Monday, August 11, 2014

The Lion's Claws (Reflections on Voyage of the Dawn Treader)

Sermon as preached at  Lambs and Evington UMC on 8/10/14





Read Malachi 3:1-5





This morning as we continue our sermon series on “The Chronicles of Narnia” we begin talking about what are probably my three favorite books of the series. Today we start with the Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Last week we briefly talked about Prince Caspian and his journey towards becoming king of Narnia. One thing that I didn’t mention last week, was that at the end of the book Peter and Susan were told they were too old to ever come back to Narnia.  For that reason the main characters of our story for today are the younger siblings Edmund and Lucy.  The war is still going on in London, so Susan is away in America, Peter is helping in the war efforts, but because of their age Lucy and Edmund have to stay in Cambridge with their Aunt and Uncle, and their cousin Eustace.
             Now Eustace is quite a character, the word that I would probably use to describe him would be brat. Eustace thought he was so much better than his cousins, he thought he was so much smarter than his cousins. Eustace believed that he was a well-defined and sophisticated person, while his cousins were barbarians who foolishly kept talking about this made up place called Narnia. One day Edmund and Lucy were looking at a painting in the house and Lucy noted that the ship in the painting looked a lot like a Narnian ship. Eustace overheard this nonsense and began to make fun of his cousins, when all of the sudden the water in the painting began to move. The ship became bigger and bigger until finally they found themselves swimming in the ocean and being pulled on board the ship. Luckily for them, the captain of this ship was none other than the now King Caspian. Caspian was on a journey to the east, where Narnians had not been for quite some time. There were seven Lords of Narnia who had made a trek east decades before, but they never returned. Caspian was on a mission to find these missing Lords.  It probably also didn’t hurt that it was rumored that Aslan’s country was at the end of the world as you travel east.  With this adventure in mind Caspian and his crew made their journey east ready for whatever they would find.
            Lucy and Edmund were excited to be back in Narnia; they caught up with Caspian and all the other crew laughing and having a good time. Eustace on the other hand hated it aboard the Dawn Treader. He acted as though he were being held hostage against his will by a foreign enemy. He found the talking animals and creatures not to be delightful, but rather he detested these creatures. He often threatened that he would turn them all in to the Brittish Consulate, which of course the people of Narnia had no idea what he was talking about. Eustace was sea-sick most of the time on this trip and he let everyone on board knoe how miserable he was. He spent most of his time writing in his journal almost like an inmate who writes about his captivity.
            While on this journey the crew run into many different dangers and excitement, much of which I will not go into for the sake of time; but I will give just a quick overview. On the first island they arrive at the members of crew are captured and sold into slavery until freed by one of the Lords who was missing. At another island they encounter strange invisible creatures who had become invisible due to the spell of another one of the Lords. On a different island they find the body of one of the Lords in a river that turns whatever touches it into gold; the Lord must have fallen in and turned to gold. In another island they found a darkness that would turn your  fears into a reality. While there the find one of the Lords who had been tortured by his own fears in that cave for years and rescue him. Finally they arrive at another island where they find the three remaining Lords in a perpetual sleep at a dining table that replenishes itself every night. Now that they had found all of the Lords many of the crew members were ready to go home, but Caspian and some others wanted to go find Aslan’s land and so Caspian and some of the others continued on in the journey while the others stayed behind. Finally they found Aslan’s land which they could not see because it was behind a great wall of water. Aslan told them that whoever went in would never come back. The children did not go because they did want to leave their family. Caspian was tempted but had to be convinced to stay behind and rule Narnia; therefore the only one to cross into Aslan’s land was the brave and noble mouse Reepicheep. The story end with the children returning back to their land, now with Edmund and Lucy becoming too old to go back
            However this morning I want to talk about a specific storyline that happens during the adventures of our book.  While the crew of the ship were searching one of the islands that they landed on in search of food and supplies, Eustace decided to go off by himself. On his journey he finds himself in a pit full of gold. He searches through the gold items, keeping some of them, wearing some of them until he finds the body of a dead dragon. He runs into the nearest cave out of fear, and finds himself falling asleep. When he wakes up he hears the breathing of a dragon, he sees it move its body, in fact it was mimicking every move he made. Finally when Eustace looked down, he realized there wasn’t another dragon in the cave, but that he himself had be turned into a dragon.  He returns to the crew who at first try to kill him, but he manages to show them that he is Eustace. Eustace is stuck as this dragon for quite some time until one day Edmund finds Eustace wandering back to camp, back to his normal body. They sit down and Eustace tells them what happened. He said that he had gone away, he was trying to tear away the scales on his body but each tear just revealed a new set of scales; it was useless. But then Aslan came along and uses his sharp claws to tear off the dragon scales. Eustace describes the experience like this, “The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt.” When Aslan was done Eustace as back to the body he was before, but he was certainly a different boy after this experience.
            Eustace’s experience as a dragon is one that all of us as humans have dealt with. No, I don’t mean that all of us have been dragons in our lifetime, but that this experience that Eustace has is a symbolism for sin.  We, like Eustace, are covered in our scales, the scales of sin. We are like a dragon, covered by sin upon sin upon sin, weaving together, overlapping one another, layered to make a great coat of sin. The worst part of it though is that we cannot do anything to change it. If we try to change it ourselves, we may makes some strides but we will end up eventually failing. Just as it was with Eustice when he would tear and tear and only find more scales beneath, we too can try to get rid of sin ourselves but we will only find more below. We can tear and tear but there will become a point in which it just becomes too painful and we stop; and those scales of sin simply grow back. This is the first great lesson about sin that our story for today teaches us; we cannot overcome it by ourselves. We live in a culture where can’t is a dirty word, where asking for help or needing assistance shows weakness, but the simple fact about sin is that we can’t, I’ll repeat can’t, overcome it ourselves. Without help we are destined to lives as a shell of who we really are, we are destined to live as a wild beast.
            As Christians we know however that there is help, there is assistance there is God. Our scripture for today from Malachi 3 predicts of this coming help. “See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight—indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts.”  The way is being prepared for the coming Messiah, or in our case the Messiah who has already come. That’s right, just as we talked about a few weeks ago when we discussed “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe” Christ came to earth died on the cross and paid for the guilt of our sin. And yet that is not the end of the story. Our sin may have been forgiven, yet we still sin. That is why we worship a risen Lord, that is why we believe in the power of the Holy Spirit, because God is still present with us, helping us in our sin.
            But Malachi asks, “But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?” For some reason there is a notion in this world that being a Christian is easy. There is a belief that repentance is as simple as being cleansed by the waters of baptism and then your good to go. This idea is misguided on so many levels. First off, no one ever said baptism was easy. Baptism is commitment, it first of all is God’s claim on your life, but it also is one’s response to God’s grace.  In baptism one is asked, “Do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world and repent of your sin? Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.” I don’t know about you, but this does not seem like an easy task to me, rejecting all forms of evil and repenting of our sin. In fact this sounds quite difficult. Repentance means turning away from our sins, which are often some of the things that are very near and dear to us.  We see the newest thing in the store that we just have to have, but are called to reject our sin of greed.  We want to keep up with the Jones’s, but have to fight that sin of envy.  We see horrible things in the world and we want to retaliate and lash out, but have to fight that sin of wrath. Even something like enjoying a decadent dinner with our favorite dessert is the sin of gluttony we have to fight against.  Sin is all around and yet our baptism vows call  for us to reject them. Like Eustace who could only tear off parts of his scales, we too weak and too scared to tear off our own sins. We need someone to help us, we need the grace of God, but like the painful tearing of scales at the claws of Aslan, repentance too is not is. Christ has to take those sins, many of which stick close to us, and tear them away. It is not an easy process.
            Unlike our story for today it is also an ongoing procedure. As Christians we live our lives seeking towards a life of Christian perfection, a life of loving life Christ loves. This means doing what Christ would do, but it also means ridding ourselves of our imperfections, those sins that hold us back.  Our scripture for today uses the amazing metaphor of refining gold and silver.  The way in which imperfections were taken out of gold and silver, at least in those times, was to heat the metal until it becomes a molten melted substance, and then the imperfections could be separated. Or the way in which a tool or sword was shaped was to heat it up to such a temperature that it is no longer fully solid and then to hammer away at the metal to bend, shape, or smooth. As humans we are like these metals. We too have to go through the refining process, which have to feel the burn, the bangs, of being ridden of our imperfections and our sins. We like Eustace  have to often endure the tearing away of that which hides our true selves.
            But for as painful, for as morbid even as this may all sound, the good news is what comes out on the other side. Eustace once again became a boy, but a changed boy. One now full of honor and courage, of love and compassion. One who went from loathing Narnia and all of its creatures, to one who as we will find out next week willingly goes back.  When we go through this difficult and usually lifelong process of refinement, of seeking perfection, we may just find that the person that comes out on the other side may be shocking to even ourselves.  After that burning and melting and pouring, we find that we have become a beautiful piece of gold. After that burning and banging we may find that we have been shaped and molded into a tool that splendidly serves our Lord and King. After the ripping and the tearing of our sins we will become an even more beautiful version of ourselves for we will no longer be weighed down by sin, but will be refined back into that perfect image of our creator.
 

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