Real Life

My text today comes from one of my favourite books. I have quoted from it before and I dare say I shall quote from it again, because it is a book which contains many profound truths and real insight into the heart of things. It was first published in 1922 and is written by Margery Williams, and it's called The Velveteen Rabbit . So: are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

A new toy rabbit has arrived in the nursery. It discovers that, although most of the toys, however posh, bright or glittery, are only toys, and will never turn into anything else, there is another toy, an old battered Skin Horse, who has become Real. "What is Real?" asked the Rabbit one day. "Does it mean having things that go buzz inside you or a stick-out handle?" "Real isn't how you are made", said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real." "Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit. "Sometimes", said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt." "Does it happen all at once, like being wound up", he asked, "or bit by bit?" "It doesn't happen all at once", said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved-off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But those things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

The Rabbit sighed. He thought that it would be a long time before this magic called Real happened to him. He longed to become Real, to know what it felt like; and yet the idea of growing shabby and losing his eyes and whiskers was rather sad. He wished that he could become Real without these uncomfortable things happening to him.

Passiontide is about all manner of things from real life, about temptation and forgiveness and suffering and sin, but perhaps precisely because these things are so real we are not very comfortable with them. Our society today prefers not to dwell on the sharper realities of life, and we have invented all manner of devices to avoid coming face to face with hurt or sorrow or moral choice or guilt. For some people the way out, the escape from reality, is through drink or drugs. For others it is via a fantasy world of film or television or even the "virtual reality" – which is total unreality – offered through the computer screen.

So the harder, the less comfortable, realities of life are increasingly hidden away behind a plush curtain of consumerism, while more and more people seem to occupy a fantasy world where the distinction between soap opera and real life has become blurred. Life has to be furnished with the illusions of happiness: more money, more things, more instant gratification. Even the church has not been immune to these false gods: more concerned with numbers than with the quality of discipleship and holiness of life; with running a good show rather than being involved in the grimy and unspectacular work of caring for the anxious and the distressed, the sick and the bereaved. Yet this is not the Way of Christ. Hear again his words so often read in Lent yet so little heeded:

If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross every day and follow me. For anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake, that man will save it. What gain, then, is it for a man to have won the whole world and to have lost or ruined his very self.

In today's long Gospel reading, the story of the raising of Lazarus, Jesus says to Martha (and I use the most literal translation of the Greek I can manage) I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even if he dies, and no-one who lives and believes in me will ever die. [John 11: 25-6].

Now in the Fourth Gospel John uses the verb ‘to live' in both a physical and a spiritual sense, and ‘eternal life' is not just life after death but a spiritual life that can begin here and now during physical life in this world. And so his meaning is something like this: ‘Everyone who is now living in the heavenly life and who is a believer in me will never really die.' In other words, when we are true to God we are being true to ourselves as men and women made in God's image, we are being what he meant us to be, we are really living, and not even death can bring that sort of life, real life, to an end.

And that makes all the temptations in the world simply sirens' voices, luring us away from God's truth and the real truth about ourselves, luring us away from real living. Real discipleship is about becoming what in God's sight we already are, his own sons and his own daughters. It is about growing up into Christ, and not being tempted away from that process of growth however hard it may sometimes be. And part of that growth will undoubtedly mean that sometimes we have to walk the path of suffering, our own or others – but only because when we love as Christ loves, we make ourselves vulnerable, the hard skin gets peeled away and – of course – our hearts will often be wrung and sometimes they will be broken. That is what it means to take up your cross and follow Him.

For this is how Jesus lived. Jesus cured and cared by being himself with people, not by playing a part. He let himself love, and he let himself be loved, and he took all the risks of loving, and made himself vulnerable. And in the end he challenged the world to search for the meaning of life by laying down his own life for love. He preached, wandered, told stories, chatted, argued, drank, went on picnics and to dinner parties, touched, prayed, wept, doubted, suffered, agonised, died. He lived to the full his own destiny, true to God and true to himself.

This is the choice we are still offered today, the choice (as Moses put it to the people of Israel) of life or death, good or evil [Deut. 30: 15]. Moses saw that the Commandments were not being given to the people as ends in themselves, to be kept for their own sake, but as signposts and landmarks to real and truly authentic living. He warns the Israelites not so much that they mustn't disobey the Commandments, as that their hearts must not turn away from God; that they must go on loving, and then the living will take care of itself. And St Paul, Paul the Rabbi, Paul the Doctor of the Law, came to understand that too. Time and again he struggles with the legalist inside himself. He knows we can't do without the Law, without the rules and the codes and the standards, because without them there is only licence, the empty aimlessness of bright and shiny things that have no point and no purpose. But he knows too that religion often deadens, the letter of the law kills, fundamentalism turns in upon itself and destroys life and living. And it's when he sees how law and grace work together that his faith takes off, his language soars, he lifts us up into the glorious liberty of the Children of God. Listen to my favourite piece of Paul, from his second letter to the Christians at Corinth:

Honour and dishonour, praise and blame, are alike our lot: we are the impostors who speak the truth, the unknown men whom all men know. Dying, we still live on; disciplined by suffering, we are not done to death; in our sorrows we have always cause for joy; poor ourselves, we bring wealth to many; penniless, we own the world. [2 Cor. 6: 8-10]

So if we, as the Church of God in this place, are prepared to struggle to be true, to follow the path of the servant, the way of the cross, to love and to be loved, to be real and to allow our lives to be rooted and grounded in the reality of Christ and his love for us – why, then, there is hope, a divine hope, that this church will get up and grow into life and into living, and that those who come here – the visitor, the stranger, the young and the old, the bereaved and the sad, the doubting and those in despair – that they will stay, as the people who heard Jesus stayed and hung upon his words, because what they find here will be real, and about their hopes and their dreams, their fears and their anxieties, their joys and their sorrows. And bit by bit, slowly and perhaps painfully, we will ourselves become Real – a bit loose in the joints, perhaps, a bit shabby – but Real because we know that God loves us for ourselves, and that we are made and kept and loved by him, and because we have discovered that Christian living is about loving God for his own sake and loving each other for each other's sake, set free to be the people God intended us to be, true to Him, true to one another and, at last, true to ourselves.