Christmas Eve Year A

Titus 3:4-7 (NRSV)

But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared,he 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, so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

If you google “recursive”, one definition you get is:

relating to or involving the repeated application of a rule, definition, or procedure to successive results.

In other words, it's a process where you keep going back to a “rule” of some kind (“rule” as authority or “rule” as process) to get different results for changing circumstances. This would dispute the adage attributed to Albert Einstein that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. There are some things that will produce dramatically different results over time. I cannot think of anything more recursive than a lectionary. We keep cycling back to the same scriptural ciphers in 3 or 5 year cycles to see what happens when we apply those cyphers to the evolved circumstances of our times. We confess that this is far more than the combination of old factors: the Spirit creates a new constellation of – what shall we call it – hope? Recursion reveals.

So we let a text "speak" to some aspect of life. A teacher uses 1 Corinthians 13 for marriage counselling. But we also have the freedom as readers and writers to point the text back at itself. This is because the Bible is not a monolithic block of holy writ. The texts themselves move recursively: Luke routes the ancient Israelite vision of Jubilee into the birth of Jesus. The result is something altogether different and new that moves through his gospel like an earthquake. The geological strata of instituted authority is shoved and broken into heretofore unknown formations to make way for God's reign. Samaritans are heroes. Women are central to the story. Pagans have hope.

Reading through the epistle of Titus does not exactly ignite cosmic upheavals for most of us. It reads somewhat like a clone of 1st and 2nd Timothy with the usual exhortations to women to be submissive to husbands (2:5), slaves to masters(2:9) – in other words to play out their roles as decent constituents of the Roman Empire. The church is apparently having its own share of upheavals among some Jewish Christian guys who like to strut around measuring their genealogies and spinning theologies that promote the sanctity of their bloodlines. (3:9) The competition for who's got the longest is fierce. People still do that sort of thing.

It does seem that the epistle, in the interest of putting out the local fires and restoring order, has thrown some water on Luke's and Matthew's telling of Jesus' coming into the world - or to put it more fairly, the way the text has been harnessed in subsequent generations to entrench authority and crush the Jubilee of Christ's coming. The advisor to these Cretan Christians is trying to choose his battles wisely. He is not trying to unseat the social order of Roman culture. Fair enough. He probably doesn't expect that Roman world to be around much longer, anyway: advent comes in two phases. We all pick our battles. Or try to.

Paul, or “Paul”, whoever it is writing this letter uses a lovely word to describe the nature of God who came to us in Christ Jesus: χρηστσοτης. It's the “goodness” in verse 4 of the NRSV translation, and it appears three times in Paul's letters (Romans 11:22; Galatians 5:22 - in Galatians it is one of the fruits of the Spirit for the people of Christ.) This word also can mean “kindness” and “mercy”. As the writer of Titus insists, this is not something we've earned. We do not leverage χρηστσοτης by staying off Santa's “naughty” list. Everything that we have received in this coming is because our God is kind. Even with the judgments and the shouting prophets. Even for the losers in Mary's song. Even in spite of the dated nature of some of this epistle's social prescriptions: God is kind in spite of it all. It is recursively shouted over and over again from the Psalms: “Hesed! Hesed!” spilling it's ink all through the pages of the other books with their own times and spins.

This is a mercy indeed. It is like a ray of sunshine slanting across the battle hardened faces of our own time. At the end of the day it is God's kindness that is our life.

Merry Christmas.

©2016 Andy Gay