Saturday in the First Week of Lent: Letter 8 Notes

Letter 8 Notes

The Propers for Today are HERE.

We begin today with the Law of Undulation!

It seems that The Patient is experiencing some of that doubt in his religious life that we talked about in Letter 7.  Wormwood thinks it is because his temptations are working.  Screwtape tells his nephew to think again!

In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis often distinguishes between the Life of the Spirit and our physical needs.  Remember the man in the museum?  Screwtape countered thoughts of God by reminding him it was lunch time.  It’s hard to be holy when you are hungry!

Well under the Law of Undulation, Screwtape takes this a step further.  There are highs and lows in the spiritual life.  We feel closer to God in Church than in the grocery store.  We go to Camp McDowell and experience God directly in our lives – but then we inevitably must go back to the real world.  This “UNDULATION” between spiritual highs and lows is a normal part of human life just as much as being hungry and not being hungry.  The key is for Wormwood to make the best use of the LOW times.

 

Screwtape points out to Wormwood that a good tempter wants to keep his Patient distracted and doing exactly the opposite of what “The Enemy” - GOD – wants.  Screwtape says

“To us a human is primarily food; our aim is absorption of its will into ours....  We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons.  We want to suck in, He wants to give out.  We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over.” 

At the heart of our Christian faith is the promise of God giving us to us new life and this new life comes to us in the form of a relationship with God marked by God’s love for us and the invitation to love God in return.

As I have said before, when we love someone, we are doing what God does.  And since God has created everything that is – then “everything” must include love which why the Bible tells us that we love because HE first loved us (1 John 4:19).  So, we receive God’s love and in turn, share it with others. 

Screwtape points out that what God promises – God will do.  God invites humans to choose to live a life of obedience in perfect freedom.  In other words, this is the very definition of free will because our wills “freely conform to His.”

“Lewis makes the case that UNDULATION is both necessary and intended by God so that we grow into the free, mature persons of faith God intends us to be.” (Bill King, Chapter 8 notes). 

This ties in with what Lewis means when he uses the words “obedience” and “obey” in The Screwtape Letters. 

Early Celtic Christians often talked about “Thin Times” and Thin Places.”  These are the times and places when the distance between God and us seems ever so thin.  For me, sitting in Church and hearing our choir sing is such a time and place.  It is easy to choose to follow God. 

Then there are those times when I am stressed, angry, or worried – REMEMBER that demons love to use our emotions against us – and I feel distant from God.  There are also places that seem far away from the love of God. 

These are the troughs that Screwtape talks about.  These are the times and places – when we most need God, and it is most difficult to believe and obey.  Screwtape tells Wormwood,

“Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

Too often I think we think that it is like a slave following the orders of the master.  A slave has no choice – no freedom.  The slave obeys or faces death which is not really a choice at all.

But as Screwtape reminds Wormwood, God wants His children to follow him because they love him.  This is what it means for the Christian to obey.  Obedience to God is obedience that comes out of a desire to follow God and live this life of love that we are invited to live. 

 

In our scripture lessons for today we read again from Psalm 119. 

This is the longest Psalm in the Bible and includes a total of 176 verses divided into 22 stanzas of 8 verses.  It is an ACROSTIC POEM with each stanza beginning with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet.  The 2^nd longest is Psalm 78 at a mere 72 verses.

Looking at Psalm 119:1-2.  The Psalmist declares that those “who walk in the law of the Lord and who seek him with all their hearts” are happy.  In our reading from Deuteronomy, Moses tells the Israelites that they are God’s treasured people because they have chosen to walk in God’s ways.  They will be “a people holy to the Lord your God.” 

This kind of obedience means that the people have chosen freely to follow God and because of that they shall be saved.  God loves the people, and the people choose to love God and to live according to God’s will.  There will be temptation and the valley of the shadow of death, but God will be with them, and they will fear no evil.

 

Screwtape also explains to Wormwood that even though God COULD – God chooses never to be “IRRESISTABLE” or “INDISPUTABLE” to humans.  Lewis is alluding to two of the factions in the Christian faith and clearly showing which side, he falls on. 

Basically, it comes down to Grace which is another way of saying God’s love for us.  Just as there were high church and low church factions in the Church of England which we talked about yesterday in Letter 7, there were also Calvinists and Free-Will Arminianism.  Calvinism holds to the doctrine of predestination which says that God chooses who will be saved.   

Calvinism, named for the theologian John Calvin, believes that people are depraved due to the fall in the Garden of Eden and are incapable in our sinfulness of making the choice to follow God.  So, God chooses us and we follow because the love of God is irresistible.  We not only don’t make our own free choice, we also don’t have the opportunity or ability to choose not to follow.  We are either predestined to heaven or to hell. 

However, Lewis clearly adheres to Free Will theology which says we humans may freely choose to follow God in perfect obedience.  We freely choose to freely follow.  By the way, I also freely choose to believe that way. 

This is a key letter to understanding Lewis’s theology and the central message of the letters that follow.  On Monday when we look at Letter 9, Screwtape will continue his instruction to Wormwood on how to use the troughs of life and faith to his advantage.

As we pray today, the Collect for Saturday in the first Week of Lent, we use another Church Word as Rich likes to call them – RECONCILIATION.  This is an important word for Lewis and he explains his understanding of it in his book Mere Christianity.  Reconciliation in Christianity is the work of being reconciled to God.  In other words, we turn away from God, but God never leaves us.  We then choose to turn back to God to live once more in the love of God’s eternal life.  And God forgives.  Think of it as the Divine Hug.  We are always free to return to the arms of a loving God who is always there waiting to take us back.

 

Let us pray

O God, by your Word you marvelously carry out the work of reconciliation: Grant that in our Lenten fast we may be devoted to you with all our hearts, and united with one another in prayer and holy love; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.