Sermon by Marjorie Brown for Sunday, April 19th 2009

When I was nine years old, the children’s librarian at the public library in Canton, Ohio told me I really ought to read some books by C.S. Lewis. I resisted her advice because I liked to choose my own books, but about a year later I finally picked them up and began a love affair with Narnia that dominated my imagination for many years. Not many people in the American Midwest knew the stories so they felt like my private property.

In recent years, of course, they have become very big merchandise indeed, especially with spinoffs into TV, stage and film. My children’s generation have experienced wall-to-wall Narnia, and I began to feel a bit alienated by all the fuss. Although in my youth I had read everything C.S. Lewis ever wrote and could have done him as my special subject on Mastermind, I had spent my adult years distancing myself as he was so over-exposed and over-hyped.

So it was with a certain trepidation that I watched a BBC programme the other evening called “The Narnia Code”. I was afraid it would irritate me not only by harping on about C.S. Lewis again but also by digging up conspiracy theories, Da Vinci code style. But I had to eat my words. For once, TV delivered a programme that was theologically literate and thoroughly grownup. It made me remember all over again the reasons I had originally enjoyed reading C.S. Lewis, particularly his combination of a rich and romantic imagination with orthodox Christian faith.

I won’t try to explain the code, except to say that an insightful researcher has made a very credible connection between the seven Narnia stories and the mediaeval cosmology of seven moveable planets, including the sun and moon, orbiting around the earth at the centre of the universe. What stayed with me was the researcher’s passion about the theology that lay behind the planetary code and that had obviously attracted Lewis. According to the mediaeval world-view, a deep pattern of meaning and beauty can be detected in the cosmos, despite all the appearances of meaninglessness. Lewis replicated this in his imagined world of Narnia, because even though he knew the mediaeval cosmology was scientifically incorrect, he believed passionately in the theological truth it embodied.

It all hinges on God’s purpose in creation, and the startingpoint we use for reading the world will determine the answers that we come up with. If we begin by breaking down the universe into its smallest particles, we will see a space of terrifying vastness and emptiness, in which balls of gas and dust collide at random, giving rise through an extraordinary fluke to a planet where organic life accidentally and briefly develops to the level of complexity that we call consciousness. In some hundreds of millions of years, the planet Earth will collapse back into the sun, and whatever life is left on it will be finished. This story gives us no hope, no purpose, and plenty of cause for bleak despair.

But the Christian faith looks at the universe the other way round. It begins with human beings, made in the image of God. If we are here, it says, then why? What is the universe for? And the story opens up outwards as we discover the beauty of God in every part of this delicately balanced, beautifully complicated cosmos. The underlying story is not meaninglessness but love. God is not the hands-off originator of the universe in the Enlightenment world-view who lights the touch paper and stands well back, but the one who is constantly holding everything in being and whose work of re-creation began on Easter Day. The Christian narrative does not depend on a geocentric view of the universe, but it does require a reading in which events in human earthly history give us an insight into the purposes of God for all of creation.

The discoverer of the Narnia code quoted in the TV programme a powerful image that C.S. Lewis used. Imagine a diver, he said, who dives deep into the sea and down into the slime on the ocean floor in order to bring up to the surface in his hand a beautiful jewel. That diver is Christ and the jewel is the whole of creation. Lewis’s understanding of Christianity is that God has chosen to redeem the whole created order, not just one parochial corner of the Middle East on planet Earth.

On Easter morning, Jesus was raised from the grave on the eighth day of creation: a new act of God, inaugurating the re-making of the whole universe. The gospel reading today tells us a bit about what this means.

The narrative is very specific: it is evening on the day of the resurrection, Sunday, the first day of the week, and the disciples are in a locked room. It is locked “for fear of the Jews” – that could mean the Temple police, but note the irony of the category. All of the disciples are of course Jews themselves. Are they locked in their own fear? Are they afraid of one another, or of facing their own failure and guilt?

Jesus appears among them, breaking the rules of normal time and space. His first word is “Peace” – the gift he had promised just three days earlier at the Last Supper. “Shalom”, the word Jesus would have used, is of course much more than the Latin “pax”, the absence of conflict or the declaration of a truce. It is a word expressing the vision of the kingdom of God when all will be put right in creation. And now Jesus offers them this divine gift. He then shows them his wounds, making clear the continuity between the human being who suffered for love of them and the mysterious, divine figure who now greets them. The disciples rejoice when they see the Lord – their eyes at last are opened to the truth, the joyful news that death could not contain Jesus. It’s an “I was blind but now I see!” kind of moment, not just something happening to cross their field of vision.

Jesus announces the gift of peace again, the beginning of the new creation, and just as the Holy Spirit breathed on the waters at the beginning of Genesis, so Jesus now breathes on his disciples, re-creating them. It is a holy, numinous, spine-tingling moment. He gives his disciples another divine gift, the authority to forgive sins in his name. It was Jesus’ action in publicly forgiving sinners, remember, that constantly got him into trouble with the religious authorities. Now he is commissioning his followers to do the same, to speak peace boldly and authoritatively in the name of God.

The gospel narrative is emphasising over and over that something that is both new and of cosmic significance is happening on this Easter day. The world has changed irrevocably. It may not be noticed by everyone. The great majority of the people crowding the city of Jerusalem who had greeted Jesus with palms and who a few days later had shouted for his blood will not meet the resurrected Lord. As far as they are concerned his story is over. But in the Church, now established with Jesus’ commission to his disciples and gift of peace and authority, the seed of the kingdom of God will start to bear the first fruits of what God is doing in the whole of creation.