Sermon-The Most Reluctant Convert

C.S.Lewis on the cover of Time Magazine, 8th September 1947

A sermon given during the Sung Eucharist at St George’s Bloomsbury on Sunday 15th December 2024 (the Third Sunday in Advent, Year C). Based on readings from Philippians 4.4-7 and Luke 3.7-18.

“You snakes”! 

Not the most polite way of greeting a whole bunch of people enquiring about baptism, is it?

But that’s exactly how John the Baptist addresses the crowds who approach him in the wilderness. 

His shock-tactics seem part of a strategy to get these would-be converts to really think. To challenge their worldview; the fundamental basis of their outlook on and posture in life. To question rather than blindly follow the position and practices they’ve inherited through culture and tradition from their ancestors. To work out what they believe and why it matters, for themselves.

One of the most famous and erudite accounts of someone who did just that can be found in the writings of Clive Staples Lewis. 

Max McLean, the Panamanian born American Actor who has spent the best part of his life portraying the author on stage and screen has said that Lewis went from being the most “vigorous debunker of religion to the most respected Christian writer apologist of the 20th century”. 

McLean stars in the short film “The Most Reluctant Convert” directed by Norman Stone. An adaptation of a one-man play, it charts the twists and turns as Lewis’ worldview changed. His emotional and intellectual journey from atheism to Christianity. It’s captivating viewing - and well worth looking up.

The film opens by explaining Lewis’ ardent atheism as being rooted in the philosophy of materialism. The belief that all life - including conscious thought - is the product of the interaction between material things.

Lewis challenges the notion that God created the universe by highlighting how utterly dreadful it appears to be. Devoid of life for the most part. A cold, sterile vacuum - and the microscopic proportion of the universe that can sustain life is characterised by one life form preying on another. Nature, red in tooth and claw, he said, is a sinking ship. 

How could humans attribute this pitiful existence to a wise and benevolent creator? He asked.

Lewis’ melancholy was deeply engrained. His father, he said, had ‘no talent for happiness’ - unlike his mother, who died when he was a young boy. 

Perhaps this loss - and later the recurring nightmares of life on the frontline during the First World War (a period he described as a ghastly interruption to rational life) - contributed to this outlook of unyielding despair as a young adult? 

Whatever the reasons, since school days, Lewis had sought solace in literature. Here he escaped from what he saw as the darkness of reality and revelled in truth, goodness and beauty in the thought-worlds of classical sagas and medieval heroic legends. 

“Nearly all I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real, I thought grim and meaningless” he said. 


On a long train journey, one book in particular “baptised his imagination”. While he couldn’t express it at the time, he later described the effect as the realisation of the existence of holiness. 

Lewis came to understand that if God is to be rejected because there is so much evil in the universe, to what state is the universe being compared? Where do the ideals of what life ought to be like come from? 

He began to reject the binary worldview of materialism - which freed him to see the expanse of the dark night sky not as cold and lifeless but as a manifestation of the immense scale of God’s creative act. 

Lewis describes this period as a conversion to Theism rather than Christianity. He was able to conceive of God as a spirit or force but unable to accept what we call the incarnation – when God took human flesh. He began to attend his local parish church - not because he believed - but because he felt he ought to fly the flag for monotheistic belief.  

At Oxford, a late night conversation with Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien - both members of the “Inklings” group who met to review and critique each other’s works - proved formative. Like Lewis, both Dyson and Tolkien shared a reverence for Greek myths, Nordic sagas and Irish legends. They helped Lewis to make a connection between this literature that he so admired and the biblical account of the incarnation, which, they argued, was the one true mythology to which all the others pointed; the birth of Christ being the moment when that mythology became historical reality.

No longer was Lewis’ worldview one that focussed on the inward - the material, the atomic - but on the outward; towards the divine and the cosmic. No longer did he retreat to the imagined worlds of literature to find truth - but looked to a person beyond himself. “To believe and to pray were the beginning of extroversion.” He said. “I had been…. ‘taken out of myself.’”

This had a noticeable and transformative effect. Lewis’ need to find beauty and peace in literature had been driven by a void that had existed since childhood; “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.”

Once he had embraced a life in Christ he realised that what he had been yearning to find - and calling joy - was not the end in itself, but a sign pointing toward the end. “Joy itself” he wrote, “turned out to be of no value at all. All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring”.

The film ends showing Lewis in church again, receiving communion - this time as a believer. 

The most reluctant convert had finally found where joy had been leading him all along.


Like the young C.S.Lewis, the crowds who followed John out into the wilderness were searching. Driven by unfulfilled desire. When they heard about the Baptist they thought they had found the lasting joy they were looking for.

In blunt terms the John tells this “brood of vipers” that their world-view needs to change. 

Baptism is not a tick box exercise on the road to personal salvation. They’re not on a fast-track to future salvation because of who they are - and the promises made to their ancestor Abraham in the past. 

Instead, like C.S.Lewis, they need to learn to seek it beyond themselves. They need to “bear fruits worthy of repentance” in the present. 

He points them to a way of using their status, money and possessions not to buy moments of fleeting happiness for themselves - but investing in the loving, compassionate and just relationships with others.

The key to this about-turn in the way they look at the world is different for each of them - but, like C.S.Lewis, is to be found hidden in plain sight. Just as the escapist literature he had spent a lifetime studying proved crucial in embracing the reality of the incarnation, for tax-collectors and soldiers and the others in the crowd, John points them towards their own everyday experience to help them to discover the same truth - and learn to see the face of Christ into those around us. Like Lewis, John the Baptist knew that next to Christ, “our neighbour is the holiest object presented to our senses.”

Living such a life of gentleness and supplication, as the letter to the Philippians puts it, will lead us to a peace that passes all understanding. When we align ourselves with the worldview of the incarnation - by being brought out of our imaginary worlds and coming face to face with the person of Christ - we will rejoice always. Because, like C.S.Lewis, our search for joy will be over.

We don’t know how many of the crowd heeded John’s advice. 

We do know that in the case of C.S.Lewis over thirty Christmasses passed by before his worldview aligned with that of the incarnation. He attended scores of services of Holy Communion before the barriers to true faith arising from his own life experience could be overcome. Before he found a way to embrace the person of Christ – the Word made flesh - and tell the story of the great gift of his sacrificial love in his own words. 

Words which offer great comfort to those of us who continue to watch and wait for the same transformation in ourselves, this Advent.

Image : C.S.Lewis on the cover of Time Magazine 8th September 1947

Links : Download,or Stream ‘The Most Reluctant Convert’