ACT I: June 16 (Fathers' Day)
"And God Said, 'Go Ahead: Laugh!'"
Know the greatest joke God ever played on all humanity? The joke God plays on all her creation, each and every day: the defeat of death through resurrection. Bringing new life beyond our wildest imaginings to each person whose passing we grieve over. That also and especially and also unexpectedly: The Spirit brings resurrection to each of us each and every day -- while we yet breathe.
And so go ahead, God tells us -- Laugh! Laugh, in the face of death’s chimera
of certainty. Laugh, in the face of new life’s improbability. Laugh -- bridge your despair with my care!
Three
passages from the Book of Genesis build this bridge for us. The first, recording the first laughing spree in all of
scripture. When God says in effect to the centenarian Abraham: “Ready to be a
daddy? Happy Fathers’ Day, old man!”
And Abraham laughs – how could he not? Father Abraham is astonished; he is incredulous. He is astounded by the joy that is God’s grace and compassion, neither of which can say no to resurrection.
And Abraham laughs – how could he not? Father Abraham is astonished; he is incredulous. He is astounded by the joy that is God’s grace and compassion, neither of which can say no to resurrection.
And resurrection
is outrageous enough that we must laugh. What else can be our response? As God said trumps
Sarah's denial in Scripture #2: “Oh yes, you did laugh!” In essence, God is
saying, “Go ahead: It’s okay. Don’t believe new life can come through you, or
to you? Go on ahead, and laugh – and I’ll see you at the birth!”
So -- in Scripture #3 -- upon giving birth to Isaac whose very name means “he laughs”, we hear Sarah claiming the laughter she had once denied. Hardly out of labor – no laughing matter – Sarah exclaims, “God has brought laughter for me! Everyone who hears will laugh with me!”
"Everyone who hears": But first, we must tell them -- beginning with ourselves! Tell of the Good News that, thanks to the reality of resurrection all around us, we can breathe deeply the Spirit-wind of the Season of Pentecost. Inhale with surprise ... exhale with laughter. Go ahead: Laugh!
Must we take ourselves too seriously, and mistake that for taking our calling seriously enough? Or will we feast on – and delight in – and frolic in the ironic humor of God’s grace? Grace we share in surprises of Spirit exhalation – versus the isolation of our self-serious Christ exaltation? Taking God as seriously as we do not take ourselves?
Biblically speaking, those with marginal lives seemed to throw a banquet every time Jesus came to town. Living in the day, they had less to protect and less future to hoard. Without in any way romanticizing poverty or suffering of any kind, and without shirking our responsibility for alleviating both, we too can discover a carefree spirit – we too can claim our “present” from God – when we join in on the humorous chorus of the suffering first-century masses in the play “Godspell”:
"Everyone who hears": But first, we must tell them -- beginning with ourselves! Tell of the Good News that, thanks to the reality of resurrection all around us, we can breathe deeply the Spirit-wind of the Season of Pentecost. Inhale with surprise ... exhale with laughter. Go ahead: Laugh!
ACT II: June 23
"The Humor of Irony: God's Grace, Our Response"
When
I first entered into spiritual recovery from the spirits that threatened to
swallow my life whole, a man named Mark would always open his shares in our
recovery groups with these words: “I take my sobriety” – meaning, his spiritual
life – “very seriously. And because I take my sobriety very seriously, I cannot
afford to take myself too seriously.”
I think that's the most profound lesson in ironic humor any of us needs to learn: “Because
I take my (spiritual life) very seriously, I cannot afford to take myself too
seriously.” Hence, our church marquee message for this
Holy Humor series: “We Take Laughter Very Seriously.”
Our scriptures,
we discover, are rich in irony of all kinds. Irony that is
defined as wisdom contained in contrast,
between reality (what is) and appearance (what seems to be). Incongruous
wisdom, puncturing our pretensions and spiritually centering our image of self: from the
hubris of God-pretension on the one hand, or the humiliation of god-awful on the other, into
the humility of being a right-sized image of our creator.
Take Balaam in
our Numbers story today. As the late comedian Henny Youngman would add: Take
him ... please! He beats his donkey for not doing what he wants it to do. Before
we know it, the donkey protests to Balaam – in a human voice and words! The
roles are reversed. The ass becomes as a human … and the human becomes …
The irony we
encounter in fourteen brief verses in Numbers – confusing our seriousness for
what is serious to God – is an irony writ large over the four chapters of the
book of Jonah.
Ready to laugh?
- Jonah flees from God’s call to Nineveh that it might repent by hopping on board a ship – as if somehow he could escape the all-seeing God, who dug out this unlikely prophet in the first place!
- An awful storm arises while on ship. The experienced mariners are terrified; Jonah snoozes away. Irony #2: The seafarers are terrified; the landlubber not!
- Jonah outs himself as a prophet to the mariners; they toss him into the sea, the storm calms, the mariners rejoice. Irony #3: The mariners appear more devout to a God foreign to them than the prophet that this God has sent!
- Later, Jonah makes it to Nineveh ... and Nineveh repents! And Jonah is furious! Irony #4: The prophet succeeds, and how he resents it!
- Resents it enough to ask God … to kill him! Ironic #5: The Ninevites – the doomed ones – are spared; God’s prophet wants to take their place.
Between
Jonah thrown overboard and fulfilling his call to the Ninevites, I have skipped
the greatest and most meaningful irony of all in this story. And that is the irony of the grace of a loving God. In Jonah’s
case: the large fish swallows him, and he is rescued. It’s ironic, because
Jonah has done nothing whatsoever to earn this reprieve. It’s a free and
unearned gift. It’s God’s grace.
Yet we cannot
claim God’s grace for us – the ironic antidote to our hubris or shame –when in
the midst of our serious business of living, we take ourselves too seriously as
well.
Jesus’
brothers in his Jewish faith – the scribes and the Pharisees – were just
not getting it. They were not getting the separation of seriousness of call
with seriousness of self. And so how could the irony of God’s unmerited grace
be recognized by them? They were too busy saving their world, if not lording themselves
over it. And so Jesus saves some of his strongest words in scriptures for these
self-serious legalists: “Woe to you … hypocrites! … You blind guides! You
strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!”
What a humorous image ... one I'm sure they didn't get! The question remains: Do we? We who take ourselves
oh-so-seriously by straining out gnats – keeping ourselves in line with church
order or in a particular alignment of Sunday worship or in particular line
items of a church budget. And in doing so, we miss the camel we so carelessly gorge: Our
attention to the humor of God’s ironic grace in it all.
Must we take ourselves too seriously, and mistake that for taking our calling seriously enough? Or will we feast on – and delight in – and frolic in the ironic humor of God’s grace? Grace we share in surprises of Spirit exhalation – versus the isolation of our self-serious Christ exaltation? Taking God as seriously as we do not take ourselves?
Whoever has a
mouth to laugh … let them laugh!
ACT III: June 30
"The Healing of Humor: Claiming the 'Present'"
Three decades the editor of the Saturday Review, and a peacemaking
activist of international repute, the late Norman Cousins was diagnosed in his
fifties with a rare form of arthritis that paralyzed most of his body. Told he
had little chance of surviving, Cousins developed a recovery program that – in
addition to medical treatment prescribed – incorporated megadoses of Vitamin C …
and laughter induced by Marx Brothers films.
He would write of his successful healing in his book Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient: "I made the
joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic
effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep. When the
pain-killing effect of the laughter wore off, we would switch on the motion
picture projector again and not infrequently, it would lead to another
pain-free interval."
What healing capacities humor holds for
each and every one of us! And yet, when I
find myself resentful over a past event or fearful of a potential future event,
laughter is one of the last medicines I can imagine for myself. For a life of good humor by its nature necessarily
consists of being present … living in the present … even, being caught up in
the present. Claiming the present: If you will, God’s “present” to us!
The great
theologian Reinhold Niebuhr has pointed out, along with many others, that we
are the only animals known to possess a sense of time’s passage – a sense of
perspective. We can look back on our pasts and see whence we came. We can look
forward to our futures and envision whither we may go. It’s a great gift to
have, this gift of the Roman god Janus, who lends his name to the month of
January: looking backward and forward, both. It’s a great gift to have, this
gift of our God who offers us in
critical biblical metaphors of Passover, Last Supper, and so on the gift of
memory, and the gift of hope.
And yet our
memories can muddy – and we can become stuck in a muddy past, refusing to
relinquish either or both of two faithless notions: our best years lie behind
us (the nostalgic) or that we can create a better yesterday (the wistful). As
for our hopes: We are prone to manipulate them. And the more we do, the
cloudier they actually become – clouds of many hues: dark, ethereal, the color
of roses ...
What to do, then, when our
memory and hope inevitably distort, or simply fails us? When our memory turns
nostalgic or wistful -- when our hope turns defensive or wishful? What to do,
then, but claim the gift of today as God’s “present” to us – the place where a
life of good humor abides?
The Galilean Jewish peasant he most
likely was, Yeshua ben Joseph – Jesus son of the landless carpenter Joseph – seemed
experientially and intuitively sensitive to the resentments (past) and fears
(future) of his most intimate companions and audience: the debt slaves of the
Roman Empire. So at the heart
of his three-chapter collection of teachings known as The Sermon on the Mount, Matthew’s
Jesus today shares with them – and with us – some authoritative wisdom to move back
into the moment:
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? ... And what can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? ... Therefore do not worry ... But strive first for the kingdom of God ... and all these things will be given to you as well.
So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today.
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? ... And what can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? ... Therefore do not worry ... But strive first for the kingdom of God ... and all these things will be given to you as well.
So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today.
Jesus
understands that life is infinitely more than the material: resenting what has
been taken from us, and fearing what could still be. Jesus understands that freedom
from resentment (past) and fear (future) is more important than freedom from
want – or even what we think we may need.
Freedom from a
past and a future stolen by worry. Worry – Jesus uses the word five times in
these 10 verses – expands life to the unresolved past and to the unforeseeable future
both. The irony is worry reduces life – real
life – today’s life – all around us. For “today’s
trouble is enough” – is it not?
Sometimes, it can seem more than enough! In the
comic strip Zits, one character admonishes another, “Live in the moment!”
“Yeah,” responds the other, “But does it have to be this moment?!” For the present may seem anything but a
present – a gift – to us. Good humor may not be appropriate to share with the
suffering among us, or at least need not apply for the position a sufferer is
in.
But humor’s application can be filed
for later reference. And when we find
the space and the place to hire humor’s service to our side, we find great healing
in the laughter. Laughter, at our foibles resentful (past) and our follies fearful
(future). Laughter, at life’s ironies all around us – if not the outright
foolishness, the vanity, of it all.
Life’s foolishness
– life’s vanity – that the wisdom writer of Ecclesiastes lines out for us today: "There are righteous
people who are treated according to the conduct of the wicked, and there are
wicked people who are treated according to the conduct of the righteous."
How to accept such intractable unfairness? What does The Teacher
commend, when the biblical mandate and struggle for justice inevitably fall
short? "I
commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to
eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil
through the days of life that God gives them under the sun."
Enjoyment.
Having fun. Being of good humor and cheer. Being … here …and now.
I have always been taken by a poignant irony in life:
Those who live closest to life’s material margins – the subsistent of God’s
world, or those who suffer the most for whatever reason – those who may not and
should not accept their plight, are the ones who have the least difficulty in
living it up in the face of it all! I have discovered this among bare-bones monastics in France: those who threw us, their prosperous guests of several dozen, a lavish supper.
And I have experienced this among peasants in southern Mexico: those who saved
their last chicken for a dozen of us in another well-heeled group.
Biblically speaking, those with marginal lives seemed to throw a banquet every time Jesus came to town. Living in the day, they had less to protect and less future to hoard. Without in any way romanticizing poverty or suffering of any kind, and without shirking our responsibility for alleviating both, we too can discover a carefree spirit – we too can claim our “present” from God – when we join in on the humorous chorus of the suffering first-century masses in the play “Godspell”:
Some men are
born to leave at ease/doing what they please/richer than the bees are in
honey./Never growing old,/never feeling cold,/ pulling pots of gold from thin
air,/the best in every town,/best in shaking down/best in making mountains of
money./They can’t take it with them,/but what do they care?/They get the
center of the meat,/cushions on the seat,/houses on the street where it’s
sunny,/summers by the sea,/winters warm and free,/all of this and we get the
rest./But: Who is the
land for,/the sun and the sand for?/You guessed: It’s all for the …/You must
never be distressed!/Yes, it’s all for the …/All your wrongs will be
redressed/Yes, it’s all for the …/Someone’s got to be oppressed!/Yes, it’s all
for the best!
The one line I
take issue with in this song: “Someone’s got to be oppressed.” Oppression – any
suffering – is never necessary. And yet: Is it not inevitable?
And so, in the midst of suffering’s
inevitability and absurdity: Humor – well-timed – claims God’s present, the
present, for us, and is healing. Generating among us a life-long conversation
with God, with others, and with God’s creation in three acts:
Act 1: God’s gift: "Go Ahead -- Laugh!" God has let us in on the
greatest joke of all, shared with us through the Holy Spirit: Jesus defeated
death on Easter morning, presenting us with love eternal and unconditional. The
eternal that is present.
Act 2: Our brokenness: We take ourselves too danged seriously! We retroject
through resentment, and project through fear, paying homage to death in our
failure to receive the present.
Act 3: God’s healing: Claim "The Present!" God offers back to us all the
fun! “My kingdom – my resurrection – is already among you! Lo, it is not there
– and lo, it is not there. It is,
indeed, among you – in my present to you: your present in me!”
I close with another Norman Cousins story – about someone he knew:
A
woman … underwent exploratory surgery, during which metastatic carcinoma was found.
As gently as he could, her surgeon broke the news to her the next day. That
evening, on passing her room, he heard sounds of laughter and saw the patient
sitting with her sister. Both women were roaring with laughter. Somewhat taken aback,
he wondered if he had been too gentle
in breaking the news, and asked her whether she understood what he had told
her. She replied, "Yes, you said I had cancer". Satisfied, he went
away, only to hear laughter again on passing her room. This time she was
speaking on the telephone to a friend. He discussed her situation with her
again, asking if she understood the prognosis. She replied, "You said
you'd try chemotherapy, but you're not sure it will work". When the
surgeon heard laughter coming from the patients' room for the third time, he really
began to wonder about the patient's grip on reality. He told her bluntly, "Look:
I have to make it clear to you. You're going to die". The patient told
him, "Doctor, there's something I
have to make clear to you. If I'm going to die, it'll be my way, not yours. I'm
not going to spend my remaining time being sad.”
Friends, that sounds like resurrection living to me! Letting go of present woes stretching our
fevered minds to eternal worry, both directions: regretful of the past, despairing
of the future. Living into a different understanding of the eternal, that’s
fully in the present: God’s healing gift of humor, freeing us from care.
Living into
God’s greatest joke of all: Death is defeated. Life is victorious.
Christ’s resurrection glory: experienced by
us all -- eventually.
Christ’s resurrection healing: experienced by
us – if we choose – today.
Whoever has a mouth to laugh: Let them laugh!
