The wonder of imagination

A sermon by Jamie Howison on Luke 24:13-35

I have a very vivid memory of a rainy Sunday afternoon back in 1971, when I was all of ten years old and bored. Very bored, in the way that only a restless ten-year-old boy can be. We’d been to church that morning, as we always did on Sundays, but once lunch was over the afternoon just looked barren. It was too cold and wet to spend time outdoors, none of my friends were available to do anything, and my pleas for my dad take us bowling were met with a very definite “not today.” Not today, so you’ll just have to find something else to do… but what? And remember, this was in a day when the TV channels were more than a little limited, and my parents pretty much restricted our Sunday TV to the Wonderful World of Disney at 6pm, sometimes followed by whatever family-oriented show aired at 7pm.

I landed up in my room, lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, and wondering how I was going to pass the afternoon. I reached over to my bedside table, where I had a little stack of these booklets called Pix, which we were given out each week at the end of Sunday School. I was, I should say, a star attender of Sunday School, and I still have the little pin that was awarded to me for three years of solid attendance without missing a single week. I was, however, singularly disinterested in those weekly Pix handouts, with their recap of the weekly lesson, puzzles, cartoons, and terribly dull—to my mind—stories. They just landed in a stack on the shelf of my bedside table, until my Mum would eventually suggest they needed to be cleared away.

So taking one of those little booklets I just flipped through until I landed on the story for the week, which turned out to be one episode in a longer serialized story called The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Well, that sounded at least a bit interesting, so I pulled the whole stack off the shelf and began to look back. Yes, I had about ten episodes in the series, so I started reading the first one. It was set in the second world war, and these four children had been evacuated from their home in London and taken out to stay at a mansion in the countryside. Okay, that’s kind of interesting, so I kept reading. And slowly this extraordinary tale unfolded.

In one of the rooms of the mansion there was a stately old wardrobe, which unexpectedly led the youngest of the four—a girl named Lucy—into a land called Narnia, populated by fauns, centaurs, talking animals, dwarves, and all manner of mythical creatures. Narnia, though, was under a kind of pall of evil, having been locked into an endless winter by the White Witch. Well, I was hooked.

There comes this moment when another one of the children—a rather sullen boy named Edmund—also makes his way through the wardrobe into Narnia, where he is met by the White Witch, who takes him into her grand sled and offers him Turkish Delight. I remember how I instantly grew hungry for candy, so I put down the book, jumped on my bike and rode through the rain to a corner store where I bought something called Turkish Taffy—not at all Turkish Delight, but what did I know? And I loved that candy.

So settled back on my bed with my candy and this extraordinary story, I resumed reading… only to discover that the Turkish Delight the Witch had given Edmund was enchanted, such that he couldn’t stop eating it even as it made him feel sick from taking too much, leaving him under her spell and longing for more, ready to betray his siblings to her in exchange for another taste of that candy. Oh… feeling just a little ill, I put aside my own candy, and then kept reading.

The serialization of the story only got me about halfway through the book, so at dinner that night I told my parents all about the story, and asked if we might be able to get a copy. The next day my father arrived home from the office, with the complete seven-volume set of the Chronicles of Narnia in hand. I was officially a committed Narnian.

I tore through the remainder of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and over the next few weeks I polished off Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. One evening at dinner I was enthusiastically telling my family all about how much I loved those books, and my sister, who is three years older than me, interrupted me and said, “well of course, Aslan is the Christ figure.” What? “And the witch is a symbol of evil,” she said, pointing out how Aslan the lion’s self-sacrifice for Edmund was parallel to the crucifixion.

I was completely dumbstruck. I’d not seen any of that in these fantastical stories, but then it all began to fall into place. When I launched into The Magician’s Nephew—which is a kind of Narnia origin or creation story—I read it with new eyes. And if anything, my excitement in reading the stories only deepened. Narnia was, and has been ever since, a place to which I love to journey—I’ve read those books many times, and from time to time continue to do so—and I think part of that is because of the delight I felt when I recognized that C.S. Lewis was telling a mythic yet deeply Christian set of stories. The rush of that discovery was ultimately exhilarating. And why am I telling you all of this? Because something very similar is happening to the two disciples in this Gospel reading today.

“Stay with us,” the two disciples on the Emmaus Road said to the stranger.

‘Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.’ So he—and he, the reader knows, is the risen Christ—‘So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’

It is such a powerful scene, isn’t it? “Were not our hearts burning within us?” That moment of recognition is compelling. Didn’t we feel something and maybe even know something that we couldn’t entirely recognize? And then He had taken bread, blessed, broke, and gave it to them, and they could in that instant finally recognize him in his fullness.

In their delight and exhilaration, they rushed back to the disciples in Jerusalem, breathlessly telling them, “what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.”

And he is yet made known to us in the breaking of the bread. Week by week we come into this space, in which people have prayed and sung and worshipped and broken bread together for close to a century. Maybe sometimes we come, and it feels like it is just being done by rote; just a kind of habit we have, and we barely taste that little piece of bread or sip of wine. But even that just prepares us for a life of coming and tasting and seeing and being a people shaped as Christ’s Body, Christ’s people. And maybe every once in a while we’ll be struck by the immense depths of being his people, eating and drinking of his great gift to us, which was and is his very life. A life offered for the sake of the world, and for the sake of each one of us.

I had such delight when I first discovered Lewis’s Narnia stories, and then a kind of utter exhilaration when my older sister ever so confidently told me that Aslan the lion was a Christ-figure. It was all the wonder of a child, engaging a set of stories of a remarkable depth and character, and discovering in their very heart a kind of brilliant gospel proclamation. It left me breathless, and the memory of it all still takes my breath away.

I pray for each of us such moments of child-like breathlessness, here in this place, the eucharist offered to us, reminding us of who we are and whose we are.