Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8:6-11; John 11:1-45
The Rev. Candice B. Frazer
Many of us have been reading The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis and listening to David’s podcast series exploring its themes of grace and judgment. And perhaps, along the way, we have discovered one of the book’s quiet secrets: nearly everyone who boards the bus would consider themselves a person of faith.
If you are not familiar with The Great Divorce, Lewis imagines what happens after death. Most souls, he suggests, begin in a place called the Grey Town—a shadowy, joyless city. There, people can conjure whatever they desire, but everything is thin, insubstantial, and disappointing. Nothing satisfies. From this place, some board a bus that will take them to Heaven.
At first glance, it seems that the great divide is between Grey Town and Heaven. But Lewis suggests something far more unsettling: the real “divorce” does not happen between those two places—it happens within the human heart. The book is not about marriage, but about relationship—above all, the relationship between God and the self. And the question at the center is not belief or unbelief, but something far more demanding: surrender or self-protection.
Every ghost in the story is given a choice. And what is striking is that many of them believe they belong in Heaven. They assume their beliefs, their experiences, or their moral standing entitle them to it. But as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that what holds them back is not a lack of belief—it is a refusal to let go. Their expectations are rooted in disordered loves, and those loves have quietly shaped their souls.
Lewis captures this with particular clarity in one memorable scene.
The narrator encounters a ghost with a small red lizard perched on his shoulder. The creature is constantly whispering in his ear—nagging, tempting, justifying itself. The ghost is clearly tormented by it. He tries to silence it, even tells it to be quiet, but the lizard continues its steady stream of persuasion.
The ghost is on the verge of leaving—ready to return to the Grey Town—when a radiant spirit approaches and gently asks why he would go back so soon. The ghost explains, somewhat embarrassed, that the lizard makes it impossible for him to stay. He admits that the creature’s presence does not belong in Heaven, but insists there is nothing to be done. “He won’t stop,” he says. And so, he resigns himself to leaving.
The spirit offers a simple but severe solution: “I can make him quiet… if you will let me kill him.” The ghost hesitates. He does not like the lizard. He knows it is a problem. But the thought of losing it altogether feels too extreme. He asks if there might be a gentler way—a gradual approach, perhaps. Something less final.
The answer is no.
Again and again, the spirit asks for permission. And again and again, the ghost delays. “Maybe later,” he suggests. “Not today.” The spirit replies with quiet urgency: “There is no other day. All days are present now.”
As the spirit draws nearer, the ghost grows increasingly distressed. He feels the heat of the spirit’s presence and recoils, accusing him of causing pain. The spirit does not deny it. “I never said it would not hurt,” he tells him. “I said it would not kill you.”
Meanwhile, the lizard begins to speak more loudly, more urgently. It pleads for its life. It promises to behave, to be less troublesome, to offer only harmless pleasures. It insists that the ghost cannot live without it—that life without the lizard would be empty, unbearable.
And this is the moment of truth.
The ghost must decide: will he cling to the thing that diminishes him, or will he surrender it, even at great cost?
At last, trembling and angry, he consents. And then, whimpering, he prays, “God help me.”
The spirit reaches out, seizes the lizard, and flings it to the ground. For a moment, everything changes. The ghost collapses—but then begins to rise again. He is no longer ghostly—dark and oily—but solid, radiant, fully alive. And the lizard, too, is transformed—not destroyed, but remade into a great, powerful stallion. The man and horse greet one another in joyous love, breathing new life into one another, renewed in Christ—the breath of God that has made him wholly thine, such that his earthly part now glows with thy fire divine and will live with God in the perfect life of thine eternity. They ride off together into the mountains—further in and further up!
What once enslaved him is now redeemed. What was disordered has been set right.
This is Lewis’s vision of transformation. And it echoes deeply the words of St. Paul in Epistle to the Romans: “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law—indeed, it cannot.”
Hostile to God.
That is strong language. And yet, Lewis helps us see what Paul means. The “flesh” is not merely physical desire or obvious wrongdoing. It is the part of us that resists surrender—the part that clings, justifies, delays, and protects itself from God.
This is the great tragedy of our humanity: though we profess our faith, we prefer our flesh.
This hostility to God rarely feels like rebellion. It feels reasonable. It feels familiar. It feels like survival. And so we cling to our own versions of the lizard. Like the bishop in Lewis’s story who prefers intellectual exploration to living faith—always discussing, never committing. Or the Big Ghost who demands his rights and cannot receive grace because it would mean admitting he needs it. It would mean releasing his pride. Or the dwarf who is chained to his need to be pitied and thus cannot release his own bitterness to open himself to love and joy. Again and again, Lewis shows us the same pattern: not a lack of belief, but a refusal to release what we think we cannot live without.
And here is where it becomes uncomfortably close to home.
Sin is rarely dramatic. It is often made up of the ordinary habits of the heart—pride, control, resentment, procrastination. These things are so woven into our lives that we hardly notice them. They feel like part of who we are.
“It’s just a little lizard,” we tell ourselves. “What harm could it do?”
But over time, those small things shape us. They train our hearts. They teach us what to love and what to resist. And slowly, quietly, they can make us less able to recognize the very grace we claim to seek.
If we cannot name our sins, we cannot confess them. And if we cannot confess them, we cannot be healed, much less redeemed. Paul is clear: as long as the mind is set on the flesh, we remain bound—unable to submit, unable to receive, unable to live. But he does not end there.
“If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you,” Paul writes, “he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.” This is the promise. Not simply forgiveness, but transformation. Not the suppression of desire, but its redemption. Not the loss of self, but its fulfillment.
But it requires something of us. It requires surrender.
The ghosts in The Great Divorce are not condemned because they do not believe. Many of them do. They are lost because they will not let go. They choose what is familiar over what is true, what is comfortable over what is real.
So, the question for us is not simply what we believe. The question is this: What are we holding onto? What sits on our shoulder, whispering to us, convincing us that we cannot live without it?
Are we willing to let it go—even if it hurts—trusting that what God offers in its place is not death, but life?
Because in the end, the choice is not between belief and unbelief. It is between the self we are protecting and the self God is longing to redeem.
Amen.