The Small Group Study Guide is here. 
Luke 1:26-38; Hebrews 12:1-3; Jeremiah 13:22-25 December 5, 2010 • Portage First UMC
“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it” (Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, pg. 3). We met Eustace briefly last week as we began our journey alongside the crew of the Narnian ship The Dawn Treader in C. S. Lewis’ third book in the Chronicles of Narnia. (The latest film adaptation of this book comes out this Friday.) Lewis’ first description of Eustace in the book bears out as the story continues, for Eustace proves to be a continual problem to his cousins, Lucy and Edmund Pevensie, and their Narnian friends as well. Eustace is not happy at all about having been transported to this magical world and he does all he can to find fault with everything. Early in the journey, Eustace begins writing a journal, which becomes his avenue for complaint: “It’s madness,” he writes, “to come out into the sea into a rotten little thing like this. Not much bigger than a lifeboat…I’ve been put in the worst cabin of the boat, a perfect dungeon, and Lucy has been given a whole room on deck to herself…I shall be ill if I’m kept in that hole any longer” (Lewis 30-31). And on and on he goes. Eustace even tries to bully the only passenger smaller than himself, Reepicheep the mouse, and when water becomes scarce, he tries to steal more than his ration (Williams, The Heart of the Chronicles of Narnia, pgs. 83-84). “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
Following a stop at the Lone Islands, the Dawn Treader sails eastward, encounters a storm and has to stop for repairs at a deserted, mountainous island. Once ashore, the crew makes plans to repair the ship and replenish the provisions. There is a long list of tasks to be accomplished, and Eustace wants nothing of it. He’s tired, and he just wants to rest, so he heads off into the mountains to find a cool spot to lay down and take a long nap. They he will rejoin the others at the end of the day. So he heads out, planning to keep the ship in sight, but it isn’t long before he is lost and in a “thick, but not cold” fog (Lewis 79). He wanders around for a while, then finds a cave, but it’s not just any ordinary cave. This one houses a dragon, an ugly, scaly creature that comes out just as Eustace stands in front of the cave. He assumes the dragon will attack him, but instead he watches as the dragon lays down and breathes his last. Eustace takes this as his cue to use the dragon’s cave as a place to rest, but when he goes into the dark cave and lays down, he notices that the ground is not very comfortable. In fact, it’s “prickly.” Now, Lewis tells us, “Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon’s lair, but…Eustace has read only the wrong books” (87). So he’s surprised to find a treasure in the cave: “crowns…coins, rings, bracelets, ingots, cups, plates and gems” (87). Treasure! A whole lot of treasure! How much could he carry? He would carry as much as he could after his nap, so for now, he puts one of the bracelets on his upper arm and falls asleep.
When he wakes up, his arm hurts and he doesn’t know why. So he gets up and leaves the cave, but as he passes by the pool of water outside, he catches his reflection in the pool—only it isn’t his face at all. It’s the face of a dragon! Eustace as first thinks there is another dragon around, but then he realizes what really happened: “He had turned into a dragon while he was asleep. Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself” (Lewis 91), and his first thought is that now he can finally get even with Caspian and Edmund (92).
Eustace’s predicament is ours as well. In telling Eustace’s story, C. S. Lewis is telling our story. Not that we become dragons of the green, scaly sort, but we have dragon hearts—greedy, selfish, prideful hearts. Since the beginning of time, we have wrestled with a little, tiny word—only three letters: “sin.” Sometimes we want to treat it as an abstract, theological concept that we discuss but don’t have anything to do with. However, in our hearts, in our dragon hearts, we know we experience that separation from God that is sin. In the very beginning, it was a choice to do what God had told us not to do. Many of you know the story from Genesis of the first man and woman, who were given great freedom but told to stay away from only one tree in the entire garden. One tree! They could have everything else, just stay away from that one tree. And yet they believed the lie that if they did what God told them not to do, they would become like God. They ate from the tree. That first sin—and every sin since—grew out of pride. It grew out of an unhealthy focus on ourselves—what we want, what we need, what we think. “Pride was the original sin of Adam and Eve, and pride is the embedded sin that ruins our inner nature and turns us into dragons…[It] is the spring from which all other sins flow” (Williams 85-86).
Jeremiah saw that working itself out in destructive ways in his lifetime. Jeremiah was an Old Testament prophet with a difficult job. His job was to tell people that their nation was going to be destroyed if they didn’t change their ways, and at the same time, he looked around and knew that destruction was certain. More than that, he lived through it. Unlike many of the prophets of the Old Testament, he lived to see the fulfillment of what he promised. I imagine that the only thing that kept Jeremiah going on most days was the promise he had received at the very beginning: “Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you, declares the Lord” (1:8). In the midst of one of his prophecies, Jeremiah addresses the nation of Judah directly, perhaps responding to some who had criticized his preaching. Some were saying, “Why are these horrible things happening? Why are bad things happening to us decent people?” It’s the same sorts of things we ask, especially when we, like they, are suffering the consequences of our own actions. In fact, that’s what Jeremiah tells the people. He puts it in a way that the people of his time would have understood: “Your skirts have been torn off and your body mistreated” (13:22). That was a euphemism in Jeremiah’s time for describing the public disgrace heaped on prostitutes, and it’s Jeremiah’s way of saying that the people are getting what they deserve. They have “cheated on” God, and they will soon get the punishment they have earned. The bad things are happening, Judah, as a consequence of your actions (Feinberg, “Jeremiah,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 6, pg. 466; Dearman, NIV Application Commentary: Jeremiah/Lamentations, pg. 145). You have a dragon heart, and you have become a dragon.
More than that, Jeremiah says, you have no hope of changing. He says, “Can an Ethiopian change his skin or a leopard its spots?” The answer is no, of course. Then, “neither can you do good who are accustomed to doing evil,” Jeremiah tells the people (13:23). Their sin has become their way of life, and it’s so ingrained that Jeremiah sees no hope of the people changing. They have forgotten God and “trusted in false gods” (23:25). It sounds pretty dire, doesn’t it? It sounds fairly hopeless, especially when we remember how we, like Judah, are stuck in a rut of sin. Like Judah, like Adam and Eve, we find ourselves rebelling against God, doing what he told us not to do. We have dragon hearts, and we know the truth of what the prophet says: we can’t change ourselves. That’s Eustace’s story. He had become a dragon, and he didn’t know how to get himself turned back to the way he was. And even if he did return to what he was, he would still have a dragon heart. Almost immediately after he thinks about getting revenge on Caspian and Edmund, he realizes that’s not what he wants. He wants to have friends. He doesn’t want to be isolated, so he eventually approaches his shipmates and helps them figure out that, even though he’s a dragon, he’s Eustace inside. They work together for a while, and then one night a lion approaches Eustace and tells him to follow.
The lion leads him up a mountain to a garden, a place with trees and fruit and everything, a place Eustace has never seen even though he flew over the entire island. And in the middle of the garden there is a well, with water bubbling up from the bottom. Eustace thinks if he can just get in there, it will help with the pain, but the lion tells him he must undress first. Eustace somehow knows that the lion means for him to shed his dragon skin, so he tries. He starts scratching himself and scales fly off everywhere, then his whole skin peels off, and Eustace steps out of his dragon skin to head toward the water. But as he does that, he looks at his reflection and finds he is still a dragon. So he does it again, and the same thing happens. Despite shedding his skin, he is still a dragon. And he does it a third time, with the same result. Then, the lion speaks: “You will have to let me undress you” (Lewis 104-108). What Eustace can not do for himself, the lion offers to do for him: to get rid of his dragon skin and help become who he was made to be.
What we cannot do for ourselves, what Jeremiah said was impossible, God can do for us. The message of the Gospel is simply this: we were, like Jeremiah said, without hope, without the ability to change. We have dragon hearts, and, as we heard in Hebrews earlier, sin “so easily entangles” (12:1). It trips us up. It’s as close as our own skin, and we can’t get away from it on our own. And so, for centuries, to try to make up for our sin, the people and priests had offered sacrifices to God. Our sin created a debt that we owed to God, and so something died in our place to pay for our sin. But the prophets saw a day when God himself would come and rescue us. The prophets saw a day when a messiah, a savior, would take the punishment we deserved for our sin. And so, in middle of a backwater town in a small province in the mighty Roman Empire, somewhere around the year 4 BC, an angel named Gabriel appeared to a young virgin named Mary and told her God was with her. Well, that’s good news, and always comforting to hear, but then the angel went on: “You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus” (1:31). In Hebrew, that name is Yeshua. In English, the name is Joshua. And in every language, it means “God saves.” The name itself points toward salvation, toward having our dragon hearts changed. Jesus was born and came to save us from our sin. He came to transform us from dragons back into the people God intended us to be from the very beginning, and he did that by giving his life as a payment for our sin. He takes away our dragon hearts.
In the story of the Dawn Treader, as in all of the Narnia stories, Jesus is represented by a lion (which is, by the way, Biblical, because in Revelation, Jesus is the “lion of the tribe of Judah” [Revelation 5:5]). The lion’s name is Aslan, and when he approaches Eustace at the top of the mountain, the boy-turned-dragon is scared, but he knows that letting Aslan “undress” him is his only hope. So he lays flat on his back and lets Aslan tear away his dragon skin. The first cut, he says, “was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began peeling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt” (Lewis 109). And suddenly, the dragon skin is gone and Eustace is a boy again. Aslan then throws him into the water—a sort of baptism—and puts him in new clothes (which was a tradition of the early church after someone had been baptized). And, the narrator says, “It would be nice, and fairly nearly true, to say that ‘from that time forth Eustace was a different boy.’ To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun” (Lewis 112).
Eustace’s story is ours—or, it can be ours. We try to tear off our dragon skin by ourselves in so many ways. We engage in “self-improvement” and read some books, or we join a group to try to modify our behavior, or we make up our mind that we’re going to try harder and not make that mistake again. Not that there’s anything wrong with books or groups or attempts to break bad habits. But even if we have some modest success, as Eustace did in removing a layer of dragon skin, we cannot change the core of who we are on our own. “Getting rid of bothersome sins does not change the fallen self” (Williams 89). We’re still dragons. Christian faith is not about self-improvement but about becoming something entirely different, something new (Hinten, The Keys to the Chronicles, pg. 38). We can only make surface changes (Brown 108), but the disease still exists. “We can’t be improved or repaired; we must be changed” (Williams 90). The only cure, the only hope we have is to let Jesus, the one who came to save us and transform us, tear off our dragon hide and turn us into the person he means for us to be. Our only hope comes when we let him undress us, cleanse us and redress us. Our only hope is to allow Jesus to change us completely, for that is what Christmas is about. That’s what he came to do.
It’s easy to overlook a detail Lewis includes in Eustace’s transformation, and that is the fact that it hurt. Eustace tells Edmund that it hurt worse than anything he’d ever felt. We tend to think of our transformation into being like Jesus as pain-free, but exactly the opposite is true. When we begin to allow Jesus to change us, it won’t be easy. For some, there may be friends or family members who don’t understand, who may even ridicule your decisions or tell you that you’re not fun to hang around with anymore. Some may accuse you of becoming too “churchy” or too “religious.” Or there may be consequences; if you choose to practice honesty in business, you may lose some business or even your job. If you put people before the bottom line, or if you choose to put your finances in line with your faith, you may find yourself needing to sacrifice some things you think you need. You may find some habits and lifestyles are incompatible with your growing faith, and it may be difficult or even painful to abandon them. The question is whether or not the transformation into the person Jesus made you to be is worth the pain. Do you want to follow him and be his disciple? Do you want to live forever with him?
Jesus came to transform us from our dragon selves into something new, and to do that, it cost him something. It cost him his life. He gave his life for you and for me. He went through incredible suffering and pain and even death in order to save us from our sin. What we suffer is relatively small in comparison. In just a few moments, we’re going to remember Jesus’ suffering as we take part in holy communion. We take bread to remember his body that was beaten and broken, his body that endured more suffering and pain than anyone should have to endure as they beat him and nailed him to the cross. The bread reminds us of his body. And we take the cup, the juice, to remind us of his blood that was shed, his blood that dripped from the cross to the ground, the blood that was his life that he gave freely to save us. The cup reminds us of his blood. Remember the words from Hebrews about what Jesus did? “For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame…Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart” (12:2-3).
This sacrament, this communion reminds us of all Jesus went through in order to transform our dragon hearts, to remove the sin that is as close as our own skin. And sometimes we come and take this bread and this cup without thinking a whole lot about it. But this morning, as we come to the table, I want us to think about what it cost Jesus to save us. This act represents his very life which he willingly gave for our salvation. When the angel stood before Mary and promised her a son, Mary had no idea where it was all leading. She simply allowed herself to be conformed to whatever God wanted her to do: “May it be to me according to your word” (1:38), she said. She was already being transformed, changed. What about us? As we come to the table this morning, will we allow Jesus to begin the painful, difficult work of transforming us, of removing our dragon hearts and making us who he wants us to be?
Once Eustace is done telling Edmund how the lion transformed him, Edmund tells him that, as bad as he’s been since arriving in Narnia, he hasn’t been as bad as Edmund was the first time, when he betrayed his siblings to the White Witch, when Aslan had to die to save him. “But who is Aslan?” Eustace asks. “Do you know him?” And Edmund replies, “Well—he knows me” (Lewis 110). You see, the question is not if we know Jesus, but whether he knows us. This Advent season, will we allow him to transform us into the person he made us to be, one who reflects his image and likeness? As we come to the table this morning, “Let us…[fix] our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith” (12:2).