You are a toy. From the time you were taken out of your box, your sole purpose has been to make your child happy. It has not always been an easy life. When your child was a toddler you were chewed, drooled, and sat upon. Once you were tied to the cat and buried. You’ve lost some accessories along the way. Haven’t we all? When your owner was a tween there were periods of neglect when you’ve been left in the toy box, or under the bed. You’ve watched other toys come and go, which has not been easy.
The good times have outweighed the tragic. You’ve helped your child learn to play and share with others. You’ve watched them laugh and have been held close for comfort and familiarity in tough times. You have been there when you were needed.
You have survived past purges. You are one of the beloved toys that your child kept, but the day of judgment has arrived. Maybe you will make it to the purgatory of the attic, where you will wait with the Christmas ornaments for a second coming. Maybe you’ll be adopted by another child at a yard sale, or given to a daycare center with a never-ending stream of playful children. Either would suffice for heaven. Maybe you’ll be sacked and carted off to the trashcan to be left in a hellscape of the city dump.
Or maybe, and this is where the fifth installment of Toy Story picks up, maybe some piece of technology will do away with the need for toys altogether. It it then, finally, you may have to face the trauma of past abandonments. You will feel the impact of forced inevitability that has haunted you all along. Change happens. That’s been the Toy Story theme over the past 30 years and five films.
My intention this morning was to have a lighter message. After all, over the summer I’ve spoken on the costs of war, the loss of parents, and a whole Sunday morning talking about the Doomsday clock. After seeing your faces that week, I vowed the next one would be lighter. And I often pick a summer movie release to use as a fun sermon illustration.
I love a good toy story.
Do you remember the book by UU minister Robert Fulghum called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten? I’m convinced that everything I need to know about friendship I learned from Toy Story, with each installment pushing the boundary of the meaning and challenges of friendship.
On the other hand, Toy Story was not created just for kids. That’s kind of the magic of Pixar: while the kids are laughing and clutching their Woody and Jessie dolls, we adults are facing some of those big spiritual questions like: What’s my purpose? What happens when I’m no longer relevant? To whom did my life matter? As Andy Shurson writes in Christ and Culture, as Toy Story explores what it means to be a toy, it offers lessons about what it means to be human. You are not a toy, but we all need to know what we are created to do. The real message of Toy Story 5 is how to deal with the forced inevitability of the world changing, falling apart, evolving, devolving. Forced inevitability is a double whammy. We can’t dance around it. We can’t play our way into oblivion. The only way to handle the inevitable is through it. Even toys, it seems, aren’t immune.
Pixar knows a thing or two about theology.
In case you’ve never seen a Toy Story movie, here’s a quick recap of how these themes of friendship, purpose, and belonging have evolved in the franchise:
In the first Toy Story, friendship looks like loyalty to a hierarchy. Woody is his child Andy’s favorite, and that’s the whole system. Woody is a benevolent patriarch for the other toys—until Buzz Lightyear shows up and threatens to knock him out of first place. Woody’s jealousy nearly wrecks everything. It takes getting lost together, genuinely needing each other to survive, before Woody understands: you have a friend in me, as the song goes. It’s not about being someone’s favorite. It’s about showing up for each other when it costs you something.
By the second film, the question shifts. Woody discovers he’s a valuable collectible—that he could live forever behind glass in a Japanese museum, admired, untouched, safe. For a moment, he’s tempted. But he chooses his owner Andy instead—even though he knows it’s a love that has an expiration date, that will fade and get outgrown. That’s worth sitting with. Real friendship, real community, is fragile by design. It’s not necessarily safe. And we choose it anyway.
In the third film Andy is leaving for college and his toys face the terrifying, sacred work of letting go. They don’t get to control who loves them next or how. They can only pass themselves on and trust their new child Bonnie will care for them. If you’ve ever handed off a ministry, a committee, a beloved tradition to the next generation of leadership—you know exactly what it feels like to let go.
And then the fourth film asks an even harder question: what if friendship isn’t the only thing that gives your life meaning? Woody spends three movies believing his entire purpose is devotion to a kid. Now he is faced with leaving the only identity he’s known to find out who he is when not defined by someone else’s needs. Sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is release the role we’ve clung to, so that both we and the people we’ve been serving can become something new. For an interim minister like me, for any minister really, letting go and helping you let go is part of the job.
Four movies. Four different shapes of love: loyalty without hierarchy, love that risks impermanence, love that trusts the next generation, and love that finally makes room for our own becoming.
As William Rodriquez writes in the Journal of Religion and Film, the films explore the agapic love found in the Christian scriptures. “Agapic love,” he writes, “because it is communal, provides a superior ethical motivation than an ethos based on personal or individualist motives.” He notes that such transcending love is not a sentiment but an attitude, a disposition, and is “inseparably bound with virtuous dispositions such as loyalty, self-sacrifice, and courage.” Friendship, like faith, isn’t static. It keeps asking us to grow into a truer version of love than the one we started with.
It’s what happens in a congregation over the years. We start out organizing ourselves around who’s central and who isn’t. Often that’s a minister, founding families, or key leaders who appear over the decades like pseudo saviors. We learn, slowly, that our presence matters more than status. We learn to let go of what we built so someone else can carry it forward. And eventually—if we’re paying attention—we learn that even the most sacred roles we’ve played aren’t the whole of who we are. As Jessies says at the end of Toy Story 5, “All that matters is that we were there at the right time to help them along.”
And this brings us to Toy Story 5, which is out in theaters now. In the earlier films, friendship lived almost entirely between the toys: Woody and Buzz, Jessie and Buster, all the toys learning to trust and become a family. This time, the toys turn to their child Bonnie’s struggle to find a genuine friend. The toys stop being the subject of the story and become the ones working, sacrificing, and stepping aside so someone else can find connection. That’s worth sitting with: sometimes love means we’re not the point. Sometimes our calling is to build the bridge, not to stand at the center of it.
The central conflict in the film is the introduction of a new “toy,” a tablet named LilyPad. I have video!
FILM CLIP
Refusing to give easy answers to this ubiquitous challenge of technology today, we become aware that LilyPad’s purpose is also to help the child Bonnie connect. Of course, LilyPad is also trapped in a systemic structure of oppression where the very technologies promising to connect us lead to isolation. Friendship, in other words, isn’t threatened by what’s new — it’s threatened by imbalance.
And in a lovely twist, the character set up to be the story’s villain turns out to have a heart after all. The line between rival and friend blurs, which feels true to real life: the person we’ve written off as an obstacle may simply be someone we haven’t yet understood.
Woven through it all is patience — relationships decades in the making finally resolving, loyalty proven not in one grand gesture but in showing up, again and again, through good times and bad. That, perhaps, is the truest gospel this film preaches: friendship isn’t a commodity. It’s a practice.
As Jessie, the toy protagonist of the film, says in her moment of epiphany: “All that matters is that we were there at the right time to help them along.”
Jessie learns that rather than fighting the changes she can’t control — Bonnie growing older, technology reshaping play, kids moving on — she finds that alliance and friendship, even with the thing she once saw as her replacement, let her stay meaningfully connected instead of being erased by it. Pixar flips its own historical formula here, treating the loss of a child’s exclusive attention not as an inevitability to be mourned but as something survivable through new bonds — Jessie and LilyPad’s friendship becomes the clearest proof that change doesn’t have to mean abandonment.
I bring this up as we enter our second year together for another reason. We spent this past year getting to know each other and growing this strange temporary friendship of ours. As I move from coming to going, this year we’ll be saying goodbye. Has this been friendship? Or just a professional relationship as I am hired to transition you to a new minister. What a strange friendship this is and has been.
And if we decode it, we will learn something about a type of relationship a Buddhist teacher of mine once called “spiritual friendship.” I was puzzling over our relationship that, at that point, had spanned more than a decade. I’d never gone out with him for a beer or movie, but we’d shared intimate details of life. In some ways, I’d told him things I would never share with my so-called close friends. It was both more intimate and less chummy.
“Oh, this is spiritual friendship,” he said.
This has meshed with my experience as I’ve moved in and out of congregations. We connect deeply and intimately. We say goodbye. And I hold every single member I’ve ever served with deep feelings of friendship, the kind where our encounters with each other changed our lives for the better.
Spiritual friendship has characteristics of both non-attachment and freedom. When a personal friend lashes out and says something hurtful, the whole relationship might be in jeopardy. When one of you lashes out and says something regretful, I realize on my better days that as we dig deep into our souls and find ourselves spiritually challenged, emotions pop up, stuff comes out sideways, hurts from the past and fears about the future get transferred in sometimes unpleasant ways. And the hurt doesn’t last long, if it registers at all. And in this kind of non-attachment there is freedom in spiritual friendships. Freedom not to worry if we say the wrong thing.
Spiritual friendship also has a great capacity to hold conflict. There’s an awareness that just walking away from each other comes at a very high cost. It can mean loss of community. Or loss of connection. Since our faith journey is bound up in these relationships, it can mean a loss of faith if we are careless with these spiritual friendship.
I think of the friendships, before I was a minister, that I had with ministers. Revs. Earl, Jay, Fern, and Alan shaped my life in amazing ways. With each I had limited heart-to-heart contact time, but I knew each cherished me, deeply, truly, as one of their spiritual friends. Never under estimate how much you mean to your ministers, even when they’ve departed.
So, Toy Story 5 made me think a lot of these friendships. Of connection. Of letting go. Of remembrance and the meaning of “doing what matters when we were there, helping others move along.” One of my favorite spiritual writers, Richard Bach, once wrote that you can find truth anywhere. For him, he said, it was once a bubblegum wrapper. Similarly, as C. S. Lewis wrote to his goddaughter, Lucy Barfield, in the dedication of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” Or watching a children’s movie about toys. Scripture is everywhere to be discovered in the way it teaches us to love, to let go, or to reconsider the ways in which we were taught to be adults.
Or maybe it’s just a story about toys.