Bernie Cochran

Pullen Memorial Baptist Church

June 10, 2001 – First Sunday after Pentecost

ON SERVING GOD WITH MIRTH

I am pleased to serve as guest minister today for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that my most recent sermon at Pullen was entitled:

"How The Hell Does One Know What To Believe?"

The title was borrowed from a line in the play, "Jumpers," by the celebrated British Playwright, Tom Stoppard. While the play and the sermon were serious attempts to deal with issues of faith and doubt, one dear Pullen lady, whose opinion and candor I respect, informed me that the title convinced her that she didn’t need to hear that sermon. So you can see why I feared that would not just be my most recent sermon but, indeed, my last sermon -- anywhere. However, one young lady told me after the service:

One never knows.

But if ministers have permission to use the H. . .word only when referring to the ultimate destination of the wicked, most of us have had to overcome an upbringing which assumed that laughing in church is an equally serious breach of etiquette. To whatever degree that conviction is held -- though not at Pullen, surely -- it’s probably due to the influence of PURITANISM, which has been described as "the fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time." Worship and theology are grim and serious matters, they firmly believed, and humor has its limits -- outside the church, if allowed at all.

I’m sure you’ve been emancipated from that point of view but if this sermon is not to crash and burn like those early experimental flying machines, be assured that you not only have permission to laugh, or at least to smile now and again -- you have a solemn obligation!

Psychological studies of humor point to its being potentially destructive or beneficent. We laugh about many things, including politics, religion, and sex. Better to laugh than to cry -- right?

It can be motivated by feelings of superiority

Over my enemy,

Over another race, religion, nationality, gender.

Why are Polacks selected as the butt of jokes in America? In England it’s the Pakastanis. Racist and sexist jokes abound.

But humor possesses beneficent qualities as well. Norman Cousins, former editor of "The Saturday Review of Literature," diagnosed with a terminal illness, concluded that extreme levels of stress, anguish, tension had compromised his immune system, so he turned to humor to reverse the process, which included, among many sources, the Marx Brothers and The Three Stooges. The result was his monograph, THE ANATOMY OF AN ILLNESS, and his invitation to serve on the staff of UCLA Medical School. That Groucho, Harpo, and Chico possess potentially curative powers is nothing short of astounding.

On a visit to Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Cousins inquired about the success of witch doctors in Africa. Schweitzer replied: "The witch doctor succeeds for the same reason all the rest of us succeed. Each patient carries his own doctor inside him. They come to us not knowing that truth. We are at our best when we give the doctor who resides within each patient a chance to go to work." Cousins was not suggesting that we tear down Duke Hospital and build a 500 screen movie theatre but that the "doctor inside him" had prescribed, among other things, a heavy dose of humor.

Our initial hymn: "All People that on Earth Do Dwell," in a version found in the Pilgrim Hymnal, contains the phrase, "Him serve with mirth." The commendable Chalice Hymnal editors eliminated the word HIM for inclusive language purposes but, unfortunately, eliminated the mirth as well. I’m not sure about the original intent of the author but I’d like to suggest that serving God with mirth means not simply being in a cheerful frame of mind but employing mirth, humor -- not unlike time or money -- as a tool, instrument -- indeed, a weapon -- in the service of God.

Mel Brooks, the creator of the insanely comical film, now record-Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, THE PRODUCERS, declared recently on "60 Minutes" that the best way to attack totalitarianism and bigotry -- in this case, Hitler and anti-semitism -- is by means of humor or ridicule. I submit that he is serving God -- wittily, even if unwittingly -- with mirth.

The political satirist or cartoonist serve similarly -- skewering Democratic and Republican idiocy alike. Garrison Keilor’s description of Lutheran guilt, Catholic guilt, and Baptist guilt, and the on-line parody magazine, "THE ONION"’s, reference to the minister of the "Holy Christ Almighty Lutheran Church" are both amusing and insightful. They serve to confirm our judgment that the Church is never more healthy than when it can laugh at itself and, moreover, when laughed at, can handle it constructively.

When Southern Baptists -- in their inimitable wisdom -- declared that ordination is limited to males because Eve bought sin into the world, a Methodist minister in Charlotte concluded:

Men can be ordained because Adam blamed Eve; however,

Women can also be ordained because Eve blamed the serpent;

But under no circumstances should we ordain snakes.

Especially, I would add, since they speak Hebrew with a forked tongue and tend to lisp -- terribly.

When Falwell informed us that he had received a revelation that AIDS is the result of God’s judgment on gays, someone offered the observation that lesbians, then, must be God’s chosen people since, generally speaking, they don’t get AIDS. To be sure, AIDS is no laughing matter but as a means of refuting simplistic moralizing, humor may well be the best weapon.

I once visited the Goliath Bar and Grill in Jerusalem for no other reason than that the guide-book described it as "only a stone’s throw from the King David Hotel." In his study entitled, THE HUMOR OF JESUS, Elton Trueblood doesn’t suggest that Jesus was a stand-up comic working the audience at the Goliath Bar and Grill but he does remind us that Jesus employed humor consistently and effectively in his parables and teachings as a tool for illustrating more vividly a moral lesson or truth.

In the passage from Matthew which Rebecca read, Jesus lampoons the hypocrite who is inordinately concerned with a small speck or splinter in the eye of another, while oblivious to the fact that there is a log -- think redwood -- in his own eye.

While not condoning Bill Clinton’s publicized pathology, right-thinking persons were appalled by those family-value, paragons of virtue,

Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, and Dan Burton, who were belatedly discovered to have indulged in the same conduct for which they were vehemently expressing moral outrage. Clinton is hardly a good "speck" example but it’s the blatant hypocrisy which underscores Jesus’ point.

I’m not a serious student of military history but I discovered that the British defense of Singapore during WW II involved scores of gun emplacements, all pointed out to sea to repel an obvious naval attack. The Japanese simply marched down the Malay Peninsula through the allegedly impenetrable jungle, rendering useless Singapore’s defenses. Humor possesses a similar ability to outflank our defense mechanisms -- erected against a frontal assault on our prejudice, our pride, or our self-serving pretensions.

Bigotry is an obviously legitimate target for humorous barbs but could prayer ever be? In a parody on the way many of us pray, David Head, an Anglican minister, has chosen a variety of examples, one of which appears on the front of the bulletin. The actual Prayer of General Confession, as you know, is a contrite confession of sin Head’s variation -- which puzzled or amused you -- is hardly contrite. He includes prayers for engagement and marriage:

Ever after.

May he have no secrets, and never discover mine.

Conversation, witty in private and sparkling in public, blind to

My faults, tolerant with my follies, never weary, never

Demanding, enjoying her own company when necessary, not

Getting too involved with female friends, performing miracles

With her house-keeping allowance, and always grateful that I

Married her.

You were encouraged to laugh -- but did I detect hissing?

The term "a we-jus prayer" was coined by the Religion and Philosophy Department at Meredith College. I’m not sure if the credit -- or blame -- should be assigned to me, Roger, perhaps Allen or Bob, or whether it was a joint, creative effort. Have you heard -- or prayed -- a "we-jus" prayer?

O Lord, we-jus pray that you will. . . . and we-jus ask that. . .and. . . .It sounds so devout, so humble, right? But just means only. Confronting God with a long shopping list of petitions, each prefaced by "only?" If, by chance, you are offended, now that I think of it, it was Roger Crook!

Is the term "Prayer Warrior" new to you? I confess that I claim conscientious objector status in the "war," especially since the term seems more prideful than penitent. Lily Tomlin’s question:

"Why is it that when we talk to God, it’s called prayer –

But when God talks to us, it’s called schizophrenia?

merits, at the very least, serious reflection.

Better to laugh than to cry surely applies to the current liberal/fundamentalist controversy among Southern Baptists. Flannery O’Connor, whose writings about religious crazies in the South delight and inform, describes two young boys planning to become fundamentalist preachers because, as they say,

Liberals get their come-uppance as well from the novelist, Peter DeVries, when the Rev. Mr. Mackeral, minister of a liberal congregation on Moot Point, Long Island, has a pulpit made of four different kinds of wood, symbolic of our inability to reconcile the four Gospels. One of his most cherished theological conclusions is that one of the evidences of the greatness of God is that he doesn’t have to exist in order to save us. Holy Mackeral!. "Deep down," a character says, "he’s shallow."

The tendency for each warring faction to claim to be the only possessor of truth has been captured by Phyllis McGinley, a devout Catholic poet. Regarding the split between Zwingli and the Anabaptist leader, Munzer:

Said Zwingli to Muntzer,

I’ll have to be blunt, sir.

I don’t like your version

Of Total Immersion.

And since God’s on my side

And I’m on the dry side,

You’d better swing ovah

To me and Jehovah."

Cried Muntzer, "It’s schism,

Is Infant Baptism!

Since I’ve had a sign, sir,

That God’s will is mine, sir,

Let all men agree

With Jehovah and me,

Or go to hell, singly,"

Said Muntzer to Zwingli As each drew his sword

On the side of the Lord.

A group of theologians named Monty Python have been variously regarded as incredibly funny, sacrilegious, perceptive, or all the above. Since God gets credit for "All Things Bright and Beautiful, All Creatures Great and Small," who is to blame for

All things dull and ugly

All creatures short and squat

All things rude and nasty

The Lord God made the lot.

Each little snake that poisons,

Each little wasp that stings;

‘e made their brutish venom

‘e made their ‘orrid wings.

. . . . .who made the sharks? ‘e did!

. . . . .Putrid, foul and gangrenous

The Lord God made them all. Amen.

They’re confronting, of course, the continually baffling Problem of Evil. If God is all-powerful and all-loving, why couldn’t he have created a perfect world where evil -- sickness, hurricanes, murder -- does not exist?

The child’s letter to God confronted the question another way.

John Calvin begins THE INSTITUTES OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION with these words: "Our wisdom. . .consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other." I’m not sure whether your immune system has been slightly improved today but, if Calvin is correct, it just may well be that as humor illumines our human situation, we shall come to know ourselves better and, in some measure, come to a truer knowledge of God.