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Welcome, welcome Ladies and Gentlemen! Please sit back, relax and prepare to be amazed and astonished at the one, the only, the Greatest Show on Earth! Yes, right here in this small room you will find the most daring high wire balancing acts never seen before in this fair Port City. Yes, right here among us are some of the finest, the fastest high flying trapeze artists working entirely without a net and the most incredibly agile and attentive jugglers. We have the funniest clowns, in the best costumes with the best pratfalls, we have for your edification the most beautiful and graceful women, the handsomest of men and for your intellectual amusement all manner of individualists, heretics and eccentrics of every description. Welcome to the Greatest Show on Earth, brought to you by the grace of God and the Eternal Universe, welcome to the Universal Human Circus !

There, ladies and gentlemen, in ring number two is the minister ! Just look at her, walking across a thin wire over the abyss desperately juggling all those things that must be done and all those things she feels she has to do before she can rest! Will she make across that wire one more time, or will she stumble and fall? Will she manage to balance on her nose, just like a trained seal, all those diverse and different theologies? Observe first at the bottom the big blue ball of our Jewish and Christian heritage, and right above it the red flag of Humanism, and then all the other balls: Buddhism, Hinduism, Earth Centered religions, and yes, just about every variation of belief you can possibly think of. Will she stumble, will someone throw her a curve ball and will she totter precariously off balance? Will she drop the ball entirely and watch it helplessly as it falls down, down into the abyss? Ups..there it goes all the way down in the spotlight, the wrong words said, the meeting she did not make, the time she failed to keep even a semblance of a non-anxious ministerial presence. If she falls will that inter-dependent web be there to catch her?

And if that should fail to amuse you then just watch over there, our finest jugglers, the large troupe of Working Parents, keeping all those things that must be done in the air. Work, family, leisure, volunteering, car pooling, soccer games, music lessons, scouts and cookie selling. Watch how money, time and values pass from hand to hand in constant motion. Frankly I do not know how they do it except by some form of great luck or grace. Give them a hand for they need all the applause they can get when they breathlessly sit down after a long day of juggling to read a bed time story to their children.

And then we have the daring, courageous, famous Flying Social Activists. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, believe it or not, these people are actually going to attempt to change this world for the better. There they go up the long ladder of society and there they fly high above the rest of us, swinging fearlessly from one right action to another. Will they manage to catch each other as they swing from one needed and unpopular cause to the next? No, there is no cause too small or too big for these courageous artists. Look how they turn somersaults from working in soup kitchens, to hurricane relief, to preserving the environment, to fighting racism and violence against women. And they do this without any safety net at all. Listen to the gasps of the audience as they watch them fly, hear the sighs of relief as these artists return safely to the saw dust and the solid earth. It would be a sad and dull circus without them, and a heart less one as well.

Oh, we do have such a variety here in our Universal Circus. One of my favorites are the clowns who know just the right moment when it is time to put on their red bulbous nose. When the meeting gets far too long, or we begin to take ourselves too deadly seriously they are there to break the tension. There are certainly times when we need to send in the clowns! They remind us that nature and God have a great sense of humor. If you doubt it just think about the rest of the animal world, the shape of an aardvark's nose or the gaping mouth and great bulk of a hippopotamus. But discretion being the greater part of valor, especially for a minister, I will let you, the audience, decide who is who when it comes to rest of our circus artists.

Now don't misunderstand me. I know that all these roles we play in our lives are sometimes plain hard work. Believe me I know all too well that often our lives are not funny at all. And as your minister I will likely take you more seriously than you may, at times, take yourself. Besides I am Scandinavian with all the darkness and seriousness of a winter night embedded deeply in my soul. But I think that it is precisely because our existence so often is tragic that we need the circus. We need to have the clowns or the mythological trickster remind us that things are not always what they seem. We need to be amused, to be enthralled by the glitter, to wonder at the poetry and magic of such wonderfully clever illusions and to laugh at the humor that all great circus acts give us. This magical universe is full of surprises! And it never fails, at least for me that when I take myself too seriously something happen to bring me down to earth. Yes, I feel sometimes as if God is the ultimate trickster. And that is a good thing too. For humor can heal us, humor can free us and strip away those masks and pretenses behind which we often hide our true self. Mark Twain said that the only reason angels could fly was because they took themselves so lightly. I believe that! Humor helps us with our fears and sometimes, yes sometimes we laugh because otherwise we would surely cry.

The newsletter editor of the First Parish in Wayland, Massachusetts, ran her favorite New Yorker squib:

"IMPORTANT NOTICE. If you are one of the hundreds of parachuting enthusiasts who bought our Easy Sky Diving book, please make the following correction: On page 8, line 7, the words 'state zip code' should have read 'pull rip cord.'---Adv, in the Warrenton, (Va.) Fauquier Democrat." Oh, I can see it now. If you missed this notice and bought this book you jump out of the plane and on the way down shout furiously your state zip code! Yes, terror can be part of humor too. We laugh sometimes in the face of danger, in the face of death. That is the whistling in the dark walking past the cemetery, a way to keep our selves sane. You find such humor in trauma centers and on the battlefield. If we can laugh hard enough the unbearable may become bearable.

But humor can also be a weapon as in sarcasm, a powerful weapon at times. It is useful against dictators as those who have seen Charlie Chaplin's parody of Hitler, The Little Dictator will know. But humor, as religion, when used to tear down people, to humiliate and hurt is neither healing nor freeing. Sticks and stones can hurt my bones, but words can really hurt me. There is a great deal of difference between the kind of cynicism or sarcasm that pokes fun at society and the one directed at an individual or a group of people.

The court jester and todays political humorist serve the same purpose as did the man in ancient Rome who was assigned to stand behind the victorious generals on their chariots. As the general drove through the streets of Rome on his victory parade, hailed and acclaimed by all, this one man would whisper into his ear: Glory is fleeting, glory is fleeting. Which was a way of not incurring the wrath of fates or the Gods, and a way for the most powerful to remember that they too were mortals, not Gods. We could perhaps use a few of those today: Glory is fleeting, glory is fleeting, it is only a basketball game…

Humor is surprise, it is the juxtaposition of things that don't really go together making a new connection. A story is told about a famous New York clergyman who wrote a book entitled: "Seekers after God." The book became a best seller and when the author wanted some to send to his friends the local publisher had run out of them but suggested that he try a large book house in Chicago. In reply he received the following telegram: " No Seekers after God in Chicago- Try Cleveland" Religion is also the binding together of things that may or may not go together. We can learn a lot about what we really believe from our funny stories. Heaven and Hell being paradoxical and somewhat irrational in nature anyhow are always popular topics. As in this one: a very well satisfied minister arrived at the gates of Heaven and asked for admission. "Where are you from?" St. Peter asked. " California " the minister answered. "Well," said St. Peter, " You can come in but you won't like it!" Or in this one from our own tradition: Hosea Ballou, the Universalist theologian once came to speak in a Congregational church who had a friendly rivalry going with the local Baptist congregation. The two churches faced each other and each watched the others announcements and attendance's. On the eve before his sermon Hosea displayed his sermon title on the Wayside Pulpit: "There is no Hell! " The next morning someone from the Baptist Church had put up a sign on the other side of the road: " The Hell there ain't! "

We laugh sometimes because otherwise we would cry. We are puny little creatures lost in a great Universe, Gods we are not and yet... The jokester, the trickster figures doesn't only tear away our masks he also at times tear away the masks behind which hide our images of God or the Ultimate Reality.

It all depends on how one interprets the evidence. Or perhaps it really depends upon faith. Wisdom may be the recognition that all the facts in this world will not necessarily change anyone's beliefs. Because we are not always entirely rational creatures, even as some of us religious liberals would like to believe so. If you doubt that let me share a few bumper stickers I've seen around Unitarian Universalist churches: " Thank God I am an atheist! " and " Honk, if you are not sure! " And there is for me something reassuring in the fact that even in this information age, in this time of faster and faster technology some of our ancient beliefs still hold sway. As in a newspaper article I read about Ireland. It seems they are having a bit of trouble getting some new high way bypasses built because of local opposition. In County Claire near Newmarket on Fergus the road was planned to go where a large and ancient hawthorn tree stands. Eddie Lenihan knows this is a favorite meeting place for the fairy folks and were they to cut that tree down the new road would be cursed. Fairies, he says, wrecks all kinds of mischief when they are angry. The engineer says he will think it over. Other highways have been rerouted to avoid such fairy sites. "People laugh at you," says Leninhan, "They say they don't believe in leprechauns. It's not sophisticated. But subconsciously they believe." Besides why take chances with the wee folks? Paradoxes abound and the truth is that we can not be absolutely sure about anything. Sometimes not even our own identity. A colleague of mine Jane Rzepka tells this story: I performed a wedding not long ago, and had a little trouble with the marriage license: it blew away. That's right--in all its signed, stamped, sealed and ready-to-go splendor, it, hoping no doubt to avoid eternal life in a file drawer, just sailed into the heavens on that windy wedding day and was never seen again.

So I went to Boston City Hall. Having had previous trouble proving conclusively that I was a "man of the cloth," I had my ordination certificate along. Having occasionally been suspected of I never knew quite what, I thought to bring the actual wedding ceremony, the couple's check, our parish register, church letterhead, and my driver's license. (I had a few nice wedding pictures along too, just in case.) But the woman said, "No dice. I have to see the 'church records.'" It did no good to point out that this hefty stack of offerings was the church records--she wasn't budging. Neither of us, it turned out, could imagine exactly what kind of "church records" would suffice. In fact, none would. She concluded that this was a problem that couldn't be solved.

I hated to go to jail, which is what I always figured happened to ministers who didn't properly file marriage licenses, so I kept at it. After a couple of hours, I, too, began to doubt that I'd ever performed the wedding, become a minister, or been born and given a name, though eventually the evidence did suffice.

As an adolescent, when I sometimes doubted my existence or my place in the universe, I turned to the existentialists if only to confirm the legitimacy of the doubt. But the actual healing came from the love, or even the nonchalant acceptance, of folks around me. May we remember to do that for each other.

I relate to her story. Recently on a visit to California I had my purse stolen with my drivers license and my credit cards. It was absurd to discover how impossible it is to prove your identity in a society where you cannot get on a plane, write a check or do any number of other things without a picture ID. We need more than ever places that know us without us having to show a card at the door or prove our credit rating. Places that do not have signs like this one from a famous department store: "For your convenience, an alarm will sound if the security device has not been removed from the merchandise."

Humor can help us look at things from a whole other perspective. You might be interested in knowing that the wolves have a different version of Little Red Riding Hood than we do. It begins as follows: Once upon a time there was a kind and good wolf, always helpful to others, always kind. One morning he met a little girl walking through the woods. Overcoming his natural fear of humans, who have a history of being cruel to wolves, he welcomed her to his part of the forest. You get the idea. This story ends with the wolf being the innocent victim of a gross misunderstanding and grandma dies of entirely natural causes.

It all depends on your perspective!

Humor can also be a saving grace. For nearly three weeks now we have been searching for this congregation's scrapbook, which has many irreplaceable memories and pictures in it. Now that we are getting ready to build a new place we wanted to have it to see where we came from. Well thanks to Don Wood we found it. When they were getting the architects model ready for the display they needed something to hold it up above the table. So for three weeks while we have been searching for those memories there it has, been our history under cover of a blue table cloth, holding up our dream of the future. Well, I call that synchronicity! Maybe I do believe in fairies after all.

De Toqueville wrote a century and a half ago:

I need not traverse earth and sky to discover a wondrous object woven of contrasts, of infinite greatness and littleness, of intense gloom and amazing brightness, capable at once of exiting pity, admiration, terror, contempt. I have only to look at myself. We spring out of nothing, cross time and disappear forever in the bosom of God, we are seen but for a moment, wandering on the verge of two abysses, and there is lost.

Lost perhaps, or maybe not lost at all, as long as we can laugh. Humor may tear away our masks and also reveal the masks behind which hide our images of God. Humor makes faith possible by pointing us beyond our narrow selves to a greater reality. We open the door and through it we glimpse the sacred. We laugh at ourselves and suddenly we see just how glorious this enormous Universe is and what a tiny part we play in it. We may get angry at the trickster, the joker even as he teaches us humility but without those paradoxes we may never see the face of God.

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