God, That Was Funny

A Sermon by Janice Francis-Smith

Delivered to the First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City

Sunday July 30, 2006

Meditation and Prayer

For the meditation with words, here are a few humorous quotes about God and religion I found interesting to mull over.

If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.--Thomas Szasz (1920--), U.S. psychotherapist, in The Second Sin

Maybe there's no devil; it's just God when He's drunk.--Tom Waits (1949--), U.S. singer

A converted cannibal is one who, on Friday, eats only fishermen.--Emily Lotney

Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.--G. K. Chesterton (1874--1936), English author

Be aware that a halo has to fall only a few inches to be a noose.--Dan McKinnon

If you're not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don't want to go there.--Martin Luther (1483--1546), German religious reformer

God often visits us, but most of the time we are not at home.--Joseph Roux, Meditations of a Parish Priest, 1886

God, That Was Funny

A Sermon by Janice Francis-Smith

Delivered to the First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City

Sunday July 30, 2006

“God is a comedian playing to an audience that is afraid to laugh.” That quote by Voltaire begins this extremely silly book I read recently, Lamb, which purports to be a new gospel written by Levi, who is called Biff, Christ’s childhood pal. Often ridiculous and heavily reliant on the kind of humor that lands junior-high-school boys in detention, the book was nonetheless – in an unorthodox and crude way – respectful of the life and legacy of the Jewish boy who came to be known throughout the world as Jesus Christ.

My husband read this book before I did, and watching him giggle and guffaw through page after page spurred me to read it as well. As we compared notes on the book after I’d finished, he asked me, “But sometimes, while you were laughing, weren’t you half expecting some lightening or something? I bet Christopher Moore wrote this book looking over his shoulder. I bet he still jumps a mile whenever there’s a lightening storm.”

Which leads me to the point of my “sermon” for this morning. Does God have a sense of humor?

I suppose with this group I have to go back and explain my core beliefs. I do most certainly believe in a God. I think it takes just as much faith, (that is, reasoned belief in something you can’t prove), to accept the idea that this fascinating, intricate world came about without the aid of an intelligent designer as it does to believe in a God.

The part I keep getting hung up on is, what is the purpose this world, what’s the “end game?” Are we currently hanging on God’s wall, virtually unobserved while she/he fixes dinner or takes a nap or prepares for a celestial party? Or is God trying to give us a chance to grow by just sitting back watching our foul-ups without interfering, as I have done from time to time with my own child?

I remember just cracking up watching my little guy trying to walk, coasting along the edge of the sofa staggering like a chubby old drunk, or hearing the goofy things he would say as he learned to master the English language. And I’m sorry, a kindergarten soccer game is one of the most hilarious things you’ll ever see. Is that what we look like to God?

Personally, I think the fact that human beings are hardwired to laugh is a strong indication that God must have a sense of humor – you can’t create what you have no capacity for yourself. It’s universal; no matter what country a person is from, what language they speak, young or old, male or female, laughter sounds the same. No two persons will ever have the same laugh, and yet laughter is unmistakably, immediately recognizable.

It’s no coincidence, I think, that in almost every personal ad ever written the person will say they are looking for someone with a sense of humor. Good relationships cannot be maintained with someone you cannot laugh with. And it’s impossible to stay angry at someone who just made you laugh. OK, you can still be mad, but it will have lessened some.

Scientifically speaking, the process of laughter, how and why it happens, is a mostly a mystery. Human beings appear to be the only species that laughs in response to humor, though chimps have been known to tickle each other. No kidding.

The scientific explanation of what happens when you laugh, taken out of context, sounds like something awful, like some kind of seizure. It’s amazing that when the body performs these “rhythmic, vocalized, expiratory and involuntary actions,” as the Encyclopedia Britannia puts it, we think this is something fun. Emotional responses seem to come from specific, isolated areas of the brain, but laughter is produced by a chain reaction involving many regions of the brain simultaneously.

One thing I really found interesting is that the area of the brain that appears to be the center of the activity, the limbic system, also controls essential, life-and-death, instinctual behaviors like finding food and self-preservation.

What’s more, laughter can actually make you healthier. Laughter reduces levels of certain stress hormones, thus inhibiting the biological “fight or flight” response. (Because of this, psychologists note that laughter indicates trust in one’s companions.) Those stress hormones that raise blood pressure and suppress the immune system are killed off by laughter, and laughing increases the body’s production of those good cells that destroy tumors and viruses, boost the immune response and make disease-fighting antibodies.

And laughing is a great workout – laughing 100 times is equal to 10 minutes on a rowing machine or 15 minutes on an exercise bike – and it works abdominal, respiratory, facial, leg and back muscles. And health care professionals are increasingly taking “laughter therapy” very seriously.

Some researchers believe the purpose of laughter is to strengthen human relationships. As was noted before, laughter signals trust in one’s companions. The more laughter there is a group, the greater the bond that forms between them, and for some reason the brain responds to hearing laughter by generating more, which serves to strengthen the bond. All I know for sure is that lots of laughter is a sure indicator of a successful party.

There’s a church in Florida that specializes in what Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne of Revival Ministries calls “holy laughter.” It was recently reported on CNN. The preacher says believers overcome with laughter have been recorded since ancient times in biblical passages about unrestrained joy. Here’s what the pastor had to say:

Quote “Religion always wants to beat you down and make you dependent upon, it's like a drug,” said Howard-Browne. “If I can make you feel guilty, then you'll come back next week and then I'll keep you in that place of guilt… Maybe I have a hard time with religion because I see what it is doing around the world. Religion feels its job is to condemn. Jesus didn't come to condemn… Church should be the happiest place on the earth. People that love Jesus should be happy.” End quote.

I wonder about these things because I spent my youth in one of the most un-funny religions known to man: the Jehovah’s Witnesses. If you’re not already familiar with the folks that knock on your door Saturday mornings brandishing bible tracts, here’s the short version: it’s all about the purity of the worship.

Due to the pagan underpinnings of almost every American holiday celebration (and that part is actually true, I’ve looked it up), they refuse to participate. No Christmas, no Easter, certainly no Halloween. No birthdays, because there are only two birthday celebrations mentioned in the whole bible and neither one turned out good for the good guys. Everything has to have scriptural backing, everything, either as an endorsement or an admonishment.

And any day, any day, God is going to take over. Everyone who is not a J’Dub, as we kids called them when the adults weren’t listening, will be “destroyed,” which is a nice little euphemism for killed, murdered, slaughtered, by God. At Armageddon, like 99 percent of the human population will be killed by various means – fire from the sky, earthquake, flood, disease, mass hysteria, or the one that gave me the most nightmares as a kid: ripped apart by wild dogs. When it’s all over, God’s people the only ones left and will make the world into a paradise, like the one lost by Adam and Eve.

My mother was a witness; my father tried it for a while, but he refused to give up smoking, and eventually my mother, so offended at this light treatment of what she considered holy, exposed my father as a smoker to the church elders. They “disfellowshipped” him, a form of excommunication where nobody is supposed to talk to you, except maybe the immediate family members in your house, if they absolutely have to, and you’re considered good as dead.

I’m not here to trash the religion – frankly, I got a lot of good from it. Due to my lessons, I’ve read the entire bible about twice, and many specific scriptures many, many times. And if you really believe the world is going to be destroyed, you can’t really blame them for running around knocking on people’s doors and trying to convert them before it is too late.

Because of this religion, I learned what it is to stand up for what you believe, even if you are alone, even if other people make fun of you, even if doing what you think is wrong is so much easier than doing what’s right. Years of standing at attention but not saluting the flag, of finding contentment in a clean conscience while the entire class eats birthday cupcakes or talks about what they got for Christmas or their birthday, was honestly not as bad as you’d think. I got presents and candy at other times of the year, so the holiday thing was not that big of a deal, and frankly I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.

But in my opinion, the problem with the Witnesses is they take everything a little too seriously. The honestly think God will be offended if they celebrate holidays, because they holiday celebrations are so religiously impure. To me, it felt like everything is a sin. Listening to a song that seems to encourage extra-marital sex: sin. Singing Christmas carols: sin. Watching rated R movies: sin. The part that really got to me: if you think too hard about a sin, that’s a sin too. There is nowhere to go in this life where you can just relax and not worry about sin. Even your thoughts are held against you. But that’s not the worst part.

The worst part is living day to the day, year after year, with the belief that almost everyone you know will soon be brutally killed when the world ends. I don’t even know how to describe that. Not fun. Maybe for a lot of Witnesses it must be just words that you don’t really appreciate, like a movie. But I took it seriously, and it broke my heart. Sweet little children laughing on the playground, the old lady librarian, the cute guy working in the pizza parlor, all condemned to death, I’m thinking. Instead of encouraging me to be good so I wouldn’t be killed like all the others, the idea made me increasingly mad at God.

So after years of asking those kind of questions despised by leaders of almost every religion, those questions that attempt to reconcile the contradictions and to which there are no satisfactory answers, I eventually abandoned the religion. As I can recall now, many years later, the first shoe to drop for me had to do with a tasteless joke. One witness, while out in the field knocking on doors, had been told by the householder that they had been born a Baptist and would die a Baptist. The witness’ witty reply to this – not to the guy’s face, but among other members of the congregation – was “You certainly will.” That is, die. As a Baptist. And everyone else in the room thought that was funny. And I was horrified that everyone was sitting around laughing at the prospect of this guy getting ripped apart by wild dogs.

The second shoe was witnessing what happened to a certain member of the congregation, a single mother of three young girls, trying to work her way off of welfare by working outrageous hours in a hospital cafeteria. She was admonished by the wife of an elder for wearing her scrubs to the congregation’s three meetings a week. You see, all the women are supposed to wear skirts.

To be fair, I know my bad experience with the religion is compounded by two really big asides: my father was an alcoholic, and my mother, though undiagnosed, clearly suffered from mental illness. For example, we were forbidden to watch Mr. Ed because my mother believed the talking horse was demonized. When they were old enough, my four older siblings engaged in drug and alcohol abuse, ran away, and did all the other things troubled youth do. I was the youngest, often overlooked in the swirl of confusion, just sitting in the middle of the action with my teddy bear watching the show. My home was not a happy one, in fact, the house I grew up in, which was the setting for just about every form of child abuse imaginable, is often the setting for my nightmares to this day.

And yet, my sisters and I are the silliest people I know. We can find a joke in just about anything. Take the most abstract, benign topic and we can riff on it, expanding the joke to outrageous proportions. Whenever I’m with my sisters, there is laughter, often the kind of really rare laughter where it makes your sides hurt and your eyes water and you’re trying to make yourself stop just long enough to get some air in your lungs. That’s a magical, rare thing.

I can remember as a kid doing our weekly bible reading and laughing like it was better than Saturday Night Live. First and Second Samuel, for instance, are filled with everything going wrong in King David’s life, people trying to kill him, his sons and daughters going berserk and raping and killing each other, just the worst soap opera stuff you’ve ever heard. And me and my sisters are cracking up because one of David’s sons was known for having this beautiful long hair, and we’re picturing him like Fabio, tossing his head around and prancing, and eventually the hair is his undoing because it gets caught in some tree branches during a battle and keeps him still long enough for somebody to come up and stab him. Hilarious stuff.

So many times my mother had to separate us in church because we were giggling. At anything – somebody’s outfit, or something they said, or even the remembrance all of our jokes we made during our bible study at home. We would sit around telling jokes, we made up silly stories, we’d watch Star Trek episodes just to laugh at how Capt. Kirk looks in those tiny little pants with the boots.

Somehow, its like we knew we needed to laugh. We needed the good chemicals, the immunity boost. We knew we needed this to survive, on an instinctual level. This is why God put the center of laughter in the limbic system, I think – it qualifies as one of those critical instincts we need to survive.

It’s my belief that a lack of a sense of humor is downright dangerous, and dehumanizing. People do things to hurt each other when they take themselves and their situation too seriously. Not that you shouldn’t have standards for human behaviors, but I think its that mindset of, “I’m important because I’m in charge of making everyone behave and believe the right way,” that has caused a huge percentage of the world’s problems.

The novelist Tom Robbins wrote in his book Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, “All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously.”

Its all perspective, I think. What might seem like a really, really serious problem to us could very easily wind up looking to God like the kindergarten soccer game – a bunch of cute but clueless children in oversized shorts running all over the place with very little idea of what they’re supposed to be doing, kicking like mad at a ball they only connect with about 8 percent of the time.

At the end of the game, the parents are so proud, not because the kids did much of anything right, but because of how much heart they put into it, how much they tried, how much better they are than last month. I must have told my 9-year-old son a thousand times over the last five years, “It’s OK, its just a game. A hundred years from now, nobody will care who won.”

Tom Robbins hit it on the head, I think, in the passage I read as today’s reading. To laugh in the face of suffering is not to ignore the suffering. It is a means of getting the perspective right. It keeps the suffering from ruling our lives. It reduces the suffering to a manageable size.

In the bible’s New Testmaent, it seems to me that Jesus is always telling people to let go, to lighten up. Here he is, hanging out with the sinners and prostitutes and tax collectors, and he’s like, this is not a big deal. His very first miracle recorded is not healing someone or raising someone from the dead or or feeding thousands or anything like that. It’s is turning water into wine at a wedding feast. The bride’s father likely performed a really embarrassing dance and slurred his way throught a godawfully awkward toast on happy juice served up by The Man himself.

Jesus is always saying things like, quit worrying about what you’re going to eat or wear. Don’t store up your treasures on eath, because this world won’t last, he says. And the irony I think is wasted on so many people is that the Jewish chief preists who were so schooled in the law, spent so much time worrying about nitpicky things like rules about the sabbath and handwashing. And when the messiah came, the big kahuna, the culmination of and the entire point for the law they knew so much about, they killed him. Talk about having your perspective skewed.

And is not just a Christian message. From what I’ve read about Buddism and Islam and Hindu religions, about Zen teachings and the mythologies of the simplest tribes, there seems to be this recurring theme: everthing in this world is impermanent, so don’t get too attached. Don’t take the details so seriously that you lose sight of the big picture. Do the best you can. Enjoy the time you are given.

When your boss or someone you really want to impress tells a joke and you’re afraid to laugh, it’s because you’re not listening. You’ve been so distracted with the work of making a good impression, you can’t really be sure the words you just heard add up to a joke. But if it came from a friend, someone you were really familiar with, you’d recognize it as a joke with no problem, and you’d laugh, really laugh because you feel comfortable and safe with that person.

So people who think religion should be serious business scare me to death. If they aren’t laughing, if they didn’t get the joke, they are likely paying too much attention to the wrong thing, I think. They don’t have a good, personal relationship with God, like they say. When a comedian says, “You’ve been a great audience,” he means, “Thanks for laughing at my jokes, I like you too.” If there is such a place or condition as heaven, I think those would be the perfect words to welcome someone to the afterlife.

I don’t think allowing yourself to see the humor in religious thought or even in the worst situations is disrespectful, or insensitive, or foolish. I think using humor to reduce life’s problems to manageble size dramatically increases the likelihood that those problems will somehow, someday be solved.

So for God’s sake, lighten up!

As a kid, one of the quickest ways I knew how to get spanked was to change the words or try to jazz up a Kingdom song, because my mother said it showed disrespect. So I was just ticked pink to find hymns in the Unitarian hymnal that I have actually been performed in a jazzed up way for years. That’s why we started today’s program with Morning Has Broken. I frankly took it as a sign when, on one of my early visits to this church, we were asked to stand and sing I Wish I Knew How, which is one of my favorite Nina Simone songs. Every time it comes up in a service, I struggle with the urge to dance around like a lunatic like I do at home whenever it comes up in the CD player. So here’s Nina’s version of I Wish I Knew How. Have some fun with it.

The world is a mess, and it’s not going to get all cleaned up this week. In the meantime, look for humor wherever you can find it. You really need a good laugh.