Church on the Choppy Seas: The Sure Anchor (Titus 1:1-4)

The sea was the darkest blue he'd ever seen. It was like sailing in a pool of rich wine. But it was not still. The ship heaved and lurched, battered by a fierce wind. The rocky coast seemed to promise refuge but also threaten destruction. Because of the wind, the voyage was slow going. The captain should have listened to Paul. It was too dangerous to keep going; they should have hunkered down longer at Fair Havens. But winter was coming, and the captain hoped to reach further west along Crete's southern coast, to the harbor of Phoinikas. But the wind kept coming. The sea stayed choppy. A violent storm seized the ship, and soon the ship was in greater danger than everyone's worst fears. For fourteen days they weathered the storm, until finally running ashore at Malta. They were safe – for now.

We learn that story in the twenty-seventh chapter of Acts – continuing the tale of Paul's transfer as a prisoner from Jerusalem to Rome. The Book of Acts closes with Paul's two-year house arrest in Rome – and then it stops. We hear no more, because the book is not a biography of Paul; it's all about how the gospel spread from its Jewish homeland to the halls of imperial power in the pagan world. But church tradition suggests that Paul was acquitted and set free that time. Remembering the places he'd passed along the way, Paul must have returned to Crete with his coworkers, proclaimed the good news of Jesus there, and then left Titus as his apostolic delegate among the scattered new churches to continue the mission and organize them. Titus was a good fixer, a good problem-solver; he was the one Paul once sent to Corinth to take up a love offering in a den of hostility. But the problems were dire indeed, and even an experienced young man like Titus needed encouragement. And so Paul, perhaps while staying in Philippi, commissioned Luke to aid him in writing Titus a message – the letter we have here before us today.

I'm sure that, as they wrote to Titus and meditated on the challenges of ministry in Crete, Paul and Luke both remembered those harrowing days spent together on the sea – churned by winds, clouded by storms, clobbered by waves. And perhaps, as they recalled the sorts of problems Titus had been left behind to handle, the parallels were clear: that ministry in Crete was a lot like slow sailing through rough and perilous waters, and a captain needed some real wisdom to navigate a church through it. We know Titus did eventually have success; even today, you can visit ancient and modern churches in Crete named after him. I've been there; I've visited them myself.

But that wasn't obvious – not at first. It maybe wasn't obvious to Titus that the churches there wouldn't crash or sink in his own lifetime or the generation to follow. And so Paul wrote him a refreshing letter, to help him chart his way through the wind and storm and waves. Now, if Paul remembered one thing from his voyages on the high seas, it was perhaps the importance of the anchor. When they took refuge in Fair Havens, it was the anchor that kept them safe and secure there. And when they pulled up anchor to continue onward, that's where they got in trouble. A sailing vessel without an anchor is a lost cause. And the same is true, I think Paul would say, of the church: without a sure anchor, we'll be forever at the mercy of every shifting wind and every passing wave.

Which is why, in the very first opening sentence of his letter to Titus in Crete, Paul points him back to the sure anchor for the church's voyage. Paul makes reference there to “God, who never lies” (Titus 1:2), and the fact that we have promises from this unfalse God, this God who cares passionately about the difference between the truth and our fabrications and can be relied on to tell the truth every time. “God, who never lies.” That was a big deal in Crete. See, Cretans had a bad reputation when it came to the truth. Paul says as much to Titus later on: he quotes a Cretan poet and prophet, Epimenides, whose one poem censured his people for their deceptive ways: “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons” (Titus 1:12). And Paul admits, “This testimony is true” (Titus 1:13).

The people of Crete earned that reputation. It was one thing for them to claim to be the original Greeks, nestled in their island off the coast of mainland Greece. They had a point there: the Minoan civilization was among the oldest in Europe. But the Cretans infamously claimed that they were the creators of Greek religion. They held that the gods worshipped all over Greece – Zeus and the rest – were really heroes who were born in Crete, and even died there. When Epimenides called out the Cretans as liars, he was referring to their claim to have found the actual tomb where the Greek god Zeus was dead and buried. The Cretans proclaimed that the god was dead. That didn't go over well.

What's more, Crete had a history of wars between all its leading cities, up until fairly recent memory as of the time Paul was writing. And the memory of those wars lingered on. In that sort of world, citizens from one city might feel justified in lying and cheating the people of the next city over – telling them whatever stories would prove most advantageous, not most honest. Preserving civic pride, and putting one over on the other guy, was simply valued more highly than truth.

And then, a century before Paul left Titus on Crete, a philosopher born there named Aenesidemus made a name for himself. He made a name for himself by arguing that, because each person looks at the world with different eyes and hears it with different ears, and because each mind must put the information of the senses together differently, well, then we can never actually know the truth about anything. We can't know that the sky is blue, he'd say, because how it looks to you may be different from how it looks to me. We can just never know, he'd tell us. Buy into that philosophy, and the ideal of truthfulness gets tossed by the wayside pretty easily.

So between those three things, first-century Crete had earned its reputation for greed and deceit, and for putting a low value on truth. They said God was dead, they scoffed at the possibility of real knowledge, and centuries of war left them more than willing to lie to each other. It sounds like a terrible society to live in, and certainly a hard one to evangelize.

I wonder, though: Is it really so different from twenty-first-century America? We live in a culture that holds truth in about the same regard as first-century Crete. People are reluctant to talk about truth. People will talk freely about 'my truth,' 'your truth,' 'their truth.' Everyone in our culture is talking past each other. In 2016, do you know what the Oxford Dictionary chose as its word of the year? “Post-truth” – as in, an age in which people no longer consider the truth valuable, relevant, or even possible or desirable. Crete was a 'post-truth' mission field, but so is ours. There's just as much skepticism here as there was there – and professing Christians aren't exempt!

If Crete in Epimenides' time proclaimed that God was dead and buried, well, look around you. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed that, to modern eyes and ears, God was indeed dead and buried, and all our carefully constructed systems of values were buried with him, gone for good. In today's society, we may not be fighting literal wars against each other, but the strife and tension between political and religious groups is no less real, no less damaging to our ability to agree even on basic facts. We seem to all see things hopelessly differently, just like Aenesidemus said. The sad truth is, what Epimenides said about his people, we may have to say about our own: twenty-first-century Westerners “are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.” Can we seriously look around us, even look in a mirror, and disagree?

Ours is a lot like the world where Titus was ministering. No wonder it felt like the choppy seas! No wonder a pastor and preacher in first-century Crete could feel seasick even once ashore! But Paul offers an antidote, an anchor: a “God who never lies.” God's every word holds up under the tightest fair scrutiny: “Every word of God proves true; he is a shield to those who take refuge in him” (Proverbs 30:5). In our world, we don't know whom we can trust. Every institution seems corrupt: political, religious, social, charitable, financial, entertainment, academic, athletic, you name it, all throwing up our pervasive red flags for institutional corruption. But God is no institution. His word is no willful grasp for power, no perverse ploy to take advantage of our gullibility. His every word proves true; he never lies. God is not dead, nor does he sleep. God is alive and well.

“Let God be true, and every man a liar” (Romans 3:4)! He is alive and well, and even if the whole consensus of the human race agreed otherwise, it wouldn't change the truth. And the God of Truth, the “God who never lies,” can see the full truth beyond all our partial perspectives. His is the outside vantage point from which we can see ourselves and our situation as we really are. His is the light that pierces our shrouded half-vision; his is the voice that resounds above and beneath the cacophony. He offers reconciliation to the hopelessly divided. The deeper we get into him, the more we're cured of our skepticism and our doubt, our fractured vision and our mistrust, our greed and our deceit. God is not content for his to be a people who pass along stories without investigating them. God is not content for his to be a people devoted to mindless gossip. God is not content for his to be a people who buy into every idea that makes them feel good, no matter how clothed it is in thin Christian trappings. God wants a people relentlessly devoted to the truth, because he himself is a God who never lies, and he wants us to be like him.

Moreover, Paul calls him “God our Savior” (Titus 1:3). The God of Truth sets us free. He sets us free from the lies, free from the division, free from the skepticism, free from the uncertainty, free from the fog and the tumult and the chaos. God is our Savior from all these things, because the God who never lies is our sure anchor. Paul explains that God made a promise “before times eternal” (Titus 1:2). He did not utter an eternal lie. He had no need or desire to deceive us from eternity past. How could he? The promise was made before the world even existed, before there was any division, before we were even around, much less had things all figured out. God didn't wait to make his promise until we'd met certain criteria – until we'd proved ourselves good enough, until we'd jumped through the hoops, until we'd dotted our i's and crossed our t's, until we'd earned a gold star or gotten enough points. God made his promise before times eternal, before the ages began, before heaven and earth, because his promise for us is no Plan B, his promise for us is not by merit but by faith.

But this eternal promise was made manifest in Paul's preaching, he says – only, Paul outright calls his preaching 'his word,' as in, the word of God (Titus 1:3). It was the word of God translated into the words of a human tongue and human pen. And so when Paul proclaims the gospel, his words are the word of a God who never lies. You can be sure that there's no deceit in the equation. The gospel is the truth. 

But what did God promise before times eternal? What promise was manifested in Paul's preaching? Just this: “hope of eternal life” (Titus 1:2). Not 'eternal lie,' but 'eternal life' – life unending, life unquenchable, life that no one and nothing in this world can damage or destroy. And the hope of which Paul speaks isn't wishful thinking. It's a solid certainty set before us, a refuge from the storm once we dock at our destination. It's where we're headed, if we stay aboard the Lord's ship and hold fast to the course. Because we have a hope. And we're elsewhere told that “by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope...” (Hebrews 6:18-19), namely, Jesus Christ, the living Truth in whom we come face-to-face with the saving God who never lies.

It was to encourage us in this hope that Paul was sent. He tells us as much himself: he opens the letter: “Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the sake of the faith of God's elect and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with piety” (Titus 1:1). Paul was sent – that's what 'apostle' means, somebody who is sent – to cultivate the faith of God's chosen people, the people gathered and formed by his eternal promise: namely, the church. If we belong to those whom God has chosen, Paul was sent to build up our faith, our trust in God, our reliance on the sure and steadfast anchor of our soul.

What's more, he was sent to cultivate our awareness, our knowledge, of God's truth, which is the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Too often, we try to divorce the two: we try to say we should grow in faith, but we don't care about growing in knowledge of the truth. Or, especially outside the church, we want to grow in factoid-gathering, but not in faith. But they go together. And Paul here affirms that we can have knowledge of the truth. Despite all that Aenesidemus said and taught, and despite all the complaints and objections of his latter-day disciples, we can know the truth through having a trusting relationship with a God who never lies. That was true in first-century Crete, and it's true in twenty-first-century America.

What happens when you bring faith, plus knowledge of the truth, together? It leads to what Luke, writing for Paul, calls 'piety.' One Roman author defined 'piety' as “to have the right opinion about the gods, as existing and administering the universe well and justly, and to have set yourself to obey them and to submit in everything that happens, and to follow it voluntarily, in the belief that it is being fulfilled by the highest intelligence.” In other words, it combines an inward attitude of reverent trust with the conduct and rituals that would honor the gods. In other words, it's worshipful living fueled by authentic faith – that's what piety is. It's a lifestyle that gives everyone his or her due, but especially to the God who never lies. It's a lifestyle of trust and worship, viewing God the right way and acting accordingly. That's where faith, plus knowledge of the truth, leads. And it's where Paul is steering us toward.

In just these few verses, Paul has sketched an overview of our voyage. Paul does not deny that the church will have to sail through some choppy seas. He knows well the seas are choppy. He knows well it's rough going. He knows it's demanding, it's hard, it's dangerous. But he urges us that we dare not give up growth in piety. We dare not waver in our practical faith, which is founded in and enriched by knowledge of the truth. We dare not give these up, because we have a sure anchor. We have the hope of eternal life in Jesus Christ, and the surety of our anchor is secured by a Savior God who never lies.

Over the next weeks, we'll be investigating more what we can learn from Paul's letter to Titus about sailing the church through choppy seas. But we have to begin here, with the safety of the anchor. The sure anchor means we aren't a lost cause. The sure anchor means we have hope. The sure anchor means it's worth undertaking the trip. It's worth setting sail, and not giving up and turning 'round. Whatever you hear out there in the world... whatever prized cultural beliefs or instincts you cherish or challenge... whatever you hear from the 'mainstream media' or the 'alternative media' or social media... whatever gossip you hear on the corner or at home... whatever doubts nag at you, whatever temptations gnaw at you, whatever concerns stress and dismay you... trust the God who never lies. In him, we have a sure and steadfast anchor indeed. Hallelujah. Amen.