There’s an unwritten rule that every minister is required to preach one sermon on The Velveteen Rabbit, the 1921 children’s story by Margery Williams, about a little stuffed bunny’s journey to become Real through the love of the little boy who owns him. I love the way the best children’s books explore these really deep theological themes. I still remember the first time my mom read this book to me when I was little and how it made me feel. And there’s a message here in The Velveteen Rabbit for Emilia and Griffin and Reeve and their parents and godparents and all of us as we promise to raise and teach and form and love them well. And there’s a message here about what it means to be in a relationship with God. Probably you’ve read The Velveteen Rabbit or had it read to you at least once, but if not, here’s what you need to know:

A little boy gets a stuffed bunny for Christmas, but it’s not as cool and exciting as some of the other windup toys he gets, so the bunny gets ignored in the nursey where he has plenty of time to talk to the other toys. He learns from an old toy horse all about what it means to Real. If a child truly loves a toy, then that toy becomes Real. Does it hurt? the bunny wants to know. Sometimes, but when you’re Real you don’t mind being hurt. Does it happen all at once or bit by bit? It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. You’ll be a very worn out, shabby toy by the time you become Real, but you won’t mind because Real things can never be ugly except to people who don’t understand.

Eventually, the bunny becomes the boy’s favorite toy, and they have wonderful times playing together. One night, the nanny refers to the bunny as “just a toy” and the boy is very upset. You mustn’t say that. He isn’t a toy. He’s REAL! And when he hears that, the bunny knows that it’s true, the nursey magic has worked on him, and he’s become Real. That night “so much love stirred in the rabbit’s little sawdust heart that it almost burst.” One day, playing outside, the little stuffed bunny meets some wild rabbits who are disturbed by his appearance. They ask him to play with them, but the bunny doesn’t have any hind legs for jumping and so the wild rabbits tell him that he isn’t Real like them which is very upsetting for him.

When the boy gets Scarlet Fever, the bunny stays with him in bed. When he finally recovers, the doctor orders everything that was in bed with the boy while he was sick to be burned—especially that old, ratty bunny. Sitting on the burn pile at the end of the garden the bunny becomes very sad and sheds a real tear which lands on the ground. A fairy flower grows from the tear and the nursey magic Fairy comes out of its blossom. She tells the bunny that she’s going to turn him Real now. Wasn’t I Real before? he asks. You were to the boy, but now you will be to everyone. She turns the bunny into a wild rabbit in the garden living with the other wild rabbits he met before. And he has real hind legs now that he can jump and twirl with. And in the spring when the boy comes out into the garden to play, he sees the rabbit and thinks it looks a lot like the old bunny he lost when he had Scarlet Fever, never realizing it was “his own Bunny, come back to look at the child who had first helped him to be Real.” The End.

When I became a parent, I was pretty shocked to be handed the pink, wriggly ball that was my first son. Of course, there was joy. And for me, also, an immediate and heady experience of falling in love with this kid. At the same time, I also felt stirring in me this primal, animal, balled-fists instinct to protect my child. And my brain, addled by that night’s emotions and hormones and lack of sleep began to worry away at the problem of every threat and danger that I would need to save my son from through the long course of his life. I could feel the momentous responsibility of keeping him safe and protecting him from all the pain and grief and injury that can happen in life.

At the same time, deep in my heart I was realizing—as my brain’s list of potential threats and heartbreaks got longer and longer and longer—that although I’m going to do everything I can do to keep my son safe, I’m not going to be able to rewire the universe. He’s going to get sick. He’s going to feel sad. I’m going to disappoint him and maybe even occasionally fail him. Simply put, I couldn’t protect him from his life. And I realized falling in love with him that night that the best protection I could offer him wasn’t a shield from life’s slings and arrows. The best protection I could offer him was to love him so thoroughly and so completely that when pain, and disappointment, and injury, and frustration, and heartache, and disease, and old age inevitably got to him that he would have the strength and the perspective to deal with their consequences.

One of the jobs we have as parents and godparents and grandparents and teachers is to help our children recognize that the price of life is totally worth paying. We can’t teach them that by protecting them from life. We teach them that by loving them through life. The Velveteen Rabbit’s perspective is that you only become Real after you’re worn out and broken. But hopefully you’ve had the experience and the perspective to realize that your fur is rubbed off, and your seams are busted, and your paint is chipped not because life is some heartless meatgrinder, but because you were so thoroughly loved by and loving to the people around you. My prayer this morning for Emilia, Griffin, and Reeve, and all our kids is that we offer them as much of this kind of unselfconscious, joyful, playful love as we can—that we believe in them. And if we love them and believe in them, they’re going to grow up, and one day leave the nursery, and discover that they can walk on their own two feet. And may they be filled with the power to love their lives and every joy and challenge that life brings their way.

And, of course, we want our children to have a relationship with God too, right? And so let’s teach them that the gift of God is waiting for them. It’s waiting to be noticed among all the other busy, shiny, exciting toys in the nursery. The gift of God is already in every life waiting to be picked up, to be noticed, to be loved. And once we pick God up, every snuggle, every game, every secret whispered in God’s ear brings God closer into our lives and closer to the world through us. Just like the boy's love breathed life into the bunny, our love and attention breathe reality into the Divine. God, like the bunny, doesn't usually become Real in an instant but evolves with each act of love, each night under the covers, every afternoon playing in the garden—God grows with us.

God loved humanity into existence in the book of Genesis. And now we here today love God into existence through our lives. And when we love God into existence in our lives, God becomes an undeniable presence, guiding us, giving us strength and perspective. The Bible tells us “God is love.” So, when we fill our kids with the love to appreciate and thrive in the face of life’s challenges, we are filling them with God. God is that love-filled perspective—the widest and deepest dimension of human existence. And when we bring that Divine dimension to life inside of us, because it is far bigger than us, it eventually escapes us, escapes the nursey, overflows and breaks free into the wide and wild world.

The moral of the story, The Velveteen Rabbit, is that things are Real not because they move or are busy, but because somebody has loved them into reality. A sign that something is Real is that it’s been worn down by that love. I have no doubt that Emilia, and Griffin, and Reeve will know that kind of love. And I pray that as that love grows up in them that it also overflows into the friends, and family, and work, and community, and world all around them. Amen.

Preaching on:
1 John 3:1–7
John 15:12–15

Happy Friendship Sunday everybody! It’s good to have friends here with us. We’re doing exciting stuff here at GRCC, and we want to share it with you. And friendship is an important part of the solution to the problems that afflict our world today. Love and friendship are virtues that hold the power to transform us from within and radiate out into our communities and the whole rest of world.

John’s first letter says that we’re all children of God. BUT what we are becoming hasn’t been revealed yet. We’re children of God who don’t know yet what we’re going to be when we grow up. You could say, I guess, that we’re all a work in progress. And we know this viscerally, I think. We look around in our lives, in our communities, in our world, and we know we could probably do at least a little bit better. We could probably do a little bit better than 11 different versions of The Real Housewives. We could probably do a little better than trying to bomb our way to peace. We could probably do a little better figuring out ways to curb greenhouse gas emissions. We could probably do a little bit better than eating the entire tub of ice cream while binging on those 11 different versions of The Real Housewives while trying not to think about climate change and war.

I mean I know you get it and you see it too. From the personal to the political, from the local to the global, there’s little doubt that we are a work in progress. But if it’s true, if you agree with me (as I think you probably do) that we’re all works in progress, what’s the process? What’s the process of formation that’s at work on us? From where does our salvation come? What’s making things better?

One answer we hear a lot is that science and technology are going to make the world a better place. Now, please, I’m not a luddite, I’m not a science denier, I’m not a conspiracy theorist. Science is real. It works. Technology has vastly improved our lives in many ways. But technology can go both ways. Atomic power used in power plants could be a good thing, as long as you don’t have a leak or a meltdown and you can figure out a good place to dump your nuclear waste. But atomic power used in bombs and missiles could end the world.

And science, which is very good at producing facts, is not as good at producing action. So, there’s decades of scientific consensus on climate change, but science has yet to produce a shift in our actions commensurate with the consequences that will be faced by future generations. Science and technology can improve a lot, but they can’t improve us. They don’t make us suddenly mature and wise. If we’re foolish and selfish, we’ll use our science and technology in foolish and selfish ways. If we’re wise, we’ll use them wisely. But where’s the button to push to make us all wise? That tech doesn’t exist. And it never will.

An alternative vision of what’s going to make the world better comes from traditional religion—that our salvation or the return to paradise or the kingdom of heaven (or whatever you want it label it) will be entirely transcendent. It’ll come from outside of us, from beyond us. God will definitively, miraculously, and apocalyptically intervene. The world will end, the badies will suffer terrible things, the good guys will be rewarded. And this new, perfect world order will last forever and ever and ever.

According to this model there’s really nothing much for you and me to do at all, except to stay out of trouble and to make sure we have all the proper religious affiliations: we’ve participated in the proper rites and rituals, we’ve affirmed the proper beliefs. And then we just wait for the trumpets to sound.

The problem with this is that it completely misses God’s living, real presence in our world and in our lives. God is imminent in everything all around us. God is here. We Christians believe that God came into our world, through Jesus, as a human being, as a fully human participant in humanity’s process. We don’t have to wait for the end of the world for God to show up. Our faith tells us that God is here now, God is calling us and moving us to do new and great things, and God cares deeply about the fate of the present world. Waiting for God to fix things denies the fact that God is already at work within and among us. And Jesus didn’t teach anyone to sit around and wait. Jesus taught us to believe a few things, but mostly Jesus was giving us the proper worldview for living more justly and more wisely.

There is a third way, a middle path, I believe, between science and religion that hasn’t been fully and properly defined or realized yet in our world. As religious people, as Christians, that should be thrilling to us. We’re not here to lead this sort of bifurcated life, where on the one hand we’re religious and on the other hand we’re worldly, and religion is private and personal and totally irrational and incapable of being discussed without offense and bloodshed, and therefore irrelevant to world and its problems.

The job of religion isn’t to wait out history in the cloister of faith. The job of religion and Christianity in particular I believe in the 21st century is to heal this division between our brains and hearts, between spirit and matter. This is the Christianity that has a purpose in our world—a Christianity that longs deeply for individual and cultural integrity—wholeness. For us, that’s the process that’s going to make to make the world a better place, that’s where I believe God is calling us.

This work will only be accomplished if we follow Jesus’ greatest commandment: to love our neighbors as ourselves, to love our enemies even, to love another as he loved us. Incredibly, in John’s gospel, Jesus tells us that we’re his friends, not his servants. And in friendship there’s equality. Now, we’re not saying Jesus isn’t great or special. What Jesus is saying to us is that whatever greatness or goodness or potential we see in him, he now sees in us. Whatever hope we put in him, he now also has in us. Jesus has recruited us. As Teressa of Avila wrote, “Christ has no body but yours, No hands, no feet on earth but yours.” And as John wrote in his letter, “What we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when Jesus is revealed, we will be like him.” We don’t know yet exactly where we’re going, exactly what we’re becoming. We don’t know exactly what the process is by which we will grow and develop. But what we do know is that we have the potential, and if we are wise perhaps the destiny, to be like Jesus.

What’s going to make things better? God’s working to make things better through us right now—as God’s friends, as Jesus’ body. When we love one another, when we live with one another in friendship that stretches us beyond our human limitations, when we grow so that our technological progress and our maturity find alignment, when we show the world that God is right here with us and all of God’s potential is already being offered to us as freely and as openly as anything is offered to a friend, that is what is going to make things better.

Friends, I believe we are on the cusp of a transformation, a pivotal moment where we can harness the teachings of love, the principles of friendship, and the advancements of science and technology to create a world that reflects the very best of what it means to be human. This is our calling, this is our mission, and together, we can shape a world that mirrors the boundless love and potential God sees in us.