If you are familiar with the C.S. Lewis story, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, you know it is a winter story – a magical story. It is the kind of story we can hear better at Christmas time. We are, somehow, more ready to open our hearts and minds to the miraculous at this time of year.
The story is about four children who go through a magical wardrobe into another world, the land of Narnia, a place where it is always winter but never Christmas. This is the first story C.S. Lewis wrote in his series about Narnia, but it is not actually the beginning of the story – the whole story. There is another book Lewis wrote sometime later that gives the back story to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It’s called The Magician’s Nephew.
The lion called Aslan first appears in The Magician’s Nephew. He enters a world that was utter darkness and nothingness. He opens his mouth and begins to sing. He sings in a manner that cannot be described but is, without doubt, the most beautiful sound ever. As he sings, a thousand bright stars appear in the sky all at once. Then there is light dawning on the horizon; the new sun appears. There is daylight.
The song changes and the land is filled with grass and mountains, trees and flowers. The song changes again and animals of all kinds begin to emerge from the ground, and the lion breathes and speaks life into them. The lion, Aslan, enters the world of nothingness and creates a world that is good. And we come to know Aslan as the one who always was; the one who was before the world began.
C.S. Lewis knew the gospel of John well.
The one who was before time began, this is the one – the Word – that became Jesus Christ.
In the beginning … John opens his gospel with the same words that open the holy scriptures in the book of Genesis. In the beginning …
In the beginning, John says, when God began creating the heavens and the earth, the word was with God … the Word was God … the Word became flesh. Incarnation.
And that is the heart of the matter. He came to the world as human flesh and blood to show us what humanity could look like. There were many ways God could have come, many ways God could have offered us salvation, but this was the way God chose to do it. God became one of us, and by doing that God showed us what we could be.
And what we could be is so much more than we know.
We underestimate what we are capable of. We use only a small portion of our brain power, we use less than our full strength, and we exercise only a small fraction of the heart-giving generosity we are capable of. We no longer remember what we are capable of.
But Jesus reminds us what we were created for.
In the beginning was the Word and the Word became flesh. And the Word made flesh lived among us, full of grace and truth.
The truth is that by the grace of Jesus Christ we may become more fully human ourselves. We remember the words from Genesis, that God created us in God’s image. Not that we look like God, but that our humanity holds the potential for us to be creatures that love and create and see a better vision for the world. We have lost sight of these things in the darkness in which we dwell, still today. But when Jesus was born into the world, he brought with him light – light that can renew our vision, inspire us with holiness, and begin to form something new out of this old clay.
The land of Narnia that Lewis created, in the cold, long winter of their suffering, was forgetting how they were created – how the song of creation had been sung; how the stars had been born, how creatures were brought forth from the earth and given the breath of life.
In the cold and dark corners of this world in which we live, people may forget also how the world was created in the power of love. But on this night, we remember how God came down for us in love.
When we light the lights of Christmas we remember. On this night of hushed reverence, we look to the light that broke through the darkness to remind us what we might be – of who we are and whose we are. The light, this night, urges each one of us to let Jesus Christ into our hearts to expand and fill them, and for us to become more fully human. This, my friends, is our salvation.
Glory to God in the highest, and peace to God’s people on earth. Amen.
