Traveling Light: Aslan Is On The Move
John 1: 6-8, 19-28
A Sermon by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart
Epworth United Methodist Church

Aslan is on the move! Aslan, the magical, light and life-bearing lion of C.S. Lewis’ book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Aslan, is on the move. On Friday afternoon a group of 21 Epworthians was among the opening day crowd to see the new film version. The book was published over fifty years ago, the first of seven books in Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. It has reached generations of children and adults, nearly 100 million copies in over 40 languages. As we walked out of the theater after seeing the film version, conversations were … lively. One younger member of our group burst out, saying, "I love Aslan!"

The book begins: Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air raids.

The children were sent , along with hundreds and hundreds of others, to the relative safety of the country. These four siblings were sent to the house of an eccentric old professor. Somehow, in a spare room of that house, they step out through the back of a Victorian wardrobe filled with coats and find themselves in a 100 year old winter in a land called Narnia. The ground, the trees, everything is covered with snow. It is always winter but never Christmas because of the light- and life-denying spell of the White Witch.

But when the children arrive, hope stirs in the air. All the talking animals and mythical creatures who live in Narnia, whisper excitedly, “Aslan is on the move!”

Much has already been written and preached about this story as Christian allegory. The Hollywood industry is seeking to boost the bottom line by using the Christian evangelical industry which, in turn, is using the media industry’s skeptical attacks to get air time to use the story as a tool for evangelism thereby boosting the Hollywood industry’s bottom line.
Peter Steinfels of the New York Times wrote facetiously that the film almost got a PG-13 rating: “Parental Guidance strongly advised – contains religious content and fleeting Christian imagery.”

Oxford professor and medievalist, C.S. Lewis, explicitly said his story was not Christian allegory but rather an imagining and myth, a “suppositional story…” Allegory has only one meaning, but myth has many. In allegory we only put in what we know, myth leads us to mystery.

Adam Gopnik in his article in The New Yorker admitted that the believer and the atheist can meet in the realm of made-up magic, because “they both need to register their understanding that a narrow material world, unlit by imagination, is inadequate to our experience, much less to our hopes.”

One scholar who studied the works of C.S. Lewis and the magical realm of Narnia said, “(Lewis’ stories) were a way to baptize the imagination. They opened up new possibilities involving myth, mystery, and the power of sacrifice.” For Lewis, imagination not only lights this narrow material world, imagination leads us to long for and look for the holy beneath and beyond what we can see. He wrote, “the witch’s magic is to make thing look like what they aren’t. The witch knows magic, but there is a deeper magic still.”

A local United Methodist layman, Alan Howe, wrote this poem for Advent:

Strings of lights pass the bus window,
Curled ribbons red and green,
Fir and spruce clothed
In shiny orbs, teddy bears, and angels;
Wonderlands tacky and tasteful
Shine from shop and home
And I am unmoved. …

I too ache for magic,
Have been seduced by fantasies
Victorian and video
I say humbug to the trappings and wrappings,
Secretly hoping for a ghost
Of Christmas to be present.

Hoping for the deeper magic
Of a dark stable,
I join the refrain of ages,
Crying for Emmanuel to come.

Hoping for the deeper magic of a dark stable.
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

In this morning’s Gospel reading … John the Baptist “came as a witness to testify to the light … He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.”

“Aslan is on the move.” Mythical creatures … talking animals … terrorized by frozen winter that never ends catch a glimpse of new life stirring …

Aslan … the lion … the real king of Narnia … offers his life to save the life of an unworthy child. Someone we might recognize in ourselves. The child, in this case, Edmund, has been taken in by the Witch’s tempting, flattering offer of sweets and power, betrayed others and placed them all at risk. This book was published just five years after the fall of Nazi Germany.

Edmund, ultimately confesses, “I’ve seen what the white witch can do, and I’ve helped her do it!” Edmund is to be executed, but Aslan offers himself in Edmund’s place, and this act of self-sacrifice releases the Deeper Magic … death itself is reversed.

Christian theology talks about the story of Jesus sacrifice and death as atonement … dying others. Jesus’ teachings talk about it saying “there is no greater love than to lay down your life for another.”

Huston Smith, as he shared when he was with us recently, was prompted to write his new book The Soul of Christianity, by reading Marcus Borg’s book, The Heart of Christianity. He could not believe that such a book would not even mention the atonement. Smith wrote that, “the root meaning of atonement, or at-one-ment, the centerpiece of Christianity, is reconciliation, the recovery of wholeness…”

God’s incarnation in human form and suffering even death on a cross is not to appease demands of vengeful law or repay a debt in some cosmic economy. It is God lighting the world with the question, in Smith’s words, “Is there anything more I could have done to demonstrate how much I love you?”
Just how radical is the power and possibility of that love, that light? Just how deep, how transforming is that deeper magic? This word is so radical it would be like a governor, walking into San Quentin and offering to take the place of a condemned man.

Smith writes, “The Word of the Cross is not uttered in the past tense. Every time we abuse the poor, every time we pollute our God-given planet, indeed every time we act selfishly, God dies naked on the cross of our ego.”

AND YET, and here is the good news, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.”

As we pray for one another this advent season, let us imagine, let us hope, let us act, let us whisper, “Aslan is on the move!”