Laughing With Blue Humans
The Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
Sunday, June 13, 2010


Reading: Laughing it Off by Meg Barnhouse

Reading: “The Sky Is Full of Blue and Full of the Mind of God” by Kathleen Norris

Message: Laughing With Blue Humans

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. If you want to hear what was actually said, you can listen to sermon visit our website at www.uurockford.org. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2010.

Once upon a time,
a long long time ago,
in a place very nearby, cosmically speaking,
someone walked along the blue-green hills of earth,
and they wept great tears of sorrow.
We can imagine what the sorrow might have been,
what precipitating event caused this
flow of salt water,
these convulsions and this wailing:

perhaps it was war
perhaps it was illness
perhaps they lost all they got and they don’t know what for
perhaps they saw the person they love
hand in hand with someone else
it could be any of these things –
maybe more than one –
starving and freezing and so very poor –
life is too hard sometimes.
cruel, arbitrary, nasty, brutish and short.

And someone sat on those blue green hills,
and they wept
and they gnashed their teeth,
and they buried their head in their hands,
and cried out.

These two songs by Regina Spektor
are informed by her Jewish heritage,
and there is an old Jewish legend –
although it comes in the middle of the written version,
it is probably the oldest story in the Hebrew Bible.

A man loses all he has:
his children die, he gets sick,
he loses his home and his animals and everything he loves,
and for no reason he can see.

And he sits in the dirt and wails.
His friends come and sit by him,
and they are full of advice.
Oh, you must have done something wrong,
one says.
God must be punishing you.
But Job – for that is his name, the sufferer,
says, no, I was a righteous man.

But his friends persist –
oh there must be a reason.
We know all about God, they say,
and this is a test.
This is a test of your faith.

The story doesn’t say this,
but I sometimes imagine that at this,
Job might have reared back his head,
his rangy beard dancing,
and laughed out loud.

“A test!
A test!
That is the craziest, most absurd,
stupidest, cruelest idea I’ve ever heard in my life!”

And I imagine –
again, this isn’t in the story,
but I offer it in the ancient tradition of midrash,
of commentary on the old stories –
I imagine that it is Job’s outright laugher
that brings God out of the thunderclouds to defend himself –
and he says those things he is said to say:
“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Gird up your loins like a man!”
he says this with a kind of twinkle in his eye,
a giggle barely suppressed –
for she too finds such a notion –
that suffering is a test of faith,
or that anyone deserves to suffer as Job as suffered,
she too finds this laughable.
Do you really think, God replies,
that I am so petty?
Can’t you see that I’m commanding the morning,
and counting the hairs on the backs of the deer?

God can be funny,
when told he’ll give you money if you just pray the right way
And when presented like a genie who does magic like Houdini
Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus
God can be so hilarious -

Nobody laughs at God –
I don’t know about that,
maybe they do, even when they are suffering,
but I take the point –
when we walk along the hills
and wail,
we are humbled and doubtful,
whereas to laugh at God,
to laugh at the universe,
this is a kind of arrogance and hubris.

But laughing with is different,
isn’t it –
laughing with invites company –
we don’t laugh at suffering,
but we can laugh with God,
laugh with recklessness in the face of pretensions to answers,
sit with Job in the dirt and say,
as that old saw goes,
“if we couldn’t laugh at ourselves, we have to cry.”

I’m with Meg Barnhouse, I guess:
I think there’s a difference between laughing
and laughing off –
you can laugh, because it’s funny,
without giving up a sense of injustice and indignation
a desire that things might be different than they are.

It is, after all, the difference between the world as it is
and the world as we would like it to be
that is the source both of our justice work
and the source of humor –
and these things need not be mutually exclusive –
there is a majesty in being the holy fool,
in laughing with God
in reminding us, as Meg puts it,
“how ridiculous we are, how righteous we pretend to be,
how often we get caught with our pretensions hanging out.”
You better laugh, otherwise the Karma fairy will get you.

The difference between laughing with and laughing at
is deeply theological.
Grant the premise that we don’t laugh at God,
but perhaps we get mad at God,
we wonder, why did God do this to me,
we wonder, why didn’t God intervene, and stop this.

We treat, in this sense, God, the holy,
as something other, something that acts upon us.

Laughing with is different –
it is the sense that God, the holy, is like someone
who sits with us in our suffering, in our confusion,
in our doubt and our pride –
a friend,
not a genie in a bottle, not even Santa Claus.
Not the one who makes things happen to us,
but the power in us and among that helps us carry on,
step back from the close-up view,
and see the blue planet that is our home from a distance.

I think this is what it means to laugh with God,
or to laugh with life itself,
if you don’t believe in something we call God,
to laugh with is to see one’s life
from the outside,
there is something liberating and humbling,
all at once,
about knowing that this day shall pass,
that we are not alone,
that even if it is a sick joke,
something is funny about all this,
and maybe we can’t see it now,
but there is something hilarious
about thinking we know the answers,
there is something liberating and humbling,
even graceful,
about laughing with.

I know not all of you find God-language helpful
on your spiritual journey,
though some of you do –
I have on days and off days, myself,
but when I think about God,
I think in terms of what is called process theology –
the idea that God, the holy,
is a companion to existence,
a power which celebrates and suffers with us,
and lures us towards our own best possibility.
Under this conception,
God isn’t the one who does all those horrible things
to people,
but the one who travels with people
and all existence
in every moment.
So sometimes we laugh with God
and sometimes we weep with God
and sometimes we plan with God
and sometimes we dream with God.
God – the sacred power of existence itself,
if you prefer,
is manifest in our everyday acts of mercy and kindness,
when we, as the song says, bind each others’ wounds again.

In this sense, the difference between laughing with
and laughing at
is about distance –
how far away is our own pain –
how far away is our own strength?
Are these things distant and far-away,
located in some celestial being,
some eternal unknowable?
Or is our pain and our strength,
our love and our hope,
located within ourselves,
and among ourselves?
Process theology, religious humanism,
and liberal religion says,
these things are close by –
as close as our own heartbeat,
as close as the firing of the synapses in our own brain.

A long time ago,
in a place not very far away, cosmically speaking,
someone was walking along the blue green hills of earth,
and she had a feeling,
a sense that things were greater than this,
more important than the humdrum of work-sleep-eat,
wake up and do it again,
a sense that this are somehow more majestic than this.
She looks up into the blue sky
and wonders about simple things
like breathing in and breathing out,
she sees a picket fence,
and has a vision of a tree,
the tree it used to be,
she looks around and realizes
that we’ve broken through the enemy lines
only to be enslaved on the assembly lines –
there is more than this,
she thinks,
and she looks out over the hills,
sees a river meandering to the sea,
and thinks about that poster
she saw hanging on the wall
of her high school science classroom,
that one of the earth taken from space,
and she thinks about the blue green hill
upon which she stands
and the oceans that make life possible,
in their sparkling blueness,
and she senses there is more than this.

This, at the core, is what we mean
when we use the word faith –
that there is more than this.
More meaning, more beauty, more wonder
than what is, at first, apparent to our eyes and ears.

Faith need not mean faith in something in particular –
it just means a confidence in more-ness,
a confidence that meaning is possible,
that the life we are living,
like all lives,
have some kind of intrinsic value.

So, to stumble into faith in this way,
to stare out at a river and see the earth,
our home, from so far away,
this moment is inspiring and powerful –
though it can also be disappointing –
disappointing when we go out into the world
and discover all the people moving fast,
and no one smiling –
no one else realizing that there is more,
that the world around them,
their own lives included,
is majestic and wondrous.

It is more than disappointing
when you look out at the meandering river,
and have a vision of the sparkling blue planet home,
yet a brown smudge is spreading,
covering over the power of life
with the power of death –
this is more than disappointing,
it is heart-breaking,
it is devastating.

When you realize that all is one,
that we are all just passengers on this blue boat,
sailing through the universe,
well, when you realize this
then your heart breaks every time
that another suffers,
that another dies for the sake of our addiction,
our recklessness.

Spektor sings that no one is laughing at God,
but I think that is what we do, if fact,
when we destroy our home,
when we poke holes in the earth a mile under the sea,
it is a kind of hubris,
a violence against mutuality and our common destiny,
it is a laughing at –
look, we can do anything!
It is Icarus, flying too close to the sun.

Theology is about distance.
When you sit in a circle of friends,
is the suffering of another something far away,
something you can give advice for,
something you can explain?
Or is it so close to your own heart
that you weep with them,
show mercy and love to them?

Is the planet, our home,
a rock, waiting to be exploited?
Or is it a precious blue pearl,
floating in a sea of deep dark space?

Theology is about distance.
Is God far away, or present in our own lives?
Is that stranger a stranger,
or are they, in fact, my neighbor,
whom I ought to love as myself?
Are my brothers and sisters those who look like me,
or they, actually, everyone –
including pelicans and polar bears?

Theology is about distance.
Think about our blue veins –
those are the veins that return blood,
stripped of its oxygen,
back to our heart to be refilled and re-en-livened,
blue veins that we each have,
every one of us –
and I don’t think it is fully a coincidence
that the founder of Unitarianism,
Miguel Serveto, a Spanish physician,
who argued that Christians need not persecute others
because of the doctrine, or lack thereof, of the trinity,
Serveto was also the person who discovered
that the blood circulated through the body,
and that this movement –
this new energy, this constant rebirth,
was what made life possible.

Serveto’s discovery,
like Copernicus’s claim that the earth goes round the sun,
helped to challenge the ancient notion
that things hold still,
and that the best things hold stillest,
and thus that God, the best thing,
doesn’t move at all –

so now we can say,
that what is greatest and most sacred
is not farthest away and least related,
but is in fact closest and most connected.

Theology is about distance.
Is our river, as Heidegger said,
flowing to un-being,
or, as Denise Levertov says,
have we only begun to imagine the fullness of life?

A long long time ago,
in a place not to far from here,
cosmically speaking,
someone walked along the blue green hills of earth.

They wept in sadness at all the tragedy
in their lives, and the lives of others whom they loved.
And they knew, in this weeping,
that they were not alone, but part of everything,
including everything sacred.

And then they laughed, for it was kinda funny,
and they knew they laughed with the holy,
a deep belly laugh.

And they saw the whole world as their home,
and they knew that all the world was family,
and they felt the blood pump through their body,
like the waters pump through the earth,
and they had faith that there was more than this,
that we were all passengers together
on this spinning blue marble,
that all that is sacred, and worthy, and awesome
is right here, close by, traveling with us
through all the days of our lives.