Titus 2.1-10
Wethersfield Evangelical Free Church
7 July 2024
We’re in the midst of a series of messages entitled Show the Beauty of Christ … Church and Culture. Today’s message bears the title ‘Agents of Transformation: A New Household’. Our text from the Bible today is Titus 2.1-10. This is what it says:
But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine. Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness. Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled. Likewise, urge the younger men to be self-controlled. Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works, and in your teaching show integrity, dignity, and sound speech that cannot be condemned, so that an opponent may be put to shame, having nothing evil to say about us. Bondservants are to be submissive to their own masters in everything; they are to be well-pleasing, not argumentative, not pilfering, but showing all good faith, so that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.
(Titus 2:1-10 ESV)
Pastor Scott always gives me the toughest texts….
Clearly, this is a text about family, although maybe not as closely defined as our revered concept of nuclear family.
We begin in family, at least biologically speaking. It’s in the coming together of a biological father and a biological mother that we begin our life as human beings. We pass in that unremembered moment from the mind of God to this place of space and time. In most cases, we end our earthy lives in the company of family, whether remembered or resented. Everywhere in between we are at least partially defined by these people who share blood or a fateful decision with us.
Yet the apostle is strangely unsentimental about family. He doesn’t write, as I heard said at the funeral of a cousin last week, that it all comes down to blood. Family is what matters.
Convinced as Paul is that the gospel of Jesus has the strongest implications for how followers of Jesus do family, Paul doesn’t elevate family to that absolute, iconic level that popular culture and sometimes popular Christian culture does. Paul does not worship family or come anything close to that. He does not imagine that the integrity of our faith stands or falls on the condition of our family, though he does ask that church leaders show evidence of good parenting. Paul does not isolate ‘the nuclear family’ from its context of our wider network of relationships. There’s no gauzy focus on the camera when this apostle turns to matters of family.
But we can say one thing about Paul’s instruction regarding family, whether here in the little book of Titus or elsewhere in his writings: When he turns to how we work out our faith in Jesus, he begins with family. When we peer out from the angle of our own human heart, family is the closest thing. It is, as a friend of mine likes to say about other priorities, it’s the wolf closest to our sled. It’s our near horizon. It’s our starting point for the hard and often unromantic adventure of living as Jesus would have us live in this life that he has given to us.
I suppose that there’s not a man or woman who stands to teach about familiy in a context like ours this morning who doesn’t feel their own inability to live up to an idealized version of what family supposed to look like. Let me say right from the start that I experience being a family man as a source of constant challenge as well as joy and belonging.
Some of you are aware that trying to find my place here in Connecticut in the family I’ve married into is one of the primary challenges of my own little life. There have been tears as I’ve tried to figure out what it means to be husband, stepfather, step-grandfather, and brother in our very non-ideal, wildly eclectic, ruthlessly bizarre, occasionally hilarious family.
So I for one welcome Paul’s unsentimental take on what it means to live out Christian integrity in a context where things are complicated and answers are not easy.
Here’s another complicating factor: If we insist on approaching today’s text with the idea that our social arrangements today represent the unquestioned pinnacle of human achievement, then there’s a lot not to like in this passage.
Paul tolerates slavery. Now this may not be like the horrific slavery along racial lines that we’ve known in this country, where a White man owned a Black man for no other reason than the color of their skin. And it may not be the cruel slavery that chains up more human beings today than ever before in human history
The organization Walk Free runs something called the Global Slavery Index: Here’s what they have to say:
An estimated 50 million people were living in modern slavery on any given day in 2021. This is nearly one in every 150 people in the world. Modern slavery is hidden in plain sight and is deeply intertwined with life in every corner of the world.
Slavery today includes sex trafficking of adults, child sex trafficking, forced labor in the form of bonded labor or debt bondage, and the recruitment and use of child soldiers.
The slavery Paul does not directly oppose is a more benign arrangement that any of this. In some cases we might argue that bondservice—a more accurate word than ‘slavery’ for what Paul is talking about—is a mechanism that allows a person to work there way out of a debt brought on them by some calamity. But the stubborn fact remains that even the slavery, or bondservice, of Paul’s day consists of the control of one human being’s life by another without consent. It would be easy for us to find in Paul some retrograde, soul-darkened, ethical monster, unworthy of our time and attention. For some, this is especially the case because this apostle purports to speak in the name of God without opposing this evil and even while giving instructions for bondservants to submit to it.
Maybe it’s even more likely that we’d take offense from Paul’s instructions for women to submit to men, or at least for wives to submit to their husbands. We might wonder where he comes off being that kind of sexist and why we would still find it acceptable to take our instruction from such a man.
I think either reaction would be mistaken. But I also find them understandable.
Paul is speaking from and to another time, and it’s up to us to find the enduring truth for our moment in how he advises his young disciple Timothy to shape the community he’s been tasked with shepherding.
That is hard work. But let’s give it our best this morning.
First of all, I don’t think Paul’s intention here is to provide a precise set of role categories and ask people to stay inside their box. Paul may or may not go at things in that way in other passages. It’s not what he’s doing here.
He’s working with his guy Titus to shape Christian communities for the long haul. He’s looking for health, survivability, and minimal conflict. Some might say minimal drama.
If you can take that opinion on faith just to get us started, then let me try to work out its implications.
I’m not big on quoting strange languages from up here, but I think in this case it’s worth doing so.
Paul deploys a Greek word twice here, in verse 1 and then again in verse 2. The word is ὑγιαίνω. If you have a brain wired for language, you might hear our word ‘hygiene’ in there. That’s not an accident. The word has to do with health or what an earlier generation of English speakers might have called soundness.
Ὑγιαίνω appears twice = ‘sound doctrine’ (1) and ‘sound in faith’ (2). Paul is signalling that his concern is not principally theoretical. It’s pragmatic. It’s about health.
In Paul’s ethical instruction, Christian practice starts from where we are, not from an idealized, imagined neutrality/perfection. In fact, if you happen to be reading the English Standard Version with notes in the margins or at the foot of the page, you’ll see that I’m not the only person who reads verses 1 and 2 this way. If you to happen to have those notes, you’ll read…
But as for you (Titus), teach what accords with sound doctrine.
Just after the word ‘sound’, you’ll see a number (it’s probably a little number ‘1’) that will direct you to the footnotes or marginal notes. There, you’ll see the words ‘or healthy’. Then, in verse 2, you’ll read this:
Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, psound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness.
Just in front of the word ‘sound’ you’ll see a small letter (probably a p). It will direct you to a note that points you back to that comment in verse 1. What it’s telling you is that the Greek word ὑγιαίνω in both verses is possibly best understood in our English today as ‘healthy’ rather than ‘sound’. And that what Paul is talking about is not a rigid code of doctrine or behavior but rather a way of life in a household that is healthy … that produces wholeness instead of disease … life instead of death … peace instead of conflict. This is how I believe we’re to understand this entire body of instruction for members of households.
Let me take an illustration from the life of, well bugs:
Christians don’t have exoskeletons, we have endoskeletons.
When we’re at our best, we don’t wear a set of doctrines around like outerwear or clothing or an exoskeleton. Rather, we internalize these truths, these realities. They come to form who we are as human beings so that we can interact with each other and with those outside the faith as the human beings creating in God’s image that we are constantly becoming.
The passion that generates this passage is not doctrinal precision, but rather the desire to see a community that can survive its hostile environment and engage in gospel conversations with its neighbors.
So what is Paul’s end-game if it’s not doctrinal precision? This may seem like a trivial question when we haven’t really even examined the text yet. But I think it’s a critical one.
Paul is not a social revolutionary. But he is revolutionary in his own way. The thing is, he’s an incrementalrevolutionary. Paul is confident that the kingdom of God is breaking in and that God’s grace is relentless and will show itself to be triumphant. As a result, Paul is willing to let some sleeping dogs lie. Not all of them. But some of them. Like bond-service.
The apostle, I am sure, has no stomach for the subjection of women or slaves. He knows that slavery and subjection are not God’s design, but rather are the way things are for now in a fallen world. And he’s willing to allow the power of grace to take its good old time undermining the forces that would subject slaves to masters and wives to their husbands.
Now please hear me out, because I could be misunderstood on this point. I am not saying that there are not different roles assigned to men and women in the design of God. We can discuss that and perhaps even come to different conclusions about that and about how that should work out in our families. For those who like technical terms for this kind of thing, we are as a church body ‘soft complementarians’. We are capable of managing different opinions about how exactly our understanding of general roles, for example, should work out. By my lights, that’s normal and that’s healthy. I have a position on such things, but I defer to our agreed stance as a congregation of believers seeking to be obedient to Christ.
What I’m driving at here is that I don’t think Paul’s intention in his instruction to Titus is to fine-tune rules and social arrangements with precision. If it were, we wouldn’t have the book of Philemon, where he urges a Christian slave to gain his freedom if he possibly can.
So if Paul is not trying to work out a precise map of social arrangements, what is his end game? Why is he dedicating ink and energy and persuasive power to a passage like this?
He’s trying to help Titus shape a Christian community that can survive and even thrive in its context, warts and all, so that it can be the bearer of the life of Christ for the looooooong haul.
He’s building into social arrangements two critical new elements: grace and self-denial.
And he’s counseling older men and younger men, older women and younger women, slaves (and elsewhere slave-owners) on one absolutely critical point: This is not about you!
You can stop fighting and stop defending yourselves. Just breathe.
As a community, Paul is saying, each one of you needs to live in a way that makes the gospel of Jesus Christ attractive to others. A life together that nourishes those gospel conversations.
===========
This is not the spirit of our argumentative age. And if you’re a committed progressive or a nostalgic conservative, you will not be happy with me this morning. And that’s OK.
=============
I believe Paul is speaking to the ‘pinch points’ of the household roles of his day. In my opinion, these ‘pinch points’ change somewhat as cultures evolve, yet I think they’re remarkably durable. In fact, I think most of us can see probably see ourselves and our own pinch points in the role Paul mentions that corresponds to ourplacement in our households. Probably not all of us, but many of us. Even if we can’t see ourselves in this text, the apostle’s instruction won’t be lost on us even if our own circumstances don’t exactly fit the ones he mentions.
So Paul works his way through the most common household roles and identifies pinch points that are going to require God’s grace and a self-denying effort on our part if we’re going to successfully negotiate the challenges they represent. Now I want to be transparent about this list. Honestly, there’s not that much that is novel or creative in them. We have ‘household codes’ very much like these from Greco-Roman culture at the time Paul was writing. Formally, they’re very similar to what we have here in Titus 2.1-10.
But in spite of this formal similarity between what the culture produced as a norm and Paul’s instruction to Titus, there is one big difference: In every case, Paul is telling household members to forget themselves and their claimable rights in behalf of a community that can survive and thrive and bear the gospel into gospel conversations in their generation. These are households that may seem rather ordinary from the outside, and yet are becoming genuine agents of transformation.
Let’s see whether you agree with me about those pinch points. We’ll start, as Paul does, with us old dudes:
1 But as for you, teach what accords with psound1 doctrine. 2 Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, psound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness.
I don’t know exactly what age range of men Paul had in mind with his expression translated ‘older men’. Life expectancies were different from what we know today. But I’m confident he was thinking of men whose age means they are no longer starting out in life. Their life has been consolidated or at least should have become consolidated by this age. They’re not anticipating any radical new directions. It’s safe to presume that the good ones among them are community pillars that others can lean on when necessary.
What does he want from these older guys?
He wants them to be…
- Sober-minded
- Dignified
- Self-controlled
- Healthy in faith, in love, and in steadfastness.
Do you see what’s happening here?
Paul is not cutting against the grain of normal life patterns here. He’s very much working with the grain.
You should be able to count on an older man to be like this. It’s natural.
The problem is that you sometimes can’t and that’s why Titus needs to instruct them.
Because an old dude like me can start to act out on his fantasies of stuff he’d always wanted to do but never did … to be driven by his disappointments … to resent his compromises … to become erratic: this is true professionally. It’s true romantically and sexually. It’s true financially.
You know the old trope about the new wife and the red Corvette convertible with the old guy hanging out of it? It’s a trope for a reason!
Men who are not sober do stuff like that. They break out like old fools and become useless to their communities because they only think about themselves. They look ridiculous when they live like this, but they’re the last ones to know.
Or, more commonly—because I didn’t see many red Corvettes in the parking lot this morning—we old guys become cantankerous and curmudgeonly and a pain in the butt to be around. Always complaining. We become Clint Eastwood saying ‘get off my lawn’, only without the coolness of Clint.
So Paul says, Titus, look, let’s be real: you gotta’ exhort your old guys to be healthy in faith, in love, and in steadfastness. You gotta’ help them stop thinking about themselves all the time! Even though you’re young, you gotta’ walk with them as they learn to become pillars for their community rather than fusty old opinionated annoyances.
Pinch points. Paul’s instruction helps Christian older men become what we naturally should become, but we don’t always do it.
Do you see?
Let’s work our way down the list.
Now I’m gonna’ be a little more careful with these, because I don’t belong to these other categoreis. If you find any caricaturing in these next pinch points, don’t shoot the messenger. Your beef is with the apostle, not with me.
Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers nor slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, 4 and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, 5 to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled. 6
When you see an older woman who’s been shaped by this instruction, you recognize her immediately. I think so, at least. I’m not going to make any diagnostic observations about older women who are irreverent … or slanderers … or winos. Far be it from me. I see enough of that behavior in us guys. But I will note that I’ve seen at least five articles over the past five years about mommies who need their wine to get through the day. And I’ve overheard enough conversations of women in my circles to know that gossip and slander are not uncommon. There’s an easy-to-cite trope for each of these things, of course, and when they are turned against women in a general way they are cruel. And inaccurate. But the trope exists for a reason. I think Paul is touching on some sore spots here that most of us can probably recognize.
Because Paul is unsentimental about Christian families and Christians in families and Christian community, he feels no obligation to deny that this kind of regrettable behavior is present and accounted for. He doesn’t throw dust in the air or get all dramatic shout that ‘they aren’t real Christians!’. But he wants this young pastor Titus to be situationally aware, and to be intentional towards the women in his community so that they are the best human beings and, yes, the best role models possible.
Do you note that he wants these women to work on their own stuff? (Here we merge into the third group Paul addresses, the young women.)
He wants the older women to be such accessible … attractive … lovable people that young women will learn through them to love their husbands and children. You might think that’s an odd ambition. Don’t they alreadylove their husbands and their children?
I think Paul’s point is more nuanced, as is almost always the case when we’re trying to understand this man. He’s talking about loving the man and the kids who are right there under her nose, not getting caught up in fantasies about a different guy and more accomplished or obedient or gorgeous children than these ordinary, snotty-nosed ones who crowd her days. Remember, he’s unsentimental and very realistic.
Now please don’t get hung up on the language that is translated in the English Standard Version as ‘working at home’ (οἰκουργοὺς) in verse 5. Paul is not arguing that these young women should not go out and get a job. That’s not the economy that he or they were living in and few of them would have had any such opportunity. Most of the guys will have worked at home as well.
Paul’s point is not that. He’s saying that these young women should be industrious where life has placed them, that they should take care of the business that is right there in front of them rather than running around in search of more interesting errands and conversations.
You may or may not like Paul’s exhortation that these young women should be submissive to their husbands. That’s material for a much larger conversation. But I would ask you to at least consider that the kind of family atmosphere that will not cause ‘the word of God to be reviled (5)’ is one where there is unity of purpose. And that in Paul’s world—arguably in our own as well, but I don’t see that as a conversation to be had on a morning like this and via a monologue like this—a kind of submission to a common purpose is the best available counsel.
Paul has only one word of advice for Titus in dealing with ‘the young men’.:
Likewise, urge the younger men to be self-controlled.
Those savages….
But if you’ve only got one thing to say to a young man, doesn’t it make sense that it should be this one thing? I think so. How many of the disqualifying, non-community-building mistakes of young men come down to the absence of self-control. Maybe almost all of them?
Then finally those slaves or bondservants.
Paul never even mentions their masters here, although he certainly does in other places.
Here’s Paul’s realism again:
Bondservants are to be submissive to their own masters ein everything; they are to be well-pleasing, not argumentative, 10 not pilfering, fbut showing all good faith, so that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.
Paul’s failure to condemn slavery here drives … people … crazy.
For many, it makes Paul and Christian faith complicit in this evil.
And yet Paul’s approach eventually won the day, at least in this country—not without immense pain and suffering and egregious hypocrisy—as the master and the slave discovered that they were brothers. We may think Paul should have taken another course here. But this is the counsel he gave.
He is playing the long game. He knows the power of the gospel to triumph and he knows that God’s metronome sometimes beats slowly.
How then shall we draw this to a close?
Paul’s instructions for households that want to become agents of transformation is not complex. It’s difficult, but not complex.
- Start where you are.
- Ask God for grace.
- Forget yourself.
- Love the ones closest to you.
Are there qualifications and conditions and some households that justify getting out of there before somebody gets hurt or killed? Of course.
For most of us, that is not our situation. Those of us fortunate to live ordinary lives in unremarkable households seek God’s power to love those closest to us. It’s where Christian practice always … inescapably … begins. It’s the wolf closest to the sled. It’s the way of Jesus.
May it be our way, too.
Canter Bridge 