St. George's Sermons

The Rev. Brett Cane, April 2, 2000

Introduction

On Palm Sunday, we move the position of the sermon so that it acts as a bridge between the joyful welcome of Jesus as king and the vicious rejection of Jesus in the crucifixion. We ourselves go from shouting, "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!" to "Crucify Him! Crucify Him!" in the same service.

But, this year, the sermon itself deals with the issue of bridge-building as we come to the end of our series on "Building Bridges". We have seen how God calls us to be bridge-builders, we have looked at building bridges between Jews and Christians, French and English, Black and White, and our faith and our wallets; today we look at bridging the greatest gulf of them all - between God and us. As we shall see, this is what Palm Sunday, Holy Week and Easter are all about.

The first thing we need to look at is do we have a need for a bridge to God? For some people, God is like a jovial celestial Santa Claus who looks over the balcony of heaven, feels positive about everything, and says, "boys will be boys" and "girls will be girls". Such people think that most people are well-intentioned and basically good and we will all be in heaven together, except perhaps for the really bad folk like Hitler and Stalin...and Saddam Hussein and some of the people on the wrong side in Bosnia...and probably the really nasty criminals in our jails...and maybe the seriously abusive parents...and many who were on the other side of the wars we have fought...or even those who have seriously hurt us personally...You see, the problem with most people going to heaven is how do you have everyone there without denying the need for justice and repayment for sins that have been committed? Do we just overlook evil and, in that case, we might as well welcome in Hitler and Stalin along with the rest?

But then there are other people who know only too well their own failings and sins. When they think about God, they run away and hide like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (Genes 3: 8). They know they can not stand before a holy God because of their rebellion and self-centredness. Then there are others who see themselves as having little worth and of being of no interest to God whatever.

The Bible is clear about there being a gulf between us and God. Adam and Eve hid because they knew their disobedience deserved God's wrath. They had doubted his loving best intentions for them and taken matters into their own hands. As a result, their relationship with God had been broken, their spirits had become detached from the Source of their life and they had brought death upon themselves, as God had warned they would (Genesis 2 :17). Paul says it clearly, "Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all, because all sinned" (Romans 5: 12). Just as scientists are now mapping out our inherited traits through the human genome project, so Paul mapped out our "spiritual genes" 2000 years ago. We inherit the tendency to go our own way and not God's and we ratify it with our own self-determined actions. As Paul says elsewhere, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3: 23). Deep in our hearts, we know that there is a great gulf which has opened between us and God.

Humans down through the centuries and across the cultures have sensed this gulf and so the great religions of the world have sought to offer solutions to bridge the gap. There is "the Buddhist eight-fold path, the Hindu doctrine of karma, the Jewish covenant, and Muslim code of law - each of these offers a way to earn approval" says Philip Yancey in his book, What's so Amazing About Grace. To these efforts, we can add the informal bargains many of us make with God - we consider that if we do enough good deeds, they will outweigh our bad ones and let us into his good books again - perhaps.

The Bible is very clear about all such efforts - however noble: "All our righteous acts are like filthy rags" (Isaiah 64: 6) says Isaiah. Jesus told us that our righteousness had to exceed that of the scrupulous Scribes and Pharisees (Matthew 5: 20) and that we must be perfect like God (Matthew 5: 48). Paul sums it up well, "No one will be declared righteous in God's sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin" (Romans 3: 20). All our good deeds, religious efforts, and good intentions can not bridge the gulf that is between us and God.

Now, to some of us, this scenario depicts God as aloof, uncaring and unreachable. Nothing could be further from the Biblical picture of God. When Adam and Eve hide, it is God who comes looking for them. When Cain kills Abel, God's marks Cain so that no one will kill him in revenge. When humanity is lost in paganism, God calls Abraham to father a nation through whom the whole world will be blessed. When Israel is in bondage in Egypt, God sends a reluctant Moses to the rescue. When Israel disobeys God and follows pagan ways, God sends judges and prophets to lead them and call them back to him; even pagan Nineveh and Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar are able to repent at the preaching of Jonah and Daniel. When Israel is exiled to Babylon, God preserves a remnant to return and rebuild the nation.

In the stories of Jesus, when one coin of ten is lost, the owner goes to great lengths to find it; when one sheep of ninety-nine is lost, the shepherd leaves the others to search for the one; when the prodigal son who has despised his father and squandered his inheritance returns expecting to serve as a hired hand, the father is out waiting for him with open arms, ready with a feast to end all feasts to celebrate his return.

All these are pictures of a God who comes looking for us. The Bible is not a story of humanity searching for God - it is the story of God searching for us! But the greatest episode of all is when God comes to earth himself in Jesus, "taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness...and became obedient to death - even death on a cross!" (Philippians 2: 7-8). "He came to his own but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him...he gave the right to become the children of God" (John 1: 12). "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life" (John 3: 16).

It is on the cross where the ultimate giving takes place. It is on the cross that the bridge between God and us is finally built after all these years of preparation. This is why the last week of Jesus' life receives so much attention in the Gospels - 1/4 of Luke, 1/3 of Matthew and Mark and 1/2 of John. This is why this week culminating in the cross and resurrection is the most important in the Christian Year. Because it is on the cross that we see what God is really like - total self-giving love - the Creator of the Universe dying in the place of his creatures - building the bridge for us that we could not build for ourselves. It is on the cross that the broken body and shed blood of Jesus, the Lamb of God, pays for the spiritual debts we have incurred, restores the friendship with God we have broken, sets us free from the chain of sins we have forged, cleanses us from the impurities with which we have been stained, removes the charges for which we are guilty, suffers the alienation our rebellion has caused, and takes the punishment we have deserved. As John beautifully summarizes it: "This is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins" (1 John 4: 10).

In Christ, God built the bridge that we could cross over back to him. Have you crossed that bridge?