It was a hot, humid day
in the Caribbean and in the West Indes. Safe havens abounded –
even for crews like this. And, most people thought, thank God there
weren't too many crews quite like this. Calico Jack was at the
command. Other feared names had been, were, or would be aboard his
ship. Right now, though, no one was aboard his ship. They'd lowered
their insignia – the rectangle of black fabric with the crossed
swords and the leering skull. They'd found an isolated cove and run
the ship just barely aground during high tide. And now, at low tide,
with fortifications on the beach and their cannons ashore, they
tilted the ship toward its side, exposing half the hull to the open
air. In short, they careened their
vessel. And they set to work.
The hull, you see, was
afflicted. Some of the wood was rotten. Other wood had holes from
cannon fire. Some of the hull was infested with shipworms – tiny
mollusks that love to burrow into the wood from the sea. Some was
covered with barnacles that needed to be chipped off. Some was
spattered with spots of mold. And across the whole, trails of
seaweed, sickly green, streaked and dangled. And that wasn't good
for the ship. It was bad enough that such afflictions hastened the
deterioration of the wood and made it precarious to sail. But with
so much build-up on the hull, so much junk sticking to and clinging
to it, the roughened surface slowed the ship's top speed to half what
it ought to be. Not good when your line of work is all about being
faster than your prey and faster than your pursuers. And so it
wouldn't do to leave the hull like that. Merchant vessels could use
dry-docks to get their chance to deal with the like problems. But
not an option for this crew – for these pirates. And so they did
what they could. They careened it – and they cleaned it.
Even today, with ships
made of different materials and affected differently by the water,
conscientious owners will still find ways to clean their boats. And
the days of wooden vessels were, in principle, no different. While
resources had to be replenished – old maritime narratives often
made reference to ships being “wooded and watered” – the
cleanliness of the hull needed to be addressed. One old British
parliamentary record, recording the words of naval leadership,
remarks that 'cleansing the ship' is “a most necessary and most
important consideration.” And so it's unsurprising that the book
that put crews like this on the map, 1724's heralded General
History of the Pyrates, speaks
of how just such crews came to a cove and “there made preparations
to careen; they carried ashore all their sails, and made tents by the
water-side, where they laid their plunder, stores, &c., and fell
to work … employ'd in heaving down, scrubbing, tallowing, and so
forth.” There's a lot of work to do to a ship when the hull is
afflicted so.
Over
the past six weeks, we've been exploring a letter from Admiral Paul
to Vice-Admiral Titus, given charge over a fleet of churches based in
first-century Crete. Those seas were choppy. They were also toxic.
And so not only was it important to have a sure anchor in God's
truthfulness – not only was it important to see the twin beams from
the lighthouse of Christ, blazing grace from his first appearance and
glory from his appearance that is fast turning 'round – not only
was it important to navigate by the star-chart whereby the Scriptures
describe the pattern of Christ our Sign – not only was it important
to sail steadily onward toward the harbor of God's embrace – not
only was it important to have good officers at the helm to steer the
ship right – not only was it important to have good rations
administered to keep spiritual scurvy at bay – we also heard how
important it is to keep swabbing the deck clear of the toxicity of
any compromised half-gospel.
But
the hull of each church is still in contact with the culture and
everything it contains. Which isn't inherently bad. After all, if
the culture weren't there, we'd be marooned on the sea floor! And
yet, sailing on choppy waters full of such dreck, there's a problem:
a ship is going to get dirty. Out there, on your private dinghy,
you'll find the very same problem. Barnacles will attach themselves
to your hull and drag as you try to go. Seaweed will wrap you up and
trail behind your bow. Shipworms will burrow their way in and weaken
your defenses against the pressures of the cultural and
circumstantial waters surrounding you. Holes and rot and mold will
form, the signs of prolonged and untreated exposure. The result will
be hindrance and deterioration.
And
I'm sure, as each of you reflects on what you've endured in your
life, or maybe what you're facing right now, you can think of some
ways you feel like you just can't get those barnacles off, like you
just can't get untangled from seaweeds and grasses, like you just
can't resist the burrowing shipworms, like you're ready to fall apart
at the slightest touch and rot and chip away. Have you ever been
there? I'm sure all of us have. I know I have. That's just the
effect of exposure to what's unhealthful in twentieth- and
twenty-first-century America, like any other culture. Paul, writing
to Vice-Admiral Titus, lists some of the afflictions of our private
vessels: “Foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to
various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy,
hated by others and hating one another”
(Titus 3:3).
And
here's the problem. Like the pirates, you can look for safe places
to run aground and try to deal with some of this – chances to rest
and regroup, chances to wash off the muck and chip off the hindrances
and cut through the weeds and carry out some repairs on your life.
But those safe places are very few and very far between. The wood of
each of our private dinghies has been hopelessly rotted for thousands
of years – ever since teeth sank in fruit that wasn't for tooth and
tongue to touch. It's true of every mere mortal who's ever lived:
the ship of their personal, individual life is doomed to fall apart
and sink into the miry deep. None can resist the toxicity of the
world. There is a hopeless rot that cannot keep out the dirt. Try
as we might, even when we get a chance to try our hand at repairs,
even when we observe best practices for boat maintenance, even when
we baby it as best we can – we're at a loss to save our ships.
I'm
speaking, of course, of the rot of sin – the rot that we cannot
cure. As much as we can try to manage it with virtue – as much as
we may make an effort to replace bits and pieces of the rotted hulls
of our lives with intact wood – we find it swiftly exposed to the
very same infection and affliction. All around you, you see folks
adrift on the choppy seas of life, and whether they can see it or
not, beneath the waterline, they're falling apart. And so, on our
own dinghies, are we. Most of us seldom peek below our waterline –
we just don't have time, don't have space, don't have a safe place to
get it exposed to the light of day.
But
if we could, we'd see the problem in plain view. We'd get a clear
sight of the rot of sin. We'd behold the tiny pricks eaten by all
the worms. We'd cast our gaze on the barnacles and the weeds. We'd
run our fingers over the holes in our own life that make us take on
this toxic water below deck. Yet even if we could, the best we can
do is patches that change nothing of the ultimate outcome. The rot
will spread. The barnacles will cling again. The seaweed will once
more dangle and tangle. The shipworms will eat, and one way or
another, our boats will be destined for the junk pile – fit no more
to sail on, never to dock at last in the good harbor where the
coconuts are sweet and the scene is always beauty in God. Our own
dinghies can never get us there. There is just too much hopeless
rot; the vessels are too junky and dirty. Zu viel schmutz. Zu viel schmutz...
We
have so little chance to even interact with our own hulls, and when
we do, we can scarcely chip off the barnacles and peel away the
seaweed and patch up the holes and the rot, but the rot will spread
anyway, and frankly we can just as easily make it worse. There is no
hope that we can make these little boats truly seaworthy after all.
If there could ever be any hope, it could not come from our own
cleanliness; it could not come from our scrubbing and chipping; it
could not be found in our repairs; or, to use the biblical idiom, it
would not come from “works done by us in righteousness”
(Titus 3:5).
“If
only,” we dream, “if only there were a ship we could board. A
ship bigger than our own private dinghies. A ship with a hull
impervious to these waters. A clean ship, a safe ship, stable in
storm and secure at sea. If only there were a ship that would not
rot before it reached the bright harbor. If only... oh, if only...”
But
hear these words! “When the kindness and philanthropy of
God our Savior appeared, he saved us”
(Titus 3:4-5)! Paul writes to Titus in words he knows Titus will
know. In the days of Roman rule, there were many patrons who
sponsored the bettered lives of individual clients; there were many
benefactors who sponsored the bettered lives of whole towns,
provinces, the empire as a whole. And the common praise for such a
patron or such a benefactor was this: that they displayed 'kindness
and philanthropy' in doing for others what others could not do for
themselves; in giving to others what others could not attain for
themselves. And so Almighty God shews forth a sweet kindness and a
love for all the human wreckage he surveys with pity. And he rescues
us – he appears precisely as 'God our Savior.'
We
know – or we should know – that our rescue could never come from
the repairs of our hands. Nor can we swab away filth by filth, nor
can we free ourselves from the barnacles and weeds and worms, nor can
we cure ourselves of rot, turn back the clock of decay. Human
history is full of toppled monuments to our efforts to do just that.
The crumpled pages of philosophers offer prescriptions. All at best
slow and stem the symptoms. The great artifacts propose something
that will never rot away. But they will, just the same as all the
rest. In our own lives, we can see these things. We cannot sanitize
the hull with alcohol, we cannot layer over the barnacles with
concealment, we cannot patch the holes with self-improvement, we
cannot rid ourselves of rot by any means – and so even if we could
make it to harbor, we'd be forever quarantined outside, so
contaminated are we by our blight! If God is to save us, it cannot
be “because of works done by us in righteousness.”
No,
it will have to be a radical act of change. It may well mean the
dismantling of our ruined boats. It may well mean abandoning our
rotted project wholesale, and boarding a ship not our own. It may
well mean – in fact, it does
just mean – receiving passage where we have no right in ourselves
to be. It means enlisting in a crew that none of our past
mismanagement could ever qualify us for. But none among the crew
were qualified at their enlistment. The most fiendish pirates have
found a place; the chronically seasick rest easy on this deck. We
must receive passage on a ship not our own, where we have no right in
ourselves to be. And that is being saved “according
to [God's] own mercy”
(Titus 3:5).
This
ship is the body of Christ – the church. The mercy of God brings
us aboard – we abandon our rotted lives alone and join a greater
crew. Because God chooses to favor us, in spite of our past
mismanagement of self and all, he enrolls us in the crew. Paul calls
that being “justified
by grace”
(Titus 3:7). And so we're on this ship, the ship of the church,
which sails the seven seas of the world but aims for the harbor we
dream of. And yet we know so well all the problems of life at sea.
We know how much can happen under the waterline. We've tasted the
rot, we know the holes, we've brushed the barnacles and been tied by
the weeds and hated the worms as they burrowed in. Every other ship
we've seen has been afflicted by the same rot. How can this be any
different?
Because
of one thing. Our old dinghies, our feeble rowboats of our own
manufacture and maintenance, needed desperately to be cleansed from
the rot, from the dreck, from the parasites and all the rest. The
solution escaped us; it was beyond our reach, nor did we even
conceive of it, so obsessed were we in mismanaging the problem by
replacing this bit and that bit, by scrubbing pitiably away here and
there. We needed a shower of something potent, something to burn and
dissolve away the parasites, to wash off the dreck, to seal the hull
in pristine condition. There was a very special washing we needed.
And
so, Paul writes, God saved us “according
to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the
Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our
Savior”
(Titus 3:5-6). In its internal dimension, we know this as the
sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, who enlivens faith to bring
about a change of heart. In its external dimension, we know this as
baptism – a literal washing outwardly with water, which is of one
piece with the inward 'washing' of the soul. It's two sides of the
same coin; we've spent too long trying to get out of it. Baptism
isn't a work we perform; it's an act God does to us, not something we
do ourselves. It's no mere symbol; it's the outward dimension of one
and the same washing with the Holy Spirit. God was not stingy with
the Holy Spirit. He did not sprinkle you with a droplet. Through
Jesus Christ our Savior, God unleashed the Holy Spirit lavishly
on us. We experience him in baptism, the other dimension of the same
act whereby we're born again.
Paul
calls this baptism – this Holy Spirit bath, experienced tangibly in
water as we re-enact the death and burial of Jesus Christ and rise
free from our drowning – he calls it here “the
washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit.”
And that's a fascinating choice of words. 'Regeneration' – it's
an unusual word for Paul, but it's the word that another Jewish
author named Philo shortly before had used for what the Flood of Noah
did to the earth. When the floodwaters came and went on the earth,
baptizing everything, this was a “purification … of all things
beneath the moon,” Philo said, with “the earth being washed and
appearing new again, as it was when it was first created along with
the entire universe, … they became the founders of a regeneration”
(De vita Moses
2.64-65). Just as Genesis describes the land emerging from the
waters when God said, “Let there be...,” so Genesis depicts the
land emerging fresh and clean from the waters again. The earth is
renewed. The earth is reborn. Everything is started over without
the baggage of the past. It's fresh, fresh as the dawn of Eden,
clean and pure. The baptism of the earth in Noah's day made, at
least physically, for a new creation, Philo's saying.
And
what Paul is saying here is that baptism – not just the outward
form, but the whole act of the Holy Spirit in external water and
internal grace grasped by faith – this baptism, this “washing
of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit,”
it's the same thing. The ship of the church is the body of Christ,
and “if anyone
is in Christ,” if
anyone is genuinely aboard and enrolled in the crew, then “he
is a new creation”
(2 Corinthians 5:17). As a part of the church's crew, you are
totally new. You are not dirtied by the pollution around you; you
have been washed clean, as fresh as Eden's dawn. It's not anything
you could achieve yourself by any works you could do. It's only an
act of God's mercy, and we received it only by faith – by accepting
passage in Christ, entrusting our lives and souls and selves to him.
And
the Holy Spirit didn't just wash the surface of the hull. The Holy
Spirit infuses the hull with sealant, the likes of which you'll never
find in a store or mix up in your garage. The Holy Spirit is the
sole efficacious seal against all rot and against all
mold, against all shipworms and all barnacles. So this ship will never rot. So
this ship will not be hindered as we sail toward harbor. So this
ship will not fall apart on the voyage. We need not fear. This was
exactly the washing we needed, this baptism of water by Spirit. And
we continually return, by faith, to swab the decks and bathe
ourselves anew in the same pure waters, the same Holy Spirit. “The
one who has bathed”
with this baptism inside and out “does
not need to wash, except for [the decks], but is completely clean –
and you are clean,”
our Lord told his disciples and, by extension, us (John 13:10).
Baptism
is a hard thing to wrap our minds around. We're so tempted to
domesticate it, belittle it. And we've surely seen the danger when
mere
outward washing, the work of men and not the act of the Spirit, is
given the same title and assumed to be the same thing. But in real
baptism, where true faith meets true Spirit in the water, where death
is dealt to death and all lifeless things dissolve, what's left
behind is a new creation, fresh as Eden's dawn, and clean as clean
can be, and sealed tight against all rot.
The
church doesn't always meet smooth sailing. Seldom, in fact! The
seas are choppy because the prince of the power of the air is enraged
against “the
kindness and philanthropy of God our Savior,”
by whose mercy we are saved (Titus 3:4-5). And when you are out in
your rotting rafts and dilapidated dinghies, you will find the seas
unbearable, and you will be in grave danger. Return to the
mothership. Sail aboard the church, and not in your own private
vessels. The seas are not smooth, but the wind and waves can never
prevail against her hull and her prow as she slices forward on the
water.
Don't
neglect this ship that's granted you passage. Don't neglect the
washing of regeneration that made this ship – that made you –
what you are. This baptism you experienced – it's the Holy
Spirit's work on you and in you. It is the outward dimension of you
having been born again, “born
not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but
of God”
(John 1:13), born to “become
heirs according to the hope of eternal life”
(Titus 3:7). And “you
must be born again,”
for “unless
one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of
God”
(John 3:5-7). Don't think you can be clean otherwise. Don't think
you can in any other way be free from the rot, free from the dreck,
free from the parasites and the entangling weeds. Don't think there
is any other way to reach the harbor of God's embrace.
But
on the flip side, if you are born of water and the Spirit, you are
born again! You are renewed! You are truly regenerated, fresh as
Eden's dawn! Whom the Son sets free is free indeed (John 8:36)! You
are a new creation, no longer subject to the laws of rot and rubbish
that once defined you – so don't sail like those rafts and dinghies
you once called home! Trust in the God of this ship, the one who
gave you passage and sealed you in mercy, and dedicate yourself –
ourselves – to productive sailing. Live in your baptism; live in
the Spirit; live in and as the church; live to “devote
yourselves to good works”
born from the same faith that gave birth to us all (Titus 3:8). Sail
on in your cleanness and wholeness, church. Sail on. Amen.
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