December 24, 2021 “Time for Hope” – Titus 2:11-14

Titus 2:11-14
“Time for Hope”
December 24, 2021 – Christmas Eve

Perhaps like some of you, I’m hoping for snow. After we all get home tonight and everyone’s travel is done tomorrow, and Christmas has arrived, it would be sweet to sit in a warm room and watch white wonder fall from the sky. And I probably get lots of “bad pastor” marks for this, but I’m also kind of hoping that the snow will have us all staying home this Sunday morning, the day after Christmas. We can “come to church” on Zoom, sitting in a comfortable chair and sipping coffee or hot chocolate.

Yet I have to admit that my snowy hope for this weekend comes from a place of privilege, from the point of view of someone living in a nice heated house with a pantry full of food. Many others around us—you’ve seen them in tents lining our streets and filling green spaces around the city—are not hoping for snow at all. It will be misery rather than beauty for them. So I’m chastened to realize that, for their sake, I ought not to be hoping for snow at all. Fortunately, we all have something else for which to hope.

Verse 13 of our text from Titus says that we are waiting for “the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.” The celebration of Christmas is full of all sorts of hopes, but the essential one is to hope in Jesus. Like all the decorations hung on a Christmas tree, all our other hopes hang upon our hope in Him.

We are celebrating tonight because that hope in and for Jesus has already been in part fulfilled. Verse 11 tells us “the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people.” Through the baby in the stable, God’s grace has been shown to us. The Bible says, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.” His grace offers salvation to anyone who will receive it. When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, grace was born into our world, and so was hope.

Grace is God’s recognition that you and I, along with the rest of the human race, are pretty hopeless creatures. As much as we would like to be nice people, to do good things, to make our world a beautiful, peaceful place, we keep fouling it up. Many times we are just plain mean or lazy or selfish. We yell at a neighbor or leave a mess for someone else to clean up or spend a lot on ourselves without sharing. We hope for that which may bring us pleasure but may just leave others wet and cold on a freezing night. Many of the problems of the world are really just the same kind of thing on a bigger scale. Selfishness and sin is multiplied on the scale of nations, of continents. On our own, we’re hopeless sinners.

The coming of Jesus is the good news that no one has to remain hopeless. We do not have to remain hopelessly on our own, lost and messed up and failing over and over. When the angel appeared in the sky over a sheep pasture in Israel, he brought “good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people. Unto you is born this day… a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” Those words were first spoken to poor men sleeping outside on a cold night. In the form of a newborn infant, God sent grace and hope to everyone, including those in the roughest circumstances. And that changes everything.

Grace is the blessed hope that change is possible, because, says verse 12, grace teaches us to say “No.” How many times have you and I said, “I just can’t say ‘No’?” You may have said “Yes” to a half a dozen Christmas cookies too many or to an expensive pleasure you can’t really afford or to an opportunity to exact a little pain from someone who hurt you. On our own, by ourselves, we just cannot say “No” to all those ways we go wrong and damage our own lives and the lives of others. Only grace teaches us to say “No,” and turn away from the old, messed up way of living to embrace something better.

The invitation to “self-controlled, upright and godly lives,” which finishes out verse 12 seems like a pretty bland and uptight theme for Christmas Eve. But pause and think about what a gift it would be to have lives like that rather than the alternative of ungodliness and unbridled passion. What a gift it would be to have control of one’s behavior, to be able to know in your heart that you’ve done what’s right, to be able stand before the Lord with a clear conscience. The gift of Christ’s grace helps us make that change.

Growing up, one item I expected to find in my stocking every Christmas was a new toothbrush. It was not at all my favorite gift, a pretty bland present. I would pull it out, note that it was blue, and set it aside. Yet it made a difference. Christmas evening, before I went to bed, I took the old brush, with its worn, flattened bristles, out of the little rack in the bathroom and threw it in the trash. Then I tore the cellophane off, opened the little box and got to work with a fresh, crisp replacement. My teeth felt a little cleaner when I finished, rinsed off my new brush and dropped it fresh into its slot.

I don’t mean to compare Jesus to a new toothbrush, but the baby born two millennia ago was the Christmas gift of a replacement life. He grew into a fresh, upright, new kind of human being. Tempted, just like you and I are, He said “No” to all the life-destroying choices you and I make. Instead, He formed in Himself just the kind of life we’ve always wanted. Jesus Christ brought into the world and, if we let Him, into our lives, a perfect humanity. His life is God’s gracious replacement for the flat, worn out, broken messes we’ve made of ourselves. By giving us the life of Jesus, God makes it possible for us to say “No” to all that is old and awful in ourselves, and to say “Yes” to a brand new life in Him.

Still, if all we have is Christmas, why bother with it? Both my wife’s parents had dentures. So Beth grew up fully expecting to lose all her teeth by the time she was forty or so. So she had little motivation for dental care, for experiencing even the bland little pleasure I got from a new toothbrush. Why go to the trouble if nothing comes of it in the long run, if you’re going to end up toothless anyway? But with a little hope for your teeth, toothbrushes are maybe a bit more exciting, because they make a real difference.

You we might wonder why it makes sense to say “No” to any of life’s pleasures or to any of its sins, if we all end up the same way, not only toothless, but tired and old and dying? Why give up the satisfaction of revenge, the sweetness of illicit love, the pleasure of getting ahead at someone else’s expense, unless giving up such things really makes a difference in the end? That’s why, here at Christmas, Titus reminds us that Jesus didn’t just appear once. He will appear again. We receive and begin a new way of life in Christ as, according to verse 13, “we wait for the blessed hope—the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

Christmas is one side of a pair of holy bookends which hold together new and changed human life. Because Jesus came the first time, you and I live in an age of grace and forgiveness and reconciliation. Because He is coming again, we have the hope of that new life made complete and perfect when He returns to us. We spend a lot of effort and time looking forward to Christmas, but the great thing is that Christmas allows to look forward to eternity, when He comes again.

In the meantime, we have these old, worn-down, ruined selves awaiting change, awaiting some new bristles to brush away all that is still wrong with us. When we take a hard look at ourselves, we may wonder why we’re selfishly stuffing our faces and singing happy songs while those around us are hungry and struggling. Yet Christmas comes around to remind us of the grace we have right now, the grace that means we can always begin again, always find renewal and new life, always have hope.

Verse 14 begins by telling us Jesus is the one “who gave himself for us.” Times have changed, but day after tomorrow or maybe on-line on Christmas itself, people will start returning presents they didn’t like or need or want for something better, or using gift cards to purchase actual gifts. You may exchange a blouse that doesn’t fit or buy a television marked down for after-Christmas sale. “Boxing Day,” as they call it in Canada and England, is often for us a day to exchange for something else whatever came in a box. Yet the greatest exchange of unwanted items for wanted gifts happened on the first Christmas.

Our Savior exchanged His life for ours. He gave up the glory and comfort of heaven to take up our weak and painful existence. He put His own pleasure and benefit down on the counter and picked up your sorrow and suffering. Jesus gave up His life in order to redeem yours. Becoming human, God the Son swapped His own eternal, perfect and joyful life for the short, sinful and often sad life we experience, so that you and I may swap our troubled lives for His blessed and holy one.

Christmas is an opportunity for everyone—because God’s grace offers salvation to everyone—to make a priceless exchange. Jesus is exchanging lives with you. Give Him your life and He will give you His. Send in to Him all your broken, defective, cheap, gaudy, plastic merchandise you thought was real living. Ask Him to replace it with something better. He will. He already has. It is His own blessed human life, begun at Christmas.

We have hope, because that’s the heart and soul of Christmas. “The grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people.” That’s our hope, not gifts nor a snowy white Christmas nor even happy times with friends and family. Our hope is that God sent His Son to bring us into a better life by make our lives actually better. Not better in the sense of being more comfortable and well off, but better in that “self-controlled, upright and godly” way. The hope Jesus offers is the hope that in Him you and I may be better people.

Living in that hope makes a difference. It makes us different. It makes us want to brush our teeth and brush the dirt off of our souls. It makes want to be the new people that Christ came to make us. As verse 14 says, He gave Himself “to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.”

Christmas can bring out the best in people. You find people a little more kind, a little more patient, a little more generous with those in need. It will move some of us to volunteer at the Warming Center shelters that will almost surely open as next week begins. That’s what God meant Christmas to do, to change us, not in a private, sentimental sort of way, but in a gracious, generous, justice-loving sort of way. God’s gift of Jesus is a lasting exchange of His life for our lives, raising us up into a life much greater and morally better than we had before. The birth of God’s Son is a miracle which gives us the hope of being far more, far better than we are now.

It’s happening. Sometimes I’m not as sure as I’d like to be that it’s happening in me, but I believe it because I see it happening in many of you, “people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.” Even though we can’t host a Warming Center here right now, some of you still team with other Christians and people of good will to shelter those who have no homes. Others of you have reached out to those new parents who, like Mary and Joseph, recently brought a baby into the dark of winter with a difficult delivery. You’ve comforted those who are hurting, given rides and shown love to those who can no longer drive. Beth and I have often received your kindness and love. By the grace of Jesus Christ, God is truly making you into “people who are his very own, eager to do good.”

Yet let us remember that Christmas and what follows is not founded on what we do, no matter how good. It is grace. It is a gift. Christmas is God’s gift to tired, confused, imperfect people who by themselves are always getting life wrong. It’s only by the grace that was born in Bethlehem that there’s any hope for us to change. It’s by that grace of Jesus who was born and died and rose again that we have the hope of being something new.

This wet dark night, with a pandemic surging around us, and snow about to fall on people sleeping outside, and a sense of deep uncertainty about the future of our nation, of the climate, of the earth itself, it’s easy to wonder, even to say, “Is there any hope for the world?” The answer of Christmas is that there is hope, there is peace for the world, because there is hope for us, hope that in Jesus you and I can still be made something more pure, something more kind, something more filled with love, something better than we are.

Go ahead and hope for snow to come down and cover the ground tomorrow. I will likely keep hoping that too. But hope even more for grace to come down in Jesus to cover all our sins and to wash them away more like pouring rain than like snow. Hope not just for the peace of a beautiful winter landscape, but for the peace with which God wants to bless every person on earth, especially those who poor and cold and lonely tonight. Hope not just for a good life in days to come, but for a life in which you are eager to do good. That is a Christmas hope, a hope that we may be people worthy of the salvation Jesus brought us, people who truly and clearly belong to God. May such hope be yours and mine tonight. A blessed, merry, and hopeful Christmas to you all.

Amen.