Narnia: Enter The Story Series

Enter the Story pt. 1 of 5

Philippians 4:8 Fix your thoughts on what is true and honorable and right. Think about things that are pure and lovely and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.

How much time have you spent thinking this week? What tends to claim your thoughts? And how much time would you say were focused on things that were pure and lovely and admirable?

I want to help build some bridges between your world and a world of fantasy that I believe will help us live better in this world. Understanding fantasy that is saturated in what is true and honorable and right will cause us to think differently about reality.

Tell me what you know about this…

IMAGE OF ASLAN

Tell me what you know about this…

STRANGE IMAGE OF GUYS DRESSED AS WOMEN FOR A DRAMA

How many possible directions could you go with this?

What if we put your picture, even dressed normally on the screen. What do you know about this?

We would have to know some of the story that surrounds that image.

There are two things I want you to start thinking about this morning. I don’t expect to solve much for you today I suppose. But I do want to help you start thinking about the concept of STORY and prepare you to see a great story that will teach us, through fantasy, much that is true about God and you.

Two things: First, your life, my life is a story. Your life is “story” that unfolds over time and the characters that enter your story and the events that unfold impact this story of your life.

But, when did the story start? Did the story that is your life just start with you? When you made that dramatic entrance into the world was that the real beginning of the story?

Think about your parents and others who helped give your life shape. Did their story start when you came on the scene? Did the things that happened to them affect you? I can tell you that the after-affects of the Great Depression had significant impact on my parents and on the way I was raised. Our story is not “self-contained”.

Our life is “story”. And, second our “story” is part of a “grander story”. And, here is a significant key to life. You and I have no way to discern the steps we ought to take in our story until we come to understand the greater story that we are a part of.

In order to understand our world, to make sense of our lives, and to make our most important decisions about how we ought to be living, we depend upon some story. Individual experiences make sense only when their seen within the context of some story we believe to be true of the world: each episode of our life finds its place there.

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre says “I can only answer the question, ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what story do I find myself a part?’ There is the assumption there is more than one basic story competing in our culture for acceptance and which story a person lives out of makes a huge difference.

The two basic stories in our culture would be the biblical story and the secular story. Biblical Christianity claims that the Bible alone tells the true story of our world. The secular story makes the claim that life is best understood apart from any thought of a grand design.

As we move into December we’re going to spend the next four weeks thinking about the STORY behind The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. But more than that, I pray that God takes us to a better understanding of the story behind us!

This coming Friday will be the release of the movie version of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. This is going to open the door for literally millions to enter into the world of Narnia and I hope, will bring all kinds of questions about a world so different than our own. A world that shakes us from the known (at least what we think we know) and predictable (at least we think predictable) to ask the questions we need to ask.

LLW was written by C.S. Lewis in 1949 but, of course that’s not where the story started. In1939 at the outbreak of World War II, a million and a half children we dispersed from London all over England. The group of children were assigned to the home of the Kilns. A house Lewis shared with his brother, Mrs. Moore and her daughter Maureen. There were quite a few children who stayed in this house over the war years. According to Colin Duriez, a Lewis biographer, Lewis was impressed with the children but he was baffled by their inability to amuse themselves. They gave him an idea for a book for children.