Humor and the Soul
Sermon 2-5-06
Jim Burklo, Sausalito Presbyterian Church
One of the ways I put myself through college was by working as a nursing home orderly, one of the emotionally and physically hardest and also most meaningful and important jobs I’ve ever had - and it paid minimum wage. That alone is something to meditate deeply about, is it not? I cleaned catheters, emptied bedpans, treated nasty looking bedsores and hopefully prevented even more of them. One day I went into the room of an old man named Dallas. Dallas wasn’t especially sick – just too feeble to function without 24-7 nursing care. This guy Dallas was in storage, and he knew it, and his way of handling his isolation and abandonment was to keep a twinkle in his eye. So I always loved going in to take care of him. I entered his room and with that twinkle in his eye and with a toothless grin he asked me to put his false teeth into his mouth. They were soaking in denture cleaner in a cup on the counter. I was used to this routine – I knew he wasn’t so feeble that he couldn’t put his own dentures into his mouth. So I grinned at him and took the cup over to him and said, “Dallas, put your own darn teeth in your own darn mouth!” After some prodding he finally took the dentures out of the cup and put the top ones on his bottom gums, and the bottom ones on his top gums, and then, with a twinkle in his eye, he flashed an upside down and backwards grin at me. What was I, a callow 18 year old, to say at that point? Dallas made a point I have never forgotten. With a great sense of humor, a wonderful sense of timing, this 90-plus year old man was protesting his situation of waiting to die in a linoleum-floored room with a TV blaring at him. And it worked. It stuck. His little joke was undignified – but because his situation was undignified, his humor paradoxically gave him dignity. Sort of like: two no’s equaling a yes. I felt a lot of respect for him in that moment, even as I was laughing at the sight of those backward dentures. I respected his protest. So all these years later, I’m here to remember Dallas with a candle on the altar.
Jesus’ humor was a lot like that. Nutty, funny protests against undignified and unjust circumstances. He touched a nerve felt by his audiences, mostly consisting of the day-laborer and peasant class that formed the majority of the Jewish people at the time. So you get sued for your coat when you can’t pay your landlord the unfair, exorbitant rent or debt that you owe him? Don’t just give him your coat. Give him your underwear, too – and walk out of court naked – and see how your landlord feels about that – and see how everybody else treats the landlord after that, too! When people heard Jesus say this, it’s likely that they hooted and hollered with joyful approval. So one of those Roman occupying soldiers thrusts his heavy backpack at you and tells you to carry it a mile, the legal limit? Okay, walk an extra mile and get him in trouble with his centurion for breaking the law. More hooting and hollering from Jesus’ pleased crowd. So you’re sick of seeing herds of pigs being raised in a country where eating pork is a religious abomination? Here’s the legend of what Jesus did: he cast a bunch of demons out of a man and sent the demons into a herd of pigs who then went crazy and jumped off a cliff! Another crowd-pleaser and laugh-getter for everyday folks in first century Israel. So in front of the temple a Pharisee wants to trap Jesus by asking him if people should pay taxes to Caesar- knowing that if Jesus says yes, the people will think he’s a traitor, and if he says no, the Romans will kill him. So Jesus asks the Pharisee to show him a coin. The Pharisee reaches into his pocket and pulls one out. Everybody howls with laughter as soon as they see it. It turns out to be the kind of coin that is necessary for paying taxes to the Romans. There’s another special kind of coin that is used only for giving donations to the temple, but that’s not the coin that the hypocritical Pharisee lifts up. “Render to Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and to God that which is God’s,” says Jesus, bringing on more laughter from the crowd, delighted at how he evades the trap and embarrasses the Pharisee.
A lot of Jesus’ humor was this kind of politically-charged stand-up comedy. But there were other levels to his humor, as well. When I worked at Stanford, I always enjoyed reading the Chaparral, the campus humor magazine. There were a few things in it that generated instant guffaws. But mostly it was strange, deadpan stuff that made you stare at it and shake your head and say, “Wow, that was truly, deeply crazy!” It was the kind of humor that would make you stop for a moment and look around and realize how odd supposedly normal life is, and smile in wonderment at it all. Jesus’ parables were like that. To get a feel for how odd they were at the time he spoke them, and how odd they still are today, I offer the following rendition of the parables in Matthew chapter 13. I’d like three volunteers, please, to take on the fictional roles of Matthew, Martha, Mark, and Mary:
Matthew: The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed. Martha: Which a woman hid in three measures of meal. Mark: What was that? Mary: It was a pearl of great value. Matthew: Which, when it was leavened, Martha: Turned into the greatest of all shrubs. Mark: What did she hide? Mary: It became a tree and the birds of the air came and made nests in its branches. Matthew: When the man found it, he sold everything he had and bought the field where he had found it. Martha: Until it was all leavened. Mark: What is the kingdom of heaven like? Mary: It's like a merchant in search of fine pearls. Matthew: It's like a woman. Martha: It's like leaven. Mark: It's like who? Mary: It's like a net which was thrown into the sea. Matthew: It's the smallest of all seeds. Martha: When it was full, men drew it ashore and sorted the good into vessels but threw away the bad. Mark: What was full? Mary: What is the kingdom of heaven like? Matthew: The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed....
I have studied Jesus’ parables for 30 years. Read lots of books and articles about them. I have concluded that Jesus’ parables are just plain wacky. The effect they have on me is to befuddle me, and that may well have been Jesus’ point – to shake us out of our assumptions about what makes sense, so that we will loosen up to be able to perceive the kingdom of God in our midst. We get so smug, thinking we know which way is up and down, what’s good and what’s bad. Reminds me of going to Chicago one time and taking the elevator to the top of Sears Tower. There, on the observation deck, looking through the telescopes down at the ant-sized cars and people below, was a big bunch of Amish people, with their overalls and straw hats, long dresses and hair buns. And there was this one old guy standing behind the rest, smirking and stroking his beard. I just started cracking up, because I had this powerful feeling of what the Amish guy was thinking. He seemed to be thinking – “Ya, sure, these city folks think they are so special, putting up this big building and such. Well, I don’t care what they think. This is nothing special. They got nothing on us Amish folks!” And I just wanted to go up to him and take him by the shoulders and shake him and say, “Yeah, you Amish folks are plenty special, so get over it – go ahead, dude, look through one of these telescopes and say “Wow!”, would ya?” The parables of Jesus are to us what Sears Tower is to the Amish. Wacked-out strange. Out of our element entirely. Reminders that things may not be as they seem. Reminders that there may be a wonderful parallel universe co-existing with what we think of as normal reality, and that we do well to open our eyes and ears to that other realm where we might meet God.
There was a medieval-era Afghan Islamic mullah by the name of Nasrudin whose crazy tales are treasured still around the world. The best thing about these tales is that they don’t have any blatantly obvious moral or point to them. You are invited to experience the tales and find out what they do to you – discover a meaning for yourself, if any is to be found. Like Zen Buddhist koans, these stories snap you for a moment out of your attachment to your assumptions. For instance, one day, Nasrudin came galloping on camel-back through a small village. His camel carried him at a rush into and out of the village without stop, while the villagers all stared in curiosity at his passing. The next day, Nasrudin and his camel came rushing back through the village, all the time his eyes furiously searching on all sides of him. Again, the villagers watched open mouthed wondering just what Nasrudin was up to. On the third day, the Mullah Nasrudin and his camel once again came galloping through the village, but this time a small boy ran out in front, causing him to screech to a halt. The small boy asked, "Great Mullah, what are you looking for?! Nasrudin responded, "For my camel. Have you seen him?" The kingdom of God is like Nasrudin’s camel. We’re riding on it. It’s with us all the time, but we aren’t seeing it. Jesus kept asking his followers- you have eyes, but do you see? You have ears, but do you hear? Humor loosens us up to see and hear what is right in front of us, but hard to see. Which is why Reinhold Niebuhr, the theologian, took humor so seriously. He said that humor was the gateway to faith. You gotta get a bit out of this world in order to be willing to check out the other world, and humor helps you do that. Maybe a belly-laugh is just long enough to snap out of your attachment to your assumptions, your prejudices, your ambitions, your opinions – just long enough to enable you to look into the realm of the soul, the realm of compassion, creativity, kindness, forgiveness, radical love that extends even to enemies.
Religion itself is very appropriately the butt of many a joke, simply because religion so often takes itself so very seriously – it’s just begging to be poked at. And let’s face it – so much in Christianity is so bizarre, it’s funny just on the face of it. It really looks nutty sometimes when you look at it through the eyes of a child. When my daughter was about four years old, she already had received a big dose of interfaith input. I worked for an interfaith agency so I was preaching in all kinds of churches and synagogues, and I often took Liz along with me. Her religious education was something of an ecumenical salad. One day she and I were the last ones to leave a meeting in a church social hall, and she said, “Dad, sit down!” She climbed up in a pulpit in the room and stood on a chair so she could get her head above the Bible. “Okay!” she said. “You be the people and I’ll be the minister.” She reached down into the pulpit and pulled out a collection plate. “Okay, people. Put your money in the plate and give it back to me.” So I put a dollar in the plate and gave it to her. “Okay. Now I’m going to take the money and turn it into Jesus. Then I will cut up Jesus like a pizza pie and you can eat him!”
Oh, the pitfalls of having a pastor as your father. She’s still recovering... And to this day I when I get a pizza I sometimes look at the patterns in the sauce and the pepperoni and ask myself – is that Jesus? Check it out for yourself, next time you go to Round Table. Amen!