“IN OUR WORLD: THE SPELL OF THE WHITE WITCH”
Romans 8:18-25
[Sermon 2 of 3]
Even though I am getting older every year, there’s still enough youth in me that I get enjoyment out of some aspects of winter. Call me a bit crazy, but I actually like snow! I like the stillness of a morning when you wake up and there are several inches of fresh snow on the ground, and things just seem so quiet. I like the beauty of the white snow covering fields before anyone or any animal has tracked across it. I like the way wet snow clings to the branches of trees, outlining them against the sky. I like the squeak of snow as you walk across it. It’s been a few years since I’ve been skiing, but if given the opportunity, I’d head down a hill in a heartbeat, even if I did crash into a snow bank at the bottom.
Like it or not, living in Western Pennsylvania means that there is winter to contend with, and with it comes the cold and the snow. But as much as I enjoy the snow, I must say that by the time the middle of February gets here and then we get on in to March, I’m more than ready for the snow to stop and for winter to be over with. Enough already! I tell our old friends elsewhere that we love living in Western Pennsylvania. The worst thing about it is that winter seems to go on and on and on.
Christmas will be here in a few weeks, and that certainly brightens up the early part of winter. It seems a shame that we can’t put Christmas a little later in winter so that we have something more to look forward to. But it’s over too quickly, and then we settle in to the long part that seems to have very little to get excited about, especially in February and March and even April. If we could have Christmas every month during the winter, it might make things a bit more bearable. I guess we should be glad we don’t live up in Canada or somewhere else further north!
Can you imagine what it would be like to have winter all the time? That would be pretty awful, wouldn’t it? And then what would it be like if you had no bright spots in the middle of winter to look forward to, like Christmas? Life would be pretty depressing, wouldn’t it? There wouldn’t be a whole lot to be hopeful about.
Well, “always winter and never Christmas” is the way that Narnia is described in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. When Lucy and Edmund, Peter and Susan find their way through the wardrobe into that other world of Narnia, they find it in a perpetual state of winter. And that’s because of a spell that has been cast by the White Witch. She has cast a spell over the land, making it continuously cold, snowy, and gray. Just reading the book can give you a bit of a chill, and I wonder if the theaters have any kind of special effects built in by which they will blow extra cold air into the theater during the movie.
Certainly that’s not the way things had been created to be, whether in Narnia or in our world. As pretty as fresh snow can be to some, I imagine that if you took a poll of which season was the favorite, you’d get a lot of people saying that spring is the best, when the grass is turning green, leaves are coming out on the trees, you can open up the windows to the fresh air, and the birds are singing. You can’t beat that, can you? We’re not meant to have perpetual winter. In fact, as the story develops in Narnia, the witch’s spell eventually is broken, and as winter starts to end, the first thing the children notice is the sound of birds.
Narnia is under a spell. And so is our world. Paul’s words in Romans 8 describe the creation under a “spell” of bondage to decay, groaning with anticipation of release. And it is not only the creation, but all of us who are also looking ahead with hope to something new, to freedom and redemption. The spell goes back to Genesis 3. Just after the disobedience of Adam and Eve and the Fall into sin, they are banished from the Garden, and God hands out his punishments, his curses. The serpent is doomed to be hated and to crawl on its belly. The woman will have pain in childbirth and have to deal with an imperfect relationship with men. The man will have to work and earn a living by the sweat of his brow. Even the ground will produce thistles and thorns. And the ultimate sign of the curse is that death has now come into the picture. Adam and Eve were created to live forever, but God had warned them of the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit (“you shall surely die”) and after the Fall, they began to die. Even we are gradually dying from the day we are born, as we lose skin and hair and eventually life itself.
This fallen world is under a spell, and we are helpless in its clutches. Well, let me take part of that back. It was under a spell, but the message of Christmas is that God came in human form to break into this world and to break the spell, and the spell was broken when Jesus died on the cross and then rose from the dead. In Christ, we can affirm that the long winter is over. Maybe it’s just taking a long time for things to get completely thawed out.
What is it like, though, to live under the power of that spell, to live in Narnia under the spell of the White Witch? The story brings out a number of things that happen in Narnia as a result of the spell, things that I’m sure that we can relate to as well in our world.
Last week we talked briefly about the “magic” of Narnia, and part of the witch’s magic was that she could make things look like something that they aren’t. She has the power of deception. When Edmund first finds his way through the wardrobe into Narnia, he meets up with the witch, and she entices him with some special candy called Turkish Delight. It looks good and tastes great (don’t know if it’s less filling or not). Edmund takes a bit, and he’s hooked. From then on, he’s driven by the desire to have more and more Turkish Delight, and that desire leads him to do some very unwise and foolish things.
What he doesn’t realize is that as good as the Turkish Delight seems to be, it’s not going to be that way forever. What seems to be so good at first turns out to come back and bite him. In the book, the Witch comes across as someone very attractive and appealing, and she is riding a sleigh pulled by gorgeous reindeer. I understand that this is one place that the movie takes some liberties in that it has some ugly polar bears pulling the sleigh. C.S. Lewis’s original intention was to portray the Witch and her evil as something very appealing. And so it is for Edmund, as he gets taken in by her and her Turkish Delight.
It’s only later that the Turkish Delight begins to taste more like stale bread, and he realizes how foolish he has been. And how many people in our world today have been lured by the pleasures of this world, including many that are clearly sinful and outside the will of God? They get lured and enticed by material things, by sex, by power, only to find after a while that none of that satisfies – that the more they have, the more they want, that promiscuous sex leaves them diseased or emotionally broken, and that power corrupts. It’s no mistake that Satan is called the Father of Lies. Stay away from his Turkish Delight.
Not only do we need to stay away from his Turkish Delight, but we also just need to plain stay away from him. When Peter, Susan, and Lucy realize that Edmund has been kidnapped by the Witch, their first impulse is to go after him and rescue him. “‘Go to the Witch’s House?’ said Mrs. Beaver. ‘Don’t you see that the only chance of saving either him or yourselves is to keep away from her?’” (p.71) James says, “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (4:7). He doesn’t say to go after him, but simply to seek to stand fast and resist. Let God take care of the offensive part of the battle. We are simply to resist, trusting that as we do so, he will go the other way.
And no one is immune from the spell, either. Peter is the oldest brother in the story, and emerges as the hero. Yet even he acknowledges his imperfections. As they are discussing why Edmund had joined the White Witch, Peter says, “That was partly my fault. I was angry with him and I think that helped him to go wrong.” (p.110) Peter, as good a character as he is, has flaws that have a negative impact not only on himself, but on others. The Bible says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Rom 3:23) The Psalmist says, “They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one” (Ps.14:3). The spell affects us all.
And the spell leads us away from giving God the glory he is due. In fact, it can lead us to even mock or deface God. Jesus predicted to his disciples that he would be arrested and killed, and that people would mock him and spit on him (Mark 10:34). God’s own Son, as he hung on the cross, was treated as poorly as anyone on this earth could be treated. At one point in the story, Edmund comes across a statue of a lion, and pretending that it is Aslan the Lion, he starts defacing it, drawing a moustache and glasses on it, and jeering at it. Aslan deserved nothing like that. Instead, he deserved the greatest love and respect and honor.
How do we treat Jesus? Do we have a tendency to mock him at times? We may not be spitting on him or drawing on pictures of him, or publicly crucifying him. We want to be more respectful than that. But just think, for example, of what we have done with his birthday, taking the good elements of the joy and love surrounding Christmas and turning them into an excuse for excessive consumerism, parties, and all kinds of things, many of which have little or nothing to do with Jesus. How will we honor and respect Jesus this year?
Yet even as we live under the effects of the spell, there is something that God has planted within us by his Spirit that can speak to us. We call it conscience. Edmund had one in the story. “I expect she is the rightful Queen really [speaking of the White Witch]. Anyway, she’ll be better than that awful Aslan!’ At least, that was the excuse he made in his own mind for what he was doing. It wasn’t a very good excuse, however, for deep down inside him he really knew that the White Witch was bad and cruel.” (p.75)
What do you know deep down inside of you? In Romans 2, Paul talks about the Gentiles, brought up outside of the Law of Moses, who still had a sense of what was right and what was wrong. We live in a culture that seems to have lost a lot of its conscience, where people increasingly seem to have no regard for what’s right or wrong or for standards of morality. But I have not given up hope that even for some of the most hardened people, for some of the hardest of hearts, somewhere deep down is that part of the image of God with which they are created, the Spirit of God that tries to speak. Too often it just has a hard time being heard. But it’s there! How well are you hearing God speak in your heart?
Winter gets to be pretty gloomy and hopeless. Without Christmas and the future promise of spring, it would be hopeless. Life in this fallen and sinful world is also pretty hopeless. We’re stuck in it, subject to deception, in danger of desecrating the holiness of God. But it’s not utterly hopeless. We have hope, and that hope is Jesus Christ, whose birth we are preparing to celebrate in a few weeks, and whose death and sacrifice for our sin is represented at the Communion Table. Let us recognize our own susceptibility to the spell, confess our sinfulness, accept his grace, and celebrate the eternal spring that is ours through him. To God be the glory. Amen.
