“THE DIVINE COMEDY”
A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear
Sunday,
All
Jesus
and his disciples were walking around one day, when Jesus said, “The
Three
boys are in the school yard bragging about their fathers. The first boy says, “My Dad scribbles a few
words on a piece of paper. He calls it a
poem. They give him $50.” The second boy says, “That’s nothing. My Dad scribbles a few words on a piece of
paper. He calls it a song. They give him $100.” The third boy says, “I got you both
beat. My Dad scribbles a few words on a
piece of paper, he calls it a sermon.
And it takes at least four or five people to collect all the money!”
Don’t you love religious jokes? In some ways April Fools Day ought to be a sacred religious holiday. When put under a microscope, religion, after all, is a foolish quest. Religion is one of the most ridiculous and amusing practices we humans have ever devised. Here we are: finite, fallible, and frustrated, thinking we can find the Ultimate Answer to the Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. That is what religion is! It is the quest for Truth. We are on a safari, hoping to capture and domesticate the Meaning of Life.
In previous sermons, I have sometimes quoted the definition of religion offered by the sociologist Peter Berger. “Religion,” he said, “is the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as if it were personally significant. To say that religion is an “audacious” project is being much too polite. “Laughable” might be another word for “audacious.” Religion is ultimately a kind of comedy.
The biggest fool in the world’s greatest literature may have been Don Quixote, who charged nobly at windmills. His story is comedy. It is farcical to see him so madly in pursuit of all that is good and right, knowing that his grasp on reality so mistaken. As the Broadway musical adaptation of the story called it, his was the “impossible dream.”
We typically think of religion in very serious terms. It is, after all, about searching for life's meaning. On the surface, though, there is an absurd dimension to the religious quest. We turn to it to solve life's great mysteries, to understand life's meanings, to make everything make sense. Here we are: you and I live on a minor planet in an almost unnoticeable solar system of planets within a universe of an uncountable number of such solar systems. And on this easily overlooked speck in the sky, we each are one of tens of billions of people who have lived here over time. And somehow we think we may be the one who gets it right! We may just be able to solve the mystery of Life, the Universe and Everything! It does sound a bit silly, doesn't it? Who do we think we are?
Sometimes I realize that I need to sit back, observe, distance myself, and laugh at this outrageous human habit. As far as I know, we are the only animals that practice religion, the only animals that care about ultimate questions of meaning and existence. And as far as I know, we are the only animals that laugh.
I believe that there is a connection between these two points of human uniqueness. I am convinced that our ability to laugh is a healthy part of our wrestle with the questions of ultimate meaning. I agree with the French novelist Collete that Athe total absence of humor renders life impossible.@
I would like the rest of this sermon to be about one specific kind of humor: laughing at ourselves. Humor keeps us human, and keeps us humble. Motivational speaker Ken Davis has written about humor, saying,
“Show me a person who takes themselves too seriously, and I’ll show you a person who doesn’t have a sense of humor – every single time – because they are trying to perpetuate the perception of perfection. Nothing destroys families, corporate teamwork, or creativity more than trying to pretend you are perfect. . . . Humor is a way of saying, ‘I’m not okay, and you are not okay, and that’s okay.”
So it is healthy to laugh at ourselves. It is, in fact, essential to mental health not to take yourself too seriously. So if you blend my two points so far – the foolish quest of religion, on one hand, and laughing at ourselves on the other – what you get from me is jokes about Unitarian Universalists. I have seen a scientific study of this, but it is my guess that in proportion to the size of denominations, there are more jokes told about Unitarian Universalists than any other religious group – with the possible exception of Jews. And by the way, did you know there’s an old joke there, too. Did you know that Unitarian Universalism has been defined as the “hyphen” in the Judeo-Christian Tradition?
So on this April Fools Day, I honor the religious fool in all of us by stringing together quite a few jokes about Unitarian Universalists. As I tell these jokes, please keep in mind that experts tells us that an essential ingredient in a successful joke is that it contains at least a grain of truth, as many of these do. I mentioned that in a sermon a few weeks ago about Charles Darwin, when I quoted his grandfather, Eramus Darwin, as claiming that “Unitarianism is a just a featherbed to catch a falling Christian.” It wouldn’t be funny if there weren’t just a bit of truth.
Anyway, here we go:
Two Unitarians were having a heated theological discussion, and one of them said, “UUs are so badly educated when it comes to the Bible!”
“We are not,” the other argued.
“Oh yeah?” said the first. “I’ll bet you can’t even recite the Lord’s Prayer.”
They each put down five dollars on the bet, and the second began reciting:
“Now I lay me down to sleep, I
pray the Lord my soul to keep;
If I should die before I wake, I
pray the Lord my soul to take.
And then the other UU said, “You win,” and paid the five dollars.
In an old New England Unitarian church, the minister was having a disagreement with the Board of Trustees about a course of action. Finally the minister said, “Look, this isn’t something just I think we should do, it’s what God wants, too.”
The skeptical board members were unconvinced, and the minister began to pray for a sign from God. A lightning bolt came down and destroyed every chair in the room except where the minister sat. No one, though, was harmed.
“Well?,” said the minister, confident that he won the argument. “Doesn’t that prove it?”
The Board President answered, “You still lose the vote, nine to two.”
How many UUs does it take to change a light bulb?
We choose not to make a statement either in favor or against the need for a lightbulb. However, if on you own journey you have found that lightbulbs work for you, that is fine. You are invited to write a poem or compose a modern dance about your lightbulb for the next Sunday service, in which we will explore a number of lightbulb traditions, including incandescent, fluorescent, halogen, three-way and long-life, all of which are equally valid pathways to luminescence.
Why is a Unitarian Universalist meeting like a television talk show? Because people speak and say nothing, nobody listens, and everybody disagrees.
A woman went to a fabric store and asked the clerk for nine yards of material to make a nightgown. The clerk said, “Nine yards is way to much material for a nightgown.” The woman said, “I know, but my husband is a Unitarian and he would rather seek than find.
A convict on death row was visited by the warden before his
death, and the warden asked if he would like to have some to talk with a member
of the clergy. The warden offered to
send for the prison chaplain. “Well,
warden, the convict said, “I was raised a Unitarian Universalist.” The warden then said, “Well, then, would you
like to talk to a math professor?”
Here’s one about a UU atheist. A Unitarian Universalist atheist was walking through the woods, admiring all the beauty of nature: the imposing forest, the rivers, the wildlife. As he was walking beside a river, he heard a rustling in the bushes behind him. He turned to discover a huge grizzly bear charging towards him. He ran as fast as he could, but the bear was closing in. His heart was racing, his legs were racing, but he tripped and fell to the ground. He rolled over to pick himself up and saw the bear right on top of him, ready to crush him.
At that instant, he cried out, “Oh My God!” Just then, time stopped. The bear froze, the forest was silent, the river even stopped moving. A bright light shone upon the man and a voice came out of the sky, saying, “You deny my existence all these years, and now you expect me to help you out of this predicament?”
The Unitarian was humbled, looked into the light and said. “Yes, it would be hypocritical for me to ask to be a believer after all these years. But couldn’t you make the bear into a Christian?”
The light went out, the river ran, the sounds of the forest returned, and the bear sat upright. The bear then brought both his paws together, bowed his head and said, “Lord, I thank you for this food which I am about to receive.”
The following isn’t
really jokes, but rather humorous quotations about Unitarians or Universalists
from well known people in history.
The philosopher George Santayana defined a Unitarian as a person who “believes in, at most, one God.”
UU minister E.H. Wilson said he was “christened at the First
Unitarian Parish of Concord (
Unitarian prayer (attr. To J.E. Renan): “Dear God, if there is a God, if you can save my soul, please save my soul, if I have a soul.”
Rev. Thomas Starr King (150 years ago) said, “The difference between Universalists and Unitarians is that Universalists believe that God is too good to damn men to hell, and Unitarians believe that Man is too good to be damned.”
The Nineteenth century Unitarian minister Edward Everett Hale was once chaplain to the U.S. Senate. When he was asked whether he prayed for the senators, he answered, “No. I look at the senators and I pray for the country.” (I know this joke is not about Unitarians, but I just couldn’t resist including it.)
W.
When writer Robert Fulghum (“All I Ever…Kindergarten”) was asked whether he was really a minister, he said, “I am a minister in a religious community, the Unitarian Universalist Association. And our motto is, ‘We don’t ever leave well enough alone.’”
Fannie Mae Holmes (wife of 19th century jurist
and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes) was asked why she was a Unitarian. Her answer:
“Here in
********************
I feel sorry for anyone who can’t laugh at themselves. I mentioned a little earlier that Jews are famous for telling jokes about themselves. That is something that has seen them through thousands of years of persecution.
There is a book about Jewish Humor in which psychoanalyst Martin Gritjahn is quoted as saying:
“Aggression turned against the self seems to be an essential feature of the truly Jewish joke. It is as if the Jew tells his enemies, ‘You don’t need to attack us. We can do that ourselves – and even better.’”
There is a similar feeling, I think, in embracing jokes about Unitarian Universalism. Though we have not experienced nearly the persecution that that is found in Jewish history, we still are a minority religion that knows what it’s like to feel misunderstood, overlooked, or disregarded by the majority. To be able to laugh at ourselves helps us be comfortable with who we are and makes us better people.
Most of us would agree, too, that a sense of humor is a quality of good character. Dostoyevsky said it this way:
“If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know the person, don’t bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, or seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you’ll get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he is a good man. . . . All I claim to know is that laughter is the most reliable gage of human nature.”
When you blend the religious quest with the essential human quality of having a sense of humor, you can’t help but put that quest in some better perspective. The religious quest is audacious. When looked at from a distance, it is foolish to think any one of us could discover the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. The religious quest is comical, but it is also evidence that humanity has not given up on life itself. The religious quest is a “Divine Comedy.”
The Rev. Richard Fewkes, Minister of the
Recent studies
seem to indicate that UUs as a whole are happier than those in other
denominations. I hope it’s because we do
more (laughing) when at church. The
question of all questions, when it comes to Unitarian Universalists, is, “What
do we believe?” It has been said that
only God knows what UUs believe, and then only on one of Her good days. About all we can say is that UUs are very
strongly anti-Trinity. They will not
allow their children to read “The Three Little Pigs.” All religions have their rites and
rituals. Catholics cross themselves; Jews
wear a yarmulke on their heads; Muslims bow to
I am very much taken with Robert Frost’s little ditty:
Forgive , O Lord, my little jokes on thee,
And I’ll forgive they great big one on me.
I would like to think that God does indeed have a sense of humor and that human beings and the deity can play jokes on one another. There is certainly an awful lot to cry about in life, and much of our tears are brought upon us because of all our too human nature. To get through it all we’d better learn to laugh at ourselves, and others, not in derision, but in holy healing humor that restores hope and sanity to an insane world. Human beings are the only animals that can laugh. Perhaps laughter, more than reason and intelligence, is what sets us off from the rest of the animal kingdom and makes us akin to the gods.
The following was
written anonymously as a public welcoming people as new members of a
As we welcome our newest members and visitors, it is only fair to let them know what we Unitarian Universalists are like, and what we expect:
We are friendly. If you are not friendly, out you go!
We are always sincere, even if we have to fake it.
We aren’t sure how ambivalent we should be.
We believe in tolerance, and cannot stand intolerant people.
We are optimists. Anyone who doesn’t look on the bright side depresses us.
We are more non-competitive than other groups.
We believe in equality; everyone is as good as the next person,
and a whole lot better.
Every Unitarian is a feminist, so he has to watch his language.
This church is run democratically because the president insists on it.
We have our critics, but they are paranoid.
Dogmatism is absolutely forbidden.
Freedom of belief is rigidly enforced.
And to this wonderful place we joyfully welcome you.