A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
April 3, 2005
A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
April 3, 2005
Quite ironically, just as we were wrapping up the plans for the Feast of Fools, planned long ago, the death-watch began in Rome. I thought, oh no, now what. In the Procession with which the sermon began I was to wear a very fine mitre, and there were to be other items to parody the churchly pomp. We thought that to do that today it would be kind of tawdry; tasteless at the least — and we dropped it — not because the Pope held much authority for us but because we want to live and speak with respect for all who live and all who die.
There is an irony about this death at Rome. As he lay dying he had the story of the crucifixion read to him — a death that began with a betrayal, undergone in humility. The pope died in a palace surrounded by bishops who wear those mitres on special occasions. Choirs sang and thousands waited reverently.
The pope held many meanings. To some he was next to God, a great spiritual leader.
A friend, whose life has been much traumatized by the Catholic church, disowned by his Catholic family because he is gay, called Friday night. His extended alienated family includes a nun and a closeted homosexual priest (gay is way too strong a word for this man). My friend spoke of the pope as he often does — as evil.
Well, I don't know that I'd quite characterize anybody with that word, a word I use very sparingly. . Each of us has a shadow. The universe itself, and Being Itself, has a shadow, as couldn't have been clearer at the time of the Christmas Tsunami. I have a shadow and so do you. And each of us — everybody — does the best we can with what we have. Karol Jozef Wojtyla [pronounced voy-tee-wah] — bishop, then pope — did his best with the universe as he understood it, with the beliefs and dogma that shaped him.
To those who remember the Solidarity movement and the fall of Communism in Poland, he is a kind of hero. He denounced dictators. Many were heartened when he denounced the American invasion of Iraq. To us who are gay, lesbian, queer — there were 26 years of unceasing — well, what must be called defamation. For women he was a symbol of exclusion, the proof that if God is male, then male is God. When the Church of England began ordaining women in 1994 John Paul issued a peremptory apostolic letter declaring "definitively" that the church had no authority to ordain women. He forbade Catholics from discussing the matter further. As the Observer of London puts it this morning, many loved him, and forgave him his teachings. But in an institution that is not democratic, he was sovereign and his teachings law.
What he was, or wasn't, doesn't really matter. There are no brokers between you and the Heart of the Universe. That has always been the point of my Feasts of Fools. We must retain our ability to laugh at any presumed brokers between us and the Heart of Being — ayatollahs, bishops, popes, even moi! This has been the message of great spiritual teachers including Jesus, the Buddha, Rumi and Hafiz, Emerson, and so many more. Mohammed included Jews and Christians in his itinerant community that finally settled in Medina.
It is for us to recognize and embrace our direct access to the Heart of all Being. And to retain the ability to laugh. A fool can look at the mighty structures of power and pomp and convention and break into gales of laughter and feel no shame because she can look at it and it doesn't intimidate her. When the old terms and conditions, the laws of injustice and fear bend our spirits to adopt a posture of cultured despair, we are still victims. We are victims until we can laugh a holy laughter from the soul of us.
And a preposterous good morning to you all.
I have received the sad and humiliating news that the preceding hymn, composed by myself, has been performed by the choir of the Unitarian Church of Evanston, Illinois and sung by several other congregations. What a legacy.
Brothers and sisters, I want you to know that the Holy Ghost gave me those words to comfort you and bless you. She said, you write these words down and then set it to the tune of Hymn 108 in the grey hymnal.
Is there in this house an aching heart? Do fears molest? Does doubt disturb, dwarfing dreams and disbursing doleful dread? Do you suffering nagging backache? You've come to the right place, my friends. Soon many of your most glaring faults will have been corrected.
I know what you're thinking. We pretty much always know what you're thinking. I know what you're thinking but a lot of it I couldn't say in church. But this much I can say that you're thinking: you're thinking, This man isn't making any sense.
Now I'm going to talk about something else. Let's talk about the Triumphal Entry.
The Triumphal Entry is the time, right about this time of the year, just before Good Friday, if you follow those churchly calendars of holy things that happened, when, according to the highly doubtful account in the 21st chapter of Matthew, Jesus came riding into Jerusalem in triumph just like a king.
And what, you are thinking, does the Triumphal Entry have to do with what I was talking about before (whatever that was)? Precisely this, my friends. They are both absurd.
I had meant to speak to you today of things
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And then I understood why: it was the great spirit and muse of the Feast of Fools.
Once a year, and in other moments of real sanity, comes this spirit, stealing upon our private heart, asking us, quietly and gently, sundry important questions.
Like for instance: so you're gonna change the world. You and whose army, and whose millions, and whose Congress?
Or this question: What are you doing here, anyway, thinking modern person? You never thought you would go anyplace religious again. You already left the Catholic church or the Methodist Church or the Baptist Church and you don't go to synagogue anymore and you very much enjoy the Sunday Times and here you are and you cannot believe it. You have misgivings. Your life experience has left you deeply uncomfortable with organized religion. Well, you needn't fear us. Organized! Ha!
Going to enter Jerusalem as a king, are you? Jerusalem under Roman occupation. Yeh right. You and whose army?
I don't think it happened.
He's going to ride triumphally into Jerusalem. By the way, he is riding on a donkey. Some king! And when he approaches the gates of the city his entourage apparently dissolves.
Absurd.
A little guerrilla theatre.
Now let me tell you something else absurd.
When religious authorities, as such, march into town to exert secular authority, only they aren't just making a statement, a little satire, a caricature on the high and mighty, but they mean to rule. But, as Harvey Cox asked a few years ago, "what place is there for caricature when the church's regal vestments are taken seriously, when its crowns and sceptres are made of real gold instead of thorns and wood? A church that actually holds power and reigns has little capacity for self-caricature or irony."1
And here is another absurd thing. When religious authorities tell you they speak for God and you'd better obey, when they can admit no doubt about ancient laws, and fears, and hatreds, and when they call the hatred love and try to make the whole jumble into the law of the land. That is absurd.
Now I'm going to talk about something else. We're talked about the Triumphal Entry. Now let's talk about me. I had this dream once, see?
Now, in this dream, I am in church. Big place, a little dusty, a few people in the pews, original people who came with the pews, sitting there listening. What they're listening to is the voice of God kind of chanting. Hmmn, I thought, and for reasons unknown, got up out of my pew and went poking around until I went up on the chancel, which is Presbyterian for this thing I'm standing on, but behind it was a crimson curtain. And for whatever reason I kind of pulled the curtain back. And there, to my surprise, was the Rev. Dr. Ansley Gerard Van Dyke Junior. He was the minister of the church I grew up in, and he served it for 45 years, and there he was, singing into a microphone, and everybody thought it was the voice of God. It's right out of the movie, of course, but unlike virtually all other gay men in the world, I had not seen The Wizard of Oz hundreds of times, and in fact I don't remember that I'd ever seen it at all. At any rate.
The dream illustrated the enormous power of religion, but also its danger. People are inherently religious but are too easily tempted to be intellectually and spiritually lazy and simply believe what they are told. And so organized religion holds great power in this world, whether it's the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Congress being run by the extreme Christian right or whatever, or the latest pronouncement from Cardinal Ratzinger. Sometimes it's important to pull back the curtain. What you've been told, well, it ain't necessarily so.
Let me make this personal. I try not to do that too often but here it is. I live in an allegedly free country with very few of the rights of a citizen. It is a nation that just eight years ago passed a special law, signed by a popular Democratic president, to guarantee that no relationship of mine can ever be recognized by federal law as legitimate. As if that was not enough, 11 states this past November passed special hate laws of their own. And why is this? Who is responsible for this but a large part of the churches of our nation? They must impose their outmoded worldview upon us all as repressive laws. As the battle over marriage heats up again in Massachusetts, we can expect more faith-based hate from pulpits. The churches don't seem to be changing very fast. Ask Bishop Robinson. Ask a few "out" Methodist or Presbyterian clergy who aren't clergy anymore. I believe Bishop Robinson knows the meaning of laughter.
Another recorded TV preacher
"They'd rather come out of their closets than clean them!"
Today, in fundamentalist churches across this nation, they're talking about another triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Millions now believe what their power-mouth preachers are telling them: that based on two chapters in the biblical Book of Daniel, the United States and Britain must come into a terrible conflict with Iran and Iraq. The United Nations and the Secretary General are the Antichrist. When God destroys Iran, Iraq, and the antichrist United Nations — why, then Jesus can return triumphally to Jerusalem and his saints will sit upon thrones and reign in Jerusalem. Oh, and did you know, the horrors of September 11 were prophesied in the Bible — and Saddam Hussein, the new Nebuchadnezzar, is responsible, they say, so who needs the evidence to the contrary?
A Time/CNN poll reveals that fully 25 percent of the American people believe the 9/11 attack unfolded according to Bible prophecy, the Gospel according to John Ankerberg and Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye. Here's what George Grant, one of their popular writers, has to say:2
Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land — to have dominion in civil structures.
Is dominion we are after. Not just a voice.It is dominion we are after. Not just influence.
It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time.
It is dominion we are after.
World conquest . . . the conquest of the land — of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments.
And while the whole nation stops in its tracks and Congress
convenes a special session over a woman whose cerebral cortex long
ago turned to fluid, today, between 16,000 and 24,000 children will die of
hunger related illness. Today, about 5,000 people, mostly children will
die from malaria. And 45 million Americans have no health insurance, and
I could go on. This is our president's "culture of life."
Could get you down, couldn't it?
But I was talking about the Feast of Fools, wasn't I?
Actually Innocents' Day was a commemoration of the children slaughtered by Herod and accordingly it was supposed to be mournful. But the French turned it into a day of revelry, although I must point out that the English were no fun at all, and in England the day was celebrated by whipping your children while they lay in bed in the morning.
But the Feast of Fools, especially in France, was a day of revelry where masters would exchange places with servants — and it was all taken into the center of power in the medieval world, the Church, and on that day the mass would be said backwards and the incense would be made of stinky old shoes and the sermon would be sort of obscene.
By the 13th century these things had become a burlesque of the Church's rule over private moral life, and of the Church's solemn ritual. In spite of repeated prohibitions and penalties imposed by the Council of Basel in 1431, the feasts kept on until the 16th century.
When the Feast of Fools gave you a day or a week to laugh at things the way they were with no hope of changing anything, it only served as an escape valve for the rage and the resentment of the people. That is the kind of nervous laughter that is at heart living in fear and intimidation.
But sometimes I think it must have served a greater purpose, as something more subversive, an act of serious, subversive satire.
A fool can look at things that nobody else can see because they think they already know what's there. A fool can look at the mighty structures of power and pomp and convention and break into gales of laughter and feel no shame because she can look at it and it doesn't intimidate her.
Laughter, you know, comes in two varieties, maybe more. But remember the distinction.
There's the nervous laughter from up in your throat that is the sound of anxious embarrassment, intimidated by the might of convention or sheer power. Heh heh. Er um. cackle.
And there's the other kind that comes from deep inside and involves your whole body and self and it's full and it's free. It's Emerson preaching that sermon that sets the whole theological world on its nose, and it's Olympia Brown presenting her application to an all-male seminary in 1860, and it's our UU minister Jim Reeb marching against the Alabama State Police in Selma and it's Jesus saying the Kingdom of God isn't some great empire with armies or mitered bishops but it's actually rather more like a mustard seed, which is actually a weed.
You get the joke.
We live amid structures of power and convention that are in many ways inadequate to serve an evolving human consciousness. They are too small; they are born of visions that were too small, and even when they are not built on greed and corruption, they are built on visions that are too small and obsolete. The roaring Furnace of creativity at the heart of all renders all rigid forms fluid and plastic.
It laughs when we fail to note that even the solid rock is really a dance of particles and energy.
It honors neither pomp nor privilege.
The beams of its light outreach our elegant pronouncements of what is true, and right.
But to the soul willing to lay down the preconceived answers
to outworn questions,
prepared to listen, beyond all the tumult of words, in the
silence, to the Immensity beyond all silence,
to the one who will accept every moment as new —
there must come a discontent with the structures of power and
convention as they are, and with the discontent, the vision to see through them
and beyond them. And to know that the Commonwealth of God is within
you and around you already — it is a matter of consciousness — and you
can live by its laws and purposes and make real its possibilities.
And then you can look into the face of things as they are and laugh, and your laughter will come from the depths of your being. And the terms and conditions of life in this world will no longer have you under their spell, and you will know freedom. Laughter is hope's last weapon.
When the old terms and conditions, the laws of injustice and fear bend our spirits to adopt a posture of cultured despair, we are still victims. We are victims until we can laugh a holy laughter from the soul of us.
2 Thomas Ice. Dominion Theology: Blessing or Curse by, published in 1988 by H. Wayne House and Thomas Ice. pp. 412
I. Thomas Carlyle, 1836
No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad. How much lies in Laughter: the cipher key, wherewith we decipher the whole [person]! Some men wear an everlasting barren simper; in the smile of others lies a cold glitter as of ice: the fewest are able to laugh, what can be called laughing, but only sniff and titter and snigger from the throat outwards; or at best, produce some whiffling husky cachination, as if they were laughing through wool: of none such comes good. The [one] who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.
II. Virginia Woolf:
It is a solemn sight always — a procession, like a caravanserai crossing a desert. Great-grandfathers, grandfathers, fathers, uncles — they all went that way, wearing their gowns, wearing their wigs, some with ribbons across their breasts, others without. One was a bishop. Another a judge. One was an admiral. Another a general. One was a professor.
Above all, where is it leading us, the procession of educated men? The . . . questions must be answered; and they are so important that if all the daughters of educated men did nothing, from morning to night, but consider that procession, from every angle, if they did nothing but ponder it and analyse it, and think about it and read about it and pool their thinking and reading, and what they see and what they guess, their time would be better spent than in any other activity now open to them.
Let us never cease from thinking — what is this `civilization' in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? Where in short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men?
III. Harvey Cox
The clown refuses to live inside the present reality. He senses another one. He defies the law of gravity, taunts the policeman, ridicules the other performers. Through him we catch a glimpse of another world impinging on this one, upsetting its rules and practices.
Laughter of course can be strained, cruel, artificial, or merely habitual. It can mask our true feelings. But where it is real, laughter is the voice of faith. . . . Laughter is hope's last weapon.