BEWARE THE WHITE WITCH (Narnia #2)
December 10, 2005 / Upper Room Fellowship
Two weeks ago I enjoyed a Thanksgiving weekend with part of my family back in Louisiana. And of course, Grandpa only had eyes for his little Kira, who’s now eight months old. When my wife and I first got married, and her young daughter, Kami, entered my life, I joked to her how my own mom essentially lost all interest in me. Kami was everything. Kami was the princess. Kami was the center of the universe. We would drive over to Grandma’s house and she would come rushing out into the driveway like a freight locomotive. “Kami! Kami! Kami!” Kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss. She had a technique called “machine-gun kissing,” and she perfected it on Kami. “Oh Kami! Oh Kami! Oh Kami!” After maybe five minutes of that, she would turn and say, “Oh, hi, David.” “Hi.” “Thank you for chauffeuring Kami here to see me. You may go now.” “Yes, ma’am.”
But as I spent this Thanksgiving weekend machine-gun kissing my own little treasure, I had a sober moment where I was alone with Lisa and I said to her: “You know, honey, I just thank the Lord – humbly thank him – that in his grace and providence, I’ve never had to struggle with the fallen chromosome or DNA that makes a man a child molester.” Of all the sins and evil tendencies that are in this world – and I’ve tasted quite a few of the fruit varieties dangling from Satan’s tree – that’s just one that never got on my menu. I’ve had two daughters; I’ve given them baths. I’ve held them in my lap. I give your little girls hugs and squeezes of affection . . . and praise the Lord that I can do that one thing with holy hands. It’s nothing good in me; I’m an undeserving sinner, just like all of you. But in God’s kindness, he let me be a man and a father and a grandpa and a pastor to small children without my having to struggle with that one desperately horrible craving.
But it’s a sober truth that there are men in this world who would love to come to Temple City and hurt our children. They would love to tease them and touch them and tickle them and tell them tantalizing stories . . . and then use them. There are evil people who would love to see my precious Kira in a little white coffin. There are pedophiles whose battleground turf is the playground and the cemetery.
I’ve always said this: when good people meet up with that kind of sin, it is all right to be angry. I’m not saying it’s all right to form a posse, but it may be all right to pray for the posse and give them road maps and a Thermos of hot coffee.
In Matthew 18, Jesus gives one of his most powerful illustrations. He takes a little child and essentially says: “Listen to me. If you mess with this treasure, if you hurt this kid – sexually, physically, or especially morally – you know what? Do yourself a favor and drown yourself. Get a big rock and drown yourself. Because that’ll be easier than what happens to you when me and my dad get a hold of you. And that’s no joke.”
I was teaching in a Christian school many years ago, when one of the tenth-grade boys was out in the playground horsing around with the little kids. I happened to wander by and found out that this role model, this tall, good-looking hero, was instructing them on how to say the F-word. Man, we almost had an old-style execution right there. We were only about two miles from the beach, and I was ready to find a rope and a millstone and some deep Pacific Ocean water.
Yesterday afternoon people around the world began to line up to go into that wardrobe closet where the back door opens up into Narnia. Lucy is the first to make the trip, and almost immediately as she gazes around at all the snow and ice she meets a sweet little creature called Mr. Tumnus. He’s a Faun – which C. S. Lewis informs us is a half-goat, half-man. He says to her, “Should I be right in thinking that you are a Daughter of Eve?” And as they’re talking, getting acquainted, he suddenly bursts into tears. Sobbing with heartbreak. “Dear Mr. Tumnus, why are you crying? Whatever can be the matter?” And he gives this wrenching confession. “I’m crying because I’m such a bad Faun . . . I’m in the pay of the White Witch.”
Well, what’s that all about? And we find out that this Lucifer enemy, this White Queen of darkness – ironically – is out to destroy. Mr. Tumnus admits in his shame that it’s his job to lull little children to sleep and then turn them over to the wicked queen. “I had orders from the White Witch that if ever I saw a Son of Adam or a Daughter of Eve in the wood, I was to catch them and hand them over to her.”
And today I reflect with a solemn heart on this reality: we have about 35 innocent children here in our ranks. Our Upper Room kids deserve our every sacrifice, and they do receive our every sacrifice. But we are surrounded, in all places and at all times, by enemies in the woods whose craving is to take our kids captive and cause their destruction. And this Mr. Tumnus lowers his voice as he says to Lucy: “Even some of the trees are on her side.”
I reflected on the issue of hate this week. In his football book, Instant Replay, which I’ve mentioned before, Green Bay Packer Jerry Kramer writes about the mental preparation he had to go through week by week, fourteen weeks back then, during the NFL season. Every week a different opponent. Every week a different rusher standing opposite him. Jerry was on the offensive unit; he was a right guard; it was his job to keep these guys from getting past him and sacking quarterback Bart Starr. And so every week he tried to conjure up a hatred for these opposing players. He actually tried to whip up a pure human hatred. He’d think to himself, “I hate Alex Karras of the Lions. Karras is trying to show me up. Karras is trying to make a fool of me. Karras wants to get to Bart Starr and throw him for a loss. Karras wants to take my Super Bowl ring. Karras wants to take money from my wallet and my family’s bread off the table.” In fact, there was a week where the Packers played Detroit, and Karras just creamed him. Jerry Kramer had a bad day and Karras blew by him and sacked the quarterback maybe four times just by himself. The announcer kept saying it: “Sack by #71; sack by #71.” Kramer knew that on Monday morning when they watched game films his coach, Vince Lombardi, was going to chew him out from Green Bay clear to the Canadian border and back. But even right there on Game Day, Sunday, which actually ended up as a 17-17 tie – not that bad – he got in his car after the game: sore, twisted ankle, bruised, beat up, fuming with embarrassment. And his ten-year-old kid said to him: “Daddy, what do you think of Alex Karras? I don’t mean as a player, just as a person.” And Kramer said to him: “Shut up. Just shut up.”
There was another week where he spent the whole seven pre-game days building up a good, vicious hatred for Charlie Krueger of the 49ers, who was actually a nice guy. And right before game time, with his heart and liver and pancreas all boiling over with this concocted fury, he happened to bump into Charlie on the sidelines. And the guy said: “Jerry, man, great to see you. Really great. Let’s get together for dinner sometime. How’s your wife?” It just took all of Kramer’s carefully crafted hatred away. And he said to himself: “How can I even play now?”
But this is fake hate; this is a seven-day campaign. What happens if you have unresolved hatred, an unmended anger that is allowed to stagnate and turn poisonous for thousands of years? Martin Luther King, Jr. once preached a sermon where he talked about unremitting anger, unchecked hatred, racial resentment – and how after a while, you begin to see good as bad and bad as good. You lose all touch with reality. You’re so happy about the sorrow of your enemies that your own objectivity is completely upside-down and destroyed. This is what the White Witch, also known as Lucifer, has experienced. He has hated the Sons of Adam and the Daughters of Eve since before Eden. He has a rage that is blind in its fury and cruel beyond our comprehending.
Now, let me say this. We need to be confident, happy Christians, and we need to be cheerful guardians of the children God has given to us. We don’t need to be anxious. I always love to say: Satan is mighty but Jesus is almighty. Here in the snowy conflict of Narnia, when Edmund is taken captive by the queen, the other kids are going: “What shall we do? How can we organize? Can we get a posse together?” And a Mr. Beaver, who knows the score, very calmly tells them about Aslan the Lion. They don’t have to do anything at all except find Aslan and remain by his side. “He is in Narnia at this moment,” Mr. Beaver says. “He’ll settle the White Queen all right. It is he, not you, who will save Mr. Tumnus [and your brother.] If [the White Witch] can stand on her two feet and look him in the face it’ll be the most she can do and more than I expect of her.”
Let’s spend just a few moments of our holy time here considering several realities about this White Queen’s existence in our own Narnia. Here’s the first truth all of us have to accept as Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve – and as parents of more fragile sons and daughters. Lucifer has battle plans. He’s not just an aimless pest who nips randomly at the heels of anyone who comes by. He has elaborate battle plans . . . and remember that he has had many thousands of years to perfect them.
I spent quite a bit of time these past few weeks reading Stephen Ambrose’s huge bestseller, D-Day, about June 6, 1944. Every single element of the Allied Forces was going to hit those Normandy beaches that morning: planes with bombs, gliders, paratroopers, infantry, destroyers bombing the coastline from offshore, subs, frogmen, Coast Guard, Marines, reserves. The whole thing was called Project Overlord, and it was contained in this huge book – thicker than a Manhattan phone book. Detailed chronologies right down to the minute, with wave after wave, battalion after battalion, one strike force after another. And all this was put together without computers; people had laboriously crafted this plan with papers and pencils. Of course, over on the German side: same thing. Rommel had spent millions of Deutschmarks and countless hours of manpower beefing up the defenses along the French coastline. With some of the beaches our GIs hit, the Germans simply had them completely covered. They could strafe any sector with machine-gun fire and with bombs and mortars.
Here in God’s Word, we often see the precision, the long-term tactical moves that Satan uses. You remember the Old Testament story of a man named Balaam, who very casually wore the label of “prophet.” A pagan king named Balak wanted Balaam to come over and pronounce a curse over this vast invading nation of Israel – which, of course, God didn’t let Balaam do. Even Balaam’s donkey spoke up and said it was a bad idea.
But then, a bit later in Numbers, we find that when Lucifer gets beat, he simply regroups and attacks the beach from another angle. This same Balaam, we read, goes back to the king of Moab and advises him. “You’ll never beat the children of Israel militarily. They’re too strong, and their God is omnipotent. Instead you have to seduce them away. Get your girls to marry their guys. And then invite them to your temples for a Super Bowl party. And you know how men are around pretty girls; soon enough they’ll bow down to your gods. And then – badda-bing, badda-bang, badda-boom – you’ll have ‘em.” And that’s what happens. Even though a flashy victory on the battlefield is crowd-pleasing right now, today, Satan settles back into the shadows and plans for a long-term victory.
I turn pale when I think of a big thick field manual, a “Project Overlord,” where the Prince of Darkness wants one of our children. He has a plan. He assigns agents to the project. He devotes resources to it. He relishes the thought of defeating one of us. And all we can do in response is to be aware of the reality of those plans, and then to stay in the presence of Aslan the victorious Lion at all times.
And that is not just a sweet sermon metaphor. Folks, I’m begging you: keep your children in the presence of Jesus. There’s not a week that goes by where I don’t thank God that we have this church here. And not just for the sake of my own employment. But this place is a military shelter, a safe haven. Our Commander-in-Chief is here; he resides here and leads our troops from here. I don’t apologize for promoting this church, and boosting this church, and gently nudging you a bit if our Upper Room Fellowship family begins to miss you week by week. Because Lucifer has a plan and we need to have a plan as well.
The second reality is that Satan can lie and cheat and deceive. Of course, he has no choice . . . since he’s the master of a doomed civilization and he knows it. Lies are all he has. But in Narnia the White Witch meets this young boy, Edmund, and immediately goes into a slippery deception mode. She gives him Turkish Delight, which is a bewitchingly delicious candy – so good that if somebody doesn’t stop you, you’ll eat it until you kill yourself. “There’s plenty more where that comes from,” she tells him. She flatters him. “You are much the cleverest and handsomest young man I’ve ever met.” She tells him she’s going to make him a king . . . and it’s especially nice to think you’ll be king and ruler over your three doltish siblings.
In this D-Day book about the June 6 invasion, the Allies knew that major sleight-of-hand and deception were their best chance of defeating Hitler. They had to fool the Axis powers about when and where they were going to invade. They had to trick Rommel into leaving huge parts of his army in the wrong places, up guarding Norway. The British had a sophisticated code-breaking system called “Ultra,” which had cracked the German communication codes, so they knew most of what Hitler was thinking. At the same time, their own forces had captured nearly all of the German spies operating in the U.K., and had “flipped” them, forcing them to work against Hitler and plant disinformation back in their own home base. The Allies had dummy armies, dummy tanks, fake radio traffic. The entire disinformation campaign was called Fortitude, and it was one of the keys of the Allied victory.
And I want you to consider the facts today. Satan often makes poison look like Turkish delight. He makes bad look good, dangerous look harmless, deadly look safe. But he’ll also go the other way; he’ll lie on all sides of any question. He minimizes a sin until you do it, then turns it around and blows it up to enormous proportions once you’ve done it so that you’ll feel guilty and discouraged.
Take the divine gift of sex: marital love. What does Satan do? He tells some people that all sex is bad. He tells other people, using the same mouth and English vocabulary, that all sex is good. If sex was a ballot measure in a California election, he’d be paying for the “YES on Sex” and “NO on Sex” propositions at the same time.
And all Satan’s deceptions soon lead to deprivation. His parties always come to an early end. This Edmund makes a pig of himself eating Turkish Delight and deciding he’s going to be the White Witch’s favorite son. The next time he goes to Narnia, though, the good times are over. There’s no more Turkish Delight – instead, a hunk of dry bread. Now there are no kissy compliments; there’s no throne for him to sit on. All of a sudden he’s a slave, pulling a heavy sled through the cold snow, the wicked witch screeching at him, and he says to himself with a broken heart, “How could I have been so foolish?”
There’s one more Narnia reality that is very meaningful to me this week. There’s a verse I want to give you in the original King James. Here it is – John 10:10: The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.
And here in this frozen land where it’s always winter but never Christmas, the enemy of God’s children, this evil queen, is dedicated to taking away. Taking away your joy, your freedom, your ability to be yourself, to grow into God’s image.
Tuesday night I was here in Temple City for our pizza party and Bible study. And as I drove home to a second Bible study, my cell phone rang. I had a long visit with one of you. Someone’s heart was breaking because of family pain, because of the barriers and the hurt and the scars that are caused by our humanity, by the fact that we breathe the poisonous air pumped out by this common enemy.
And there wasn’t much I could do, not much I could say. I share these same times of frustration, where you want so much for things to be well, to be healed, to be at peace with that certain someone . . . and the wall between you is so cold and forbidding. Winter but not Christmas.
So I’ve spent the past four days thinking with a heavy heart how Lucifer separates Edmund from his brothers and sisters, and separates us from those we love – and want to love. People we simply cannot reach because they’re over in that castle of the other side. In fact, there’s a scene in C. S. Lewis’ story where the children get to her fortress and all the captives she’s taken have been turned to stone. How can there be reconciliation when that person we love is now stone? All the therapy in the world, all the “sorry’s” and “please forgive me’s” are futile if this person’s heart is as hard as stone. And we remember that happier time when we were friends, when we were close, and when that person wasn’t a frozen statue but our friend, our relative, our child.
Let’s never be so naive as to think that this war isn’t going on, or that Lucifer is not a reality. I have felt the reality this week, and maybe some of you have too. I’ve had people in the church leave the church, and cut themselves off completely. They made them impenetrable. Letters unanswered. E-mails ignored. Phone calls reach a disconnected number. Nothing! A person I loved and who used to love me is now stone.
These are the ground rules of earth. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight back. When someone slips away, fight back. When feelings get hurt, fight back. When our children begin to glaze over to the things of God because we live in a secular world, fight back and make it less secular. When division hits this church, let’s all gather around and fight back. We don’t have to be a divided congregation. We don’t have to accept conflict as being the status quo in the Christian faith.
And despite that painful phone call I shared in Tuesday night, I still believe that God’s promises have hope for us today. Don’t forget, ever, that Satan is mighty and that Jesus is almighty. Adolph Hitler had plans, but the Allied forces, with democracy and liberty and religious tolerance on their side –they had better plans. Satan has a plan to defeat your child, but Jesus wrote down a plan for your son or your daughter before the foundations of this world. Before Cain and Abel were born, Jesus already had a detailed salvation scenario written down for the children of Upper Room.
Satan promises Turkish Delight and then gives us poison. Jesus not only keeps His promise, but he comes along with the antidote for Lucifer’s poison and then on top of that gives us the abundance our soul really desires.
And let me address with you the core issue I think we care about most. They say, “All politics is local,” and we are most anxious with what Lucifer might be doing right here in our own ranks. The White Witch took this family of four innocent children and split them up. Put a wall there. She took the delightful menagerie of Narnia and made most of them into frozen cold statues, unable to love or hug or respond to a Christmas card. That’s what Lucifer has always done, and what he always will do here in his last days.
But right at the end of this story of redemption, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Aslan the Lion and all the survivors of the great war go to this castle, this fallen fortress where the stone captives are. Where friendship have gone stale. Where children have strayed away from parents, and where marriages have gone on the rocks. There in the cold now the statues are lifeless, with frozen, unseeing eyes.
Lewis the storyteller puts it like this: “I expect you’ve seen someone put a lit match to a bit of newspaper which is propped up in a grate against an unlit fire. And for a second nothing seems to have happened; and then you notice a tiny streak of flame creeping along the edge of the newspaper.”
The first time I read this I figured it was a metaphor for the Resurrection. And it can still be that. But today, as I think about that Tuesday night phone conversation and the tears, I want to suggest to you that Aslan the Lion – Jesus Christ our Redeemer and Reconciler – can come into this place. Can come into our homes, our families, our relationships. And through the power of grace and forgiveness, he can wake up the statues of our lost friendships. He can heal a marriage. He can reconcile parent and child, brother and sister.
In our Tuesday evening pizza study here, we were talking about heaven and all the things the Bible says about what it’ll be like. And we noticed a verse from Isaiah 65:25. The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain.
Now, I don’t think this verse is really trying to tell us the menu or the seating arrangement of the celestial zoo up in heaven. It’s basically saying, “Those who used to be estranged will now be close again. We will have supper with that person whose feelings were so bruised, who wasn’t psychologically able to cope with the tumult of family life, who couldn’t handle being in this high-maintenance Upper Room family. We’ll be safe again with that person we used to think was dangerous to be with.”
Picture with me as we close your most intimate, open friendships. Unguarded conversations on the beach with your lover and spouse. Hilarity and helpless laughter and the pure joy of savoring the acceptance of your high school best friend. Holding your newborn baby in your arms and knowing that in that tiny, beating heart, they already love their mommy and trust her implicitly.
And this mighty Aslan, who has muscles of nobility but a gentle heart, wants to give you back that tenderness. The caresses that calcified – he’s going to give you them back. The looks of love that in the confusion of Lucifer’s darkness turned to estrangement – he’ll bring back the wide-eyed innocence and the tears of reconciliation.
Aslan says to us, “Behold, I make all things new.” A new mansion might be nice. A new lease on our loves will be even better. Shall we pray?
Lord Jesus, thank you for your unbroken record of victories, all on our behalf. Your triumph on the cross is what spells doom for this enemy of our children. We want to invite you today to resurrect our lost loves, and repair our broken hearts and dreams. In your saving name we pray, Amen.
