The Invisible Epistle

Scripture — Titus 2:11-14 (NRSV)

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, 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.

Devotion

In my Episcopal tradition, this reading from Titus is the Epistle reading for “Christmas I” in our lectionary, which in more everyday parlance is the Christmas Eve service. Consequently, no one ever preaches on it. At the Christmas Eve service we tell the Christmas story from Luke, and occasionally a preacher might refer to the assigned Old Testament lesson for the day (Isaiah 9:2-7), but I have never heard a sermon on Titus 2 on that day and I have never preached one. In this set of Life for Leaders devotionals, Mark got to tell the Christmas story from Luke yesterday. Today it’s my turn, and we have this invisible, forgotten Epistle reading.

It’s interesting that, although our weekly theme is “love,” this passage actually talks more about hope than it does about love. And honestly, even in the lectionary, it’s an odd reading for Christmas Eve/Day, because it sounds more like an Advent reading. It begins: Jesus is coming; prepare yourselves; we live in hope and await that day. Then it jumps us straight from Advent to Holy Week, concluding with an attestation of Jesus’s sacrifice on our behalf to redeem us and a reminder of his promise to purify us. Where’s the Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in that? Where’s the warm and welcoming love, the candlelight, the quiet singing of Silent Night, the tiny baby, the nostalgia, the memories?

Let me tell you a story. For years, on Christmas Eve my family and I listened together to the Nine Lessons and Carols, a service broadcast annually from King’s College at Cambridge University in England since 1928. (The service actually began occurring at Cambridge in 1918, but according to the official website, radio broadcasts began in 1928, and the service is now also streamed over the Internet.)

For British attendees, the service is held in the afternoon, when at 3 pm in Cambridge in winter the shadows of evening are already falling, but thanks to the time difference, if you listen to it in the U.S., you will be doing so on the morning of Christmas Eve. The opening carol is always “Once in Royal David’s City;” the closing carols are always “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing;” a new carol is always commissioned from a contemporary composer. The Scripture readings take us through all of salvation history—beginning with the story of the Fall in Genesis, and ending with John 1:1-18, where (1:14) we hear the great statement that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

In some ways, if you listen, the service delivers everything we expect from a sentimental Christmas moment: warm and welcoming love, candlelight, the quiet singing of Silent Night, the tiny baby, nostalgia, memories. Yet it is also, in many ways, a service deeply marked by sorrow. As the Dean states in his remarks on the official site, the Cambridge version of this service was “born out of the ashes of the First World War, and while the service was not new in 1918, the Bidding [opening prayer] was. It carefully placed the lessons and carols in the context of the many who suffer and refers to the huge cloud of war-inflicted bereavement when it mentions those ‘who rejoice with us but on another shore and in a greater light.’”

One by one, all of those I once listened to this service with as a child and most know what it means to me—my grandparents, my mother, my father—have now begun rejoicing on another shore and in a greater light. Last of all to leave us was my uncle, who taught me all the Latin words to “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” and who died in January 2020, just as we were all embarking on a three-years-long lesson in sorrow.

Love is not only sentimental and candlelit. It is also difficult and hopeful, deep and sorrowful, passionate and bereaved. If Christ is, as I believe he is, the Word made flesh, he walks with us and loves us through all of that—from Advent hope to Christmas joy to Holy Week terror to the blinding eucatastrophe of the Resurrection, and beyond.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: Titus: Working for Good Deeds.