Readings for the Day:
Sermon:
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Original Manuscript:
In C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the landscape of Narnia is very bleak. It has been over a hundred years of winter in the land, with no Christmas. This is the world that Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy enter.
It turns out that their entrance is part of the prophecy leading to the return of Aslan, the true king of Narnia whose singing at the beginning of time birthed the land into existence. As the children make their journey onward, they find that the snow begins to melt, Father Christmas returns to the land, and they finally meet Aslan as Spring finally arrives.
As with all of The Chronicles of Narnia series, Lewis presents a perfect allegory for our situation. Sin in this world creates a winter in the landscape of this world. It divides us from our Aslan, from our Lord.
But as in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, there is hope for us. That hope is in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Our readings this morning remind us of that fact. Where once the presence of God was separated from us, where once we had to travel to specific places to be close to our Lord, now God resides in our hearts. The winter is gone. There is hope for us once again.
In Revelation, we learn that there is no more need of a temple, for God resides with us and is our very light.
In John, Jesus tells us that His death and Ascension, which we will be celebrating this week, will not leave us orphaned, but instead we will have an Advocate, a Helper, in the very Spirit of God Himself in our lives. No longer will God be separate from us, but will be intimately bonded to us, as we will celebrate soon on the day of Pentecost.
And finally, we have Acts, which shows us the presence of God coming into the homes of those who worship the Lord through the Apostles. It is a great reminder to us that we too represent our Lord to all others in the world. We hear this message too in the Outline of Faith in our Prayer Book.
We are well into Easter now, but it never hurts to remind ourselves of what it is that the Resurrection has worked in us in this world. Thanks to Jesus' death and Resurrection, we no longer live in the winter of sin, but we live in the spring of God's immediate and intimate presence with us.
Even now, we sometimes have to deal with this winter. There are times when sin is still present. There are times where we want to make the work of the Divine presence in our lives contingent upon ourselves and our own work. This is the idea of the so called "True Self" that if we only dig deep within ourselves, we can find that person we've always wanted to be. This is the idea that the search for the Divine is just the search for ourselves.
That is not, however, what our Scripture today tells us. When we make the spiritual journey about ourselves, we make it about ourselves alone, and thus by doing so, we are always separating ourselves from God. Thank goodness that God came down in the form of Jesus to be with us, end the winter of sin in our souls, and bring us back to Him. Thanks to the work of Jesus, not ourselves, we have the means to be more connected to our Lord than ever.
As this season of Easter comes to a close, remember that Jesus came so that we might no longer be separated from God, but so that we could be intimately connected to our Lord in a way that was not possible before. Remember that Jesus didn't come to help us find the nonexistent "True Self", but came to remake us into our Resurrected Selves in order to live the Resurrected Life we live together. Remember what this life we live together truly is, because soon we will celebrate that life, that life we live now, in the celebration of Pentecost, the birth of the church, the birth of who we truly are.