Grace and Growth

Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve

When I look at the night sky and see the work of your fingers- the moon and the stars you have set in place- what are mortals that you should think of us, mere humans that you should care for us? Psa 8:3-4 (NLT)

Who are we, anyway?  Everywhere in Narnia, there seems to be an answer.  You find a hint in the children’s rhymes… another hint in the awe and surprise of the beavers and fauns when they meet a Son of Adam and a Daughter of Eve...  and another in the fears of the Witch when she sleighs past Edmund and grinds to a fast stop: “What are you?” she asks.  Well, he is human... and she is not happy with the answer. 

The reason is that everywhere in Aslan’s world creatures know humans are destined to rule.  The four thrones at Cair Paravel, empty for centuries, were meant for two Sons of Adam and two Daughters of Eve.  When they ascended to those thrones, the reign of the White Witch would end.

“When Adam’s flesh and Adam’s bone Sits at Cair Paravel in throne The evil time will be over and done…”

This is the same answer that you find in the pages of the Bible.  Men and women are meant to have dominion over the earth…

For you made us only a little lower than God, and you crowned us with glory and honor. You put us in charge of everything you made, giving us authority over all things- Ps 8:5-6 (NLT)

This is why we instinctively want to be in charge and control and shape our world.  It is why you want to hold on to the TV remote.  It is why you don’t want to ride in the passenger seat... 

Life with Christ is about learning how to share his rule over God’s creation.  Those partnerships are all over the place in our lives.  Your family is one of those gardens.  Your church is one.  Your job is another.  So is your body.  So is the city you live in.  Places you manage and rule in a partnership with Christ. 

Do you hear the voice of Aslan…?

“Bear it well, Sons of Adam!  Bear it well, Daughters of Eve!”

 

Aslan on the Move

The Witch knows that Aslan is giving himself in Edmund’s place to fulfill the demands of the Deep Magic.  As she raises her terrible stone knife over him she cries out her victory, “Fool…”

The Deep Magic in Narnia is Lewis’ imaginary picture of the Moral Law.  In Narnia it is not the kind of magic that can be manipulated by incantations or spells or ceremony.  It is so deep that it is written into the foundations of the universe itself, an essential part of the way things are.  That is true of the Moral Law.  It is not some optional add-on to the way things are.  It is the essential nature of a universe that is fundamentally relational.  That is why Jesus declares the law will outlast even the visible cosmos.

That is why when Lewis imagined the land of Narnia, betrayal meant death.  It is the same law that is written into the real world.

“When you eat of it you will surely die.” Gen 2:17 (NIV)

It is a statement of fact.  It is always true. Sin destroys our lifeline to the sinless God.  Like the flower pulled from the earth, like the vine cut off from the branch, we wither and die. That is the way it is in a universe that is entirely dependent upon the living and holy God.  Betrayal means someone must die.  And to save Edmund, Aslan offers himself.  The Deep Magic must be appeased.  

God put the wrong on him who never did anything wrong, so we could be put right with God. 2 Cor 5:21 (The Message)

Always Winter, but Never Christmas

Do you believe that God is good and that he has made this world good and your life good?

When Susan hears for the first time that Aslan is a lion, she is afraid to see him.  "Is he quite safe?  I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion."  Mrs Beaver responds...  "Safe?  Who said anything about being safe?"  Mr Beaver would later explain that Aslan is "not a tame lion".  "But he is good."

Aslan invades Narnia with a "wild and powerful goodness" (J Rogers).  And that is what Narnia - and we - need.

When you look hard at our failures in life, I think underneath them is a fear that God is not good, then he cannot be trusted to manage this life, that he has required too much of us, and that we must take things into out own hands and live our lives from our own resources.  And when we do, we fail.

In Narnia, Jadis herself falls to the same temptation, long before Narnia is born.  She had been Queen of another world, Charn.  She has power, a power called the “Deplorable Word” the word that kills all living things but its speaker…  Happy with that power, in Charn, she kills all her subjects, preferring to be Queen over nothing than to be not be Queen over everything.  That will be the destiny of Narnia, unless someone intervenes.  Next week we will look at Aslan on the move.

In the Narnia Chronicles there are two kinds of people. Everyone gets to decide which one they will be.  They are based on two differing worldviews.  Everyone gets to decide which one he believes. 

Lewis calls one the Magician, he calls the other the Adventurer.

The Magician - is someone who looks at life and decides it is not fair, distrusts the goodness of God, and decides that they must take life into their own hands, and seek the power to bend God’s world to serve their ever narrowing life... 

The Adventurer - is someone who looks at life and decides it is more than fair, who sees that God is good, that his world is a gift, and that God can be trusted with my life.  The adventurer can yield her life to God's care.  Their cry is “Let us take the adventure that Aslan gives to us.”  And they do!

The truth is that each of us has both the Magician and the Adventurer in our hearts.  Now, with God's help, you have to choose which one you will be.

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Will Heaven Be Like Earth?

He must remain in heaven until the time for the final restoration of all things, as God promised long ago through his prophets. Acts 3:21 (NLT)

How much of this present cosmos will be present in eternity?  How much continuity will there be between our present world and the world to come?  I wonder.

Under the influence of Dallas Willard (Divine Conspiracy ch 10, etc), I have begun to rethink my eschatology this year, wondering if I had been too inattentive to the teaching of Acts 3 and Romans 8, and too presupposing a “radical discontinuity” between the current created order and the Kingdom of God.  I had long thought that this cosmos will be entirely destroyed before the creation of a new cosmos.

But what if the cosmos to come has significant continuity with the created order as we now glimpse it - in all its extraordinary grandeur?  What if passages like 2 Peter 3 refer to a redemptive cleansing and transformation of the current cosmos, but not its entire destruction?  I have taken a Hubble photo of the interstellar star fields and put it as wallpaper on my computer - labeling it, “My Father’s House”! It fires my imagination! “Could well be”, I think - and I wonder!

I worry that something else drives our theology of “radical discontinuity”. I have become wary of teaching that locates the Kingdom entirely in some other place and time yet to come. Surely that is less than faithful to the Kingdom teaching of Jesus who so clearly proclaimed the present availibility of Kingdom life to everyone who longed for it - even while looking forward to a future fullfillment. Seems evident to me that the ‘radical discontinuity’ theology is driven IN PART by an aversion to radical discipleship. We all know the pervasive and tragic truth of this in contemporary evangelical life. ‘Real life is somewhere else - not here’, we think. So we wait for a Kingdom yet to come, and somehow find cause to go on living our lives within our own resources, not those of the Kingdom among us.

But eternal life has already begun. And the Kingdom is even now in our midst. What we do here and now is training for what we will do there and then in the renewed cosmos. The continuity is impressive, inspiring, and massively hopeful, even while we wait for the great renewal sure to come.

Into Narnia: The Gift of Imagination

“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”    Is 55:9

We can’t see very well.  Our vision is dim.  Our sight is limited.  But the capacity to see beyond sight is essential to the life of faith…

Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.   Heb 11:1

You have to see beyond your sight…  How do you do that? It is in the partnership of Revelation + Reason + Imagination that we “see beyond our sight”.

The Narnia books are an imaginary story about real life.  In it the Emperor beyond the sea created a land called Narnia through his son, the great lion named Aslan.  Narnia is filled with talking creatures of every kind, and had come under a spell from the White Witch making it “always winter, but never Christmas.”  Ancient prophecies, however, speak of four human children who will come to Narnia and sit on the four empty thrones at the great castle.  When they do, the reign of the White Witch will end.  And so, much to their surprise, the four Pevensie children, who have been sent by their mother from wartime London to the safety of a countryside manor owned by a Professor, are playing hide and seek one day, and they stumble into the magical land or Narnia through a door in the back of a wardrobe.  And so the adventure begins. 

Why would Lewis be more famous for these books than for all his other great works?  Because he tapped into one of God’s greatest gifts, the gift of imagination.  I want to start our series with a couple thoughts on why God would give us the gift of imagination. 

Imaginative stories were Jesus’ preferred method of teaching.  Matt 13 is full of stories about seeds being sown, large catches of fish, buried treasure, and pearls of great price.  Why teach like this?  Because it is easy to remember?  Certainly.  But also because in appealing to the imagination he was awakening people’s God given capacity to see farther and reach deeper. 

That’s why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they’re blue in the face and not get it.    Matt 13:13 (The Message)

Your imagination is a great gift of God, and it is essential to the power of truth and the life of faith.

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Making Resolutions for a Lifetime

I’ve been thinking about some New Year’s resolutions I could make this year…  But failure is more common than success. Why?

Change is hard because of your… auto pilot!  You know what an auto pilot is…  It is that system in an airplane or a boat or a car that you can set to go a certain speed or a certain direction. 

If you're in a boat and the auto pilot is set for East, you can force it to go West by putting an oar in the water and forcibly pushing it.  But after a while you get tired, and you let go of the oar - and back to the east it goes!

We are a lot like that.  You try to change your life by forcibly turning in another direction. You make a resolution. By willpower, you force yourself.   But the whole time you're under tension, because by willpower you're trying to go the opposite way that you're naturally inclined to go. Pretty soon you get tired and you let go of the oar and it automatically turns back.   I go off the diet, start smoking again, bitterness floods back, acting the way I've always done. If you want to change, you've got to change your auto pilot.

How do you do things like this?

“No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit.” Luke 6:43

Jesus says you have to change the tree.  No apple tree makes a resolution to have cherries this year!  You have to have a new tree!  If your resolution is to be more forgiving, you have to become a person for whom forgiveness is a natural expression of your heart.  If your resolution is to become more generous, you have to become a person who loves to be generous and does it naturally and easily - the good tree that bears good fruit. 

How does he do that in you?  Here’s the secret:  change the inside, and the outside will follow…

 

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Another Kingdom Dream

Becca had a dream earlier this year. 

One of those sharp, 'pay attention to this' dreams, one of those 'there must be more' dreams.  She dreamed she was in the garden courtyard here outside St Stephens - our girls were little, dressed for church, and running around near her - I was inside the sanctuary - and a strong wind started blowing out of dark clouds, a wild wind from black storm clouds sweeping in off a sea. 

The wind was sweeping everything.  Sweeping it clean.  Blowing all the dead leaves and broken branches away.  Blowing hard.

Then on the wind came a white veil, long, swirling, coming down from above, dazzling against the dark clouds and wrapping all around the church, it was a bridal veil… 

Then suddenly out of the storm clouds a shaft of brilliant white light descended unexpectedly to the ground right at her feet.  And she knew if she stepped into that light she was stepping into eternity, stepping into joy.  It took her breath away. 

She made a collage of it.  It hangs on our dining room wall (see picture above).  We have thought about it often.  Especially in these days of growing persecution.

He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. Jn 15:2 (NIV)