in our love for one another.  

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+ 

Above It All, Always, Is Jesus - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 12/26/2023

Feast of St. Stephen, Year Two  

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 28; Psalm 30; 2 Chronicles 24:17–22; Acts 6–7 

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 9 (“The First Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 12:2–6, BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94) 

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd, so glad to be with you this Second Day of Christmas!  

While everybody else is taking down the Christmas decorations and sending Santa on his merry way back to the North Pole, Christians who follow the Christian year are just beginning the party. We celebrate twelve days of Christmas. Through Advent, it’s been all about anticipation. Now for a season of celebration.  

Characteristic of Christian joy, however, is a tinge of pain. Jesus’s incarnation brought the Second Person of the Trinity all the way into the mess he had come to redeem: murder in the name of God, lovelessness among the “godly,” callous disregard for life’s “little ones.” The Christmas year acknowledges this reality with what I think of as “A Christmas Triptych.” We remember Stephen and his martyrdom on December 26, the apostle John and the commandment of love on December 27, and the “Holy Innocents” and the need to protect the vulnerable on December 28. 

Collect of Saint Stephen: We give you thanks, O Lord of glory, for the example of the first martyr Stephen, who looked up to heaven and prayed for his persecutors to your Son Jesus Christ, who stands at your right hand; where he lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen. 

Few of us are asked to take up our cross as severely as Stephen. However, in many parts of the world, losing your life for your faith is not uncommon. As a professor, I was humbled by the risks some of my students took in coming to the US for training in ministry. At least one student won a martyr’s wreath upon his return to his homeland.  

But there are other kinds of deaths besides crucifixion or stoning. They vary from lost job opportunities, to rejection by spouses or family members, to subtle and not so subtle snubs by former associates or friends. We can use these experiences to be reminded by St. Stephen that “the fellowship of the sufferings” of Christ is part of the privilege that comes with the Incarnation.  

The Christian story is one of forgiveness, forgiveness, always forgiveness. Stephen’s “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (Acts 7:50b) is both a lovely echo of Jesus’s own forgiving prayer from the Cross, and also a powerful call to Christ-followers to resist the haters by not hating them back. It is a call to translate loss, rejection, and snubs into thankful praise for the new friendships and for the newly opened doors that always seem to follow the doors that get slammed in your face.  

Most importantly, Stephen teaches us that above it all, always, is Jesus: “But filled with the Holy Spirit, he gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!’” (Acts 7:55–56). By his death Jesus destroyed death, and by his life he destroys our fear of death—every kind of death, the big ones and the little ones. As Lord of all, he is lord even when (as was the case with Stephen) deluded people are running the show and have you in their power. You never know when (as was the case with Stephen—see Acts 8:1) there’s a Saul/Paul in the wings observing, if uncomprehendingly in that moment, your equilibrium, your faith, and your undeniable love.   

I pray that as the Collect invites us to pray, we may know the absolute supremacy of Christ over every hand of opposition that comes against us or voice of criticism that we hear. I pray that the power of forgiveness and grace has the upper hand in our lives, and that it overflows to those around us.  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

A Divine Sweetness - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 12/25/2023 (Christmas Day) 

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) 

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd, and it’s a joy to be with you this Christmas Day. Merry Christmas! Please accept my meditations this morning chiefly on Paul’s amazing Christmas verses: Titus 2:11–3:8a, prefaced with brief remarks on Psalm 72 and Mary’s Magnificat in Luke 1:39–50.  

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+