This Sunday, August 21, is the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost.
This week’s sermon is Lutheran Worship: Hearing the Word
This week’s readings are:
Message: Resurrection Power
I. Consider the joy
and celebration of Aslan’s resurrection.
A. The
girls’ sorrow leads to gladness.
i. It
can be uncomfortable reading about Susan and Lucy’s heartbreak as they deal
with Aslan’s body. It is important to help us to see the contrast with when he
rises!
B. Note
the mice – They are important later.
II. “Death turns
backward.”
A. “What
does it mean? Is it more magic?” – Susan
B. “Yes!
It is more magic! … 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.” - Aslan
III. The idea of eucatastrophe.
A. This
term comes from Lewis’s friend J.R.R. Tolkien.
B. "I
coined the word 'eucatastrophe': the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces
you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of
fairy-stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its
peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature
chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief
as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. It perceives – if
the story has literary 'truth' on the second plane (....) – that this is indeed
how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And
I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest 'eucatastrophe'
possible in the greatest Fairy Story – and produces that essential emotion:
Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow,
because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled,
as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love."
IV. Aslan takes the girls
to the Witch’s castle.
A. He
rescues the people who had been turned into statues - turning stone to flesh.
B. Ezekiel
36:26 – God replaces stone hearts with hearts of flesh.
C. Ezekiel
37:9 - “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to the
breath, Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath,
and breathe on these slain, that they may live.”
D. Aslan
storms the Witch’s castle and brings her victims back to life by breathing on
them.
i. Note
the parallel to what Jesus says about spoiling the strong man’s house in Mark
3:27-29.
ii. Note
also Ezekiel 17:9 when God says to Ezekiel, “Prophesy to the breath: Prophesy,
son of man, and say to the breath, ‘Come from the four winds, O breath, and
breathe into these slain, that they may live.”
iii. And
again, in John 20:22 when Jesus breathes on the disciples and says, “Receive
the Holy Spirit.”
V. The battle is
finished, and the victory is won.
A. In the
book, the battle is brief with few details – unlike the Disney movie.
B. “The
battle was all over a few minutes after their arrival.”
C. What
is left is healing those harmed by the Witch’s minions.
i. This
is an excellent vision of our work as believers in Jesus!
ii. We
live in a world where people are harmed by the devil and their own sin. We
bring Christ’s healing through the Gospel.
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