Holy Imagination

My wife and I recently watched the C. S. Lewis movie, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe on DVD. It was our second viewing of the movie. I have a deep emotional attachment to the Narnia stories. I read them early in college. My wife and I read them and we spent hours discussing the books with friends. And I confess that I was moved to tears throughout the movie.

The story itself takes obvious hints from the Gospel. How else would one explain a character who is a lion sometimes referred to as a lamb, who died as an utterly innocent victim for a traitor and then comes back from the dead with enabling power for those who follow him? Lewis knew the power of stories to convey vital information. Apparently God is well aware of the power of story. Scripture, some say, is a bout 77% narrative. The Bible tells us the story of salvation and it is a true story, a historic story, a story that directs us to God himself. God used the story form because story reaches our souls in ways that a plain, declarative statement can’t. This is why we often fall asleep trying to read a theology book while the Bible itself keeps our attention. Story, like music, moves us deep in our soul.

Lewis’s story is fiction. It is a story that transcends itself and points us to a truth elsewhere. However, I am not claiming that Lewis is inspired or that his stories bear any resemblance in nature to Scripture. Like all good stories it awakens within us a longing for something that is more grand and powerful than the story itself. When I read the Narnia stories, I don’t want to meet the lion, I want to know Christ. His story awakes in me a deep desire to know Christ face to face. In the last pages of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, King Edmund said: “I don’t know how it is but this lamp on the post worketh upon me strangely. It runs in my mind that I have seen the like before; as it were a dream or in the dream of a dream.” This is what Lewis’s stories do to me, they whisper of far away places that seem to break in on me and leave me thirsty and hungry for more. And like a moth to a flame, I am drawn, not to the story, but to the whisper, to the reality behind it that is really too large for my imagination. All I can say now is it is “a new heaven and a new earth” and it whispers my name. The future intrudes into the present and calls ever so softly and it is as we I am dreaming a dream within a dream, something just beyond my grasp.

But there is also the darker side of the story. No one can read the experiences of Edmund or Eustace Scrubb and not sense his own hideous condition before God. When I read the stories, I am reminded of my own betrayal and treacherous behavior and yet God has loved me anyway. Very few stories do this. The only other literary form that does this, for me anyway, is a well crafted and well-preached sermon.

After the movie was over, I thought to myself, this moves me far more that most religious movies. The Passion of the Christ, as an example, moved me viscerally, but Lewis’s movie moved my underused imagination. God gave us imaginations, let us put it to holy use.

Another Easter to Remember

It is not unusual for tragic events to happen around here at Easter. I have had murders and death, and other events that seem to defy the season. This past Easter was milder than most. However, one even did get my attention. Our chairman of Deacons had to have a pacemaker placed in his heart. He is 52 years old. His heart was beating too slow.

Tommy had not felt fell since the surgery. A week later he went for a checkup. Through a series of mistakes, he did not get to see the doctor until late in the afternoon--the nurses did not think he needed to see the doctor at all. Sometime in the afternoon, something changed and Tommy started feeling terrible. When they did an EKG, they rushed him back to the hospital--if you can call it rushing. I beat him to the hospital. He was in the building next to the hospital and I was 25 miles away and had to drive through rush hour traffic, which, in this case, included three wrecks. He hurt all evening and they took him into surgery about 10: 30 that night.

The doctor said that he was on the OR table for about 30 seconds when his heart stopped. The disease had progressed in a week to the point that his lower heart no longer fired, no beating at all. Because they were in the OR, they restarted his heart immediately and reinstalled the pacemaker. One of the leads had pulled out of his heart. The doctor said that in 15 years, this was the first time a lead had pulled out in one of his patients.

Here is what the doctor said. If Tommy had not gone to the doctor's office, he would have been dead last night. If he had gone into the OR one minute later, he heart would have stopped in the corridor of the hospital and they could not have done anything about it. He would have died in the hallway. His heart stopped when he was on the table and they restarted it with no trouble.

I know that this will not meet the standards of evidence for some atheists that I have met, but God was in and around this event last night. It is too coincidental to have just happened. I know that the hard core will say it was just a matter of a probability. Still, it is clear to me that God bent history to accomplish his purpose. He caused things to work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. I noticed that as the doctor talked last night, he kept looking down at the book I had brought with me to read, The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard. It was if God had underlined this event with a bold title.

I hope that as each of us remember and celebrate the Resurrection, we remember that God is in charge. God invited us to be a part of His Kingdom and we rule with him. Even now, God bends history for the benefit of His Kingdom and for those who are called according to his purpose. This past Easter was another one to remember. This time we saw the momentary bending of history, the precise appointment of God

Paul wrote that we are a fragrance of Christ unto God. However, sometimes the very fragrance of heaven blows to us on the winds of the Holy Spirit. The perfume of God himself blows into our time and space so that we smell His presence. The fragrance of heaven wafted through the halls of a hospital that night and we smelled its exquisite sweetness and we were reminded that He is risen, He is risen indeed!

2 Corinthians 2:14-16 4 But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and manifests through us the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Him in every place. For we are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; to the one an aroma from death to death, to the other an aroma from life to life. And who is adequate for these things? (NASB)

Indeed, who is adequate for these things!