II. THE WORLD IS NOT FAIR – IT’S UNJUST, EVEN WHEN WE TRY OUR BEST

There is fairness and the lack of it in the spheres of justice. Our Nation is in many ways ruled by un-elected judges - in a democracy yet, where they are appointed. But, with respect, they may have (and I think have) made decisions with which we don’t agree. We’re not convinced they’re always right in their judgments. Who could be? Our church movie-night group went to see the movie, 'Bridge of Spies' - of a story depicting the Cold War of the late 1950’s when an American lawyer (played by Tom Hanks) is recruited to first defend an arrested Soviet spy in court, and then help the CIA facilitate an exchange of the spy for the American U2 spy plane pilot, Gary Powers, whom the Soviets had shot down as he filmed Russia from a very high altitude. Afterwards, our discussion included focus on the ethics of a judge who wants to give due process to an accused spy but who believes he really is a spy. He tells the prosecutor to go through the motions of a fair trial and for the defense attorney to suck it up and let it be that he be found guilty, because after all, 'he’s guilty!' What if a judge isn’t just; then what?

The Lady holding the scales of Justice is supposed to be blind – impartial. But is she? What if the injustice system is not fair? What if they get it wrong? - They are human too.

Brokenness, blindness, prejudice, hypocrisy and ignorance can be in our courts as well. The scales are held by Lady Justice (or Justicia) - who is depicted as weighing the case. Her statue symbolizes the measure of a case's support and opposition. You see it at courthouses and in courtrooms. It brings together the attributes of several goddesses who embodied Right Rule for Greeks and Romans. Justicia blends the blind-folded Fortuna (or fate) with the Greek Tyche (for luck) and she carries a sword like the goddess Nemesis (the god of retribution, punishment to remind us of what happens when one gets what one deserves if found guilty of the crime).

III. RIGHT AND WRONG – A CLUE . . .
We wish the world was fairer – more just. We often have within us an enormous sense of injustice. We long for a world where there is perfect in rightness and righteousness, in justice, truth, fairness and liberty for all.

So I’m sitting in English Class, in about grade eleven or so. And we’re studying this essay – this little thought-provoking, philosophical and logical essay and being asked to discuss it. Am I’m more interested in the cute girl in the desk next to me and excited that we’re getting out early this day for a football home-game. But then, somehow my attention is drawn into the discussion and something positive and profound happens in my thinking. Something clicks within me as we interact. We’re studying C. S. Lewis’ -‘Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe.’

It was first given as a radio address and then included in Lewis’ essays and in his printed books such as ‘Mere Christianity’ and ‘The Case for Christianity.' I was raised in a Christian church, a conservative, evangelical congregation; but it has never before occurred to me that there are reasons to believe in God other than because I been told and taught to do so from years of Sunday School lessons and Sunday Sermons. Christians believed it; that made sense, but was there a case for believing in God that even somebody who never darkened the door of a church might acquire, if they thought about it? - if someone pointed it out to them? Lewis thought so and said so – and wrote so. It’s what we call a Christian 'apology.'

Said Lewis (and I'm abridging slightly): “Every one has heard people quarreling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however is sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say thinks like - ‘How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you? . . . That’s my seat, I was there first.’ - Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm’). People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated; children as well as grownups.”

We know what he means. We see, hear and feel this way often regarding the Sports we follow. In hockey, a referee or linesman blows a call and it favours the other team or penalizes ours. Or in baseball, the umpire’s strike zone is not what you and the team you’re rooting for agree on. Or perhaps in your everyday commute, there’s a four-way Stop - and you get there slightly first. And since you’re on the right, you’d be in the right to proceed first through the intersection; but the other person blunders ahead, leaving you to jam on your brakes and think (if not say) some nasty words you’d thought you’d left behind at your conversion. Maybe you think: ‘Where’s a cop when you need one?!’

I mean, how do you feel when someone quickly darts into the mall parking spot for which you were waiting? You’ve been patiently idling, waiting for someone to exit that spot, and this opportunist (to be polite) ignores you and your signal - and slips into the spot. Says Lewis, ‘What interests me about all these remarks is that the one who makes them is not merely saying that the other person’s behaviour does not happen to please him. He’s appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour he expects the other to know about. It looks in fact very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule or fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you’d like to call it, about which they really agreed.”

There are many, many such examples - and they happen almost daily. It seems that everyone innately knows the rules: that there are universal laws and right practices.

IV. COMMON GRACE . . .

Sometimes we notice that some thing or someone is at least leaning in the right direction -leaning, bent toward fairness, justice, getting things right; saying things wisely, helpfully, hope-fully. There’s a whisper, a rumour of Something More – even of Laughter. It's there despite and in the face of evil, injustice, unfairness. There are signs of hope, evidence of grace, for God continues to advance His Kingdom and to restrain evil – not fully or finally yet, but noticeably.

It’s a wonderful world still - a world full of beauty and wonder, with so many mysteries yet to be discovered. And there are people we meet daily who are wonderfully kind and helpful - truth-tellers and fellow-explorers on Life’s Journey, our contemporaries in this time and place. You don’t have to be a Christian to tell the truth, to appreciate beauty or have a sense of the numinous, to be awed and amazed at mystery and wonder all around us. All truth is God’s truth. And an unbeliever – or an innocent little child, an enemy or perfect stranger, may speak the truth and bring the wisdom we need, as does our world.

Again, unbelievers ALSO do good in this world. We think of the discoveries of medicine, science, technology – all a great boon to us all when rightly stewarded, rightly used. And there are the many delights of the arts: music and painting, good drama and movies.

Theologians talk about this common good in the world and label it: ‘common grace.’ They mean that God appearsd to have placed in all His human creatures a kind of moral ‘homing device’ or compass that points towards right, truth and justice, ultimately that points toward God. There's within us all a kind of deep knowing about the way the world really works at best, the way it should be, should work. People may be more or less unaware of this, may fight it; scoff at it and continue their waywardness, war-likeness and abuse; but they have at least an inner restlessness, an unease within - if they're at all honest with themselves in quiet, alone moments. For they know this is not the way things should be, and in very moments of deeper thought, they wonder if this is the way the world could be, even when one is in or from different cultures, even when we choose to ignore these inner thoughts and feelings that we all have.

Common grace is God's gift to all Creation, to all His creatures. But it’s also a world where leaders and rulers scoff and think they can get away with things - and they can and they will, for a while at least. So we need more grace – and more assurance that the wrong will fail and the right prevail.

V. BUT THERE’S MORE GRACE THAN THAT – AVAILABLE

Says St. Paul (in his letter to the Church at Rome): ‘Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.' And, there is a fuller, deeper, richer revelation – that of God’s Word – like the searching poetry of Psalm 2 that explain what’s really going on, sometimes on the surface and often behind the scenes and give due warning and direction if we would escape - or benefit from, the rewards of our faithless or faithful thoughts and actions. God’s Word is revealed through prophecy, poetry, allegory, story, and plain ‘hey! Listen to this!’ It says that God is working still, that He's interested, caring and carrying still in our world, which is first of all and after all: His world. He's still bringing to bear upon His creation His wonder-working, mysterious, steady, interventions. He’s still working all things for good in this world and in the lives of millions of people, as He had through the ages and does still today.

And we believe, some of us, that God has spoken into our own hearts and lives, that He speaks still; that, as Francis Schaeffer used to say: 'He is there and He is not silent.' This has made an incredible difference to us, and most of us want to somehow share it - albeit gently and sensitively, with others.

God is sovereign. God is in control. Through the manner and method of Jesus, God wins in the end. The battle, the outcome is already decided, the outcome sure. The Psalmist uses the image of God laughing - O, the absurdity . . . as if anyone could really stand up to God and thwart His will so as to ultimately win against Him. Why God allows what He allows temporarily, we cannot say; but this is not all He wrote. Evil will not win.

Through Jesus, God wins – and we too, who have entrusted to Him our lives. He says of Messiah: “I have installed my king on Zion, my holy mountain. will proclaim the LORD’s decree: He said to me, “You are my son; today I have become your father. Ask me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession. You will break them with a rod of iron; you will dash them to pieces like pottery.”

There’s News to share – Good News we say (Gospel) - though it's sometimes side-by-side with bad news, where there's ongoing unbelief and rebellion against God and God's purposes and ways. God our Creator has not abandoned the project of this world. In Christ He has come to this planet, to show us what He’s like and what we could be like – and what could – and will happen (again: -- imagine that!).

VI. We Know that THE SACRIFICE OF CHRIST MAKES IT POSSIBLE

Long before the cry for justice that echoes in the streets: – ‘Black lives matter!' -Martin Luther King preached that: "We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating "For Whites Only." We cannot be satisfied so long as the Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and the Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied -- and will not be satisfied -- until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream."

But justice comes through suffering, and conflict and bloodshed, in the righting of wrongs. Luther King continued: - "I am not unmindful that some of you come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive."

Christians have often got this wrong too. We have contributed to injustice, like the rest of the world. But at the heart of the Christian Message is the Good News that God rules, that God’s way will come round and the world will come right, that – if you can imagine and believe it – there is a different way, there can be a different world - a different future outcome.

Jesus has already made that possible, has ushered in - is ushering in, a new just world – (the truly just society), and we are called to join Him in what He about, in what He is doing. The Good News includes the fact that we cannot do what we need and ought to do. We need God’s Help. Because, before and unless the Spirit intervenes in our lives, we are spiritually moribund - ‘dead in trespasses and sins,’ is how St. Paul put it. We are unable to pull ourselves or our world up to where we and it should be. We need the intervention of Another, the help of God. We need to be rescued, to be saved and we need to cry to Him for His forgiveness mercy and enabling if ever we're to be lifted up and out of whatever ‘miry clay pit’ we’ve been sucked down into, trapped in a quagmire, left dirty, in debt and despairing. God sent His Son, loving the world so much (all the people and places and everything else within it) that if we commit ourselves to Him without limit or reserve, we will not perish, but have Life – eternal and abundant.

God's lifting us up and out of the pit, does not lift us up and out of this world. That’s not the plan – not the end-game . . . for God is colonizing the world with the atmosphere, power, will and wonder of His Kingdom, so that: beginning now and fully at last, things get done here just as they do in Heaven. So we can now live, serve and enter into the joy of the Lord and of His Kingdom, in glimpses, snatches of glory of what will be a new earth that one day will be perfectly right-side-up again, once more in perfect synchronization and harmony with God’s heart, God's Heaven, God’s Kingdom, God’s Will.

SUMMARY

We long for justice – for a better world, for a just, right-side-up, fair and equitable world, for justice that is not just about retribution for bad people we don’t like or understand, but for the full revelation of a good world even for bad people, for those made good by Jesus’ life-and-death work.

Have you experienced God’s grace – cried out for God’s mercy? Have you asked God for a taste of His Kingdom and His Son for a ticket to this Life abundant?

Says the Psalmist -Serve the LORD with fear and celebrate his rule with trembling.Kiss his son, or he will be angry and your way will lead to your destruction,for his wrath can flare up in a moment.Blessed are all who take refuge in him.