Church on the Choppy Seas: The Washing We Needed (Titus 3:3-8)

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.