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Good
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 Sermon
04/04/2010
Deeper Magic from Before the Dawn of Time
~ by Reverend Thomas Cary Kinder
April 4, 2010 Easter
First Congregational Church in Thetford,
Vermont, UCC
Psalm 118; Isaiah 65:17-19, 25; John 20:1-18
Jesus
rising from the dead; wolves and lambs, lions and oxen feeding
together in peace; no one hurting or destroying on all this holy
earth: Easter is magical. It
offers us a path to peace, joy and love in our lives. But Easter’s path is in
competition with other paths that seem just as magical in their ends
but more conventional in their means.
Easter’s path is the reverse of violence, it is the path
of nonviolence, but our culture’s violent path is so often the
magic we choose.
Children
discover at an early age that violence works like magic. Two pre-school brothers were at a
family gathering. The older
one saw his little brother playing with blocks. He walked over, plopped down, and
grabbed the blocks away from him.
Then he turned his back and began playing with them while his
little brother sat stunned. The
little boy looked as if he was going to cry, but instead after
reflecting for a few seconds, he turned, picked up the entire box of
blocks and dumped them on his brother’s head. Then he began happily playing with
something else, as his brother plotted his next attack.
By
magic, violence got the older boy what he wanted. He wanted the blocks, and maybe he
wanted to annoy his little brother, and violence got him both. Then by a disappearing trick
involving violent revenge, the younger boy rid himself of
frustration.
The
deep magic of violence goes all the way back to the dawn of
time. Adam and Eve disobeyed
God by eating the apple in the Garden of Eden and then they tried to
hide from God, thereby doing violence to their relationships and to
the true order of the world.
Soon after that, their children began killing one another out
of greed and pride. Like the
two little preschoolers, they became caught in a spiral of violence
that seemed to have no escape.
Our world still seems to be caught in that spiral today.
But
if we go farther back in the Genesis story we find a deeper magic
from before the dawn of time.
Genesis says that in the very beginning when the earth was
without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep,
the Spirit of God moved over the face of the waters. The Hebrew word translated
“moved” means literally that the Spirit brooded like a
mother bird over her flock, nurturing and protecting her eggs or
hatchlings. If the name of the
deep magic is violence, the name of the deeper magic is love. This kind of self-giving,
mothering, creative love that Easter is all about offers us an escape
from the endless spiral of violence.
Those
of you who know C.S. Lewis’ The
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, may remember that “Deeper
Magic from Before the Dawn of Time” is the name of a chapter
toward the end of the book.
The merely Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time gives the White
Witch the power to claim the life of the boy Edmond
because he betrayed his brother and sisters and the good creatures of
Narnia. But Aslan, the loving
Christ-like lion, sacrifices himself to save Edmond.
Edmond’s
sisters, Susan and Lucy, watch the Witch kill Aslan on the Stone
Table, and then they go and tend to his dead body, just as the women
watched Jesus be crucified and then tended to his body. But when dawn comes, and Susan and
Lucy are off sadly looking at the sunrise, they hear a terrible crack
behind them. They turn around
to find the sacrificial table broken in two, and Aslan alive and
stronger than ever. That is
when he explains to them about the deeper magic from before the dawn
of time, and how loving self-sacrifice overcomes the power of
violence and death.
In
Narnia Aslan comes back to life after his nonviolent sacrifice of
suffering love and then goes to war to kill his enemies, resorting to
the magic of violence to gain peace.
But this is not how it was after the first Easter on
earth. Followers of Christ
refused to go to war or to kill or even to hurt anyone for any
reason. They believed that
Christ absolutely forbid violence, that it was not his way. Christians held strictly to
nonviolence for three hundred years.
The
Mahatma Gandhi said that the only people in the modern world who do
not understand Christ’s nonviolence are Christians. Gandhi was right about many, but not
all. There are nonviolent
denominations like the Mennonites, and more widely, thanks to
Gandhi’s inspiration, Christians in the American Civil Rights
movement learned to trust in the deeper Easter magic of nonviolent self-sacrifice
and creative, self-giving love.
Michael
Nagler, in his book The Search
for a Nonviolent Future, tells about a march for voter’s
rights that took place in Birmingham,
Alabama
in the 1960s. Most of the
marchers were black, and as they drew near city hall they found their
path blocked by white police and firemen with hoses at the
ready. Not knowing what else
to do, the marchers knelt down to pray. Here is how one of the marchers
described what happened next:
After awhile we became “spiritually intoxicated,”
as another leader described it…. This was sensed by the police
and firemen and it began to have an effect on them…. I
don’t know what happened to me.
I got up from my knees and said to the cops:
“We’re not turning back.
We haven’t done anything wrong. All we want is our freedom. How do you feel about doing these
things?” [We] started advancing and Bull Connor [the notorious
segregationist police commissioner] shouted: “Turn on the
water!” But the firemen did not respond. Again he gave the order and nothing
happened. Some observers claim
they saw the firemen crying.
Whatever happened, [we] went through the lines.
(p 64)
Children
learn the Deep Magic of violence early, but in Birmingham
children learned the Deeper Magic and taught it to the whole
world. Just when things were
looking hopeless, a young African-American minister named James Bevel
organized what came to be known as the Children’s Crusade. Children poured out of the
Birmingham Schools, climbing over walls and jumping out of windows
when the schools tried to lock them in, and they started
marching. At first they were
sent to jail, children as young as eight years old among them, but
the jails were soon crammed overfull.
Then
Bull Connor decided to try to stop them with fire hoses powerful
enough to strip bark off of trees, and police dogs trained to
bite. People saw the
photographs and footage of the children under attack, and finally
understood the truth. It was
the turning point in the Civil Rights movement. The Deeper Magic working through
those children woke the conscience of America,
just as the Deeper Magic working through Christ’s crucifixion
and resurrection woke something in people two thousand years ago and
continues to do so to this day.
The
Rev. Jin S. Kim is the founding pastor of Church
of All Nations
in Minneapolis
and a prominent national leader in the Presbyterian Church. Rev. Kim wrote about today’s
passage from Isaiah in a recent issue of Christian Century magazine. Isaiah said, “For I am about
to create new heavens and a new earth…. They shall not hurt or
destroy on all my holy mountain.” Rev. Kim said,
Isaiah…insists that God will be God in both the means
and the end. For those of us
who follow Christ, this prophecy is fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth. He will not wage war to bring
peace. He will not use
violence to end violence. In
Jesus Christ the wolf and the lamb, the lion and the ox, will break
bread together…. When Jesus suffered violence on the cross
without retaliating, he emptied violence of its power once and for
all. Violence itself was
crucified in Jesus…. He pointed to the kingdom and embodied the
kingdom. We are called to
embody this reign of God by renouncing the violent ways of the world
and living into the call to be a new creation. In the risen Christ, the people of
God are the peace and justice that the world has been waiting
for. (3/23/10 issue, p21)
Isaiah
said, “Be glad and rejoice in what I am creating, for I am
about to create Jerusalem
as a joy and its people as a delight.” This is the joy that Mary must have
felt when her tears of grief turned into a cry of gladness in that Jerusalem
dawn. It is the spiritual high
that the marchers in Birmingham
felt when they knelt praying in front of Bull Connor’s fire
hoses, and that the children felt singing freedom songs in jail. This is part of the Deeper
Magic. It brings a power of
joy that works a change not only in those who feel it, but those who
witness it.
This
is Easter joy, and C.S. Lewis gives a beautiful image of it just
after Aslan the Lion comes back to life in the chapter “Deeper
Magic from Before the Dawn of Time.”
“Oh, children,” said the Lion, “I feel my
strength coming back to me.
Oh, children, catch me if you can!” He stood for a second, his eyes
very bright, his limbs quivering, lashing himself with his tail. Then he made a leap high over their
heads and landed on the other side of the Table. Laughing, though she didn’t
know why, Lucy scrambled over it to reach him. Aslan leaped again. A mad chase began. Round and round the hill-top he led
them, now hopelessly out of their reach, now letting them almost
catch his tail, now diving between them, now tossing them in the air
with his huge and beautifully velveted paws and catching them again,
and now stopping unexpectedly so that all three of them rolled over
together in a happy laughing heap of fur and arms and legs. It was such a romp as no one has
ever had except in Narnia; and whether it was more like playing with
a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten Lucy could never make up her
mind. And the funny thing was
that when all three finally lay together panting in the sun the girls
no longer felt in the least tired or hungry or thirsty. (p 151)
Easter
invites us to that self-forgetful, childlike, joyous playfulness, an
exertion that leaves us neither tired nor hungry nor thirsty. It invites us to the spiritual
high, the deeper magic, the world-changing power of self-giving
love.
The
table is spread before you to fulfill your hunger for peace and your
thirst for joy. Will you
settle only for the deep magic from the dawn of time, or will you
exchange it for the deeper magic from before the dawn of time?
Let
us pray in silence, each making our own choice. Let us listen for the guidance of
the risen Christ that will tell us where to go from the empty tomb of
our past and what to do in our life right now…
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