Church on the Choppy Seas: Lighthouse Ahead! (Titus 2:11-15)

I'm sure you've heard this story before, or something like it. I know I have. It was a dark and stormy night. Well, not so much stormy as foggy. The choppy seas sloshed beneath a sopping wet blanket of fog, thick and heavy. There was a great big ship, trying to make it through the fog. They had their own lights, trying to slice a way through the black shroud. But they could scarcely see a yard in front of their own faces, even with their lights at their brightest. With the fog so heavy, they couldn't see heaven. With the fog so heavy, they couldn't see ocean. With the fog so heavy, they couldn't see earth, with all its threat, nor any other ships on the water.

Suddenly, in the distance, they saw a light that looked so much like theirs. It was directly out in front of them – in their path! The captain grabbed his radio and signaled ahead. “Warning: We are headed in your direction. Please change course to get out of our way.” The captain watched the sole spot of light in the fog. It had no flicker, no deviation. The radio crackled. “Negative. Change your course.” The captain was not used to this. He was a decorated veteran. This was a military ship, and a big one, too. It was hard work to turn it, and beside all that, the captain was proud. He fired back, “Negative. You change your course. We will not be changing ours.” He glared at the light, daring it to stand still. Which it did. The radio crackled again. “Negative. Again, change your course.” Now the captain was irate. He snatched up his handset and yelled into the radio, “This is Captain Reginald T. Waterstreet of the H.M.S. Leviathan, the second-largest ship in Her Majesty's Royal Navy. On the authority of the Crown, I order you to change course this instant!” The captain fumed. Sweat rolled from his brow. Silence; all was still. Then the radio crackled. “Greetings, Captain Waterstreet of the H.M.S. Leviathan. Message received and acknowledged. This is a lighthouse – you change your course!”

Well, don't that just beat all? That's the thing about being on course to a lighthouse. You have to react. It won't be moving for you, no matter how hard you bluff and bluster, no matter how you flail and fume. No matter how much sweat, blood, tears you add to the equation, it makes no difference. The lighthouse is a constant. And yet how awful it would be for the lighthouse to not be there! For us to be abandoned in the darkness of the night, beneath the oppressive load of that isolating fog, with no glimpse of reality anywhere we turn! Many a captain, thinking clearly and setting aside his pride, has been mighty glad for the life-saving service rendered by many a lighthouse. Because the lighthouse shineth into the darkness, and the darkness and the storm and the fog and the waves and the wind – well, the lighthouse shineth in, and all this darkness has not overcome it.

So it is on many a shore. And so it is in matters of the spirit, matters of the soul, matters of the world. Friends, the waves of our culture are choppy. The waters can be plenty toxic. That's the truth about this life. The world is awash in brackish water, churned into a frenzy. So little out there makes for smooth sailing. In and of itself, it is dark out there. It is foggy. It is just plain impossible for us to see a yard before us, beside us, behind us, whichsoever way we bend our benighted gaze.

How often have you sensed the darkness and the fog descending in your life? I know I've run up against it my fair share in mine. A loved one dies, interrupting or abbreviating a relationship you thought would last a lot longer. Thus thickens the fog. A plan fails, a hope shatters. The fog thickens. Precious cargo plops overboard, lost to the waves. Fog thickens. Sickness infects the body, turmoil afflicts the mind. Fog, thicker fog. Chaos seems to reign. Everyone, everything seems so confused. It's all incoherent,, all jumbled and put together wrong. Elementary truths are forgotten out there. Fog, thickest fog, all so dense, all so heavy. And this very moment, so many around us – maybe we ourselves – are scratching at each other's throats, at our own throats, running around and flailing, because we're feeling claustrophobic with so much fog 'n smog clogging the air.

Ever since the swords swished at Eden's gates with us on the wrong side and no key, thick fog has been the natural environment of humankind. It didn't take long for us to forget where we were. Sometimes we thought we were so far away when we were so close. Often, we thought we were so close when we were so far away. You can see it in our sordid lot of religious endeavors; you can behold it in our cultural enterprises. We think we can build a tower all the way up to the very top, and we've misjudged the distance so badly, because we're working blind. The radio is not silent. It crackles, it hisses, it speaks. But most of our story is the history of willfully tuning it out. We drift in the fog, lost and feeling alone; when the fog thickens harder, we feel isolated from even our own shipmates, if we have them, let alone everyone else; and yet we sense the prospect of threats out there in the great unknown.

We build the tower – it collapses into fog. We maintain empires – they collapse into fog. We prostrate our soul and mind before lifeless things – the dark'ning fog blinds us to what they really are in the light of day. From our pyramids to our great walls, from our fast-paced hippodromes to our huts and houses and holy shrines, there's just so much fog. We knew not whence we came from; we knew not whither we were headed; we dreamed up eight billion dreams, but lost in the fog we were, and at our better moments we knew it. It was a dark and foggy night, so bitter cold. Long had the radio crackled. But few had ears to listen.

And then, from far away, photons leapt faster than any fog-bound thing! A blessed ray pierced through the cold night. It slashed the fog to ribbons where'er it went. When there was no other way of finding our bearing, no stable point of reference, the light shined in the darkness, the light shined in the fog, and all the fog and all the darkness could not overcome it (John 1:5)! The light fell upon our faces, shining bright, coming from straight ahead, puncturing our path and letting us not only see it, but finally catch a glimpse of each other.

You see, amidst all the pervasive fog, there stands a lighthouse. And a lighthouse has bulbs stronger than your ship. A lighthouse has one purpose: to save your ship from destruction; to guide your ship to safety; to give you the gift of sight, the gift of getting your bearings about you. And friends, however lost you have ever been, however astray you have ever drifted, however dark has been the night where you found yourself, however thick has been the fog settling on your heart and mind and soul, however dense has been your confusion, know this: there is a lighthouse ahead!

For “the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all people” (Titus 2:11). That is just what I mean! As with the radiance cast forth from a lighthouse into the foggy night, the grace of God has appeared, slicing through our soupy skies, clearing a path in the darkness, which, however much it may resist, cannot but give way to such a powerful beam. All once was doom and gloom; but now there is a light shining. All once was wrapped in fog; but now there is a light shining. This light brings rescue and security to all who will but open their eyes and see things in its light, all who will see where it illuminates and be responsive to it. This light is called the grace of God. It is God's favor, God's gift.

As I said last week, when the grace of God appears, it is the opposite of God looking on you with contempt or dismissal or hate or indifference. If God shows you his favor, it means he is not opposed to your best interests, nor does he act without regard to you. You are very much in his consideration, as a positive factor. God acts for you, not against you, not apart from you. It's grace. It's his favorable disposition to bless you, not to curse you; to rescue you, not to abandon you; to welcome you, not to shut you out; to gift you, not to rub you; to build you up, not tear you down.

“The grace of God has appeared,” slicing through all our fog, all the fog of this world. Though we sail on wild seas – and go ahead and look at twenty-first-century America and tell me the seas aren't heaving and churning, tell me the fog hasn't gotten in people's heads, go on, tell me that – yet still the light shines and is not overcome, still the grace of God leaps forth into our darkly foggy world and our darkly foggy lives and our darkly foggy hearts and leavens our thickness with its lightness and brightness. But whence comes this grace of God? How does it appear?

We hear the call over the radio, not with so much static as before: “Jesus Christ … gave himself for us” (Titus 2:14a). That's the beam we see. There was a great trade. That was the gift. The gift given in God's grace is Jesus himself. He gave himself in our place, unto shame and pain and death and wrath and all the due penalty, all the due isolation, all the due wreckage and drowning – he gave himself for us. That was how the grace of God truly appeared: when, as a sign and seal of God's favor, and to secure it for us forever, he gave himself for us, so that he could forever give himself to us. What did all that accomplish?

He “gave himself for us, to redeem us from all lawlessness” (Titus 2:14b). In the world Paul was writing to, it was known that there was one good way a slave might get set free from a harsh master. There were temples that had a standing offer. They would pay the ransom price. They would buy a slave from his master. They said they were merchants negotiating the sale on behalf of the god they served, the god to whom they as a temple were dedicated. And so they would buy the slave. Legally, the slave would be sold out of human bondage to become a servant of the god – which was freedom from all those former chains. And that was how many slaves were redeemed: by legally becoming slaves of a god, and of no man.

We were slaves to many things, before the grace of God appeared. We were slaves to our bitter Mammon, and its greedy clutches. We were slaves to our desires and our lusts. We were slaves to political forces, religious forces, economic forces, that kept us on a short leash. Paul sums all this up by suggesting we were slaves to lawlessness – slaves to the culture's haphazard ways of ordering human life, slaves to all the waves that tossed us to and fro, slaves to our idols and our images, slaves to every rough thing, slaves to the criminal impulse that lurks in each of us and holds sway all around us, lawlessness masquerading as law, lawlessness that no mere law can uproot. And we were slaves.

But Jesus Christ, the high priest of God, yea, even the temple of God, made a standing offer. He wanted to get you away from this harsh master called Lawlessness. And that was the trade. He paid the price. Lawlessness unleashed all its chaos against him, in a storm of fury and mockery and agony and blood. The redemption price was paid. “You were bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 7:23). So with a price, you were indeed bought. You were sold out of bondage to those former things, to become a servant of Jesus' God – which is freedom from all the former chains that bound you, the chains of shame and human esteem, the chains of greed and lust and pride, the chains of all prevailing ideologies, all dominant principalities and powers, earthly or otherwise. The chains you yourself forged – even those, he bought you away from. To “redeem you from all lawlessness.”

What's more, Jesus “gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession” (Titus 2:14c). Many teachers have come and given you a pitch of what else you must add in order to be really pure, to be really acceptable to God. Many teachers have offered you this law or that law, this twist or that twist, this rule or that rule. But Jesus gave himself to purify you, and to purify you entirely; in merely hearing his word of grace and receiving it into yourself, he pronounces you already clean, already pure (John 15:3). You have need of nothing else than more of this word. Any time you have ever felt dirty, any time you have ever felt unclean, any time you have ever felt unworthy, know this: he gave himself to purify you; it's accomplished. Simply live out in your life the purity already granted to us by his decree.

But the text does not merely say that he gave himself for us to purify for himself a person here, and a person there. We read that he aimed to “purify for himself a people for his own possession.” Paul remembers here the promise to Israel long ago: how, if they were faithful to the covenant, they would be a people, a corporate body, exalted above all nations as a collective royal priesthood, a holy presence in the world (Exodus 19:5-6). Jesus did not come to purify for himself an aggregate – a mix-'n-match batch of individual Christians, all leading their separate lives.

We are so fond of saying that you don't need to be part of the church to be saved. I don't know where anybody ever got that. Perhaps a delayed overreaction to fights picked in the sixteenth century. But Jesus did not come to purify for himself individual souls and individual lives disconnected from all the rest. We read here that he came to purify a people – a whole people, drawn from many scattered tribes and different tongues, from myriad walks of life, but forged into a new organic unity – once called 'no people,' now called 'my people.' Jesus came to purify for himself a people, whose organized expression we call 'church,' the body politic of the kingdom of God. Don't let the fog of do-it-yourselfism get in your brain; don't let the fog of stay-homeism or even of pew-sitterism get the better of you. We are purified together, to live together now, as one organism, one entity, one coordinated active expression of the body of Christ in our community.

Wait, look! The lighthouse has not just one beam, but two; it rotates 'round, we see something new! Where one beam emanates from the past, from the redemptive work of Jesus accomplished outside Jerusalem in the first century, the other beam is cast from the future, perhaps the near future. For we read here that not only do we live in the light of what Jesus has done, but also in the light of what he will do. We are “waiting for the blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13).

This, too, illuminates our darkly foggy worlds, lives, souls. The grace of God has appeared, but his glory will appear. Jesus Christ is “our great God and Savior” – yes, you heard that right. Let there be no doubt: Jesus is the real deal. He is God and fit to be worshipped. He is the God who is mighty to save. And so he is our Savior. Many emperors, many kings, touted themselves – or have been touted – as 'god and savior.' Hellenistic rulers bore that title. It was applied to Julius Caesar in his memory. But they are a pale parody of what in Jesus is brightness and majesty. What so many kings, so many priests, so many politicians and economists and scientists and journalists and philosophers and theologians and celebrities and athletes and activists have cast themselves as, in olden times and in our day, they fall short, because they merely parody the real deal. Jesus is our great God and Savior. He will appear with glory. We are waiting expectantly for that, for its potentiality at every minute, every moment. And this will be our “blessed hope,” tethering us to our sure anchor in the God who does not lie, the God whose every word is truth and who shouts and sings grace, grace, wonderful grace.

In the meantime, while we wait, we live amidst the present age. That's the world around us. The world as we see it – or, rather, as we see the swirls and structures of fog in the dark. We live amidst the fog, we sail through the fog and over the choppy seas, but we sail in light of the grace that has appeared and in light of the glory that is turning 'round our way. We live between the salvation that's been brought and the salvation that's up ahead – they're of one piece, they shine from the same lighthouse, the same source, in twin beams that come our way. This is our hope – the hope that is the answer to all the plight of all our fog. All the confusion, all the chaos, all the questions implicit or explicit in our loss, our grief, our trial, our stress, our languishing darkness – all of it has, as an answer, “We wait for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.” And in the meantime, the grace of God has already appeared, already smiled on us with favor, already lit up our rescue and beckoned us to safety.

As we wait, we catch word that light is tantamount to learning. The grace of God appeared, “training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and pious lives in the present age” (Titus 2:12). Not only has grace appeared, but we are to be educated by grace. It's an education for all people, we read; you don't have to pass a prerequisite course to enroll in grace. But the light of grace will teach you – teach you to renounce, to forsake all those former masters, and to serve God alone in the way he bids, as the example of Jesus models for you, for us. He did, after all, come “to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works” (Titus 2:14d). By no means are we saved by good works, but his end goal was to get a version of us who burn hotly to do 'em. Not just any kind of works, but the good kind, the kind that belong in the light for good.

On our voyage, we have to admit, much remains foggy. We don't have all the details of the answers; but we do have the Answer, our great God and Savior. Grace has already appeared to poke a hole in our fog, and the beam of glory is turning 'round. No matter how dark or how obscure things get, no matter how confused you may be, no matter how distressed or weary, no matter how sick, no matter how dead, rest in the light; it shineth for thee. The light fell on you when our great God and Savior gave himself for us all, to redeem us away from our harsh old master Lawlessness and into the freedom of his temple. The light fell on you when Jesus blasted away all impurity from this whole people, as a people. Real purity isn't following a rule. Real purity isn't submitting to a ritual. Real purity is being part of Jesus' people, the people purified as his own possession. And as we wait for that glory beam to turn 'round on us, we respond to this grace, this redemption, this purification by learning what the light came to teach us and by being zealous for good works – just like Jesus wants. We cannot keep to our old course. That's why the lighthouse shines for us. No matter how big or bad we think our ship is, we have to move – as the light shows us the way for spiritual sailing. The light is shining. No darkness, no fog, can ever overcome it. That's the grace we have and the glory we wait for. Sail on, church. Sail on. Amen.