On a September evening in Oxford, England in 1931, three men took a long walk. They talked into
the wee hours of the morning about the subject of mythology. Two of these three men were
Christians. Their names were Hugo Dyson, a lecturer at the University of Reading, and J. R. R.
Tolkien, an Oxford Professor who later became famous as the author of the The Lord of the Rings.
The third man was a suspicious, rather cynical English Professor who’d recently, and reluctantly,
come to admit that there might actually be a God. His name was C. S. Lewis. A few mornings later,
Lewis had planned a trip into London, in the sidecar of his brother’s motorcycle, to visit the
Whipsnade Zoo (which is one of my more favorite place names). On the way, something remarkable
happened. In C. S. Lewis’s own words, “When we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the
Son of God, and when we reached the zoo, I did.” (Now, presumably this change of heart had
nothing to do with his brother’s driving.)
Of all the conversations in which I would love to have been a fly on the wall, or on someone’s tweed
lapel, this little walk around Oxford the night of September 28, 1931 definitely ranks in the top ten. A
long conversation about myths and ancient stories, and then, a few days later, the almost
anticlimactic conversion of the man who was to become one of the great Christian thinkers of the
20th century. Something happened that evening that changed C. S. Lewis’s life permanently, and
made our literary world much richer as a result. Interestingly, it has something to do with the
connection between mythology and the Christian message.
From time beyond memory there’ve been whisperings and visions of an inconceivable event.
Fragments of strange stories with similar themes kept bubbling up in cultures as diverse as ancient
Greece, Persia, and India. Stories of blood sacrifices and gods dying and rising again. These were
shrouded in mystery and couldn’t be traced to a specific time and place. Rather they were like
collective, cultural dreams that were often used to describe the seasons and cycles of nature,
among other things. C. S. Lewis said this about these stories: “God sent the human race what I call
good dreams. I mean those odd stories scattered all through heathen religions about a god who
dies and comes to life again, and by his death, has somehow given new life to men.”
Some have assumed that the resurrection of Jesus is simply another one of those old, mythical
accounts. But from their depth of knowledge and personal experience, J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo
Dyson convinced C. S. Lewis that for all their similarities, there’s one huge distinction between those
dreamy death and rebirth stories of the ancient world and the story of Jesus’ death and
resurrection. Put simply, the distinction is this: the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ
is a real event in history. It stands as the great fulfillment of those stories of old. A few moments
ago this church rang out with the acclamation that Christ is risen. How do we know he’s risen? I’d
like to spend a few minutes with you briefly talking about just that.
How we know can be found on several levels. The first is the evidence history itself. St. Paul wrote
to the Corinthians that Christ’s post-resurrection presence was witnessed by several hundred real
people, and these people quickly spread the word of what they’d seen. And in the Book of
Acts, Paul makes his defense to King Agrippa and the Judean governor Festus. After Festus
accuses Paul of being a couple bricks shy of a load, Paul’s response is this: “I am not out of my
mind, most excellent Festus, but I am speaking the sober truth. Indeed the king knows about these
things, and to him I speak freely; for I am certain that none of these things has escaped his notice,
for this was not done in a corner.”
Indeed, this was not done in a corner. Last night at the Easter Vigil service we talked about how the
twelve disciples were transformed from men utterly defeated and distraught, to men who trumpeted
the Resurrection to an incredulous world, even to the point of surrendering their lives in defense of
this truth. I think it stretches credibility to think that this could have been anything other than a
response to the Resurrection as a historical fact.
The next question that is certainly fair to ask is, “Well, how do we know that these accounts we read
are really accurate? After all, this all was to have happened almost 2000 years ago.” In this day
and age many people seem to trip over the reliability of the New Testament scriptures.
Unfortunately, this hasn’t been helped by the fact that we have a lot of pretty uninformed claims
going on based on old scholarship or poor scholarship, or both. The classic example is Dan Brown’
s book The Da Vinci Code that came out a few years ago and quickly became a bestseller. Brown’s
contention was that the scriptures were thoroughly altered after the Fourth Century church councils,
to support the dogmas developed at that time.
The fact of the matter is that there is very good evidence that all of the New Testament documents
were written in the First Century, virtually all within a time period during which they could have been
refuted if they’d not been accurate. And the number, consistency and geographic spread of the
original Greek manuscripts also provides ample evidence that there’s been a trustworthy continuity
in the story from the oral histories of the mid-First Century right up to this day. The task of changing
all existing copies of the New Testament books would have been far beyond what was possible at
that time. And there are myriads of other evidence that changing the texts simply could not have
happened.
It would take a good hour just to give the basics of why the scriptures are reliable, and I don’t want to
do that to you on Easter morning. Instead, if you have any desire to check this out further, one work
I’d highly recommend is F. F. Bruce’s book, which is called The New Testament Documents: Are
They Reliable?
But beyond all of the empirical evidence from the changed lives of the disciples and the reliability of
the New Testament, in another way—in some intuitive way, does this story not somehow resonate
with something deep inside of us? Why is it that these old stories take flight within our souls and
inspire us to imagine something we can hardly even dare to hope for? Why the persistence of that
golden dream that perhaps, somewhere, there’s a place where only good exists, and life in total
beauty and love stretches out to eternity?
I think of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz singing wistfully, “Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue,
and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” Do you remember how you felt when
you first heard Judy Garland croon that song? I remember breathing a deep sigh and feeling a hot
lump of longing in my chest. I believe that this is that part of us that recognizes in its soul the love
song of the Creator. This is the part that tentatively reaches out our hand and says, “Yes, I think I
really do believe. Here I am.”
A few moments ago I shared a little about C. S. Lewis’s conversion experience. He’s one of the most
systematic and thoroughly well-educated writers I’ve ever read. And he writes with incredible
emotion, especially in his fictional works. But interestingly he writes this about his ride to Whipsnade
Zoo: “I had not exactly spent that journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. ‘Emotional’ is perhaps
the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after
long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.”
As I was preparing this sermon I paced a little in the office and bemoaned to Deacon Jane about just
how difficult it is to capture something as earthshaking and pervasive as the Resurrection of Jesus
Christ in a Sunday homily. It’s kind of like spending a few casual sound bytes explaining the
formation of the universe or something. But the Lord relieves us from the responsibility of having to
fully comprehend truth in order to receive it. For C. S. Lewis God gave him the simple experience of
waking up into the truth of the gospel.
I had one of those, too. My own ‘waking up’ experience came during a personal crisis in April of
1983. After years of assuming that the truth I’d been given during my Christian upbringing hadn’t
been all that relevant to my life, I’d come to feel utterly helpless and hopeless. And in that moment
of crisis, that freeze frame in a long movie, the God of the Bible impressed upon my heart that I’
d been barking up some pretty wrong trees in trying to find Him. It was an intuition. And I’ve never
had a stronger one.
It compelled me to pull a Bible off my shelf and read the first place my eyes alighted on. And here’s
what I read: “For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit
their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching
ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.” That woke
me up.
In the years following this event I spent a whole lot of time trying to make sense out of all of this. One
result is that I came to the same conclusion that C. S. Lewis did before his conversion. I believe that
the evidence is strong that God has left signs in many cultures, in many times throughout history.
Many of these were “myths” in the good sense of the word. Many of them were road signs pointing
the heart to Jesus. (I suspect that when Paul used the word “myths” he was talking about stories
that had no basis in historic fact, but were being indulged in for their own sake. And his advice to us
is to invest ourselves in the true story toward which some of the old myths pointed.)
There’s a final piece of evidence that we all too often neglect. This is a piece of evidence modeled
by many people in this room right now, and all the around the world. That is the changed lives that
have come about as a result of trusting Jesus as Lord and Savior. If given the opportunity I’m
confident that, if asked, more than a few of you would come up here and share personal accounts of
God’s actions through Christ in our lives. Broken addictions, mended relationships, miraculous
healings, and restored hope. Not that the Christian life is a carefree life—Jesus never promised
that—but ample evidence of lives changed, sometimes slowly and sometimes instantly, by a God
who walks this life with us, and even lives within those who believe, just as he promised. For Jesus
himself said, after his Resurrection, “Remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
Well, I’d just like to close by recalling an old saying: “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” There’s
plenty of smoke in the form of evidence for Jesus and his resurrection. It signals the reality of the
fire behind it all. And it’s a fire that continues to burn throughout the world and testify to the
reality that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, bringing all of us into the new, eternal life into which
he arose.
My prayer this morning is that you’re one of the people who’ve concluded that Jesus and his
resurrection are real facts of history. But more than that, I hope that you’re one of the people who
has trusted in Jesus as your Lord and Savior. It’s possible to believe that the resurrection took
place, and still not avail ourselves of all of its benefits if we don’t invest our faith in Jesus.
If by chance you haven’t yet done this, I’d like to make an opportunity right now for you to give him
your heart, just as C. S. Lewis, Hugo Dyson, J. R. R. Tolkien, and countless others have done
through the ages. I know this may sound like a mildly un-Episcopal thing to do, but I’d like all of us to
bow our heads and pray in our hearts the prayer I now offer:
“Dear heavenly Father, thank you for sending your Son Jesus to remove our sins by dying in our
place. We offer you my sorrow and repentance for any and all sins we’ve committed. And we
joyfully accept your gift of salvation and eternal life by receiving the risen Jesus as Lord and Savior.
Thank you that you hear our prayer, and have already sent your Holy Spirit to live within us.
Through your Spirit protect us and guide us to grow in your ways, until that day when we’re lifted
joyfully into the fullness of your kingdom. Amen.”
The Great Fulfillment
Easter Sunday, 2009
On a September evening in Oxford, England in 1931, three men took a long walk. They talked into
the wee hours of the morning about the subject of mythology. Two of these three men were
Christians. Their names were Hugo Dyson, a lecturer at the University of Reading, and J. R. R.
Tolkien, an Oxford Professor who later became famous as the author of the The Lord of the Rings.
The third man was a suspicious, rather cynical English Professor who’d recently, and reluctantly,
come to admit that there might actually be a God. His name was C. S. Lewis. A few mornings later,
Lewis had planned a trip into London, in the sidecar of his brother’s motorcycle, to visit the
Whipsnade Zoo (which is one of my more favorite place names). On the way, something remarkable
happened. In C. S. Lewis’s own words, “When we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the
Son of God, and when we reached the zoo, I did.” (Now, presumably this change of heart had
nothing to do with his brother’s driving.)
Of all the conversations in which I would love to have been a fly on the wall, or on someone’s tweed
lapel, this little walk around Oxford the night of September 28, 1931 definitely ranks in the top ten. A
long conversation about myths and ancient stories, and then, a few days later, the almost
anticlimactic conversion of the man who was to become one of the great Christian thinkers of the
20th century. Something happened that evening that changed C. S. Lewis’s life permanently, and
made our literary world much richer as a result. Interestingly, it has something to do with the
connection between mythology and the Christian message.
From time beyond memory there’ve been whisperings and visions of an inconceivable event.
Fragments of strange stories with similar themes kept bubbling up in cultures as diverse as ancient
Greece, Persia, and India. Stories of blood sacrifices and gods dying and rising again. These were
shrouded in mystery and couldn’t be traced to a specific time and place. Rather they were like
collective, cultural dreams that were often used to describe the seasons and cycles of nature,
among other things. C. S. Lewis said this about these stories: “God sent the human race what I call
good dreams. I mean those odd stories scattered all through heathen religions about a god who
dies and comes to life again, and by his death, has somehow given new life to men.”
Some have assumed that the resurrection of Jesus is simply another one of those old, mythical
accounts. But from their depth of knowledge and personal experience, J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo
Dyson convinced C. S. Lewis that for all their similarities, there’s one huge distinction between those
dreamy death and rebirth stories of the ancient world and the story of Jesus’ death and
resurrection. Put simply, the distinction is this: the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ
is a real event in history. It stands as the great fulfillment of those stories of old. A few moments
ago this church rang out with the acclamation that Christ is risen. How do we know he’s risen? I’d
like to spend a few minutes with you briefly talking about just that.
How we know can be found on several levels. The first is the evidence history itself. St. Paul wrote
to the Corinthians that Christ’s post-resurrection presence was witnessed by several hundred real
people, and these people quickly spread the word of what they’d seen. And in the Book of
Acts, Paul makes his defense to King Agrippa and the Judean governor Festus. After Festus
accuses Paul of being a couple bricks shy of a load, Paul’s response is this: “I am not out of my
mind, most excellent Festus, but I am speaking the sober truth. Indeed the king knows about these
things, and to him I speak freely; for I am certain that none of these things has escaped his notice,
for this was not done in a corner.”
Indeed, this was not done in a corner. Last night at the Easter Vigil service we talked about how the
twelve disciples were transformed from men utterly defeated and distraught, to men who trumpeted
the Resurrection to an incredulous world, even to the point of surrendering their lives in defense of
this truth. I think it stretches credibility to think that this could have been anything other than a
response to the Resurrection as a historical fact.
The next question that is certainly fair to ask is, “Well, how do we know that these accounts we read
are really accurate? After all, this all was to have happened almost 2000 years ago.” In this day
and age many people seem to trip over the reliability of the New Testament scriptures.
Unfortunately, this hasn’t been helped by the fact that we have a lot of pretty uninformed claims
going on based on old scholarship or poor scholarship, or both. The classic example is Dan Brown’
s book The Da Vinci Code that came out a few years ago and quickly became a bestseller. Brown’s
contention was that the scriptures were thoroughly altered after the Fourth Century church councils,
to support the dogmas developed at that time.
The fact of the matter is that there is very good evidence that all of the New Testament documents
were written in the First Century, virtually all within a time period during which they could have been
refuted if they’d not been accurate. And the number, consistency and geographic spread of the
original Greek manuscripts also provides ample evidence that there’s been a trustworthy continuity
in the story from the oral histories of the mid-First Century right up to this day. The task of changing
all existing copies of the New Testament books would have been far beyond what was possible at
that time. And there are myriads of other evidence that changing the texts simply could not have
happened.
It would take a good hour just to give the basics of why the scriptures are reliable, and I don’t want to
do that to you on Easter morning. Instead, if you have any desire to check this out further, one work
I’d highly recommend is F. F. Bruce’s book, which is called The New Testament Documents: Are
They Reliable?
But beyond all of the empirical evidence from the changed lives of the disciples and the reliability of
the New Testament, in another way—in some intuitive way, does this story not somehow resonate
with something deep inside of us? Why is it that these old stories take flight within our souls and
inspire us to imagine something we can hardly even dare to hope for? Why the persistence of that
golden dream that perhaps, somewhere, there’s a place where only good exists, and life in total
beauty and love stretches out to eternity?
I think of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz singing wistfully, “Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue,
and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” Do you remember how you felt when
you first heard Judy Garland croon that song? I remember breathing a deep sigh and feeling a hot
lump of longing in my chest. I believe that this is that part of us that recognizes in its soul the love
song of the Creator. This is the part that tentatively reaches out our hand and says, “Yes, I think I
really do believe. Here I am.”
A few moments ago I shared a little about C. S. Lewis’s conversion experience. He’s one of the most
systematic and thoroughly well-educated writers I’ve ever read. And he writes with incredible
emotion, especially in his fictional works. But interestingly he writes this about his ride to Whipsnade
Zoo: “I had not exactly spent that journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. ‘Emotional’ is perhaps
the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after
long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.”
As I was preparing this sermon I paced a little in the office and bemoaned to Deacon Jane about just
how difficult it is to capture something as earthshaking and pervasive as the Resurrection of Jesus
Christ in a Sunday homily. It’s kind of like spending a few casual sound bytes explaining the
formation of the universe or something. But the Lord relieves us from the responsibility of having to
fully comprehend truth in order to receive it. For C. S. Lewis God gave him the simple experience of
waking up into the truth of the gospel.
I had one of those, too. My own ‘waking up’ experience came during a personal crisis in April of
1983. After years of assuming that the truth I’d been given during my Christian upbringing hadn’t
been all that relevant to my life, I’d come to feel utterly helpless and hopeless. And in that moment
of crisis, that freeze frame in a long movie, the God of the Bible impressed upon my heart that I’
d been barking up some pretty wrong trees in trying to find Him. It was an intuition. And I’ve never
had a stronger one.
It compelled me to pull a Bible off my shelf and read the first place my eyes alighted on. And here’s
what I read: “For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit
their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching
ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.” That woke
me up.
In the years following this event I spent a whole lot of time trying to make sense out of all of this. One
result is that I came to the same conclusion that C. S. Lewis did before his conversion. I believe that
the evidence is strong that God has left signs in many cultures, in many times throughout history.
Many of these were “myths” in the good sense of the word. Many of them were road signs pointing
the heart to Jesus. (I suspect that when Paul used the word “myths” he was talking about stories
that had no basis in historic fact, but were being indulged in for their own sake. And his advice to us
is to invest ourselves in the true story toward which some of the old myths pointed.)
There’s a final piece of evidence that we all too often neglect. This is a piece of evidence modeled
by many people in this room right now, and all the around the world. That is the changed lives that
have come about as a result of trusting Jesus as Lord and Savior. If given the opportunity I’m
confident that, if asked, more than a few of you would come up here and share personal accounts of
God’s actions through Christ in our lives. Broken addictions, mended relationships, miraculous
healings, and restored hope. Not that the Christian life is a carefree life—Jesus never promised
that—but ample evidence of lives changed, sometimes slowly and sometimes instantly, by a God
who walks this life with us, and even lives within those who believe, just as he promised. For Jesus
himself said, after his Resurrection, “Remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
Well, I’d just like to close by recalling an old saying: “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” There’s
plenty of smoke in the form of evidence for Jesus and his resurrection. It signals the reality of the
fire behind it all. And it’s a fire that continues to burn throughout the world and testify to the
reality that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, bringing all of us into the new, eternal life into which
he arose.
My prayer this morning is that you’re one of the people who’ve concluded that Jesus and his
resurrection are real facts of history. But more than that, I hope that you’re one of the people who
has trusted in Jesus as your Lord and Savior. It’s possible to believe that the resurrection took
place, and still not avail ourselves of all of its benefits if we don’t invest our faith in Jesus.
If by chance you haven’t yet done this, I’d like to make an opportunity right now for you to give him
your heart, just as C. S. Lewis, Hugo Dyson, J. R. R. Tolkien, and countless others have done
through the ages. I know this may sound like a mildly un-Episcopal thing to do, but I’d like all of us to
bow our heads and pray in our hearts the prayer I now offer:
“Dear heavenly Father, thank you for sending your Son Jesus to remove our sins by dying in our
place. We offer you my sorrow and repentance for any and all sins we’ve committed. And we
joyfully accept your gift of salvation and eternal life by receiving the risen Jesus as Lord and Savior.
Thank you that you hear our prayer, and have already sent your Holy Spirit to live within us.
Through your Spirit protect us and guide us to grow in your ways, until that day when we’re lifted
joyfully into the fullness of your kingdom. Amen.”
the wee hours of the morning about the subject of mythology. Two of these three men were
Christians. Their names were Hugo Dyson, a lecturer at the University of Reading, and J. R. R.
Tolkien, an Oxford Professor who later became famous as the author of the The Lord of the Rings.
The third man was a suspicious, rather cynical English Professor who’d recently, and reluctantly,
come to admit that there might actually be a God. His name was C. S. Lewis. A few mornings later,
Lewis had planned a trip into London, in the sidecar of his brother’s motorcycle, to visit the
Whipsnade Zoo (which is one of my more favorite place names). On the way, something remarkable
happened. In C. S. Lewis’s own words, “When we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the
Son of God, and when we reached the zoo, I did.” (Now, presumably this change of heart had
nothing to do with his brother’s driving.)
Of all the conversations in which I would love to have been a fly on the wall, or on someone’s tweed
lapel, this little walk around Oxford the night of September 28, 1931 definitely ranks in the top ten. A
long conversation about myths and ancient stories, and then, a few days later, the almost
anticlimactic conversion of the man who was to become one of the great Christian thinkers of the
20th century. Something happened that evening that changed C. S. Lewis’s life permanently, and
made our literary world much richer as a result. Interestingly, it has something to do with the
connection between mythology and the Christian message.
From time beyond memory there’ve been whisperings and visions of an inconceivable event.
Fragments of strange stories with similar themes kept bubbling up in cultures as diverse as ancient
Greece, Persia, and India. Stories of blood sacrifices and gods dying and rising again. These were
shrouded in mystery and couldn’t be traced to a specific time and place. Rather they were like
collective, cultural dreams that were often used to describe the seasons and cycles of nature,
among other things. C. S. Lewis said this about these stories: “God sent the human race what I call
good dreams. I mean those odd stories scattered all through heathen religions about a god who
dies and comes to life again, and by his death, has somehow given new life to men.”
Some have assumed that the resurrection of Jesus is simply another one of those old, mythical
accounts. But from their depth of knowledge and personal experience, J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo
Dyson convinced C. S. Lewis that for all their similarities, there’s one huge distinction between those
dreamy death and rebirth stories of the ancient world and the story of Jesus’ death and
resurrection. Put simply, the distinction is this: the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ
is a real event in history. It stands as the great fulfillment of those stories of old. A few moments
ago this church rang out with the acclamation that Christ is risen. How do we know he’s risen? I’d
like to spend a few minutes with you briefly talking about just that.
How we know can be found on several levels. The first is the evidence history itself. St. Paul wrote
to the Corinthians that Christ’s post-resurrection presence was witnessed by several hundred real
people, and these people quickly spread the word of what they’d seen. And in the Book of
Acts, Paul makes his defense to King Agrippa and the Judean governor Festus. After Festus
accuses Paul of being a couple bricks shy of a load, Paul’s response is this: “I am not out of my
mind, most excellent Festus, but I am speaking the sober truth. Indeed the king knows about these
things, and to him I speak freely; for I am certain that none of these things has escaped his notice,
for this was not done in a corner.”
Indeed, this was not done in a corner. Last night at the Easter Vigil service we talked about how the
twelve disciples were transformed from men utterly defeated and distraught, to men who trumpeted
the Resurrection to an incredulous world, even to the point of surrendering their lives in defense of
this truth. I think it stretches credibility to think that this could have been anything other than a
response to the Resurrection as a historical fact.
The next question that is certainly fair to ask is, “Well, how do we know that these accounts we read
are really accurate? After all, this all was to have happened almost 2000 years ago.” In this day
and age many people seem to trip over the reliability of the New Testament scriptures.
Unfortunately, this hasn’t been helped by the fact that we have a lot of pretty uninformed claims
going on based on old scholarship or poor scholarship, or both. The classic example is Dan Brown’
s book The Da Vinci Code that came out a few years ago and quickly became a bestseller. Brown’s
contention was that the scriptures were thoroughly altered after the Fourth Century church councils,
to support the dogmas developed at that time.
The fact of the matter is that there is very good evidence that all of the New Testament documents
were written in the First Century, virtually all within a time period during which they could have been
refuted if they’d not been accurate. And the number, consistency and geographic spread of the
original Greek manuscripts also provides ample evidence that there’s been a trustworthy continuity
in the story from the oral histories of the mid-First Century right up to this day. The task of changing
all existing copies of the New Testament books would have been far beyond what was possible at
that time. And there are myriads of other evidence that changing the texts simply could not have
happened.
It would take a good hour just to give the basics of why the scriptures are reliable, and I don’t want to
do that to you on Easter morning. Instead, if you have any desire to check this out further, one work
I’d highly recommend is F. F. Bruce’s book, which is called The New Testament Documents: Are
They Reliable?
But beyond all of the empirical evidence from the changed lives of the disciples and the reliability of
the New Testament, in another way—in some intuitive way, does this story not somehow resonate
with something deep inside of us? Why is it that these old stories take flight within our souls and
inspire us to imagine something we can hardly even dare to hope for? Why the persistence of that
golden dream that perhaps, somewhere, there’s a place where only good exists, and life in total
beauty and love stretches out to eternity?
I think of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz singing wistfully, “Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue,
and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” Do you remember how you felt when
you first heard Judy Garland croon that song? I remember breathing a deep sigh and feeling a hot
lump of longing in my chest. I believe that this is that part of us that recognizes in its soul the love
song of the Creator. This is the part that tentatively reaches out our hand and says, “Yes, I think I
really do believe. Here I am.”
A few moments ago I shared a little about C. S. Lewis’s conversion experience. He’s one of the most
systematic and thoroughly well-educated writers I’ve ever read. And he writes with incredible
emotion, especially in his fictional works. But interestingly he writes this about his ride to Whipsnade
Zoo: “I had not exactly spent that journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. ‘Emotional’ is perhaps
the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after
long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.”
As I was preparing this sermon I paced a little in the office and bemoaned to Deacon Jane about just
how difficult it is to capture something as earthshaking and pervasive as the Resurrection of Jesus
Christ in a Sunday homily. It’s kind of like spending a few casual sound bytes explaining the
formation of the universe or something. But the Lord relieves us from the responsibility of having to
fully comprehend truth in order to receive it. For C. S. Lewis God gave him the simple experience of
waking up into the truth of the gospel.
I had one of those, too. My own ‘waking up’ experience came during a personal crisis in April of
1983. After years of assuming that the truth I’d been given during my Christian upbringing hadn’t
been all that relevant to my life, I’d come to feel utterly helpless and hopeless. And in that moment
of crisis, that freeze frame in a long movie, the God of the Bible impressed upon my heart that I’
d been barking up some pretty wrong trees in trying to find Him. It was an intuition. And I’ve never
had a stronger one.
It compelled me to pull a Bible off my shelf and read the first place my eyes alighted on. And here’s
what I read: “For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit
their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching
ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.” That woke
me up.
In the years following this event I spent a whole lot of time trying to make sense out of all of this. One
result is that I came to the same conclusion that C. S. Lewis did before his conversion. I believe that
the evidence is strong that God has left signs in many cultures, in many times throughout history.
Many of these were “myths” in the good sense of the word. Many of them were road signs pointing
the heart to Jesus. (I suspect that when Paul used the word “myths” he was talking about stories
that had no basis in historic fact, but were being indulged in for their own sake. And his advice to us
is to invest ourselves in the true story toward which some of the old myths pointed.)
There’s a final piece of evidence that we all too often neglect. This is a piece of evidence modeled
by many people in this room right now, and all the around the world. That is the changed lives that
have come about as a result of trusting Jesus as Lord and Savior. If given the opportunity I’m
confident that, if asked, more than a few of you would come up here and share personal accounts of
God’s actions through Christ in our lives. Broken addictions, mended relationships, miraculous
healings, and restored hope. Not that the Christian life is a carefree life—Jesus never promised
that—but ample evidence of lives changed, sometimes slowly and sometimes instantly, by a God
who walks this life with us, and even lives within those who believe, just as he promised. For Jesus
himself said, after his Resurrection, “Remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
Well, I’d just like to close by recalling an old saying: “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” There’s
plenty of smoke in the form of evidence for Jesus and his resurrection. It signals the reality of the
fire behind it all. And it’s a fire that continues to burn throughout the world and testify to the
reality that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, bringing all of us into the new, eternal life into which
he arose.
My prayer this morning is that you’re one of the people who’ve concluded that Jesus and his
resurrection are real facts of history. But more than that, I hope that you’re one of the people who
has trusted in Jesus as your Lord and Savior. It’s possible to believe that the resurrection took
place, and still not avail ourselves of all of its benefits if we don’t invest our faith in Jesus.
If by chance you haven’t yet done this, I’d like to make an opportunity right now for you to give him
your heart, just as C. S. Lewis, Hugo Dyson, J. R. R. Tolkien, and countless others have done
through the ages. I know this may sound like a mildly un-Episcopal thing to do, but I’d like all of us to
bow our heads and pray in our hearts the prayer I now offer:
“Dear heavenly Father, thank you for sending your Son Jesus to remove our sins by dying in our
place. We offer you my sorrow and repentance for any and all sins we’ve committed. And we
joyfully accept your gift of salvation and eternal life by receiving the risen Jesus as Lord and Savior.
Thank you that you hear our prayer, and have already sent your Holy Spirit to live within us.
Through your Spirit protect us and guide us to grow in your ways, until that day when we’re lifted
joyfully into the fullness of your kingdom. Amen.”
The Great Fulfillment
Easter Sunday, 2009
On a September evening in Oxford, England in 1931, three men took a long walk. They talked into
the wee hours of the morning about the subject of mythology. Two of these three men were
Christians. Their names were Hugo Dyson, a lecturer at the University of Reading, and J. R. R.
Tolkien, an Oxford Professor who later became famous as the author of the The Lord of the Rings.
The third man was a suspicious, rather cynical English Professor who’d recently, and reluctantly,
come to admit that there might actually be a God. His name was C. S. Lewis. A few mornings later,
Lewis had planned a trip into London, in the sidecar of his brother’s motorcycle, to visit the
Whipsnade Zoo (which is one of my more favorite place names). On the way, something remarkable
happened. In C. S. Lewis’s own words, “When we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the
Son of God, and when we reached the zoo, I did.” (Now, presumably this change of heart had
nothing to do with his brother’s driving.)
Of all the conversations in which I would love to have been a fly on the wall, or on someone’s tweed
lapel, this little walk around Oxford the night of September 28, 1931 definitely ranks in the top ten. A
long conversation about myths and ancient stories, and then, a few days later, the almost
anticlimactic conversion of the man who was to become one of the great Christian thinkers of the
20th century. Something happened that evening that changed C. S. Lewis’s life permanently, and
made our literary world much richer as a result. Interestingly, it has something to do with the
connection between mythology and the Christian message.
From time beyond memory there’ve been whisperings and visions of an inconceivable event.
Fragments of strange stories with similar themes kept bubbling up in cultures as diverse as ancient
Greece, Persia, and India. Stories of blood sacrifices and gods dying and rising again. These were
shrouded in mystery and couldn’t be traced to a specific time and place. Rather they were like
collective, cultural dreams that were often used to describe the seasons and cycles of nature,
among other things. C. S. Lewis said this about these stories: “God sent the human race what I call
good dreams. I mean those odd stories scattered all through heathen religions about a god who
dies and comes to life again, and by his death, has somehow given new life to men.”
Some have assumed that the resurrection of Jesus is simply another one of those old, mythical
accounts. But from their depth of knowledge and personal experience, J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo
Dyson convinced C. S. Lewis that for all their similarities, there’s one huge distinction between those
dreamy death and rebirth stories of the ancient world and the story of Jesus’ death and
resurrection. Put simply, the distinction is this: the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ
is a real event in history. It stands as the great fulfillment of those stories of old. A few moments
ago this church rang out with the acclamation that Christ is risen. How do we know he’s risen? I’d
like to spend a few minutes with you briefly talking about just that.
How we know can be found on several levels. The first is the evidence history itself. St. Paul wrote
to the Corinthians that Christ’s post-resurrection presence was witnessed by several hundred real
people, and these people quickly spread the word of what they’d seen. And in the Book of
Acts, Paul makes his defense to King Agrippa and the Judean governor Festus. After Festus
accuses Paul of being a couple bricks shy of a load, Paul’s response is this: “I am not out of my
mind, most excellent Festus, but I am speaking the sober truth. Indeed the king knows about these
things, and to him I speak freely; for I am certain that none of these things has escaped his notice,
for this was not done in a corner.”
Indeed, this was not done in a corner. Last night at the Easter Vigil service we talked about how the
twelve disciples were transformed from men utterly defeated and distraught, to men who trumpeted
the Resurrection to an incredulous world, even to the point of surrendering their lives in defense of
this truth. I think it stretches credibility to think that this could have been anything other than a
response to the Resurrection as a historical fact.
The next question that is certainly fair to ask is, “Well, how do we know that these accounts we read
are really accurate? After all, this all was to have happened almost 2000 years ago.” In this day
and age many people seem to trip over the reliability of the New Testament scriptures.
Unfortunately, this hasn’t been helped by the fact that we have a lot of pretty uninformed claims
going on based on old scholarship or poor scholarship, or both. The classic example is Dan Brown’
s book The Da Vinci Code that came out a few years ago and quickly became a bestseller. Brown’s
contention was that the scriptures were thoroughly altered after the Fourth Century church councils,
to support the dogmas developed at that time.
The fact of the matter is that there is very good evidence that all of the New Testament documents
were written in the First Century, virtually all within a time period during which they could have been
refuted if they’d not been accurate. And the number, consistency and geographic spread of the
original Greek manuscripts also provides ample evidence that there’s been a trustworthy continuity
in the story from the oral histories of the mid-First Century right up to this day. The task of changing
all existing copies of the New Testament books would have been far beyond what was possible at
that time. And there are myriads of other evidence that changing the texts simply could not have
happened.
It would take a good hour just to give the basics of why the scriptures are reliable, and I don’t want to
do that to you on Easter morning. Instead, if you have any desire to check this out further, one work
I’d highly recommend is F. F. Bruce’s book, which is called The New Testament Documents: Are
They Reliable?
But beyond all of the empirical evidence from the changed lives of the disciples and the reliability of
the New Testament, in another way—in some intuitive way, does this story not somehow resonate
with something deep inside of us? Why is it that these old stories take flight within our souls and
inspire us to imagine something we can hardly even dare to hope for? Why the persistence of that
golden dream that perhaps, somewhere, there’s a place where only good exists, and life in total
beauty and love stretches out to eternity?
I think of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz singing wistfully, “Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue,
and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” Do you remember how you felt when
you first heard Judy Garland croon that song? I remember breathing a deep sigh and feeling a hot
lump of longing in my chest. I believe that this is that part of us that recognizes in its soul the love
song of the Creator. This is the part that tentatively reaches out our hand and says, “Yes, I think I
really do believe. Here I am.”
A few moments ago I shared a little about C. S. Lewis’s conversion experience. He’s one of the most
systematic and thoroughly well-educated writers I’ve ever read. And he writes with incredible
emotion, especially in his fictional works. But interestingly he writes this about his ride to Whipsnade
Zoo: “I had not exactly spent that journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. ‘Emotional’ is perhaps
the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after
long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.”
As I was preparing this sermon I paced a little in the office and bemoaned to Deacon Jane about just
how difficult it is to capture something as earthshaking and pervasive as the Resurrection of Jesus
Christ in a Sunday homily. It’s kind of like spending a few casual sound bytes explaining the
formation of the universe or something. But the Lord relieves us from the responsibility of having to
fully comprehend truth in order to receive it. For C. S. Lewis God gave him the simple experience of
waking up into the truth of the gospel.
I had one of those, too. My own ‘waking up’ experience came during a personal crisis in April of
1983. After years of assuming that the truth I’d been given during my Christian upbringing hadn’t
been all that relevant to my life, I’d come to feel utterly helpless and hopeless. And in that moment
of crisis, that freeze frame in a long movie, the God of the Bible impressed upon my heart that I’
d been barking up some pretty wrong trees in trying to find Him. It was an intuition. And I’ve never
had a stronger one.
It compelled me to pull a Bible off my shelf and read the first place my eyes alighted on. And here’s
what I read: “For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit
their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching
ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.” That woke
me up.
In the years following this event I spent a whole lot of time trying to make sense out of all of this. One
result is that I came to the same conclusion that C. S. Lewis did before his conversion. I believe that
the evidence is strong that God has left signs in many cultures, in many times throughout history.
Many of these were “myths” in the good sense of the word. Many of them were road signs pointing
the heart to Jesus. (I suspect that when Paul used the word “myths” he was talking about stories
that had no basis in historic fact, but were being indulged in for their own sake. And his advice to us
is to invest ourselves in the true story toward which some of the old myths pointed.)
There’s a final piece of evidence that we all too often neglect. This is a piece of evidence modeled
by many people in this room right now, and all the around the world. That is the changed lives that
have come about as a result of trusting Jesus as Lord and Savior. If given the opportunity I’m
confident that, if asked, more than a few of you would come up here and share personal accounts of
God’s actions through Christ in our lives. Broken addictions, mended relationships, miraculous
healings, and restored hope. Not that the Christian life is a carefree life—Jesus never promised
that—but ample evidence of lives changed, sometimes slowly and sometimes instantly, by a God
who walks this life with us, and even lives within those who believe, just as he promised. For Jesus
himself said, after his Resurrection, “Remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
Well, I’d just like to close by recalling an old saying: “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” There’s
plenty of smoke in the form of evidence for Jesus and his resurrection. It signals the reality of the
fire behind it all. And it’s a fire that continues to burn throughout the world and testify to the
reality that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, bringing all of us into the new, eternal life into which
he arose.
My prayer this morning is that you’re one of the people who’ve concluded that Jesus and his
resurrection are real facts of history. But more than that, I hope that you’re one of the people who
has trusted in Jesus as your Lord and Savior. It’s possible to believe that the resurrection took
place, and still not avail ourselves of all of its benefits if we don’t invest our faith in Jesus.
If by chance you haven’t yet done this, I’d like to make an opportunity right now for you to give him
your heart, just as C. S. Lewis, Hugo Dyson, J. R. R. Tolkien, and countless others have done
through the ages. I know this may sound like a mildly un-Episcopal thing to do, but I’d like all of us to
bow our heads and pray in our hearts the prayer I now offer:
“Dear heavenly Father, thank you for sending your Son Jesus to remove our sins by dying in our
place. We offer you my sorrow and repentance for any and all sins we’ve committed. And we
joyfully accept your gift of salvation and eternal life by receiving the risen Jesus as Lord and Savior.
Thank you that you hear our prayer, and have already sent your Holy Spirit to live within us.
Through your Spirit protect us and guide us to grow in your ways, until that day when we’re lifted
joyfully into the fullness of your kingdom. Amen.”
The Great Fulfillment
Easter Sunday, 2009
Easter Sunday, 2009
April 12, 2009
Fr. Dan Tuton
Fr. Dan Tuton
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