God's Saving Grace Has Appeared: A Sermon For Either Christmas Day Or Epiphany

God’s Saving Grace Has Appeared!

Titus 2:11-14

Everyone loves a good story. Everyone loves a good storyteller. Back in the days before television we were entertained by stories. Our imaginations were left to paint the picture. A good storyteller makes you feel that you are part of the story. The storyteller paints a picture with words. A person who gets really absorbed into the story is said to be “spellbound.” “Spell” is the Old English word for “story.”

God has a story. When we put “God” and “story” together we get “God spell” or “Gospel. We are gathered here together tonight to remember one of the gospel stories. We remember the shepherds abiding in the fields watching over their flocks in the dark of night. And suddenly the Angel of the LORD appeared with glad tidings (gospel) of great joy. We can imagine what that must have been like. We can see the sheer terror when the angel appeared. We then think of the wonder they must have felt as though we were there. We look in amazement at the singing of the heavenly host. Then we accept the invitation to “Come to Bethlehem and see.” We re-enact this story in our Christmas plays and see the joy on the children’s faces. Perhaps we think back to our childhood when we were the actors.

Stories are used to explain truth. Jesus, who was the greatest storyteller of all time, explained truth in stories called “parables.” Storytelling was common in the Middle East. The shepherds themselves probably broke the monotony of the cold nights in the field with a good story. The really good news is that the Christmas story is true. It is not just that it teaches us truth. The very Truth had come in Jesus Christ.

We read the Christmas Eve selection this evening from the Book of Titus. However, we see at once that these verses are not in story form. Truth can also be conveyed by making a statement and then explaining it. This is the Greek way of revealing truth. Paul is writing to a mostly Greek congregation on the island of Crete. So he tells here the Christmas story in the way the Greeks processed truth. It is not that the Greeks did not use stories also. We can think of the fables of King Midas and the golden touch, for example. But the Holy Spirit used Paul to use a statement known as a “proposition” in which the truth is stated and then explained. Even though the method is different, the truth is the same. Herman Ridderbos compared the teaching of Jesus and Paul and concluded that they were saying the same thing in different ways. Everyone learns a little differently. So God in His wisdom uses different methods to convey the truths of the Gospel.

I went with this extended introduction to put the Christmas story in mind before we examine this text. I hope that will shed some light as we explore what God is teaching us here. Paul’s thought can be very complex. He uses very long Greek sentences. It takes a lot of work to unpack them. You might have had to diagram sentences when you were in school. That is hard work, and few took much delight in it. However, once the task is complete, we can see how much better we understand. The text we read tonight of three verses is actually one sentence in Greek. It will take some work to decode it.

Every sentence, by definition, makes one main point. The simplest sentence consists of a noun which is called the “subject” and a verb which describes the subject which usually says what the subject is doing or what is being done to the subject. So what we need to do is to find the subject and main verb. In Greek this is easy. The subject is “grace” and the action is “appeared.” Everything else in this long sentence says something related to either “grace” or “appeared.”

The Greek sentence actually starts with the verb “appeared.” Greek is not dependent upon word order like English. However, Greek tends to use word order similar to English. When a word is put out of place, it makes the word emphatic. So “appeared” is put in the spotlight. Grace “APPEARED.” The actual Greek word here is the verb form of “Epiphany.” We can think of a Sunday coming up in two weeks called “Epiphany Sunday.” On that Sunday, we remember the Word of God going out to the Gentiles. We thing of the Wise Men coming from the East because of the appearance of a special star which guided them to Bethlehem. The simple past tense tells us about a specific event. And that event is that Jesus came to earth. We are brought back to the story of Jesus whose earthly journey started in Bethlehem.