Last Sunday we began our short series on St. Paul’s letter to Titus and we were introduced to the criteria St. Paul insists on for those in positions of leadership within the Church. But we saw too that these criteria were wholly appropriate for any Christian man or woman who genuinely aspires to becoming a faithful and effective Christian.
Now I hope I did not give the impression last week that unless you meet these high standards there is no room in the local church for you. Perish the thought! Christ came into the world to save sinners. So the local church must be a place that welcomes all sinners, whatever our track records. The point here though is this; that Paul expects those in positions of leadership – and I would want to add ‘any self-respecting Christian’ – to aspire to such criteria in the faith and, I trust, growing conviction from personal experience, that not only does God forgive us our failures but also helps us every step of the way when we are humble enough and desire enough to accept his grace, his power in our lives.
It has always been the righteous, or rather the self-righteous, rather than repentant sinners, who have found difficulty with God’s offer of forgiveness and grace; which of course is why, much more often than not, they are so much less effective as Christians.
Jesus said it would be so. And, anyway, would we rather have Paul lower his standards? Would we rather have had Jesus water down the Sermon on the Mount? Of course not! Why? Well principally, I think, because we Christians need to learn that what appears to be and is a counsel of perfection for those who want to do their religion on their own and with God at a healthy arm’s length is actually possible for those who are humble enough to do their religion with him. So often, nine times out of ten, the problem people have with Christian practice and Christian belief is the problem of their personal pride: and unless we recognise this and ask God to help us sort it out, we will find the biblical teaching hard to believe, hard to put into practice; and we will find Paul’s teaching here not only tough but even perhaps offensive to our modern liberal values that have replaced God’s perfect law of love with our indifference and tolerance.
So, what is the issue Paul is advising on? Why is it a problem for the church there and what can we learn from this for the sake of the church in our day?
In v10 we see that the problem was one of rebellion against orthodox belief and practice on a significant scale by ‘mere talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision group.’ ‘Mere talkers and deceivers’, means here, as we shall see, those who are not just, as we might say today, ‘all mouth and trousers’, all talk and no action, but those whose words deceive, v11 ‘ruining whole households’, and, what is more, ‘for the sake of dishonest gain’. We learn in v14 that the main substance of their false teaching on Crete, their heresy, is ‘Jewish myths’ and ‘the commands of those who reject the truth’. Such people Paul sums up in v16 ‘they claim to know God but by their actions they deny him’. And the words ‘by their actions’ must include not only how they behave but the ‘action’ of teaching what is not true.
Now I know it would be convenient to say to ourselves, ‘Well, really, what has what was going on on Crete in the middle of the first century AD got to do with my own spiritual life and the life of our church today. Just because the Vicar says it does is no argument. I am quite content in my faith and I know what I believe and, frankly, it cannot really matter.’ You may laugh; but I have heard this all too often: we in the modern West have become so comfortable in the little islands of our own religious beliefs and practices, and so tolerant of the beliefs and practices of others, that not only do we fail to see how important sound doctrine and sound living are for the health and effectiveness of our Christian lives, we now tolerate beliefs and practices that are completely at odds with the Gospel. And not only does this ‘ruin whole households’, as it was doing on Crete in Paul’s day, it ruins whole churches. Why? Well because unsound belief and unsound living bring division and ineffectiveness with the result that either people do not know what their proper Christian calling is or they no longer think that calling matters. And of course such an insular approach to religious belief has been reinforced in this country by social taboos and, as society becomes ever more individualistic, with belief centred not in God but in oneself.
The fact is that for a Christian, what he or she believes really does matter: it matters because of the two great commandments; commandments designed to take us out of ourselves and the prisons of personal religious preference – which can so very easily and quickly lead to unsound belief and to unsound living – to put God and others firmly before us. Tolerating the erroneous beliefs and the unhealthy practices of others, be they Christians or not, may win you respect by them and by the liberal elites of the media and the Church of England for your tolerant attitude, but by doing so you are certainly not respecting God or loving your neighbour as yourself. We all have a choice.
Now I shall very probably be accused of exaggerating the case because of course most of us - and I include myself - prefer a quiet life and the avoidance of controversy: but we cannot have our cake and eat it. We cannot, on the one hand, argue for tolerance of such things whilst on the other complain or blindly wonder why the Church of England moves from crisis to crises and is haemorrhaging people, especially the young. The present crises are at root not so much about women priests or bishops but about what we believe and how we behave – in short, about sound belief and sound practice. And I am sad to say that, as Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali has said, the problem starts at the top.
V12 is one of those generalisations that people are inclined to make on the basis of their experience of the people of a particular country; you know, ‘the English are very reserved’; ‘the Welsh are very passionate’; ‘the French are – yes, well the less said about the French the better! Paul takes this unpleasant generalisation about Cretans and tells Titus that in his experience it is true. But notice in v13, having pulled no punches with them, he tells Titus to rebuke them. Why? ‘so that they will be sound in the faith.’
The rebuke is to be made, it has to be, in order that they may see themselves clearly and turn from their sins. Rebuking members of the congregation is of course not a very Anglican thing to do! On the one and only occasion here a few years ago now when I said to the PCC that unless a certain member of the congregation stopped upsetting others with their spiteful behaviour I would rebuke that person publically in church, you should have seen the looks on their faces. Sadly, with some people a gentle word does not always work, and for the sake of the church a rebuke is necessary; hopefully, in order that they will repent.
V15 tells us that people who do not hold fast to sound doctrine but who have greater regard for, here, Jewish myths or who promote false, man-made teaching, cannot tell the difference between what is right and what is wrong with respect to God because, says Paul, ‘both their minds and their consciences are corrupted’. Indeed for such people truth is very much up for grabs; they are incapable of discerning it on account either of their fascination with what is not part of God’s revelation or their obsession with the keeping of unnecessary ritual - which would be unnecessary if they were genuinely pure.
In v16 Paul’s assault on the false teachers reaches a climax with a damning contrast: those who claim to know God not only fail to match their actions to their words but by those actions actually deny him. Paul calls them ‘detestable’, a word that occurs only once in the whole of the New Testament.
Now I realise this perhaps all sounds terribly dogmatic: but is being dogmatic about God’s truth something to be ashamed of, especially when Paul’s life was characterised by totally committed love, service, and self-sacrifice? Being dogmatic about orthodox Christian faith may today be considered illiberal or even bizarre, but the pressing need for a strong, unambiguous gospel in a society like ours is just as vital as it was with the Cretans. If Paul and Titus were to have allowed the false teachers to carry on unrebuked, all manner of heresy and divisions would have resulted. So today, where the gospel, as clearly expounded by Christ and his apostles, is replaced with unsound teaching and unsound living, the Church and Christian mission will suffer as a result. In England, where social customs and conventions are allowed to determine what is said and done in church, where the gospel is replaced, undermined, or changed altogether, the health and effectiveness of those churches will suffer. And it is so easy for social convention and unbiblical teaching to do just that – undermine the health and effectiveness of a church.
All the while we are interested solely in paying the bills, in not upsetting anyone – regardless of what they believe and how they live, in allowing unhelpful practices and passtimes to distract from the work of the gospel and unsound teaching to undermine it, then the Church cannot fulfil its calling effectively. And no matter how spiritual its leaders seem or how content its members are, we must always remember that true spirituality is a matter of the extent to which the Holy Spirit is motivating, empowering, and changing our lives. The business of the local church is not to condone but to challenge; not to tolerate but to love; and not to pander to prejudice but to teach the truth in order that through sound doctrine and sound living its members may become effective salt and light in a world that desperately needs to hear God’s truth and to experience his love. For this challenging calling he has chosen you and me.
Next week, we’ll discover what Paul instructs Titus to teach the congregation.
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