Sunday 26 February 2017

Saved to do good: true godliness & living generously

Image: Joey Bonifacio

Sermon preached at Abington Avenue URC, Northampton, on 26 February 2017. Texts: Titus 3:1-15, Matthew 17:1-9.

What’s the point of being a Christian? Why do we show up each week to church? What’s the purpose of us being called into God’s kingdom, into membership of God’s people? Is it just about our individual experience with God, our experience of Jesus’ redemption, our personal experience of the Holy Spirit? Or our need for community, for something to do on a Sunday morning?

All these things are important, but to me the message of the gospels is a deeper one: that Jesus came to call us, and the world, into a radical transformation. He came to show us love and mercy, richer and more generous than we could imagine. And he calls us to a path of showing that generous love and mercy to others. We love, because he first loved us. And to complete that love, we must show it to others, in the way we do good in the world.

We reach the end of the letter to Titus that has been the subject of several sermons over the past few weeks. As others have said in this sermon series, the letter probably wasn’t written by St Paul – the vast majority of biblical scholars agree on this, and say it was written by a later author in his style, a common practice in the ancient world – so we can pass over the greetings at the end of the letter. But this chapter has some real gems in it, and it contains some deep truths about the nature of the Christian life. And even if it wasn’t by Paul, it has the lawyer-like complexity and detail of argument that we often find in his letters. So we need to follow through carefully what the author is saying.

The chapter falls into three parts, as well as those final greetings. There’s a rather beautiful and poetic piece about salvation through the mercy of God, sandwiched between two sections on how to live a good Christian life. The presence of this theological piece about salvation illuminates and gives power to the rest: we live a good life in response to God’s goodness; we act in mercy and love because of God’s love for us.

So in the first few verses we see a contrast between the old life & new life. It’s framed rather like one of those personal testimonies that some people may have heard or indeed given in churches – the author gives a list of negative characteristics with a statement that “at one time we too were…” and then lists foolishness, disobedience, malice, hate. By contrast he begins the chapter with a list of the way we’re told to be as Christians – peaceable, considerate, gentle, slandering nobody, being obedient. This chapter doesn’t contain the word ‘godliness’ as such but that’s a constant theme of the letter to Titus, and this could be considered a list of ways to lead a godly or an ungodly life. Now there are those here who came to Christian faith as adults, and might characterise parts of their former life in that way. Others have been Christians all their lives and so experience it differently. I’ve never myself had a conversion experience, but I can readily see ways in which my own life exhibits those ungodly patterns at time, as well I hope as the more godly ones. Others may feel the same way.

And then we move on to this much more poetic passage. It has a different style to the rest, and there’s reason to think that it may well be a quotation of some sort, perhaps from an early hymn or liturgy. The author writes that “when the kindness and love of God our Saviour appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy”. Now there’s an interesting thing about this passage, which is that it mentions Jesus’ birth, it mentions baptism and the Holy Spirit, but it doesn’t mention his death. The letters of Paul, in whose tradition this letter was written, are full of passages about Jesus bringing salvation through his death and resurrection, but that’s not in this chapter. Here we see the important factor being the kindness and love of God of Saviour appearing. It’s for this reason, by the way, that these verses from the letter of Titus are set in the lectionary to be read on Christmas Day. They’re deeply concerned with incarnation, with enfleshment, with God being born among us in human form.

That word ‘appeared’ is important. It’s a translation of the Greek epephane, from which we get the word epiphany. It refers to the breaking-through of God into the human world, the sudden and profound experience by us human beings of the divine presence. Now epiphanies can happen in all sorts of ways, but two of the ways we see them in the Bible and that they’re experienced by Christians today are mentioned in this passage: through the ‘washing of rebirth’, which is to say baptism, and through the coming of the Holy Spirit.

And that’s the relevance of the other passage we heard this morning, the disciples’ experience of the transfiguration of Jesus. Today is the day, the last Sunday before Lent, where many churches celebrate the transfiguration. Lent leads up to Jesus being lifted up on a cross on the mountain of Golgotha, and the world being transformed by his death and God’s transformation of his suffering by bringing him back from death. But here we see a different sort of transformation up a different mountain – Jesus appearing in dazzling white, surrounded by the great figures of Moses and Elijah, with his ministry affirmed by the voice of God saying “this is my son, the beloved, with him I am well pleased”, the same words spoken at Jesus’ baptism. That baptism was an epiphany, a breaking-through of the divine presence; so is this moment on the mountain.

Can we experience the same sort of transformation? I don’t think it’s an impossibility for any of us. It’s a different thing from the conversion experience – it can happen whether we’ve been a Christian for 80 years or never at all. I’m reminded of the words of the French-American monk Thomas Merton, who wrote of an experience of God in the everyday, walking down a street in Kentucky:
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. … I have the immense joy of being human, a member of a race in which God himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
Merton remained as a monk after this experience. But it led him to realise that holiness, that profound experiences of God, push us into the world rather than taking us away from it. He became an activist as well as a mystic, writing and speaking about peace, racial tolerance and social equality.

And that takes me back to the letter to Titus. In the third section, after the description of how Jesus’ coming has transformed us through the mercy of God, we see the way that we respond to this. Again there are specific instructions, but they come down to one phrase: “that those who have trusted in God may be careful to devote themselves to doing what is good”. If you’ll permit me a bit more Greek, the word ‘good’ appears three times in most English translations of this chapter, but it actually translates two different Greek words. The first time we’re told to do good, it’s the Greek word ‘agathos’, which refers to moral and practical goodness – doing good things. But when we’re told to do good in the section after the depiction of the transformation Jesus brings, it’s a different word which appears twice – ‘kalos’, which carries the same sense of moral goodness but also a sense of beauty. This kind of goodness shines out in the world like a beacon. It’s the shining radiance of the transfiguration. It’s the image Thomas Merton had of people walking around shining like the sun.

Because this is the thing which most makes us shine in the world – by doing good. Acting to change the world for the better is the true sign of godliness. Jesus said that by their fruits you will know them. The 17th century Quaker William Penn, founder of the American state of Pennsylvania, put it beautifully, and it relates to the theme of godliness found throughout the letter to Titus. Penn wrote: “True godliness does not turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it and excites their endeavours to mend it”.

Now, doing good will vary for each of us. And the gospels are not short of definitions. Those who were here last Sunday heard the version Jesus told us in Matthew 25 – giving food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, welcoming in the strangers, clothing the naked, healing the sick, visiting prisoners. The same sorts of lists are repeated throughout the teachings of Jesus.

For some of us, this means specific work to help those in immediate distress, like support for food banks or to care for the homeless. For others, it is done through acts of generosity like Christian Aid’s Count Your Blessings campaign or by following 40 Acts. For still others, it comes more locally, with looking after old people in need, or visiting people in hospital, or welcoming strangers into your home. All these are good works. They are works which will shine in the world like the sun.

Others are called differently. We live in dark times, full of injustice and prejudice. Sometimes we are called to stand up against this injustice. There is an idea that the church should stay out of politics, that politics has no place in the pulpit. This is mostly said by those who are comfortable or in power. Those who are suffering need the church to act on their behalf. They need Christians to confront laws which would bar refugees because they come from supposedly wrong countries and to say: this is not the love of God. They need Christians to confront policies which shut down health care, or put people on benefit sanctions for trivial administrative errors, or close day centres for people with dementia and say: this is not the mercy of God. They need Christians to confront warmongers and environmental destroyers and robber-baron banks and say: this is not the transformation of God. None of this involves telling people how to vote, but it does involve politics.

The letter to Titus tells us that we were saved “not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy”. We are not called to do good works in the world, to act as agents of God’s shining transformation, because it will gain us salvation. Only the grace and mercy of God can do that. But we are called to do good works in the world because it continues the love and mercy of God. The theologian and former bishop Tom Wright writes that “what we see, in a life transformed by the gospel, is the direct result of God’s lavish, generous love. And that’s why he wants us to be generous, kind and gentle in turn.”

We love because he first loved us. By loving others, we show the depths of God’s love for us; by showing generosity to others, we demonstrate the generosity of God’s mercy for us. And then we will become part of God’s transform love, we will transform others and we ourselves will be transformed, and we will shine out like the sun.

May it be so for us all, in the name of the life-giving Father and the redeeming Son and the ever-transforming Holy Spirit. Amen.

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