Narnia: Discover The Light Of Christmas Series

Message #3 Advent Narnia Series

Discover the Light of Christmas

Introduction:

We are continuing in our Narnian themed Advent series this morning with message #3, Discover the Light of Christmas. In this wonderful children’s series, C.S. Lewis masterfully tells the story of four children who enter into a fallen world called Narnia. This world is ruled by an evil Witch who has great power and who has turned Narnia into a place where it is always winter but never Christmas. That was our theme in week #1 when we talked about what our world would be like today if Christ had never come. In week two, we examined the power of the witch and contrasted it with the Christ figure in Lewis’s story. The Lion called Aslan conquers the spell of the witch and the witch herself.

This morning we want to look at another wonderful image in the book; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. That image is of the “lamp post” which is mentioned in three chapters of the book. We want to examine the significance of the image of the lamp post in the story to understand the author’s intention.

We first read of the lamp post early in the story when Lucy’s, playing a game of hide and seek with her siblings, hides away in a wardrobe only to find it to be a portal into the Narnian world…

The lamppost in the woods

“This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!” thought Lucy, going still further in and pushing the soft folds of the coats aside to make room for her. Then she noticed that there was something crunching under her feet. “I wonder is that more moth-balls?” she thought, stooping down to feel it with her hands. But instead of feeling the hard, smooth wood of the floor of the wardrobe, she felt something soft and powdery and extremely cold. “This is very queer,” she said, and went on a step or two further.

Next moment she found that what was rubbing against her face and hands was no longer soft fur but something hard and rough and very prickly. “Why, it is just like branches of trees!” exclaimed Lucy. And then she saw that there was a light ahead of her; not a few inches away where the back of the wardrobe ought to have been, but a long way off. Something cold and soft was falling on her. A moment later she found that she was standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air. Lucy felt a little frightened, but she felt very inquisitive and excited as well. She looked back over her shoulder and there, between the dark tree-trunks, she could still see the open doorway of the wardrobe and even catch a glimpse of the empty room from which she had set out. (She had, of course, left the door open, for she knew that it is a very silly thing to shut oneself into a wardrobe.) It seemed to be still daylight there. “I can always get back if anything goes wrong,” thought Lucy. She began to walk forward, crunch-crunch, over the snow and through the wood towards the other light.

In about ten minutes she reached it and found that it was a lamp-post. As she stood looking at it, wondering why there was a lamppost in the middle of a wood and wondering what to do next, she heard a pitter patter of feet coming towards her. And soon after that a very strange person stepped out from among the trees into the light of the lamppost.

In the sixth book of this series; entitled; The Magicians Nephew, we learn more about the origins of the lamppost. In this book, a piece of a lamppost from our own world is brought into another world by Queen Jadis, who we know as the White Witch. Just as Aslan is bringing Narnia to life, Jadis throws the piece of lamppost at him, and, like a seed, it falls to the ground and begins to grow. It eventually becomes the lamppost which light the way into Narnia when the children arrive many years later. It is the lamppost which leads the way into Narnia and years later, it becomes the last thing they see when the re-enter their own world.

And, as those of you who have read the book and perhaps seen the movie this weekend know, one day, many years later, when the four children are all grown up and have ruled Narnia as Kings and Queens, they rediscover the lamppost still lit up, standing in the wood. As they enter the thick trees, they find themselves once again children tumbling out of the wardrobe with but a moments time have passed in their own world.