But I’m going to do something that perhaps hasn’t been done here in over three hundred years of celebrating Christmas at the corner of Church and Hope. I want to call your attention not to the hills of first-century Palestine, but to the Island of Crete, a lovely spot in the Mediterranean just off the coast of Greece. I wonder what it would be like to celebrate Christmas Eve there tonight? Different, I imagine, from winter in New England. My weather app says it’s 65 degrees and sunny…
Tonight’s epistle reading does in fact take us to the early Christian community on Crete. At the time the letter of Titus was written, Crete had quite the reputation as a rough place. In fact, one of the locals said “Cretans are liars and evil beasts and lazy gluttons.” To which the writer of the Epistle of Titus simply responds, “well, yeah…”
I say “the writer” intentionally; while the epistle claims to be from St. Paul to his dear friend Titus, most scholars think it was written later, by somebody else claiming Pauline authority. No worries and we don’t need to go down that rabbit hole tonight. (I just want you to know I did my research!)
The point is that it is to this early Christian community in Crete that Titus is called to serve as bishop. That title is a bit misleading, though, because the role of bishop was not yet very clearly defined in the first century. Titus isn’t expecting a cathedra to sit on or a miter for his head. Even so, he is called to oversee the flock there; to serve as an episcopos to a flock taken from a bunch of liars and beasts and gluttons.
The
letter is written as advice from a friend to a friend on how to be a good
bishop to a bunch of Cretans. Here is a paraphrase of what the writer tells
Titus:
Good luck, because you have your work cut out for you! You are going to need to be tough on these people: their minds are easily corrupted and while they say they know God, they really aren’t living in a way that would make anybody notice. Their actions and their deeds deny the very God they profess to believe in. (See Titus 1:1-16)
So that,
in a nutshell, is the background for tonight’s epistle reading. Ministry in a
context like this isn’t about nuance. One has to cut to the chase, speak
clearly and concisely, not mince words. Basically what we get is a pretty clear
and concise summary of the gospel and a mission statement for this bishop and
the young church he is called to serve. While it may not be as familiar to us
as Luke’s telling of the Christmas story, in truth I believe that it has
everything to do with celebrating our dear Savior's birth:
...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, while we wait for the blessed hope and the manifestation of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. 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 who are zealous for good deeds.
Grace
has appeared. It’s an interesting way to put it. Most
of us tend to think of grace as an abstract concept or a doctrine to be
affirmed or debated. But the claim being made here is that grace is experienced as
a person: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we have beheld his
glory, full of grace and truth. When we see Jesus we see grace,
and out of that encounter "Cretans" of every time and place are
invited to leave our old lying and gluttonous ways behind in order to become a
people after God’s own heart, a people called to live more self-controlled,
upright, and godly lives; a people zealous for good deeds.
It’s become rather popular for people to claim that they are “spiritual, but not religious.” I get that. As I hear it, this is a claim made by those who wish to distance themselves from the institutional Church and Lord knows there are plenty of reasons people may wish to do that! There are many days when I feel the very same way, and I'm enmeshed in it. Next month I’ll start drawing a pension from this institutional Church so I don’t want to bite the hand that has fed me for my whole working life and I hope for many years to come. But if forced to choose between religion and spirituality I’d go with spirituality every time.
Spirituality grows out of the awareness that we are more than our physical bodies, even if we only get in touch with those feelings on a dark winter night or walking along the beach collecting shells on a lazy summer day. Spirituality suggests something that unites rather than divides Buddhist and Hindu and Muslim and Christian and Jew. I love spirituality.
I appreciate the fact that for far too many people, religion signifies something close-minded and bigoted and out-of-touch. It sounds politicized and dogmatic, suggesting that you are either “in” or “out” of a club. But tonight is one of the two times each year when there may be a higher percentage of folks in the room who feel exactly that way than on a normal Sunday morning. So let’s talk…
The Church needs to own the fact that we have contributed to the situation in which “religion” has become a dirty word. But on this holy night I want to try to reclaim this word “religion,” not as an end in itself but so that people don't have to choose.
While the ultimate origins of the Latin word religio are a bit obscure, Joseph Campbell and others have made the case that the derivation comes from a word that means “to bind or connect;" or more precisely, "to reconnect." The work that God gives us to do is about making connections: about reconnecting and binding things back together with their Source. In spite of the commercialization and trivialization and sentimentalization of Christmas, God keeps breaking into our world and into our lives and calling us to true religion by giving us a mission and a vocation. We who come to adore him on this night are changed by this encounter because in seeing grace, we glimpse what is yet possible for our own lives and families and beyond, for this fragile island home. That vision changes us, or at least it is meant to change us. When we see grace, the work of Christmas begins as we begin to participate in this work of binding up a broken world.
Our previous Presiding Bishop was famous for saying, “if it’s not about love, it’s not about God.” I hope, my friends, that in the fifteen months I’ve served at St. Michael’s that you’ve heard that consistently from me as well. But Bishop Curry also had another famous line that I want to remind you of tonight. He said that we, the Episcopal Church, are a branch of the Jesus Movement – out to change this world from the nightmare it is for so many into the Dream that God has for us.
I want to make the case for being Spiritual and religious, which I think is about a call to be disciples. Followers of Jesus. Part of a movement. Spiritual and religious brings us into community, because we can’t do it alone.
This work is not very different from what Titus was up to back in Crete two thousand years ago. To behold grace is in some measure to be invited to become grace for others. Or as this epistle reading puts it: “the appearance of grace, which brings salvation to all” not only redeems us but trains us, forms us, uses us to continue that work of healing and renewing the world around us. The birth we celebrate tonight is about forming a people after God’s own heart to share in this work of making things new again. Let me say that one more time because if for any reason the sugar plums dancing in our heads tonight have kept you from following along with the preacher, here is the whole thing in a nutshell: The birth we celebrate tonight is about forming a people after God’s own heart to share in this work of making things new again.
The good news we remember and reorient our lives around on this holy night is that God has come into the world—this world as it is, this world of Cretans. God seeks us as we are, not waiting around for some sanitized version of what we hope we might become with our New Year’s resolutions. God has come into this world in all of its pain and all of its glory to overcome separation and estrangement and to repair all that has been rent asunder; to bind all things together again.
Sometimes the biggest estrangement we need to overcome is an internal one, the inward spiritual journey toward integration and wholeness. Until we are healed from within it may be impossible for us to become true agents of reconciliation. But ultimately we are called beyond ourselves and into the world, this world that God that God loved so much as to be born into it as one of us.
Do religious institutions need to be changed and redeemed and revitalized and reoriented around God’s mission? Yes, always! But on this night above all other nights I am proud to call myself spiritual and religious because it suggests to me that Christmas is more than sentimentality or nostalgia for a distant past: it is a clarion call to share in God's mission. Tonight. And tomorrow. We then need to develop spiritual practices and disciplines that build up the Body of Christ so that together we can do that work, for the sake of this unsteady and confusing world.
To say it another way: we don’t become more "spiritual” by avoiding all of the challenges of life in community. Rather, we discover a more authentic spirituality when we become religious enough to embrace it all, for the love of God in Jesus Christ. Our neighbors have been given to us to be companions along the way. Not just the ones we agree with or even like. But the ones who annoy and hurt us. We are invited (even commanded) to love one another as God has loved us. This binding and re-binding changes us for good. As that great mystery unfolds, we really do find ourselves in a place where we can see grace and truth, and where we see grace and truth we see this child, Jesus.
Merry Christmas, St. Michael’s. God is definitely not finished with you yet!
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