Transcript
Well, once again, thanks for inviting me to T.S.F. and this has just been one of the joys
of, for me, of coming to the October meeting of the Board of Trustees.
Would you believe that I've been a trustee of this seminary now for 25 years, and I've
been very faithful in attendance, it occurred to me the other day that I have not missed a
single spring meeting of the Board, and spring meeting of the Board is always commencement,
so I think of it. I've watched 25 classes of students commence out of the seminary, and
it's been marvelous over there at the University Chapel, and then also to come here every October
for the October meeting, and I don't know how many it's been, but I think since T.S.F.
was founded, you've been nice enough to let me speak, and so this is a long time that
I've been talking to T.S.F. not maybe 25 years for sure, because it hasn't been in existence
for 25 years, but for a long, long time I've been coming here in October. I just feel honored
that you're willing to risk this crowd to me, but I'm honored.
Clive Staples Lewis was born November 29, 1898, and he died November 22, 1963. And he was
a writer, a professor of medieval literature. Now, there are lots of writers and lots of professors.
Why should I suggest him as a mentor for us today as pastors? And that's what I'm going to talk
about. I'm going to try to make a case for Lewis as a mentor for you today, and why should I do that?
Well, one reason would be for a pastor would be Lewis's use of language. Lewis is
a master of the English language. He always means what he says and he says what he means, and that
is very important quality. In fact, Lewis is the one who wrote in his little book, Experiment
and Criticism, which I think is the best book on Bible study I've ever read, and it's not a book
about Bible study. It's a book about how to read a book. It's one of the last books Lewis wrote
before he died was Experiment and Criticism, which is a really a book about literary criticism.
And in that book, he says, tell me what the hard words mean, and you've done more for me than a
thousand commentaries. He wanted to know what the words meant, what they meant to the person
who said them, what they meant in their context, and then he wanted to know what you meant by them.
So that would make him certainly a good mentor for a pastor. He also wrote in a letter to a
young person about writing, he said, know the meaning of every word you use. Be sure you know the
meaning of every word you use. So that was good, and that would make him a mentor. But
this writer who wrote a lot of words, here's a statistic that might interest you. I was at a
meeting about Lewis. In fact, this being his 100th centennial year. I don't know why a lot of
people thought I was an expert on Lewis. I'm not. I just got interested in him and started
reading everything he wrote. And I've just been giving talks on Lewis when people asked me to do
it. And so I don't consider myself a great expert on Lewis. But I think I know how he thinks.
And you can do that. You know, you can make a mentor. You can make a mentor out of a literary person
because you then that kind of know how they think. And I was at a meeting about Lewis
and I've been at several this summer as he commented. Twice I was an Oxford this summer. But I was at
meeting where a publisher made a comment to us that so far in this century 80 million copies
of C.S. Lewis's books have been published. He's been dead since 63 and yet as of this year,
still the publishing rate for Lewis's books is now two million copies a year. There are more
PhD thesis listed in the Library of Congress written about C.S. Lewis in the last four years
than any other writer. He's now surpassed T.S. Elliot as the main object in this writer for PhD thesis.
You realize that that 80 million copies of his book sold a statistic means that in the 20th
century, the most published author of the 20th century is C.S. Lewis. So I guess that qualifies him
to stir the interest of pastors and wonder why he might possibly be a mentor for you just from that
standpoint alone. But most of all, and what I want to talk about today, I feel Lewis should be a
mentor to us because of his ideas. You know, I got to think about every writer and every pastor
as I see it, I've been a pastor now for over 40 years and I think I can say that every one of us
in our lifetime has about seven or eight great ideas and that's about all we have.
And those seven or eight great ideas are in everything we preach. You can just always spot it
and Lewis is the same way. He has about seven or eight great ideas. They sort of are in everything
he does. No matter what he touches, those ideas are sort of there. Same to be said about Karl
Barth by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, other great people, maybe in ballyhoo. And you might want to wonder,
here's something for your journal, go home today and write down what your great ideas are.
I mean, the things that mark you and that all the kids always say, yeah, I know that,
yeah, I know what you're going to talk on that because that's one of your great ideas.
And I decided today for this talk to just sort of focus on what I would call the first of his
great ideas. The one that started out early in his life and tried to work with you on one of his
great ideas. First, a little background on Lewis. As a teenager at age 15, his father sent him to
to study with his own tutor, WT Kirkpatrick. You will never understand Lewis if you don't
understand the relationship with WT Kirkpatrick, the man he called Great Knock, who was his tutor for
two years, 15 to 17. And he is the one that had a profound influence on Lewis, especially his
use of language, because he had to know the meaning of every word he used with WT Kirkpatrick.
But also Kirkpatrick was a rigorous atheist. And Lewis, who had been raised,
Presbyterian and interestingly enough, in North Ireland, his family faith was Presbyterian.
At age 15, with a great deal of fanfare abandoned his faith. He let the whole family know.
It caused a little breach with his father for quite some time. And his friend Arthur Greeves,
his childhood friends, he let him know in no uncertain terms because he carried on a correspondence
with Arthur Greeves for his whole life. And he let everybody know that he had become an atheist.
In fact, he toyed becoming a Marxist under the influence of W. T. Kirkpatrick. But at age 17,
he had to go to war. And he went to France and fought in the war. And just as he was matriculating
in Oxford, then he was drafted, had to go to France. In France, he got wounded. In fact,
was badly wounded, came back to England and recuperated for several months in England. And
carried shrapnel in his body for the rest of his life. By the way, I have to pick a comment about
Shadowlands, which I love that film, except I did not like. I love the American version,
especially. But I did not like what Adam Borrow did at the beginning of that film to try to
establish Lewis as a kind of egghead intellectual who knew about pain and knew about these things
in his head. But then when his wife would die, he would really discover suffering. And that they
established by having these fictitious lectures that Lewis is supposed to have given to these
women's groups. And it's a very patronizing at the beginning of Shadowlands. I don't know if
you remember it, but you see him giving these talks on suffering. And the whole thing is to say,
yeah, he's intellectual, but what's he know about it? And I thought that was a cheap shot because
that man had suffered. I mean, carrying shrapnel for the rest of your life, he had a congenital defect
in his hand which meant that all this writing he did with pain and he wrote everything long
hand, all his books were written long hand. He wrote letters to all these people so he had paid.
His mother died when he was nine years old. It was a desolating blow because his father couldn't
relate at all to him. Send away at age 10 to a prep school in England where he was desperately
lonely. He knew what suffering was. And I thought that was the one cheap shot in the Shadowlands.
But otherwise, I thought the film was spectacular. No, Lewis at age 17 goes to war. He gets wounded.
He comes back after he gets recuperated. He goes to Oxford. He majors in three subjects.
He does what they call honors in three subjects which is just unprecedented at Oxford and
toyed with whether he was going to go to the route of philosophy or literature. He's finally
decides to go toward medieval literature and becomes a first rate medievalist. And at age 25,
he's made a tutor at Oxford at 25. And so tutor, he's still an atheist. He's an atheist actually
through his twenties until right about age 28, 29. Oh, this is interesting about his atheism though.
During that whole period, now they published his diaries of that period so we can really get
an insight in the Lewis during that period. By the way, that's a great book to buy for you as
theologians called All My Road Before Me. It's just been published about three years ago.
His diaries of that period, 22 to 27, because he stopped diaring after 27, age 27.
And during that time, he found himself making Christian friends. All his friends are Christians.
They're weird, a little bit weird. Owen Barfield is a downright weird person.
Was all his life, but still he was a Christian, odd, but a Christian. And he was definitely an
odd Christian. And he found himself gravitating to these Christians. And even to Christian authors,
like George McDonald, who he always loved, even though he couldn't accept McDonald's faith.
And Chesterton throughout the diaries, he keeps saying that he was reading this by Chesterton and
that by Chesterton. He's kind of making fun of Chesterton, like calling him Earl the Pearl,
and stuff like that, and we're just kidding. G.K. the Pearl. You'd never call G.K. Chesterton the Pearl.
Six foot seven, you know, Kate. Often wondered if the young life kids, and they're the ones that
started calling me Earl the Pearl, if they would have done that if I was six foot four, or something
like that. And a name like Earl, you know, Earl's not really a strong name. So anyway,
he was making fun of Chesterton, but yet he was reading Chesterton. And he was, he was drawn
to Christians. Then finally, about age 28, he decides to become a theist, like Thomas Jefferson,
a theist. I believe in God, but that's about as far as I'll go. He couldn't figure out Jesus Christ.
He thought, in fact, we have several of his letters at that time, which he thought Jesus Christ
was really extraneous to the whole thing. A little bit like Rudolph Bootman. He,
I mean, Rudolph Bultmann's extraneous to the whole thing, but he couldn't figure out what to do
with Christ. And yet he decided, he called himself the most unwilling convert in all of England,
and he decided to become a theist. This is all in his book, Surprised by Joy. Then in 1931,
he had an amazing experience. He was walking on Addison Walk. And by the way, if you go to Oxford,
be sure to go to Modern College, where he was tutored, and take the Addison Walk. And now there's
a plaque in Addison Walk in honor of C.S. Lewis, because it was in the Addison Walk with two friends,
a man named Hugo Dyson, and another man named J.R.R. Tolkien. They were in a study group of
northern stories. They were northern stories study group. He loved adventure stories. Tolkien
was the leader of the group. He was a professor at Merton College, right across the road. And so
they were on this famous walk on Addison Path. And then they went back, this is all in the letters
that Lewis wrote. They went back to Lewis's rooms in Modeling, and they sat up till three in the
morning talking. The next day, Lewis went with his brother in his brother's side car,
his brother's motorcycle, and this is exactly what Lewis wrote. I got in my brother's motorcycle,
and I rode to Whipsnade Zoo with my brother. On the beginning of the ride, I did not believe at the
deity of Jesus Christ. At the end of the ride, I believed in the deity of Jesus Christ. This is a
direct quotation from Lewis. Nothing happened during the ride. He wants to make that clear. It was not
a, it was not a road to Damascus experience. Nothing happened during the ride, but the long talk
last night with Tolkien and Dyson had much to do with it. So Lewis in 1931 became a believer in
Jesus Christ. He never wavered from it. And then he started writing. He wrote a book right away as
a Christian, which probably was a mistake, called Pilgrim's Regress. And it was a little too heroic,
a little too sophomoric. The heroes were too heroic. The villains too villainous. And he paid a
heavy price for writing that book. One of the reasons he was never promoted to professor,
according to one school of thought, was because he wrote that book. He broke a rule in Oxford,
now that you don't write outside your field. And so anyway, he got in trouble for that book. So
then he just dug in and did his work at Oxford. He wrote several important books on medieval literature.
Then in 1939, he broke silence again. The war is breaking out in Europe. And he wrote a book, his
first Christian book after Pilgrim's Regress, The Problem of Pain. And he wrote on that and then a
whole flood of books. And you know the rest of the story. Well, what are his great ideas?
There's no way of looking at C.S. Lewis without running up against the first great theme in his writing.
And it starts out when he's not a Christian. During that whole period, if you read the Diaries,
the whole period in the 20s, he was totally preoccupied in his so-called Dymer poem that he was
writing. He was totally preoccupied with the problem of evil, just like T.S. Eliot. If you read
Eliot, Eliot is completely preoccupied from Prufrock, Wasteland, Hollow Man. He is totally preoccupied
with the problem of evil. Lewis is just like Joseph Conrad, a heart of darkness. It's a study of
the problem of evil. William Shakespeare, it's in everything of Shakespeare, as you know, all the way
from Lady Macbeth, out damned spot, out damned spot, part of the greatest line in all Shakespeare,
is a woman who cannot resolve her guilt. Or even in his love story, Romeo and Juliet,
the Capulets and the Montagues , the Montagues views have this hatred between the two families and
that murderous hatred between the two families is pure evil. Here we romanticize Romeo and Juliet,
but at the core of it, and Leonard Bernstein saw that when he wrote his own interpretation of Romeo
and Juliet's West Side story, that at the core of it is raw evil. So Shakespeare is up to it.
Dostoevsky, you know, in the Brothers Karamazov, the father Fyodor is pure evil.
You sympathize with him because of the greatness of the writer, Dostoevsky, but you realize that he's
bad, bad of the core, and then, of course, in the crime and punishment, the most the greatest of
Dostoevsky's books, Raskolnikov, murders a woman with a hatchet, and then Petrovich, the great
detective, tracks him down. Lewis, you cannot read anything in Lewis without running up against
this great theme in Lewis's writings. He's always grappling with the human crisis and its
catastrophic nature, the catastrophic nature of the human crisis, and one of the reasons that
Lewis wrote great, and I'm going to give you a very important comment now about books in general,
but Lewis in particular. One of the great reasons that Lewis wrote great adventure stories
is because he faced the totality of this crisis without flinching, and that's what makes a great
adventure story writer. You've got to face evil without flinching. So why Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs is a good adventure story because the selfishness of that queen who looks in the mirror,
you know, she says, mirror, mirror, who on the wall, who's the fairest of them all, and once they've
established the fact that the mirror always tells the truth, then you know you have a tragedy on your
hand. Because sooner or later, the mirror will tell the queen that she's not the most beautiful
in all the kingdom, so she is at that point. And the moment the mirror tells the queen that she's
not the most beautiful, you know that she's going to have to kill the one who is the most beautiful.
And so you know if you're an adventure story writer, you're an adventure story reader,
you know that Snow White's going to have to be killed by the queen who becomes a witch to do it.
She herself becomes evil to do it. But that's all good adventure stories. Every great adventure
star wars, every one of them, and by the way, George Lucas admits that the great inspiration for
star wars was J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Unflinchingly, Tolkien faces up the problem of evil.
So does Lewis, his great friend. He saw evil, but saw, and here's Lewis again, the greatness of
Lewis, and the greatness of writers that are able to handle this, he saw how complicated the crisis is.
Let me show you from Lewis how wise he is on this score. Edmund, the character you meet in
Lion, Witch, and the wardrobe, is tempted. It's interesting. This is the first presence of evil in
the Chronicles. He's tempted by simply something he wants. That's pretty garden variety. And what
he wants is so silly, Turkish delight candy, which even the English people is a terrible tasting
candy. People keep giving me Turkish delight. It tastes like it's got perfume in it. It's awful.
And I have a whole package at home that somebody just brought back from Turkey for me,
and they think I love it because I love C.S. Lewis. Lewis is pulling a joke on his readers with
Turkish delight. This kid falls in love with Turkish delight, and nobody likes Turkish delight.
It is the worst candy in the world. Imagine being tempted by that. And yet the queen, the winter queen
is able with that simple desire of Edmund's that now goes haywire. Lewis had this definition of
an ever-increasing appetite for an ever-decreasing pleasure. And that's addiction.
And addiction is what happens when you want something very badly so that it tempts you.
And so here's Edmund with the the mildest of all temptations, just something I want.
But he ends up the man of treachery. And he ends up belonging, now get this, to the queen of treachery.
When you're a traitor, you belong to that which is treacherous. I had a girl in Seattle when I was
a youth pastor who was caught shoplifting at Frederick and Nelson. Maybe one of the reasons
it went bankrupt is all the people who shoplifted there. But she was caught shoplifting, and they couldn't
get a hold of her parent. And so they called me, she said, well, maybe my youth pastor can come get me.
And so I went down, and this girl was just weeping. And I vouched for her and they said, okay,
we're not going to- were going to let you take her home. And she was shoplifting we caught her. So you can take
her home. And she was a little junior high kid. And I was driving her home and oh, she was just sobbing.
You know, the humiliation, all it was going through her head that now the youth pastors come to get
me and the world will be out at the youth group. You know, we'll be praying for her and stuff to say.
Please pray for Esther and her problem and stuff like that. You know, I'll be discreet of course,
but she would, she was all this is going through her head. I'm sure she kept saying in the car,
it's the worst day of my whole life. It's the worst day of my whole life. And she was just sobbing.
And then I said to her, I kind of decided to try to be pastoral when I said to her, well,
can you think of any worse that could have happened today? I thought maybe that would change the
subject a little bit. You know, think of some of the other people that are suffering like the
Armenians and stuff like that. And I said, can you think of anything worse? And she said, no.
I thought she was just sobbing. I can't think of anything worse that could happen to me today.
And so I decided once again to be bold and be pastoral. And so I said to her, well, you know,
I can't think, I'll call her Mary. I said, you know, Mary, I can't think of something worse
that could have happened today. And she said, what's that? And I said, if you hadn't been caught,
I said, maybe that's worse. Because if you had been caught, you'd be stealing at Frederick
Nelson's again tomorrow. And maybe tomorrow, you'd get bolder and steal something bigger.
And then you'd steal a little bit more the next day. And then finally, you'd be in the mafia.
You know, I told that very story to my, we have four services at our church and the
evening services, the fourth services, all young people in their 20s. And I told that story,
and they all roared when I said it, and then you'll be in the mafia. But then I said to him, hey,
why'd you laugh? How do you think you'd get in the mafia? How do you get in the mafia?
Selling little drugs here, first in a street corner, and then running for another guy,
and then for another guy. And then finally, you're breaking people's kneecaps.
You belong to them. You belong to evil. And it all started with just a little thing you wanted.
Okay, I just wanted a little money for spending. So I'll do this, I'll do that. But how does
anybody get in the mafia? That's how they got in. It all started small. It accumulated. And Lewis
saw that. Notice how he portrays it in a children's story. Edmund, who starts out with Turkish delight,
ends up with treachery. Okay, think of Mark in the, that hideous strength, one of the adult novels.
Mark is tempted. And by the way, he's in a university town tempted by the intoxication of raw
power. And Lewis superbly portrays that temptation, that evil, the evil of power.
Eustace. He is in the voyage of Dawn Treader. He is selfish. He is brutish. He is rude. He's arrogant. He runs rust-shot over everyone.
He acts like a dragon. And being a fantasy story, Lewis is able to have fun with that. He becomes
a dragon. He becomes what he's acting like. Lewis saw that. The cumulative effect of evil.
Or Lucy. Now this will surprise you. If you read the Chronicles of Narnia, the hero, the heroine,
in all of the Chronicles is Lucy, the daughter of Owen Barfield, who he dedicated the first book to.
He only originally planned to write one book you know. And then he got carried away. And he dedicated
to his godchild, Lucy Barfield. So Lucy is the hero. She is unquestionably the great person
throughout the Chronicles of Narnia. But it's interesting to me that Lewis saves the worst
temptation in all the Chronicles of Narnia for Lucy. And if you read Voyage of Dawn Treader,
you remember that marvelous scene in the magic book. When she because of her maturity can look
in the magic book, which nobody else can do. And when she looks in the magic book, she sees
her friends back in England and she sees their weaknesses because of her maturity. And she sees
them on a train making fun of her. And so she says to them, well, you won't make fun of me anymore.
And spiritual pride and all these things come in. And then she hears the growl of Aslan.
And he disciplines her. That's the worst sin of all. Spiritual pride. Self-righteousness.
Lewis understood the catastrophic nature of evil is cumulative, catastrophic nature. And I believe
pastors that one of the reasons he's so relevant to our generation is because he helps us see
ourselves and see the crisis of the addictive nature, catastrophic nature of evil. Start small
ends terrible. And by the way, that's how you became a self-believer. Let me tell you about the
long talk. Remember he says the long talk with Tolkien and Dyson had much to do with it.
Here's Tolkien. You can read this in the book, the Inklings written by a hungry
carpenter who is the biographer of J.R. Tolkien. He tells us what happened in that night.
The night in Lewis's rooms, this was Tolkien's argument. Tolkien made arguments Lewis. He said,
you know, we love adventure stories, the northern stories. And in every adventure story,
he said to Lewis, there has to be two things present in an adventure story. There has to be the
sense of catastrophe. I told you about it, the snow white and the seven dwarfs, right? The wicked
witch gives a poisoned apple to snow white. Tempts her with an apple that looks good. She eats it
and she apparently dies. There has to be catastrophe. But there also has to be what Tolkien called
in being a philologist. He created a great word from the Greek language. There has to be
eucatastrophe. See, good, you know the EU and Greek means good. Good catastrophe.
And when the prince who loves snow white kisses her, you discover that love is more powerful
than a jealousy and hatred and envy. And that's the happy ending of snow white and the seven dwarfs
except it has one PS. The dwarfs chase the wicked witch over the cliff. There is judgment.
Okay, but the point is she gets her comeuppance. You have to have catastrophe in a great story,
like in Star Wars. You have Darth Vader who represents the catastrophic nature. But Obi-Wan
Kenobi is stronger than Darth Vader because you have better weapons, more important weapons
that Luke Skywalker must learn how to use. And that's of course the volume two, volume three of the
Star Wars Trojan. But good catastrophe. Now here's Tolkien's argument with Lewis. And Lewis
himself tells this in his letter Arthur Greeves the next day. Tolkien said to Lewis,
you know that in every story there's catastrophe and good catastrophe. Jesus Christ is the good
catastrophe of all time except that he's true. And our stories are in our imagination, but he's true.
And that put all the pieces together for C.S. Lewis. And he got his Christology.
Jesus Christ is the good catastrophe. He is catastrophic, you know.
But he's good. Now do you know why he said about the great golden lion Aslan? Is he quite safe?
Oh no, he's not safe, but he's good. He got all that from that talk with Tolkien the next day.
He decided he believed in the deity of Christ. And Lewis helps us understand in new ways the
gospel of the good catastrophe. And I for the last few minutes, I know I have to end it 20 after.
And then if anybody wants to ask some questions, hey, I'll stick around. But I want to give you three
quick readings to show you Lewis say it himself. First in one of the finest books Lewis ever wrote
which is the book he wrote after the death of Joy Davidman called A Grief Observed. In fact,
some people think this is the high water mark of Lewis's writing. He wrote it with a pseudo name.
He wrote it with the name C.N. Clerk after Joy died. And then people came up to him and said,
you know what Dr. Lewis, we know how much you're grieving. And we have read a book that we think
might help you a great deal. And then Lewis admitted that he himself had written, he wrote this book,
A Grief Observe. This is a truly profound Odyssey book. I want to read what he writes at one point.
He says, what do men, what do people say when they, what do people mean when they say, I'm not
afraid of God because I know he is good? Have they never been to the dentist? Yet this is unendurable.
This is he writing still a joy that's alive but dying with a lot of pain and cancer.
But this is unendurable. And then one babbles if only I could bear it or the worst of it or any of it
instead of her. But one can't tell how serious that bit is for nothing is staked on it.
If it suddenly became a real possibility then for the first time we should discover how seriously
we had meant it. Yeah, you know, this is one of the parts of the tragedy of life, isn't it?
You have a youngster who's got leukemia or you've got a youngster who's sick or a young person
is ill and a parent says, oh, I wish I could have this illness they've got. Nothing staked on it,
though. You can't take it. I mean, you can't take leukemia away from your child or you can't take
an injury away from say a youngster who's injured even though you love them very, very much or
like in this case, Lewis's wife, Joy Davidman. You can't take the cancer on himself. So we say it.
He says one babbles if only I could take it for her instead, but he says nothing is staked on it.
So we don't even know if we mean it, but now listen to it. But is it ever allowed?
It was allowed to one we are told and I find that I can now believe again that he has done
vicariously what can be done. He replies to our babble, you cannot, you dare not, I could, I dared.
And that's Jesus Christ, the good catastrophe coming alongside the catastrophe.
And that's Lewis, expressing it. By the way, is that has Lewis in a fresh way explained
atonement to you? That's the greatness of Lewis as a mentor to pastors. He will teach you how to
think with imagery. He'll teach you how to think with new earthy language to express great truth.
Now, from another book you wrote called Miracles, Lewis again talks about the Eucatastrophe and
what I think is one of the vintage passages from Lewis. In the Christian story, God descends to
reascend, I love this passage. He comes down from the heights of absolute being in the time and
space and down to humanity, down further still at embryologists are right to recapitulate in the
womb ancient and prehuman phases of life. Lewis is a Darwinian. He doesn't have any problem with
the fact that God identifies with the whole of us. And so do we, you know, we have a continuity
with the earth. I never understand the great Darwin debate. My daughter is a doctor and I said,
isn't it wonderful that you could do operations on a dog's heart to learn how to do operations
on the human heart? It's because the human being has a continuity with the dogs. I couldn't
understand why anybody would be bothered that we have a continuity with apes because thank God for
that continuity. We were created in the sixth day with the rest of creation and so Lewis is no
problem with that. So he says, he comes down from the heights of absolute being and to recapitulate
in the womb ancient prehuman phases of life down to the very roots in the seabed of the nature he
created. Now there's the key. He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up
with him. One has the picture of a strong man stooping lower and lower to get himself underneath
some great complicated burden. He must stoop in order to live. He must almost disappear into the
load before he incredibly straightens his back and marches off with a whole mass swaying on his
shoulders. Or one may think of a diver first reducing himself to nakedness then glancing in mid-air
and then gone with a splash, vanish rushing down through green and warm water into black and
cold water and down through increasing pressure into the death-like region of ooze in slime and
old decay. How do you like that for the catastrophe? How do you like that as a definition of white
color crime? Or adultery, mid-life crisis? I thought adultery was supposed to be so fun.
It's ooze and slime and old decay. It's catastrophe. It may start with just Turkish delight,
but it ends up a treachery. See? It's ooze and slime. Don't you love Lewis?
Earthy, right? How do you like your sins described? How about Lucy's sin of pride looking...
Oh, I went to Garrison Keillor the other night. He was absolutely hysterical. He was talking about his
upbringing in the sanctified brethren movement. And he said, my mother was sanctified brethren.
We love to realize how blessed we were because we were saved and then we just had to grieve over all
those that weren't sanctified brethren. Of course, we're not saved. I like the Lutherans and the
pet Catholics that are Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Church and all those others.
But we, sanctified brethren, were saved. Then he went on to say, my mother's favorite part of the
newspaper, though, were the stories about crime and murder. She loved that best of all.
She'd always say, listen to this. This young man, 14 years old, takes a frying pan, hits his
mother over the head and kills her and then fries eggs with a frying pan. What's the world coming to?
Do you ever hear anything like that? He put that in the beginning of the sketch and then he kept
bringing that in throughout the sketch. This guy frying eggs with a frying pan after he killed his
mother. And Garrison Header said, my mother liked those stories about crime because she felt that we
really had to know the sins of people so we could pray for them. So she was really interested in
the sins of all the people. And that's why she liked to hear the gossip from her sister when he
came from the beauty parlor telling about all the gossip in town because we have to know the sins
of the people so we can pray for them. And he really nailed us there on that run. But that's Lucy.
Lucy looks in the magic book and because she's so mature, she sees the sins of all the people.
But Lewis is calling Lucy in the magic book her spiritual pride. He's calling it ooze and slime and
old decay. Okay, I'll finish this great image. So there it is down there at death-like region of ooze
and slime and old decay and then back up again, back to color and light. His lungs are now almost
bursting till suddenly he breaks surfaces again holding in his hand the dripping precious thing
that he went down to recover and that's Lewis's description of us. That's Lucy after Aslan
growls and that's Edmund you'll see and I'm going to do a reading about Edmund. He and it are both
are colored now since they've come back up into the light and then his last line is vintage Lewis
again down below where it lay colorless in the dark. He lost his color too. That's the price of
the good catastrophe. That's why he calls it a good catastrophe. Jesus Christ dies so that we can live.
Well where does Lewis get all this stuff? He gets this in Romans 5. Do you remember in Romans 5,
Karl Barth calls it the most important chapter in the whole Bible? Paul tells about how there's
the first Adam and then there's a second Adam and the first man, the second man, see the
catastrophe is the first man who brings in the catastrophe because we all see him. He preserves our
freedom and then the second Adam comes Jesus Christ the good catastrophe and then at the end of
that great passage that for that model the Apostle Paul ends it with this wonderful line but where
sin increased, it's accumulated, catastrophic, the grace of God increased more.
It's not an equal equation. Barth makes a big point of that. It's an unequal equation. Thank God for
that. The kiss of the prince is greater than the hatred of the witch. Obi-Wan Kenobi's power is
greater than that of Darth Vader. Jesus Christ's power is greater than that of evil including the
devil, including death, including sin. It's catastrophically good. That's where Lewis got it. So it's
not original. He got that great idea from the Apostle Paul. I got it from Jesus Christ. Now the last
reading I'll do is very short. In line which in wardrobe his first novel Edmund who becomes a
traitor and becomes guilty of treachery then belongs to the winter queen because the winter queen
is the one who has the right to own all those who are traitors like the mafia. And so she says at one
point I get to kill him now because he belongs to me. He's my property. And then by surprise as
in the golden lion some of the emperor from beyond the sea shows up at the scene and says to the winter
queen don't kill the boy you can have me instead because it's me that you really want and it's true.
She really wants asthma. She was trying to flush him out. And so asthma allows her to put him on the
stone table and they bind him to the stone table. They shave all his golden mane off and then with one
great flurry she stabs him and kills him. I'll never forget where my wife was reading that to our
children. My son who was age five ran into me. I was in the other room and he says dad they just
killed Aslan. This little boy. He was crying. Aslan was killed. And the next that night the girls
the boys ran for cover like it happened in the first century too. And the girls came to try to see
if they could what would happen to Aslan. It was the middle of the night. It was dark. Susan and
Lucy come see what's happened to Aslan. And they see him there tied to the stone table and they're
so sad. And then they see a horrible thing apparently they see little mice going around
gnawing on all the ropes. And then they realize first they say get away you ugly mice and then
they realize the mice are just nibbling away at the ropes and the ropes are finally off and then
he's still lying there. And then they stand there and it's getting very cold. And they're looking
out toward Narnia toward the Cair Paravel in the dark. And then they see some birds then gave
a chuckling sound. It's been still for hours and hours to startle them. And then another bird
answered it and soon the birds were singing all over the place. It was definitely early morning
now. I'm so cold said Lucy. So am I said Susan let's walk around a bit. They walk them to the
eastern edge of the hill. And then they saw a they saw Cair Paravel out in the in the in the
in the distance. And then well I'll read it here. They it all looked dark gray. But beyond the
very end of the world the sea showed pale the sky began to turn red. They walked two and
froze several times more. They could count between the dead Aslan in the eastern ridge trying to
keep warm. Oh how tired their legs felt. And then is that last they stood as a moment looking at
a moment looking out at the sea at Cair Paravel which now they could just begin to make out.
And the red turned to a gold along the line where the sea and the sky met very slowly came up
over the edge became the sun. And at that moment they heard from behind them a loud noise,
a great cracking deafening noise like a giant had broken a giant plate. What's that said Lucy
clutching Susan's arm. I feel afraid to turn around since Susan something awful is happening.
Something worse is happening to him. And Lucy said come on and they turn she pulls Susan around
and rising of the sun had now made everything look so different the colors the shadows were changing.
And for a moment they didn't see the important thing. Then they did the stone table was broken
into two pieces by a great crack that ran it down from end to end and there was no Aslan.
Oh no cried the two girls rushing to the table it's too bad sobbed Lucy they might have left the
body alone who's done it cried Susan. What does it mean is it more magic? Yes set a great voice
from behind their backs it is more magic and they turned around and they're shining in the sunrise
larger than they'd ever seen him before shaking his mane for it apparently grown again stood Aslan
himself oh Aslan cried both children scaring at him almost more frightened than they were glad
aren't you dead then dear Aslan said Lucy not now said Aslan you you're not a uh asked Susan
and a shaky voice you couldn't bring herself to say the word ghost Aslan stooped his golden head
and licked her forehead the warmth of his breath the rich sort of smell that seemed to hang about
his hair came all over her do I look it he said oh you're real you're real said Aslan cried Lucy
and both girls fun themselves upon him and covered him with kisses but what does it all mean
asked Susan when they were somewhat calmer it means said Aslan that 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 dawn she would have read there a different incantation she would have known
that when a villain willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead
then the table would crack and death itself would start working backwards and that's how Lewis
decided to explain the document the resurrection of the children catastrophe good catastrophe see a
traitor belongs to the queen of traitors belongs to evil when you and I commit evil and we all know
it's true we belong to evil the good catastrophe is greater than the evil where sin increased the
grace of god increased more well that's the first of the great ideas of Louis and for that reason
I think he's a great mentor he helps us understand the most important doctrine the cat the
catastrophe and the good catastrophe hey listen I'm supposed to stop right this minute and you can
go to class or if anybody wants to raise some questions about Lewis I'm available for a few moments
do it everyone hey god bless you
[text unavailable]