Making a Difference in the World
Before the tragic event that took place in Tucson Arizona a week ago Saturday in which fourteen people were wounded and six others including a lovely nine-year-old girl were murdered, I had already chosen to preach today on Making a Difference in the World. The reality is every single human being makes a difference in the world. Some by their hateful behavior make the world a more violent, fearful, and ugly place. Others by their actions and the good they do make the world a more loving, caring, and beautiful place. You and I are making a difference in the world every day, every week, every year that we live. We want that difference to be a positive one, not a negative one.
January 16, 2011: Titus 3:1-15, Making a Difference in the World
Douglas Scalise, Brewster Baptist Church
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When an event such as the assassination attempt on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords takes place, I find the response in the media to be easier to predict than a Cape Cod snowfall. Everyone will say what a tragedy it is. Then commentators will take sides. Those on the left blame the Tea Party’s rhetoric and Sarah Palin’s gun sight on certain congressional districts. Those on the right blame irresponsible individuals and socialism. Progressives call for more gun control; conservatives will say more people should carry guns. Everyone will have some sort of spin that benefits their party, their platform, and their policies. It’s so tiresome and I’m sick of it.
I’m not interested in assigning blame or taking sides. As a Christian and a pastor who takes God’s word seriously, my role is to help us all to reflect on God’s word and our words, on what we believe, on who God calls us to be, how the Lord calls to live and what we are to do. Sermons should help us reflect on our behavior, and there has been much bad behavior in our country over the last several years. We’ve allowed fear to motivate our politics. Our public discourse has become shallow, base and cruel. There is a lack of depth, serious thinking, and listening. Public servants have been ridiculed and demeaned, and sadly too many deserve it because they’ve behaved criminally, arrogantly, stupidly, greedily and acted as if they are above the law making themselves easy targets for comedians.
We have fallen far short of being “one nation under God, indivisible.” It feels as if our nation is fracturing to some extent and that God’s Word on how we are to live is being disregarded. We’ve allowed ourselves to be very “divisible” rather being united for the good of the country.
I long for the day when at least those of us who claim the name of Christ will sincerely and diligently try to live out the words of Titus 3. Listen to them carefully and what they say to us as God’s people:
“Remind them to be subject to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, 2 to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show every courtesy to everyone. 3 For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, despicable, hating one another. 4 But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, 5 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. 6 This Spirit he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, 7 so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. 8 The saying is sure.
I desire that you insist on these things, so that those who have come to believe in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works; these things are excellent and profitable to everyone. 9 But avoid stupid controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless. 10 After a first and second admonition, have nothing more to do with anyone who causes divisions, 11 since you know that such a person is perverted and sinful, being self-condemned.
12 When I send Artemas to you, or Tychicus, do your best to come to me at Nicopolis, for I have decided to spend the winter there. 13 Make every effort to send Zenas the lawyer and Apollos on their way, and see that they lack nothing. 14 And let people learn to devote themselves to good works in order to meet urgent needs, so that they may not be unproductive. 15 All who are with me send greetings to you. Greet those who love us in the faith.
Grace be with all of you.”
In these verses from Titus 3 we are given a brief summary of Christian belief and what that belief should produce. It is about who we were, what God did, and what we are to do.
Who We Were
We may think that we live in a time that is filled with more violence, resentment, rudeness and hatred than most and I think we can acknowledge it is pretty bad. But in verse 3 writing about himself and the members of the church the author of Titus writes that “We ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, despicable, hating one another.” That describes a lot of human behavior with eight terms that seem to get worse as they go – tracking the history of human sin. This description of who we were was accurate in the first century and still is today. Even a brief look at the news on any given day shows that Paul’s description is accurate.
With all the terrible and incomprehensible things that happen it is important to remember our own failures so that we don’t despair and rant excessively over other people’s sins while being blind to our own. We also don’t want to grow hopeless or cynical about the power of the Spirit to change even the most challenging person. Many of us would have to admit we are not successful at even doing the few things mentioned in the first couple verses of Titus 3 “to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show every courtesy to everyone.” I would guess many of us struggled just to do those relatively small things this last week. Yet it is in the midst of the mess and meanness of human stupidity, selfishness, violence, and sin that God’s grace appears.
What God Did
Paul says the undeserved, unmerited loving kindness of God our Savior appeared right in the middle of the mess of the world and our lives. The good news is simply that based on God’s mercy, new life and new birth that put us right with God are possible through the Holy Spirit. By the grace of Christ we are given the gift of eternal life. God saves us by the renewing of baptism, cleansing us from sin and enabling a new life in the Spirit, in which we become beneficiaries of a great inheritance. I enjoy noting bumper stickers and one I saw that made me smile said, “Where there is a will…put me in it!” That is what God has done. We are not saved by any wonderful deeds we have done, but by God’s own mercy. That is the message of the gospel (Titus 3:5-8) – cleansing (forgiveness), birth (by means of washing/baptism), and new life (by the revitalizing power of the Holy Spirit). The source of our hope is that we have confessed the truth of God’s word about who we were and received and believed what God has done for us regardless of who we were and what we did.
The question then becomes what are we to do now?
What We Are To Do
The key connecting phrase in Titus chapter three is “good works (verses 1, 8, & 14).” It is too bad that some people associate “good works” with the mistaken idea that we can “work” our way into heaven. God has taken the initiative in mercifully and lovingly reaching out to us in Jesus Christ, through whom we are forgiven, reconciled to God, and empowered and commanded to live a new life with the help of the Holy Spirit. Humility marks our life of discipleship because we recognize how undeserving we are and how far God has gone to extend life and hope to us all. We are saved by God for a purpose beyond just personal eternal fire insurance and as the letters in the New Testament make clear over and over again that purpose is to do good. It is unfortunate that today some people actually use the phrase “do gooders” in a negative or put down kind of way because according to so many of the letters in the New Testament good works, doing good, is the way we demonstrate that we are saved, it is the way we express our godliness, it is the way others know we have a transforming relationship with Jesus. Good works are the way godliness expresses itself in the wider world. Our good works are the expression of our priorities and our attitudes. So we are not saved by our good works, but our good works demonstrate that we are saved. Listen to Titus 3:8, 14 again, “Be careful to devote themselves to good works; these things are excellent and profitable to everyone. Let people learn to devote themselves to good works in order to meet urgent needs, so that they may not be unproductive.”
We are to devote ourselves to good works to meet urgent needs so that we are productive followers of Jesus and productive citizens of our communities. We are not to waste our time and energy in pointless quarrels, stupid controversies, dissensions or anything that is divisive. Paul is writing with a sense of urgency – Speak evil of no one, avoid quarrelling, always be friendly, be gentle, show courtesy to all. Life is too short. There is too much important work to be done. Christians can be as guilty as anyone of spending their time arguing about stuff that most people don’t even care about instead of devoting our selves to good works to meet urgent needs.
Good works are excellent and profitable for everyone to be a part of – whether it is supporting the Overnights of Hospitality, Caring Cupboard, mission trips, visiting folks who are grieving or sick, giving someone a ride, giving our time and service as a volunteer – the list is endless. These are things that we are called to do, we are to be energetically engaged in doing good – whatever is profitable and excellent.
When we respond to needs it is an opportunity for us to grow in grace and in the power and leading of the Holy Spirit in our lives. A man named Sundar became a convert to Christianity and decided to stay in India to be a missionary and bear witness to Jesus. One late afternoon Sundar was traveling on foot high in the Himalayan Mountains with a Buddhist monk. It was bitter cold, and the night was coming on. The monk warned that they were in danger of freezing to death if they did not reach the monastery before darkness fell.
It so happened that as they crossed over a narrow path above a steep cliff, they heard a cry for help. Deep down in the ravine a man had fallen, and he lay wounded. His leg was broken and he couldn’t walk. The monk warned Sundar, “Do not stop. God has brought this man to his fate. He must work it out by himself. That is the tradition. Let us hurry on before we perish.” But Sundar replied, “It is my tradition that God has brought me here to help my brother. I cannot abandon him.” So the monk set off through the snow, which had started to fall heavily.
Sundar climbed down to where the wounded man was. Since the man had a broken leg, Sundar took a blanket from his knapsack and made a sling out of it. He got the man into it and hoisted him onto his back, then began the painful and arduous climb back up the path. After a long time, drenched with perspiration, he finally got back to the path, struggling to make his way through the increasingly heavy falling snow. It was dark now, and he had all he could do to find the path. But he persevered, and although faint from fatigue and overheated from exertion, he finally saw the lights of the monastery.
Then he nearly stumbled and fell. Not from weakness; he stumbled over an object lying in the path. He bent down on one knee and brushed the snow from the body of the monk who had frozen to death within sight of the monastery. And there, kneeling on one knee in the snow, he said aloud to himself the scripture (Luke 9:24): “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” And he understood what Jesus meant and was glad that he had decided to “lose his life” for another.
Years later, when Sundar had his own disciples, they asked him this question: “Master, what is life’s most difficult task?”
(How would you answer that question, “What is life’s most difficult task?”)
Sundar’s answer was, “To have no burden to carry.”[1]
The letter to Titus teaches us the basic truth that the grace of God teaches and trains us how to live as civilized people who bear other people’s burdens, care for people in need, contribute to our community and our country in a positive way and by doing so we give glory to God and bear witness to the truth of what we believe.
Blessing: Grace be with all of you. (Titus 3:15)
William J. Bausch, A World of Stories, pages 323-324.