“IN OTHER WORLDS: BEYOND THE WARDROBE”
Ephesians 6:10-20
[Sermon 1 of 3]
In a little over a week, movie theaters will be showing the new movie The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The movie is the portrayal of the first of C.S. Lewis’s series about Narnia, a mythical land that he wrote about in a series of children’s books in the 1950’s. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was the first book in the series to be written, even though some of the other books (there are 7 books in the series) actually take place before this one. It’s a great series of books that I highly recommend for reading to your children, as well as for your own enjoyment.
The Narnia of Lewis’s imagination is a magical land, a land
· of talking animals like Mr. and Mrs. Beaver,
· of unusual creatures like Tumnus the Faun, half goat and half man,
· of mountains and rivers and forests,
· and of fabled places like the ancient castle Cair Paravel and the place of the Stone Table.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is the story of four children, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy, who enter the land of Narnia unexpectedly when they enter a wardrobe. (A wardrobe is a large piece of furniture in which to hang clothes in houses before they had built-in closets.) The wardrobe is in an otherwise empty room in a large house belonging to an old Professor, and the children are playing in the big house when they stumble into the wardrobe. Lucy is the first one in, Edmund comes later, but eventually all four of them end up in Narnia. While they are in Narnia, they have a great adventure which takes place over a period of time. Interestingly, though, when they come out of Narnia and back through the wardrobe into the house, no time has past. It’s as though the two worlds, Narnia and the “real world” of the Professor’s house, are existing side by side, but in totally different time zones.
And actually, this is about more than just those two worlds. There’s a third world to the story that gets only brief mention on the very first page of the book. Let me read you how 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. They were sent to the house of an old Professor who lived in the heart of the country, ten miles from the nearest railway station and two miles from the nearest post office.” (p.1) The big world is at war in a great World War in places far away, but the world also contains the Professor’s house with the wardrobe, where there is also access to a whole other big world, the world of Narnia.
Clearly there is more to the world that the children live in than meets the eye at any given moment. And that truth is reality not only for Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. It’s also reality for us. Our limited vision and perception tends to see only this world, our immediate surroundings. At the very least, we get absorbed with what goes on right around us – homes, jobs, neighbors, school, church, family, friends – and that tends to be as far as we are aware of.
But the Bible clearly teaches that there is something more to our existence than just what we see or experience. The letter to the Ephesians speaks numerous times of a reality that is beyond our immediate perception, but which nevertheless is a reality. Our passage this morning speaks of “principalities, powers, world rulers of this present darkness, spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places.” Do you ever think about that part of reality? What’s beyond your wardrobe?
From Scripture we get little glimpses of what that might be like, which we can piece together to some extent. We even get one of the great purposes for the church expressed in terms related to that greater reality. “Through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.” (Eph. 3:10) The church exists to speak to more than just our world. There is much more!
But much of what’s “out there” we can only speculate about, looking ahead in hope to a time when we will see it in its fullness.
In The Sacred Romance, Brent Curtis and John Eldredge talk about the greater reality of which we are a part in terms of 3 acts of a play, which they entitle God’s Eternal Heart, God’s Heart Betrayed, and God’s Heart on Trial.
· Act I, God’s Eternal Heart, is the eternally existent God from even before the very beginning, existing as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in communion together. It is the God of “In the beginning God” in Genesis 1.
· Act II, God’s Heart Betrayed, is the creation of heavenly beings who surround God. But one of those, sometimes called Lucifer or Satan, tried to become more than he was created to be, led a rebellion, and then fell from grace. He is the fallen Day Star in Isaiah 14:12, the Satan who Jesus saw “fall like lightning from heaven” in Luke 10:18.
· Act III, God’s Heart on Trial, begins the part of the story we’re most familiar with. It begins with the creation of the world and humanity, humanity’s fall into sin through the temptation by Satan, and the road to redemption and restoration culminating in the Incarnation of God coming in Jesus, who was crucified, buried, and rose again. (72-82)
There’s a much bigger world out there than we might imagine. The world that seems to be so big to us is just a small part of a much greater reality.
And in that larger world (we can call it the cosmos) there are eternal principles at work. In Narnia, it’s called “magic.” When the children stumble into Narnia, they find that it is under the spell of the White Witch. And the Witch has certain magical powers at her disposal. She is able to make things look like something that they aren’t, and that power of deception ends up getting Edmund into trouble. There is also what is called the “deep magic,” a long established principle. “You know that every traitor belongs to me as my lawful prey and that for every treachery I have a right to a kill,” says the Witch (p.121).
But that magic isn’t all that there is. There is an even “deeper magic” of which the Witch is unaware. Aslan the Lion (the Jesus figure in the story), says “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.” (p.139)
There is an eternal reality governed by eternal principles (call it “magic,” “deep magic,” “deeper magic”) that governs Narnia. And so there is for us as we live in this world. As much as we might understandably think that this world is all that there is, and that this is where our entire focus should be, maybe we need to step back from that at times, and try to recognize that larger reality, mysterious as it may be, and to trust that the God we claim to be the Creator of the Universe (the “Emperor” in Narnia) is sovereign over all and working his will.
And what might the wardrobe have to say to us even in this world in which we live? Trying to think of the “other worlds” of the cosmos can be very overwhelming, so most of the time we aren’t even consciously aware of that larger cosmic reality. But as we live our lives focused on our immediate world right around us, do we even have any sense of the larger world and reality that exists even here? Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy were “kids being kids” in a larger world that included adults like the Professor, his housekeeper Mrs. Macready (who didn’t particularly care to have children around) and those who were engaged in a world war. They were just kids, able to be blissfully ignorant of a lot of the rest of reality. Can we claim that excuse?
We are called to recognize and to be engaged in a world beyond just our little rooms with our wardrobes. We affirm in Scripture that “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son,” (John 3:16) yet it’s easy for us to forget that large world for which Jesus came and died, choosing instead to focus on the immediate things, the “world,” of our own lives. I must confess that for me, part of that displays itself in my being a bit of a “news junkie,” watching the news and reading the newspaper to keep up on important events all over the world.
But even if being a “new junkie” is not your cup of tea, at the very least we can be engaged at the level of prayer. Do our prayers reflect an acknowledgement of the larger world for which Jesus died? Is that world being lifted up to God in prayer? And then out of that prayer, are we actively engaged in mission to that world? In Ephesians Paul calls us to be prepared for spiritual warfare. The evidence of that is not always easy to see directly. But in the gospels, Jesus commissions us to “go and make disciples of all nations.” (Matt. 28:19) The evidence of that is much more readily discerned. How are we doing with that?
As God continues to empower us for life and ministry by his grace, let’s be a part of the “other worlds,” the worlds beyond our wardrobe – to Narnia, to the larger world (a world more often at war than at peace), the world that so desperately needs to know the love of God. And ultimately, let us look with hope to living in God’s eternal realm over which he rules, now and forever. Amen.
