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Foolery April 1, 2007 Rev. Paul Beckel First Universalist Unitarian Church ~ www.uuwausau.org
An Intergenerational Service
OPENING LAUGHSLaughter. Laughter is a safe way to express anxieties, fears, and hidden emotions. It breaks the ice, builds trust, and connects us to other humans, and to animals; it even connects us to life’s greatest mysteries.
Laughing exercises our face and neck, our diaphragm and abdomen, even our arms and legs when we let ourselves go. Our pulse and blood pressure rise for a moment, our breathing becomes faster and deeper, and oxygen surges through our bodies. Even more quickly than thru meditation, thru laughter we can achieve a state of alertness and aliveness.
So today we are going to laugh! Why? Well, in part we’re going to laugh because it is April Fools day and a too rare opportunity to be foolish without the normal social inhibitions against foolery. We’re going to laugh for our health, and to reduce the stress that may be built up in us from taking ourselves too seriously. We’re also going to laugh because being fooled, being surprised, is a way of breaking down barriers: breaking down barriers to learning and breaking down barriers between people. Laughter can help us to recognize our common humanity, the universal frailties and hopes that we share.
Today is also Palm Sunday, the beginning of the Christian Holy Week. Why would we celebrate foolery at such a sacred time as this? Well, as I will say more about in a few minutes, Jesus may be among the greatest jokesters of them all. His Palm Sunday journey into Jerusalem -- riding on a donkey while his followers lay palms down before him -- could well have been a parody of Roman emperors and their military forces.
The biblical Jesus was just one of a long line of prophetic voices making religious parodies and satires, from the ancient Greek playwrights and the medieval jesters to the modern fake newscasters like Jon Stewart who put a funny spin on news stories that we might not otherwise be able to stomach straight up… to the clownish Jesus character of the 1970s Godspell. They all point out our human follies with a grin – not just to make us mad but hopefully to help us recognize our hypocrisies so that we might change instead of just getting defensive.
Also, of course, people have just been being silly for a long time. In 1907 some silly people came up with “Glow little glow-worm.” Let’s sing it as we light the chalice. LIGHTING THE CHALICEREFLECTIONS on GelatologyThere is actually a field of study of laughter, it is called “gelatology.” No kidding. And it has nothing to do with Jell-O. Why do we laugh? How did laughter evolve? What does it mean? What are the medical and social effects? There are a lot of curious things about laughter that we may never understand. I think it’s funny just to wonder about these things.
Doctors are doing experiments to see if and why laughter can help prevent heart disease and even protection us against infections. Again, no kidding. And it seems fairly intuitive that laughter is good for us in general, not just because our hearts and lungs get a workout, but because when we laugh our brains send happy chemicals into our bodies. Strangely, this happens even when we laugh fake laughs. Our bodies don’t know the difference.
There is an old saying that laughter is the best medicine. Well a doctor in India wanted to see if this could be literally true. So he got a bunch of people together just to laugh. Years later, they are still coming to the park every day just to laugh together. A documentary the middle school class watched a few weeks ago showed what they do. Apparently thousands of laughing clubs now exist in dozens of countries around the world. People get together to laugh, not at comedy, but just to laugh for the health of it.
They don’t need a reason to laugh, they say. You can just fake it and it does just as much good. Or at least you fake it until it becomes real laughter. That may sound strange since UUs tend to talk about being authentic, true to ourselves, not faking things… but there are a number of spiritual practices which I suggest to people that they begin by faking it, and in time it can become real (for example: forgiveness, non-defensiveness, hope… there are a lot of things like this that we just need to prime the pump to get ourselves going).
One laughter club member says: "You do not have to have a sense of humor to laugh. You don't have to be happy to laugh. You don't have to have any reason to laugh... Motions lead to emotions. When you act happy, you create the chemistry of happiness."
Laughter can be a distraction from hunger or obsessive thoughts; it can take our mind off of pain, worry, or sadness. It can help us to accept things in life that don’t make sense.
I want to show you some pictures now and I’m not going to spend a lot of time with them. These are from a National Geographic article about “animals at play.” I’ll probably bring them out again some time so we can talk more about whether animals really “play.” But for now these pictures bring up some interesting ideas about laughter and humor. Some people believe that there always has to be pain involved in any joke. It’s an interesting question. It’s hard to tell in some of these pictures if the animals are fighting or playing. It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference with humans too.
But I don’t agree that humor always has to involve someone getting hurt. I think surprise is the biggest part of humor – being fooled – having things turn out different from what we expect. We laugh from tickling even though there’s nothing funny about tickling. It’s been suggested that the first joke – probably long before there were humans – was the tickle that didn’t happen.
So now I’m going to ask you to laugh. We’re going to do some laughter yoga. I’m going to ask you to laugh even though there’s nothing funny to laugh at. Actually most of the time that people laugh there is nothing funny going on. We just laugh as punctuation for our speech and our interactions. But still you might find it hard at first to laugh. You may feel self-conscious. You will almost certainly say this is a really stupid thing to do.
Now of course you shouldn’t laugh if you have broken ribs or a hernia or if you’re going to spit phlegm all over your neighbor. But barring that, I hope you’ll give it a try.
If it works maybe you’ll want to start a laughter club in Wausau. If not, well then the joke’s on me.
LAUGHTER YOGA[If you weren’t there you’re probably thinking, “Thank God I wasn’t there,” because yes, we just laughed, hard, and it was pretty weird. But it was fun, it was contagious, and it was a good cardio-vascular workout. Afterward I felt more relaxed and receptive.
STORY Coyote & The Laughing Butterflies [Summary: Coyote, sent to the lake to get salt, takes a nap when he gets there. The butterflies decide to carry him back home while he sleeps, and when he wakes his wife is mad that he has been so lazy. The next time he redeems himself, and the butterflies help too.]
REFLECTIONS on Tricksters The Jews have a holiday called Purim. I noticed something in the newspaper a few weeks ago about there being a Purim party for the general public, and I wish I had gone. Purim is an unusual holiday in that it is often celebrated with carnivals and parodies, noisemakers, cross-dressing; the Talmud even commands drinking until your judgment is blurred. Drink until you can’t tell the difference between “cursed be Haman" and "blessed be Mordecai." These are lines from the story that is always told at Purim – from the biblical book of Esther, in which an evil advisor to the king of Persia plots to exterminate the Jewish people.
Esther is the hero of the story because she risks her life to go to speak to the king. And it’s interesting because it is the only book in the bible that does not mention God. You might say that God is still there in this story but that God is being tricky by providing a surprising person to save the day.
You may have heard that “God works in mysterious ways.” That’s an idea that has come up all over the world even where there are very different understandings of what God might be. All over the world there are stories about human gods and animal gods who are tricksters -- characters who have surprising powers or who find unexpected solutions to problems, or even solve problems by getting themselves into trouble. Or the tricksters teach us something by becoming the butt of a joke. Coyote is frequently the trickster character in Native American stories.
And the Christian bible has all kinds of images of Jesus that are similar to trickster characters. In fact, when scholars look at the Bible to try to figure out which things Jesus might have actually said, and which parts were added as the bible stories were re-told and re-written over time, they look at some particular characteristics of Jesus’ speech – patterns of speech that they think most likely point to the real Jesus. And these are the common patterns that they look for:[1] The things that he said contradicted what would be expected by social and religious conventions of his day.
He says: eat whatever food is before you, don’t worry about the laws that say which kinds of food you can eat. He told a story in which the enemy turned out to be the good guy. He said lend money and don’t expect to get it back. He said love your enemies. He said, “Poor people are blessed by God” and “the person who has given the least has actually given the most.”
He said, “Invite people you don’t know to your parties.” He said, “The smallest seed grows into the biggest plant.” And he told a story – this is one of my favorites – about some people who came to work in the morning and some who came in around lunchtime and some came in just before quitting time. And then the boss came and paid everybody. And everybody got the same amount of pay! Why do I like that story? Not because I’m lazy and want it to be ok to get paid for doing half as much work as everyone else. I love that story because it’s mysterious! People have been trying to figure out what it means for 2000 years! (One Universalist interpretation is fairly straightforward: that God loves all equally... but of course there are other parables which speak differently about rewards... and even if we stick with the equal-grace interpretation it’s still an incredible puzzle – how to translate that into our day-to-day lives.)
That’s what Jesus was like! His sayings and stories surprise or shock us by reversing roles, and frustrating what we would think is going to happen. He uses exaggeration and humor and paradox (putting things together that don’t normally go together). He answers questions with more questions, or with stories that you don’t quite know why he’s told them. Or he gives evasive answers that force the listeners to think for themselves. Like he was asked, “Is it right that we should pay taxes?” He answered: “Pay the emperor what belongs to the emperor, and pay to god what belongs to God.” He gives us puzzles that lead to deeper and deeper puzzles. And to even come close to an answer you have to think it out for yourself.
Like any good jester or clown, trickster Jesus had quite a range: [images[2]] from the pathetic clown of thorns, to the comforter, the celebrator, and of course the storyteller. Now you might think that I am making fun of Christianity by calling the Christian hero, Jesus, a clown, a trickster. Not at all. That’s what made him a great teacher.
But is it ok to criticize others, and make fun of other people’s religion? Jesus did it all the time when people did things that made no sense. Or if they thought superficial things were important while forgetting about what truly matters. For example one time he and his followers were walking through a field of wheat. And they were hungry so they pulled heads off the wheat and ate the grains. Well believe it or not people criticized them for that! It was the Sabbath, and the law in that time and place was that no one could work on the Sabbath -- certainly not work in the fields harvesting grain.
But Jesus said to his critics: you can’t be serious! Don’t be ridiculous! You’re going to condemn us for breaking off the tops of a few stalks of wheat?! Your laws don’t take any account of people who are hungry or people who are sick. Your laws are only made for the people who are in power!
Jesus was a bit like the little kid in the story you’ve probably heard about the emperor’s new clothes. It was the little kid who had the courage to face the person in charge and call him a fool. So your parents have a lot of courage bringing you here. Because we’re making it clear, here, that they don’t know everything. Of course you don’t either. And this makes a lot of parents nervous. Most parents would rather have you learn some rules as if you would just follow the rules. But here we teach you ideas and tell you that you need to figure out how to apply these ideas to the real world. Because Jesus and all the other tricksters knew this: rules don’t always fit the real world.
Tricksters don’t pretend that the real world is always a happy sunshiny place. In trickster stories things often go badly and people get hurt and die. People and animals get lost and confused and embarrassed, and things happen that aren’t fair. And people make bad judgments because things are not what they seem to be.
Like Jesus on Palm Sunday. The people of his day were familiar with Roman Armies and Generals and Emperors riding into a city in triumph. The Romans had conquered the entire known world and had imposed their rule over the Jews, and the religious leaders were going along with it. So Jesus made fun of the whole project. He told his followers to get him a donkey, that he would play out a story told by one of the prophets from long ago, Zechariah, to protest that the local leaders were going along with the empire which was controlling them.
So Jesus was a critic of people’s foibles, and religion’s hypocrisy. Why was that ok? Because he did it with love. When is it ok for parents to criticize kids? Or kids to criticize parents, to point out when they are wearing no clothes? When they are doing it with love. When is it ok to show kids the harsh sides of life? When we can do it with love and comfort. When is it ok to make fun, when is it ok to point out other’s failures? When we are willing to stick around to help them get better.
We trick one another because taking a full dose of truth is often too painful. Jesus the trickster used a spoonful of sugar, drawing people in, surprising them. He was a great teacher because he had the greatest of techniques. Not just presenting facts for how the world is, or commands for how to behave, but with stories and examples that were unforgettable. Because if he could convey even the smallest bit of truth, that mustard seed of truth, he knew, would grow and grow and grow.
And that’s my message for you today: not that you should be constantly irritating other people by fooling them, but that you should be constantly looking for truth, little bits of truth, in unexpected places. The Buddhists talk about how the beautiful flower, the lotus, grows in the most unexpected place, the stinking rotten muck. So too you should look for the tiny sparks of beauty and truth and goodness even in what you think might be the most ridiculous Sunday morning ever. |