Palm Sunday — Truth Roadshow

Anybody remember that old saying that one man's trash is another man's treasure? Where on TV is that more obvious than on The Antiques Roadshow? Have you ever noticed that sometimes the antiques experts, the appraisers, will take the wind right out of the sails of somebody’s antique dreams? What somebody thought was a treasure, turns out to be a fake. On the other hand, there are times when an antique buff was convinced that what they had was the real thing, and the expert confirmed it. And on rare occasions, what somebody thought was junk turns out to be a treasure.

Isn’t it interesting that some surprising sources in our world may trash the truth of Jesus Christ and ridicule Jesus for claiming to be the truth? It doesn’t matter, though. Because he is the treasure. His truth endures to every generation.

There are pundits who will tell us that there is nothing in life that is true any more. There are people who’ll say to Christians,"What planet are you guys from?" Because today, in some circles, "truth" is no longer solid and relevant. We hear it from our courts. If you question some of the candidates in the upcoming federal election you’ll hear it. We can watch it as examinations into the "Adgate" scandal in Ottawa continue. Truth is whatever anybody wants to believe, isn't it? Aren’t we told that everyone is entitled to his or her own truth claims? You can figure out what's true for you, and I can figure out what's true for me. But we’ve come to accept, haven’t we, that "There is no true truth."

We Christians take a big hit on this. Particularly in churches like Paris Presbyterian. We're looked on by some as being bigoted and narrow and arrogant, because we claim that there is truth, and that it can be known.

I thought of this when we were driving through Wisconsin on the way to Minneapolis one summer. On National Public Radio there was a feisty discussion that had broken out into a quarrel. One speaker was saying that he had a problem with people who believe in absolutes. "Fundamentalists!" was the word he spat out. Like one Canadian novelist does in her Handmaid’s Tale, he painted Christians with the same colours as radical Islamic terrorists. Christians, he said, exist to terrorize and control people. As we drove up Interstate 94, there were some antique bi-planes doing stunts overhead. They depended absolutely on some of the unchanging laws of aerodynamics to stay in the air. So I wondered. The program host said that it should be a punishable crime to believe and to teach that there are some things in life that are absolutely true. Was he absolutely right to say that? Was his claim an absolutely true claim? I felt like I was hearing the guy on the radio stand up and castigate me for being an arrogant bigot. Incidentally, doesn’t the electronic medium called radio depend on some absolute truths in order to work?

But there was something that he didn't understand. We Christians just don't just waltz through life, and shake our heads, so that twenty absolutes fall out. We don’t say "let’s hit other people over the head with these imaginary truths that we have conjured up." It's far deeper than that. We believe in truth, because we believe in God. We believe that there is truth in this world because we believe in a God who is true. We have humbled ourselves before the presupposition that God is a true God. Everything that comes from God is truth. If it’s not true, it’s not from God. We have claimed that by faith. Therefore, we embrace not our own concoctions, but we embrace a personal God. There is a whole lot that we don’t know. And there’s a whole lot that other religions know that we don’t know. But we, along with every human being on the face of the earth, can know God in a personal way, the God who is true and who has revealed his truth.
I take great strength from what the psalmist says in Psalm 100:5. It says, "And his faithfulness endures to all generations." It means that God is truth. And because God is truth, He will be true to you in a very personal way. How do you know that? Only by tasting to see if the Lord is good. That reliable, truthful God endures to all generations. He doesn’t come and go like clothing fads, or musical styles, or political notions. Get yourself in the mainstream of truth, and it's going to last a long, long time if it's God's truth. And that's a wonderful thing.

I haven’t been there, but I’m told that in Moscow across from the Bolshoi Theater, there is a long stone slab on which are pictures of Marx and Lenin. Between the two pictures on this stone slab, chiselled in the stone are these words, referring to Marx and Lenin: "Their words are true, and they will last forever." I guess if a period of seventy years is forever, the words of Marx and Lenin did last forever. But it’s possible to know that since the very beginning of time there has been a true God. And that true God has given us truth. To be in that mainstream that flows out of the life of God himself is an eternal, enduring reality. Enduring, by the way, for more than 70 years.

So here at Paris Presbyterian Church, everything is based on two assumptions. Assumption one: we take by faith that there is a God. And by the way, that's not a blind leap. The world of modern science as we know it began, by and large, with devout people whose faith was in God. They invented nothing. They discovered what others had known from the beginning. They discovered the truth that the Psalmist discovered, "The heavens are telling the glory of God. The earth advertizes his handiwork." As scientists go deeper and deeper into the microcosm of our creation, many bow in reverence because the evidence leads them to the feet of an ancient reliable God. And when we entrust our lives, our days, our relationships, our destiny to that God in a very personal way, we discover for ourselves that His love is reliable. It is true.
Assumption number two. This brilliant, intelligent God who is reflected in a brilliant, intelligent, orderly universe doesn’t play hide-and-seek from us. But this God revealed himself and all of his truth in a human life named Jesus, and in this book called the Word of God. In Jesus on the Cross, God faced the full dark powers of evil, and bore the full brunt of it. When we see Jesus, we see God. We see him riding without pizzaz, on a donkey. That is God, coming among us to serve us. That same crowd that cheers and huzzahs on Palm Sunday comes back the next week. Then it howls and spits and drags him through the streets in a barbaric, evil scene that was recalled in Fallujah Iraq last week. When we see that, we know that there is no experience of anybody’s life anywhere from which God is willingly absent. That's not a blind leap of faith either, because the evidences for the divine nature of Jesus and evidences of the reliability of this book are multiplied.

We as a church embrace those evidences. We want to teach the truth that this is not a random world, subject only to the survival of the fittest, and the triumph of evil. This is a well-ordered world where God, a loving, compassionate, God will never abandon us. And Jesus, by his creative power, holds the whole thing together. One reliable truth of God is that there is worth and dignity in every single human being. And there is purpose and meaning for your life. There is hope for you, and there is a future for you. And we boldly proclaim that truth of God to you in this church without shame. Because God is true, and he has revealed his truth in his Word. Here at Paris Presbyterian Church you'll get something you can hang onto for the rest of your life and be sure about. "This is a faithful saying, and worthy of acceptance by everybody, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners." That rules out arrogance. Because that same God is at work in every part of our world among every language and every tribe and every nation.

He is at work here today, drawing you and me to himself. Because of that truthful God, in a confusing and sometimes crackpot world, we may trust him. Because when all else changes, when all else dumps us into despair, he remains true and faithful and just and good.