Return to Sermon Index
 

This morning is the first annual auction service sermon. At last February's auction, Cecilia Kloecker won the auction sermon, and she chose the topic of "humor". Cecilia's sense was that we take ourselves too seriously and that we could use a sermon on humor. Today we honor the place of humor in religion, faith, and life.

The great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr writes "Humor is, in fact, a prelude to faith; and laughter is the beginning of prayer." What does Niebuhr mean by this? I have a story to illustrate his point, a story about a time not so long ago when I thought that faith, religion, ministry and prayer was only serious business.

My ministry did not begin with laughter. Although certain of my calling, I was uncertain about Unitarian Universalism, insecure about my length of time with the association, and terrified of being a woman in ministry. My fears and uncertainties had made me deadly serious. This changed when I became intern at the First Parish in Concord, Massachusetts and met the senior minister, the Reverend Gary E. Smith.

Gary is the person who showed me how to minister to myself and others with humor. I have always loved to laugh, but I just didn't believe humor and laughter was applicable to ministry and religion. I believed that faith was a serious thing. Gary proved me wrong at every turn.

Gary is a very intense man, the senior minister of a congregation with over 700 adults, and Gary loves a good joke. I'd say he thrives on a good joke. He might even survive on a good joke. On Sunday mornings I discovered that he liked to sing falsetto on the closing hymn. Never a great singer, his falsetto was outrageous. When he discovered that I couldn't contain my laughter over this habit of his, he would intentionally stand closer to me during the hymn and lean in when it got really bad. In the receiving line people would ask me "Why were you laughing up there?"

He was delighted that in previous years he caused the former associate minister, Beth Graham, great consternation on Sunday mornings by telling her things like she had toilet paper on her shoes, or that her skirt was tucked into her hose. When I began interviewing for ministry positions his advice to me on meeting with Search Committees was this, "Imagine them in their underwear, Sharon (which by the way, works)!" And then there was the joke to end all jokes. The joke he played on me that changed my idea of ministry and humor for good.

Few things have brought me as much terror in my life as facing the credentialing body of the UUA, the Ministerial Fellowship Committee (or MFC). My interview was scheduled for the February I was at Concord, and like most of my classmates, I had begun studying the June before. By January my nerves were stretched, and I had acquired a special, irrational fear about questions on UU history, a fear that I mentioned to Gary.

One day Gary went out to lunch with the Reverend David Pohl, a member at First Parish who is also the former Director of the Department of Ministry at the UUA. The Reverend Pohl is greatly respected and a kind, and committed man. To me he fully represented the weight of the UUA and MFC. After lunch Gary and David returned. Gary came to get me and said "Sharon, David wants to see you before your MFC interview."

I went out to talk to David and he said "Sharon, I think you'll do just fine, but I want to ask you a question to see if you are ready." Given the events that followed this question, I truly can't remember it anymore. It went something like "Who was the first Unitarian minister in Transylvania?", and then David listed four possible names. In a moment of blinding panic I realized I didn't recognize any of his four names (which was my worst nightmare), and that I would fail my MFC interview. I stammered out "I don't know." At this point Gary was almost jumping up and down in the hallway. "Don't you get it, Sharon, none of them are, and the MFC is never going to ask you that question."

David left, Gary confessed to twisting his arm to do such a thing, and I proceeded to pay Gary back by immediately going into our supervisory session and crying uncontrollably for the next hour. In fact, I couldn't stop crying. I was mad at Gary for a few minutes. He apologized, realizing that he had gone beyond my ability to tolerate a joke, but soon even I could even see that it was funny.

The only reason I ever fell for this joke was because I was locked into an irrational, paralyzing fear that removed any room for the possibility of humor, and with it, all chance for faith and life. Quite ironic. My growing humorlessness was killing me and my approach to ministry. Gary's joke let loose all my terror, frustration, and stagnation. It was utterly cathartic. On the day of my real MFC interview I sailed through, largely because I had already faced my worst fear with humor, and survived, thanks to humor. Today I believe ministry and life are unbearable without humor, and I seek humor at every turn.

Reinhold Niebuhr writes,

I agree with Niebuhr until the end, and this is what I learned from Gary. There is laughter in the holy of holies. There is a desperate need for laughter in the holy of holies. Of all things, we must be able to also laugh at and with what we hold most dear, what we want most desperately, what pains us the most, what we value the highest.

Of course there is a time and place for laughter and humor. In his book, The Courage to Laugh: Humor, Hope, and Healing in the Face of Death and Dying, Allen Klein writes about laughter as both hope and true communication because it takes our minds off things and connects us to one another. (I strongly recommend this book to anyone coping with their own illness or death, or that of a loved one. It's truly outstanding with lots of accessible and comfortable stories, great quotes and powerful insights.) Klein maintains that one of the most important gifts we can give someone who is ill, is actually the permission to laugh. He also has some important qualifiers, humor isn't appropriate at all times, people need to feel respected and listened to before they can appreciate humor, humor can be misused to mask important feelings, and it is crucial to understand an individual's threshold for humor.

Klein's caveats are very important and they helped me understand Gary's joke on me. In many ways Gary crossed my threshold for humor on that topic at that time, yet I always knew that he respected me and listened to me, so that made the joke bearable, then funny, then transformative. Today I am only grateful that Gary played this joke on me (this one joke transformed me, and only because it was so shocking did it snap me out of a dead end street), but I only want so many heart-stopping moments in my life. The threshold of humor can be a mysterious place and we do well to tread with caution until we know one another well.

There is also a difference between types of humor. Sarcasm is anger, not humor, and it wounds. Irony and satire can be fun, enlightening, painful, or cruel. The genius of humor is wit, spontaneity, acceptance, resistance, truth-telling, gentle self-depreciation, and that which makes us laugh and feel good about ourselves and others (and in this moment I am reminded of the late, great Steve Allen).

In this book Klein quotes a story by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen. I like this story because it is strange yet it has all those good qualities of humor, wit, spontaneity, acceptance, resistance, truth-telling, gentle self-depreciation, and it empowers both the giver and the receiver. Remen tells the story of a man who has angrily struggled through cancer at a young age. He has lost a leg, yet he learns to accept his loss through helping others. Remen writes about this man:

I love this story, because it is about survivors helping one another. Several years earlier the young man would have been too angry, to self-focused to help this woman. But as time passed and acceptance grew, he was able to see himself not as a victim, but as a whole person subject to the pain and whim of life, yet still full of strength and power.

There's a good chance that only someone who had felt such anger and betrayal of the body, could have help someone now feeling the same thing. I am certain that his ability to dance on one leg was astonishing for him and also transcendent. It speaks of his liberation and power, and then he was blessed with the opportunity to share this with someone who needed to know that there could be freedom and joy in her future as well. Humor is a prelude to faith, faith in the possibility of life. And laughter is a prayer, a gift, a blessing, sacred.

Within Hinduism one of the most popular gods is Krishna. Now Krishna has many images, but the most popular is Krishna as a careless, playful, mischievous child, the butter thief. Krishna's actions are solely for the purposes of self-delight and it is no coincidence that Hindus are drawn to this image of a god. The Bengalis say of him "Without Krsna there is no song". Scholar David R. Kinsley explains:

This image of Krishna has always fascinated me. Leave it to the Hindus, with their polytheistic pantheon, to understand that there must be laughter in life to make it bearable. Krishna lives to play. He even defeats his demon enemies in play. Humor, laughter, play. Hindus understand and honor its place in life. "Without Krsna there is no song." I'm not sure we understand this quite as well in America. To begin with, our Western interpretations of the Bible and religion are fairly serious.

I was hard-pressed to think of "funny" moments in the Bible. What I think of as humor in Western interpretations of the Bible are passages like Paul's reference to "the foolishness" of Christians for having faith. But this is a sort of submissive, ironic type of humor that is very obviously instructional. This is no belly laugh. This is no silliness for the sake of being silly and loving life. This is what Niebuhr is reflecting in his words. Niebuhr is wise enough to realize that there is humor in religion, but he can't quite place it in the holy of holies. That's not what we have been taught.

In his book, And God Created Laughter: The Bible as Divine Comedy, Conrad Hyers makes a fairly good case for the presence of humor in the Bible. Hyers points out that humor and jokes are the first things lost in translations. He notes that the Bible has been translated from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, and that much of the humor has been lost. I'm not saying that the Bible is a laugh riot, but the ancient Hebrews loved a good play on words, and good word play brings with it great subtlety, wit, and playfulness. Hyers maintains that we can easily find this humor in the Bible if we look for it.

Hyers uses the Hebrew Scripture story of Abraham and Sarah to illustrate his point. Historically Abraham and Sarah are the parents of the people of Israel. In the Book of Genesis we are first told that Abraham and Sarah are both old and that although they wished for children, they have been unable to have any. Then Abraham is told by God that he will bear a son. He laughs, as does Sarah when she hears the news.

A year later though a son is born and God says "you will call his name Isaac [Isaac, which means 'he laughs' or 'laughter' in Hebrew']" ( Gen. 17:19). . . Abraham gave the name [Laughter] to the son Sarah bore him. When his son [Laughter] was eight days old, Abraham circumcised him, as God commanded him. Abraham was a hundred years old when his son [Laughter] was born to him" (Gen. 21:3-5). As Hyers explains, the history of Israel begins . . . with a joke, a divine joke. Abraham laughs, Sarah laughs, God laughs. Sarah says "God has made laughter for me; every one who hears will laugh over me" (Gen. 21:6).

I often hear this story interpreted as Sarah laughs at God, God gets mad at her, and as a sort of "punishment" the child is named Isaac. There are a couple of things I don't like about this interpretation. First, it's utterly humorless. Second, if God "blames" Sarah for laughing, God must not be all-knowing because God ignores that Abraham laughs too. It's right there in the scripture. Beyond that, I have never seen the name "Isaac" or his birth story as one of punishment. This is a story about hope, miracles, humor, and the uncontrollable mysteries of life. This is a story about an older couple struggling with infertility and yet the story of Isaac is symbolic for more than the difficult conception and then miraculous birth of a child.

On a symbolic level, Isaac (or laughter) is not a child at all, but an understanding or wisdom about humor that Abraham and Sarah acquire in their old age. God tells Abraham he will make a covenant with Isaac. God covenants with laughter, or "he who laughs" and a nation is born. "I will establish my covenant with [laughter] as an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him" (gen. 17:19). First there is despair, then laughter, then life is born. This story tells us that laughter brings hope and a new beginning, and that God just might have an excellent sense of humor, especially in the holy of holies.

Hyers concludes his book by noting that our unnecessary religious lack of humor has hurt us in other ways as well. He notes that we like to cling to tragic interpretations of things instead of embracing the comic. He writes:

While adding this quote into the sermon I couldn't help but think of our bizarre Presidential election. Last week I watched the television show 48 Hours, and Dan Rather interviewed a constitutional scholar who was hysterical in his interpretation of the Presidential election. When asked about constitutional issues he immediately stretched the situation out to the worst possible conclusion, the electoral college couldn't vote in December and America would have no new President in January. He was almost ecstatic.

Can we take our ideologies and beliefs a little less absolutely, and ourselves a little less seriously? I compare this to our own Dick Bozian who recently offered me these sage words regarding the election, "Well, we've survived Herbert Hoover." Now here is humor and perspective.

Whatever side of the political fence you are on, the point is that we will most likely be just fine if we can take our ideologies and ourselves a little less seriously and find some humor. There are people in America who are seriously concerned about the ethics of President Clinton. There are people in America seriously concerned about the future of civil rights if George W. Bush is elected President.

Ethics and civil rights are not laughing matters, but if we can't also find ways to laugh about this situation, ourselves and our values, we will collapse under the anxiety. We will become entrenched in anxiety, fear, and extremism and we will not be able to help our country. Has it occurred to anyone else here that at this point there is a good chance that the candidate and party who will be the winner is the one who graciously steps down for the good of the country, and that this is just a little bit funny? We have survived Herbert Hoover.

All my life I have enjoyed funny people, not really comedians, they seem too pre-meditated, too calculated for me, but people who know how to see and name humor as it happens. Here at First Church I think of people like Rick Boydston, Dick Bozian, Adam Gerhardstein, Carol Lloyd, Jim Percival, Tommie Thompson. I think of these people because more than once I have been with them when they found the humor in a situation. To each of them I am grateful for making me laugh, for making many of us laugh, for guiding us away from extremes, absolutes and burdened self-images.

Life needs humor, especially when the stakes are the highest, and the potential for loss is the greatest. To this beloved community gathered here I wish a ministry of humor, humor to deal with committee misunderstandings, worship snafus, matters of family and the heart, canvass calls, parking lot votes, reconciliation projects, social justice and mission statement endeavors.

Our life here is important. So important that we need to develop a kind sense of humor so that we may live and work and help and heal and love one another and this world of which we are a part. Our laughter is sacred and we desperately need it in that which each of us calls the holy of holies. May we be blessed with the gift of humor in times of joy and especially when confusion and distress reign supreme. May it always be so.

Return to Sermon Index