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So once upon a time, in a distant kingdom , an aging king and queen tried desperately for many years to produce an heir to rule the kingdom upon their death. After some time, and with great

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difficulty, the queen finally gave birth to a child . A beautiful daughter. The whole kingdom rejoiced with the royal family and its new princess. Messengers were sent out to every Hamlet. Trumpets blew, flowing

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banners were hung, fireworks were exploded and glasses were raised in every tavern. After a short time, the king invited everyone in the royal court to the christening of the new baby. Everyone that is,

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except the king's sister, Princess make them not who was a spiteful and sour woman. When the day came for the child's christening, the king's wicked sister arrived without an invitation and in order to get revenge

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for the king's thoughtlessness, she placed a curse on the little princess, and the curse was that the little princess would would not be subject to gravity. And so when the vicar lifted her in his arms

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to baptize her, she simply floated away into the air, up into the ceilings, rafters and had to be brought down by servants on ladders. And when she was laid in her crib for a nap

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the nurse had to place heavy stones on her dressing gown so she would not fly away. As she grew older, the little princess spent her days floating in the air over the countryside, unable to touch

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the ground, always dangerously close to being carried off by a sudden breeze. And more than once she was caught by a draft and floated off through the castle windows and had to be recaptured by the King's

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balloonist. Not only did she cast off physical gravity , but she also lacked gravity in her temperament. There was no gravity to weigh down her soul either , so she never thought on serious topics. She

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could not be made to empathize with people, and she never cried. She laughs day and night at everything. The court philosophers when consulted, we're unable to propose any cure for the poor child. And

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one day she accidentally fell into the lake where as she struggled to swim to her surprise, she recovered her gravity. The water embraced her and held her down and so she developed a passionate love for swimming

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. But still as soon as she left the water , she floated into the air. The court philosophers proposed that perhaps if she could be brought to cry , it might break the curse, but nothing could

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induce her to cry. She is, it seems a damaged child gaping a morally at the world of gravity, as if at the harmless bangs and crashes of a Disney cartoon. So this is the premise

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Of an 1864 Fairy Tale by Scottish author and Minister George MacDonald, who some of you may know uh as a major influence for C. S. Lewis . J. R. R. Tolkien, G

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. K. Chesterton, Lewis, Carroll madeleine lingle and J. K. Rowling of Harry potter fame . Today, more than a few theologians have noticed that while theology no longer holds a place of central

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importance in our secular culture, it is fascinating if book and movie sales are any indication that our society is enthralled with fantasy literature. The harry potter series , the Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, comic

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book, hero movies and the Philip pullman series. His dark materials are seemingly insatiable appetite for fantasy seems more than a rearguard action of a retreating Christianity. More importantly, it seems to reveal our suspicion that

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the world is more than it seems to be. It reveals our longing for transcendence in the face of the decline of Christianity. Mcdonald and chestertown especially claim that this decline is linked to a failure of abstract

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reason to sufficiently grasp the character of christian faith. But what can fantasy literature accomplish that cannot be accomplished by abstract reason? Our scripture text for today make it clear that it is Children particularly who come to

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see Jesus, and if the rest of us are to see him, we to ourselves must become like Children and be born again as Children in order to be fit for the kingdom of God. one particularly

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unique feature of the Christian tradition is this notion that Children are not merely incomplete adults who will grow through experience to the highest version of their humanity at the pinnacle of adulthood. On the contrary, jesus seems

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to have something to teach the elders in the temple as habituated as we are in this culture, to see everything in terms of developing progression from less developed to most developed. If we are to be consistent

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to our theology, we must remember that Children also reflect the very image of God that jesus, even as a child was the very likeness of God, that because the father is only the father by virtue

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of the sun hood of christ, then theologians claim the mystery that the child instructs the parents in equivalent to the measure in which he himself is instructed. Thus, the logos speaks on earth first with the

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childish wisdom that even his developed adult mind does not lose sight of. And for us as christians, even as our ego identities harden in adolescence and adulthood , even as our intellect grows in subtlety. Even

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as our experience of the world teaches us hard and critical lessons, the beauty of gray mists and wildflowers and the plea of the immigrant. Even if we are to be like christ, we must learn to

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see again through the innocent eyes of the child eyes of play, eyes of wonder. And yes, magic. If adulthood is to be properly negotiated, it must be re envisaged in terms of its original

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innocence in order that its wonder play and it's selfless excess maybe successfully embraced. G. K. Chesterton states that the outlandish world of Elf land is but a pale shadow of the world in which we live

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. Its extravagance is an expression of the wealth of our existence and its strangeness. But a caricature of our own Elf land, he says, lays hold of the fierce wonderment, not of some other world

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but of ours. This makes fairy tales, not a series of lies, but a series of truths . Fairy tales say that apples are golden only to refresh refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they

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were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember for one wild moment that they run with water. Fairy tales challenge the reader to imagine magical worlds different from our own, so as

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to be reminded of the thing we should never have forgotten, that our world might have been different or not at all and is magical the way it is unexplainable, unpredictable and surprising. Fairy tales are enjoyed

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by the child for their own sake in the mode of play and in this way the childish I has more regard for the ultimate point of things, since it is relatively immune to the adult goals of egoism

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, ambition, possession, or conquest. A key metaphor for the fullness of God's reign, involves the lion lying with the lamb and the child playing with the asp without being harmed. The play of Children

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, and not for any pragmatic reason, saved. The light points powerfully to our chief aim to love God and enjoy him forever. Tolkien and Chester to agree that fairy tales remind us of our desires for

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belonging, love, abundance to commune with animals, trees for justice and harmony. And so since our princess has not been able to fall except into the lake, neither have tears been able to fall from

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her eyes in the light. Princess, the girl who laughed in mirth, but who never smiled in joy. We learn something about gravity that grounds our feet and our hearts among the things of this world

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. And we learn of a world in which our well being is bound up with the well being of others, and that freedom is not found in floating free from the gravity of our connections to be human

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without gravity is indeed grotesque. So one day a prince from a nearby kingdom sets out to find a wife but finds fault in every princess he meets predictably , he had not intended to seek out the Light

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Princess, but upon becoming lost in the forest, he comes upon the princess happily swimming in the lake thinking she is drowning. He jumps into the water to rescue her, ending up with her in the

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air with her scolding him. He falls instantly in love and upon her demand puts her back in the water and they swim together. For the afternoon, though the princess is incapable of being serious about anything

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, least of all love, she consents to spending time with him while she swims. So day after day after day, the Light Princess and the prince swim together in the lake where she is subject to

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gravity and where she can at least speak to him eye to eye. Meanwhile you haven't forgotten the evil Princess Princess making, Not who cast a spell on the Light Princess when she discovered unhappily that the princess

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loved swimming and the lake, she sets out to dry it up. So she cast a second spell over all the kingdom. So the water is drained from the lake. The springs are all dried up

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, the rain ceases, even babies no longer cry wet tears. All the water is gone from the kingdom. So in this part of the fairy tale we find that providence has sent the Light Princess a

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helper, the foreign prince, who swims with her in childish abandoned and with whom she can share the gravity of water to date her most humanizing experience. And as you know, such sender helpers appear commonly

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in fairy tales to show the way forward to share advice or to bestow certain powers. Sometimes these are objects like rings or girdles or weaving looms or magic swords or beans or mirrors and sometimes godmothers. But

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they are misty personages that move the hero or the heroine toward their desires. And they remind those with the childish I of the surprising presence of grace, even without quite ever settling the matter of its real

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source, and so begins the kajaki sis of the light princess as the prince joins her in the lake for her daily swim. If fairy tales always features such sender helpers to aid the protagonists, then,

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as G. K. Chesterton asserts, Christianity is , it's meta story as christians, we meet our cinder helper at the table in the bread and the wine in which we find our way becoming what we

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eat by receiving these gifts and giving them to other each other and to the world. Fairy tales like the liturgy exposed the material world as open to transcendence . The Sender Helpers and Fairy Tales eight us and

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perceiving the eliminate all in a liminal possibility of things in this world. Things that speak to us of God. Not only is the bread and wine of the table sent as our help, but so if

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we look closely enough, we find cinder helpers all around us, in the farmers, in the bakers , in the Children, in the samaritan, in the stranger, in the immigrant and green pastures and

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replenishing rains and sheltering trees and in the work of our hands. All these things are sent to help us find what we seek communion with God and neighbor . Yet we cannot see them apart from the Child's

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Innocent. I, so long as we see trees work and people as resources merely to further our power , we do not see them truly. But even as fairy tales are set within a fallen world,

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we and our cinder helpers must find the way forward amidst orcs, dragons and wicked sisters who drained the lakes in which we swim. So now with all of the kingdom drained of water, the lake emptied

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through a hole in its center. The love struck prince sets out to discover how to reverse this wicked curse. He discovers a cavern below the lake and he discovers in that cavern a rusted platinum, which

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tells him the only way to refill the lake is if a man is brave enough to give his life by plugging the hole with his body until the lake fills again, fearing that the princess will die of

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sadness. If the lake is not restored, the prince volunteers to sacrifice himself on the condition the princess sit beside him in a boat till the deed is done. And so the prince wedges himself into the

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hole and instantly the lake begins to fill again with water. Water rises to his chin and then to his mouth and finally over his nose and eyes all the while the light Princess sits in her boat eating

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cherries and chatting carelessly and though she initially clapped with delight that the lake was rising and returning. When the princess sees the prince drowning, she suddenly and strangely becomes distraught and she dives in and pulls him

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out of the hole in the lake and she carries him to her old nurse and together they lay him in a bed as he struggles through the night between life and death. But when he finally wakes the

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next morning, she falls to the floor and weeps with joy. Love has broken the curse. And so, as the story goes, the to mary and have many Children, none of which ever lose

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their gravity. Tolkien's defense of fantasy rested rest on three essential things that fairy stories give to its readers recovery, escape and consolation. Recovery is getting back of a clear view of things that too long have

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been taken for granted by seeing them through the lens of fantasy. We see them freshly as if for the first time, escape is precisely that retreat from the mundane world into a secondary world where the impossible

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is possible, where humans can fly, change their shape. Converse with beast and fight with dragons, token insists I do not accept the tone of scorn and pity with which escape is now so often used

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. Why should a person be stormed if finding themselves in prison? They should try to get out and go home or if they cannot do so, they think and talk about other topics than jailers in prison

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walls. Best of all is consolation. The writing of injustice, the restoring of things to their right order, the return of death to life, the winning of the prince or princess. That brings about

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the happy ending, which is the hallmark of the fairy tale of all fairy tales, token maintained. The gospel of jesus christ is the greatest because not only has it the necessary ingredients, it is also

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true. The birth of christ, he says, is the U catastrophe, the sudden and decisive, decisive upturn of human history, the resurrection is the U catastrophe. The happy ending of the story of

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the incarnation. At the center of Christianity, stand narratives and symbols and images that are in exhaustively inspirational and end their initial imaginative and intuitive response to this saturation of meaning. There lies something of more authority

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than adult reflection. Adults may be the means of transmission, but they are conveying what they have received as Children and must continue to receive themselves as Children . In closing for those still waiting for something more

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like a sermon. I will offer this final sermon ish reminder as your biblical and theological tools become increasingly sophisticated as your politics, ethics and critical theory provide new categories for understandings the workings of power in the

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world. It is my hope that you will not forget that you will return again and again to childlike wonder with the innocent. I to those first moments when you're captured by the impossible fairy tale of the

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Gospel, that you will continue to drink from the well of that inexplicable wonder that once pulsed in your heart as you seek truth or justice. Do not forget that every threshold you cross, every person you

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encounter every new day that dawns is an invitation to ferry to God's creation, whose wildness cannot be exhaustively mapped or captured. And while it is a good thing to expand and diversify our tools for theological and

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social engagement, to grow in intelligence, courage, skill, and even righteous anger, it is also not such a bad thing to return with innocent eyes and to be taught by the wisdom of the Child

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of Mystery, Goodness, gratitude, consolation and hope