So I did not grow up with Harry Potter – I was born about a decade or so late – you can do the math. I grew up with C.S. Lewis, though, with The Chronicles of Narnia – The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the six books that follow. I read them the first time one by one – each time I finished one, my parents would give me the next one. (It was kind of exciting!) I read them first as adventure stories, and when I was older my mother explained the Christian allegory in them. For years of my childhood I would walk into closets and wardrobes hoping to find myself in the forests of Narnia, where it was always winter and never Christmas until the lion Aslan comes back to the world and brings it back to life. I was captivated by battles, by talking animals, and the good, noble power of four children who stumbled into another world.
I was in my 20s when Harry Potter came into being. It took me a few starts to read the books, and then once I got going I couldn’t put them down. I still remember working through the fifth in the series while sitting in the Amtrak station in Lynchburg at about 3 in the morning – snow was coming – waiting for a train, drinking hot chocolate – it felt very appropriate and perfect..
There is magic in the reading of these books. And some magic in the books themselves. For instance, in the Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan, after he dies – is sacrificed – and then miraculously returns from the dead – a resurrection story that echoes the death and resurrection of Christ – he speaks of a deep magic that is ancient and good and undoes the powers of evil – a magic that gives life.
In Harry Potter, magic is what in some ways defines the characters that J.K. Rowling, the author, wrote into her books – a world made up of wizards and witches, born with certain magical abilities – and “Muggles,” non-magical human beings. The magic of Harry Potter’s world involves spells, potions, magic wands. To learn how to use their abilities, young witches and wizards go to Hogwarts School, as many of you may know – a mysterious, beautiful, nurturing place where the professors – at least most of them – care deeply about their students, and where young people who don’t quite fit in in the outside, non-magical world, find a place where they do fit in and where they can learn and grow to live their lives fully.
They are born, as I mentioned, with power, these young witches and wizards, irrespective of where they live, how much money they have, who their parents are. They are born with magic, without asking for it, without having to prove themselves worthy of it. (Sounds a lot like grace, doesn’t it?) The important question for each one, however, is: what they choose to do with this magic.
The books tell a story that is about goodness, about love, about caring for our neighbor. They raise up stories of sacrificing self for the sake of others, stories of battles between good and evil, stories of redemption – and grace – stories reminding us that people are complicated, and that there is goodness even in the scariest and most dangerous and most challenging of people.
One of the most, for me, beautiful examples of that happens early on, when Harry first arrives at Hogwarts, and he finds a whole lot of students, and doesn’t know a soul – it is a diverse and large community, and he has to find his own way around. And Harry, as he navigates this new world, chooses not to ally with the bullies, but to be in friendship with the misfits, the vulnerable, in some cases those who are bullied. He has friends who are quirky, who might struggle with their magic or have questionable social skills, friends who are not afraid to be themselves, who work hard even when they can’t seem to get it right, and even while making mistakes they keep choosing on the end to be on the side of good.
Harry and his friends stand up for each other, take risks with one another, and seek to understand and to work against darkness.
So how does all of this – what does this have anything to do with this morning’s scriptures, you may wonder? And I’d like to suggest that today’s Gospel, and really, all of the texts that we’re reading this morning, is a bit about that kind of magic.
Once again, as we often do, we hear Jesus speaking in parable – a parable that goes beyond life and death and this present world. A rich man has ignored the poor man sitting outside his door for years. And as we hear, finally, both die, and while the poor man – Lazarus – is taken up to heaven by angels, and the rich man … is not. Instead, he looks up from Hades, and asks Lazarus to bring him water, or at least warn his own brothers not to follow the path he did. This he asks of Lazarus, who sat by his front door day after day for a long time, just hoping for some food.
And Abraham says no.
It’s a hard response to listen to.
There are some interesting things to note in this parable. First of all, Lazarus is the one person who is named – not the rich man, not the angels. Lazarus, in fact, is the only person ever named in any of Jesus’ parables. Lazarus, poor, powerless, and ill, is the main character of this story.
When we read parables, one question we can ask to help our understanding of them, is who do I relate to the most? We do this a lot – with the Prodigal Son, with the Good Samaritan – and this is no exception.
We might find that we identify with Lazarus, this poor man who is ignored by those in power, a man who is weakened by sickness, feeling a hunger and a need for sustenance, healing, comfort. We may identify with the wealthy man, reminded of how often we walk past people, perhaps every day, and don’t stop often enough, don’t see their suffering, don’t stop and say hello, be a presence. And I would say that probably we are all Lazarus and we are all the rich man at different times.
Some theologians, though, suggest that we put ourselves in the story in another way – that we are the brothers – the brothers that the rich man asks Lazarus to go talk to. Perhaps most of all, we are the brothers who have heard the warnings already – “We have the Law and the Prophets to know how to treat others” – and yet so often we choose not to.
Just like this morning’s parable, the Harry Potter stories remind us that we are to love beyond our walls, we are to love those who gather at our doorways, hungry, heartbroken, bullied, misfit.
In these stories, whether stories written about misfit wizards in the 20th century, or they are Biblical stories written thousands of years ago about a deeper magic – they show us that when people, as AJ pointed out last night at the Hogwarts banquet – he spoke beforehand – that these are stories showing that when people come together they can do good things – they can do great things. People who love can change the life of one child, or one world. It requires compassion. It requires acknowledgement. It requires empathy. It requires seeing the poor man outside our door, or the awkward kid who on the first day of school doesn’t have any friends. This kind of faith is the magical kind – this kind of faith is the compassionate, curious, empathetic kind.
So be swift to love. Make haste to be kind. Reach out to your neighbor. Befriend the misfit. As we heard in the Epistle this morning: Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. Speak up for the vulnerable. Respect the dignity of every human being.
That is the deep magic. And it’s magic all of us – wizards or Muggles – are capable of.
Amen.
