"Good Grief!"

Rev. Sharon Dittmar
March 28, 2000

When the Worship Committee first suggested I do a sermon on Peanuts, I had no idea what I would say. Sure I liked the comic strip, Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz. And yes, I grew up with a large Snoopy stuffed animal. And yes, I went to sleep every night under a Peanuts blanket. And yes, my father went around the house singing "No Dogs Allowed" (his favorite song from the 1972 movie "Snoopy Come Home"), but Peanuts as sermon material? Is a comic strip really that relevant? Come to find out, it is.

In the late 1940's, Charles Schulz returned from WW II to his home state of Minnesota. There his promised job, lettering tombstones (if you can believe that), never materialized. In 1950 he submitted a comic strip to United Features Syndicate entitled "L'il Folk". Due to some copyright concerns United Features Syndicate changed the name to Peanuts (a name that Schulz never liked), and the rest is history. For fifty years Peanuts has enchanted us.

Considering the political, social, and military upheaval of the last half-century, it's amazing any comic strip could retain its appeal and continue to attract new generations of followers. Peanuts was created before the civil rights and women's movements, before Vatican II and Vietnam, before the Beatles and the first Super Bowl. The Peanuts gang have not changed clothes in fifty years. They could be outdated. Instead they are fresh and relevant. The secret is that Peanuts was never faddish. Instead, it offered honest and real social, political, and especially human commentary, even when it hurt.

Washington Post columnist Henry Allen gave this tribute to Peanuts after Charles Schulz died last month.

This past week I watched "A Charlie Brown Christmas Special." And while I have seen it dozens of times, this time I watched it to really hear what Schulz was saying. The special begins with that melancholy Christmas music composed by jazz musician Vince Guaraldi. The children sing "Christmas time is here, happiness and cheer, and for all that children call their favorite time of year..." They are singing about happiness, but it doesn't sound very happy. It doesn't feel very happy. There were years when I could not stand to hear this music. I wouldn't let anyone play it in my house. It just depressed me.

And I was definitely onto something, because the very first lines, uttered by Charlie Brown, are these "I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. Christmas is coming but I'm not happy. I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel… I always end up feeling depressed." Linus responds "Charlie Brown, you're the only person I know who could take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem." And while we laugh at Linus' response, don't we also understand Charlie Brown? My favorite line in the whole special is from Charlie Brown who says, "I know no one likes me. Why do we have a holiday season to emphasize it?"

Trust Charles Schulz to get past the hype, to the truth. The holiday season is both happy and sad, and often offers more pain and disappointment that outward appearances indicate. Once again, Charles Schulz redeems the ordinary, lonely, forgettable, hopeful person at the core of all of us, by invoking the kind of laughter that comes when we realize we're caught between the rock and the hard place, in this case, of Christmas.

When talking to one of my friends this past week I asked her for her thoughts on Peanuts. She immediately responded, "Schulz talked about depression before it was OK to do so, in an era of ‘Leave It to Beaver’ and ‘Father Knows Best.’ Schulz was ahead of his time. I was amazed when I realized the Christmas Special was produced in 1965. It deals with the timeless themes of crass holiday commercialism, depression, religious obscurity, careless therapists, and self-interest, themes that have only magnified as the century continued."

Snoopy wins the "Lights and Display Contest" with what I consider "the gaudy light show from hell." Charlie Brown, who is depressed, goes to visit Lucy in her psychiatrist's office and she tells him to pay first because "I love the sound of cold, hard cash". Sally asks Charlie Brown to write her letter to Santa which concludes, "I'd like money, in 10s and 20s, please." When Charlie Brown looks pained she responds, "All I want is what is coming to me. All I want is my fair share."

Good grief is right. It's just so darn funny and terrible at the same time. My friend also commented about Schulz, "He was ahead of his time, but he did it in a way that was not alienating. Humor can make a better point when well done." In just twenty- five minutes, Schulz offers a rough send-up of the season along with some sanity. In the last few minutes Linus reads the story of the birth of Jesus from The Gospel of Luke, and Christianity is pulled back from the brink of complete irrelevance and obscurity.

In The Gospel According to Peanuts, author Robert L. Short tries to make a case for Peanuts as a Christian expression, with many strips being parables that offer insight on sin, God, and evil. Although Schulz was a Christian, and there are some Christian themes within Peanuts (as editorial cartoonist Bill Maudlin says, a major theme of Peanuts is "Love thy neighbor even when it hurts"), even so I was not convinced by Short's case.

Just two weeks ago when the Jesus Seminar came to First Church, we heard Brandon Scott say that the parables of Jesus were shocking and unanswerable, leaving the listener confused. Peanuts is less shocking and more obvious than a parable. A solely Christian analysis of Peanuts is limiting, like trying to fit a round peg in a square hole. Yet, I do think Short is on to something. Schulz's genius rests in his ability to make some human and disturbing observations in gentle ways that we can hear.

The amazon.com website offers reviews of books for purchase, including The Gospel According to Peanuts. I want to share one review with you from a reader in Dublin, Ireland. And I think it is noteworthy that this reader is from Ireland. Peanuts has such universal appeal that the strip appears in 75 countries in 21 different languages. Schulz was not just telling the American story. He was telling the human story. The reviewer from Ireland notes:

Although I disagree with the reviewers premise, which suggests that suffering and oppression are not central to Christianity, when in fact they are, I find his other insight fascinating, Peanuts as a deadpan, sunlit hell where nothing changes. We tend to think of the Peanuts characters as charming, funny, and cute, but they are more morose and ironic than we realize. This again is the genius of Schulz, his ability to say painful truths in a way we can hear, and want to keep hearing. Grief is good, or at least human and real, and ultimately we must love it if we are to love ourselves. Good grief. Good grief!

In his Peanuts collection entitled A Kiss on the Nose Turns Aside Anger, Schulz does a series of strips. My two favorites were Sally approaching her first day of kindergarten, and Linus receiving notes from his mother in his lunch pail. Sally spends her summer dreading kindergarten. She tries to make Charlie Brown write a note that will permanently excuse her. She has attacks of fear and panic. She insists she is not the going-to-school type. Finally, at the end of one strip she walks to school with Charlie Brown who says, "There it is . . . there's your school. In the next frame we see Sally running away with her hands in the air yelling "AAUGH!"

As the next strip continues there is a surprising change. After one day, Sally is a convert who raves about the wonders of kindergarten. She says, "Some children just don't know their minds. . . It's ridiculous for a child to have this fear of kindergarten! I think we pamper kids too much these days . . . (and finishing with her fist in the air) Don't fiddle around with 'em! That's my motto! Send 'em off!" Charlie Brown rolls his eyes and sighs.

During the first part of this series my sympathy for Sally grew. Her first day of school was like the first day of anything, work, marriage, retirement. Her fear of school is almost pathological so she responds best to compassion. And then in one day she becomes a cold, militant convert, demanding the forced induction of all children into kindergarten. In her fervor I saw shades of myself on a bad day, and all sorts of self-righteous spokespeople for every type of cause. Sally's first day of kindergarten is a brilliant parody that lets us see, know, and maybe even love and forgive ourselves as we are.

In another series Linus starts to receive letters from his mother in his lunch pail. The first one reads

This letter makes Linus cry. Charlie Brown says "Good grief!" The next letter is more intense.

Charlie Brown comments, "I used to wonder why you sometimes drag that blanket around, but now I think I know!"

Here again, we have an everyday universal event, a boy opening his lunch pail and finding a note from a parent. And yet we also have a brilliant passive aggressive attempt at guilt, an authority figure who preys on (in this case a child's) fear of failure, and the resulting need for security via a blanket. Whether it’s a note in the lunch pail or a supervisor's veiled comments, this scenario is familiar.

I keep coming back to the gentle pathos of Peanuts. It might be an autobiographical piece of trivia that Schulz almost lettered tombstones, but there is something dead and alive, sad and happy, depressed and redemptive about Peanuts. The characters might never change, but it is not a deadpan, sunlit hell. It is life.

I asked another friend why he likes Peanuts and he responded, "I could relate to Charlie Brown and I was never intimidated. Unlike other strips it wasn't fantastic or perfect and the characters weren't beautiful." With Peanuts it's safe to be human.

Perhaps the most surprising tribute to Peanuts is from New York Yankees manager, Joe Torre, manager of the best (or at least they win the most) baseball team in this century. As you'll recall, Charlie Brown was also a baseball manager, only it is safe to say that he managed the worst baseball team in this century. Torre says, "Charlie Brown playing baseball and never doing it quite right. You know, I can relate to that." Charlie Brown helped all of us, even Joe Torre, know, love, and forgive ourselves as we are. Behind every 15 minutes or lifetime of fame, there is still a person who is lumpy, imperfect, confused, hopeful, and ordinary.

The most interesting and insightful story about Schulz and Peanuts comes from producer, Lee Mendelson. He recounts this story.

What a powerful story. In it I can hear Schulz's love and appreciation for his characters, how much they lived with him, how much he kept rooting for them, although some of them lost for fifty years. In many ways they were more authentic than his own imagination. In creating characters about the truth, he could never deny the truth, even when he wanted to. And that is why young or old, we love Peanuts. Charlie Brown wouldn't really be alive if he kicked the football, and neither would we.

Recently I watched the 1972 film "Snoopy Come Home." The film introduced the only "new" Peanuts character that I can remember, Woodstock. I had never considered the larger implications of Woodstock, but watching this film I thought about the counter culture rock festival, Woodstock, held three years earlier in 1969, and for the first time I wondered how this bird who never flies right, got his name. Woodstock is a good-natured bird and friend to Snoopy, but he's just not "with it." And for all these years I just thought he was a bird. Now that is political commentary through humor that we can hear.