Laughter

A question for you, and one I want you to take a moment to consider deeply: Have you ever been laughed at?  In a high moment, when you were at the top of the world and feeling good about yourself or proud of an accomplishment, has someone pulled the rug out from under you by laughing at you?  In a low moment, when you were already at your most vulnerable, have you been laughed at?  For roughly half the population—the male half—there is nothing worse.  Author Margaret Atwood once famously said while a woman’s greatest fear of men is that men will physically harm them, a man’s greatest fear of women is that women will laugh at them.[i]  That’s a remarkable reality: that the fear of being laughed at is, for many, on par with the fear of being actually, physically hurt.  And, I suspect that the fear of being laughed at is more universal than Margaret Atwood suggests.  Being the brunt of the joke, on the receiving end of the pointing finger and scathing, ridiculing laughter; having the spotlight of the world cast an unflattering glow, revealing our previously private, secret insecurities.  There are few things worse in the world.  Cruel laughter, perfectly timed can upend a life.  Do you know what that feels like?  Have you ever been laughed at?

Lest we misunderstand, this is the experience that Sarah has in the Genesis reading today.  Sarah is a prominent woman, the spouse of Abraham, who has become an affluent, nomadic trader in Canaan.  Abraham and Sarah are leading citizens, we might say, with all the social cache that comes from their position.  And yet, Sarah bears a heavy burden, a deep sorrow that is well-known in the community but never spoken.  Sarah is, and has been all her life, barren.  She cannot bear children.  Whether she is unable to become pregnant, or whether she has repeatedly been unable to carry a child to term, we do not know.  Regardless, Sarah is childless.

In our world, with fertility treatments and global adoption options, families have infinitely greater opportunity to remedy childlessness.  And in our world, women have agency not to have children and create a different kind of flourishing life. Sarah’s world is not our world.  In a culture in which there is no social safety net, children are the insurance of well-being in one’s old age.  In a religion that has not yet developed an idea of the afterlife, children are the assurance of immortality, that one’s family line will continue.  In a society in which honor is paramount, the greatest honor is children.  In a world that yearns for God’s blessing, the sign of divine favor is children.  This is Sarah’s world, and Sarah is barren.  When today’s reading begins, Sarah is already an old woman.  She has borne her grief for decades, and undoubtedly it lives just beneath the surface.

And so, today three strange but alluring travelers approach Abraham’s and Sarah’s caravan.  The greatest value of their culture is hospitality, and Abraham and Sarah respond as the prominent people they are.  They provide comfort, refreshment, and the best food for their guests.  No doubt both Abraham and Sarah feel good about how well they are able to provide.  Their hospitality accrues to both their virtue and their social standing.  It is in just that moment, as Sarah is on top of the world, when one of the guests cuts her down—or seems to cut her down—mercilessly.  “I will return in due season,” says one of the mysterious travelers to Abraham, “and your wife shall have a son.”

Sarah hears, and she thinks she is the butt of a joke.  A cruel joke.  A gut-punching, ridiculing, belittling joke that dredges up the deepest pain and insecurity Sarah knows.  So how does Sarah respond?  How can she respond, other than fold in upon herself and try to disappear?  She laughs, in self-defense and in the attempt to defuse the joke.

Laughter can be a wounding weapon, and being laughed at can be the next worst thing to death, but like all things, laughter can also be redeemed.   Long ago, Reader’s Digest told us that laughter is the best medicine.  Today, with controlled, peer-reviewed research to back it up, the Mayo Clinic agrees.[ii]  Mayo says, “A good laugh has great short-term effects. When you start to laugh, it doesn’t just lighten your load mentally, it actually induces physical changes in your body…Laughter enhances your intake of oxygen-rich air, stimulates your heart, lungs and muscles, and increases the endorphins that are released by your brain.  A rollicking laugh fires up and then cools down your stress response, and it can increase and then decrease your heart rate and blood pressure.  Laughter can also stimulate circulation and aid muscle relaxation, both of which can help reduce some of the physical symptoms of stress.”

Those are the immediate effects of laughter, but in the long-term, Mayo adds, “Laughter may ease pain by causing the body to produce its own natural painkillers.  Laughter can help lessen depression and anxiety…It can also improve self-esteem.”

Laughter therapy is now a professionally-recognized modality to treat all of the above.  In fact, the National Institutes of Health recommended laughter as a primary treatment for the detrimental psychological effects that the COVID pandemic had on so many of us.[iii]

There may be nothing else in the world that can both harm and heal as much as laughter.  And Sarah experiences the oscillation of both its effects today.  It turns out that the mysterious travelers were sent from God, and what Sarah perceived to be a taunt was instead a promise.  In due season, Sarah does bear a son, and her laughter is transformed.  In fact, she and Abraham name the baby Isaac, which means “one who laughs.”  And Sarah says in joy and wonder, “God has brought laughter for me, and everyone who hears will laugh with me.”

That’s one of the bible’s best images.  Sarah, the recipient of God’s promise, becomes a person of laughter, a person in whom and for whom laughter heals, a person from whom laughter courses through the world to heal others.

In his already-classic book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell tells story after story of the ways in which small things make huge differences, how sometimes the whole world tips when we put pressure in just the right spot.  In one chapter, Gladwell talks about the phenomenon of “emotional contagion,” in which one person actually “infects” another with her emotions.  Gladwell says, “If I smile and you see me and smile in response—even a microsmile that takes no more than several milliseconds—it’s not just you imitating or empathizing with me.  It may also be a way that I can pass on my happiness to you.”[iv]

That’s fascinating, but there’s more.  Psychologists have noted that, “Some [people] are very good at expressing emotions and feelings, which means that [they] are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us.  Psychologists call these people ‘senders.’”[v]

In Genesis today, Sarah, who connects with her joy, becomes a sender.  “God had brought laughter for me,” she says, and “everyone who hears will laugh with me.”

We, too, are each the recipient of God’s promise in our lives, of the grace that manifests as joy.  Today’s Gospel passage is all about Jesus sending his disciples into the world, and the post-Communion prayer asks God to “send us out to do the work you have given us to do…with gladness and singleness of heart.”  We pray to God to make us senders!  In a world corrupted by anger and pain, what better way to be disciples, what better way to take the sting from cruel laughter and redeem it entirely, than to become contagions of healing laughter.  To smile, to laugh, to pass on joy from one to another…Send us out, gracious God, to tip the world until, as Sarah says, the whole world laughs with us.

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[i] https://www.pbs.org/kued/nosafeplace/articles/nightmare.html#:~:text=That’s%20pretty%20easy.,re%20afraid%2 0of%20being%20killed.%22

[ii] https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-management/in-depth/stress-relief/art-20044456

[iii] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8496883/

[iv] Gladwell, Malcolm.  The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, pg. 84.

[v] Gladwell, pg. 85.

An Exploration of the Trinity: God the Network

Every Saturday morning in the late 1970s, my brother Robert and I would wake up at 6:45 a.m. and stumble sleepy-eyed to the big cabinet television set in my dad’s study.  We’d turn on one of the three channels we could get in Paragould—ABC out of Jonesboro, CBS out of Memphis, or NBC out of Little Rock—and the screen would be filled with the static we used to call “snow,” because none of the channels began broadcasting on Saturdays until 7 a.m.  (Remember that?)  We’d sit expectantly in our pajamas, until at the top of the hour the Hall of Justice would appear, and the first Saturday cartoon, Super Friends began. Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman would be followed by Bugs Bunny or Scooby Doo, and Robert and I would sit mesmerized in front of that television until lunchtime, when cartoons were replaced by professional wrestling or an old Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movie.

As much as I loved that weekly dose of cartoons, my favorite part of Saturday mornings happened in-between shows, when the T.V. producers subversively decided to teach us something about grammar, or outer space, or how a bill becomes a law.  If you’re near my age, you know that I’m talking about the series of cartoon short films known as Schoolhouse Rock.  They included “Conjunction Junction,” “Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here,” “Interplanet Janet,” and “I’m Just a Bill.”  But my favorite Schoolhouse Rock episode was different from all the others.  Whereas they were upbeat and toe-tapping, it was thoughtful and quiet, as if it were inviting grade school children to plumb deeply into its subject.  Its name?  “Three is a Magic Number,” and the opening lyrics were, “Three is a magic number.  Yes, it is.  It’s a magic number.” 

That’s as much as I remembered, but as I was preparing today’s sermon, I got on YouTube and listened to it again.  To my surprise, the next line of this mass-produced, Saturday morning network cartoon is, “Somewhere in the ancient, mystic Trinity, you get three, there’s a magic number.  The past, and the present, and the future; faith, and hope, and charity; the heart, and the brain, and the body give you three.”

Today is Trinity Sunday, when the preacher is tasked to explain in thirteen-and-a-half minutes the Doctrine of the Trinity.  (This is generally considered by priests to be the most undesirable preaching date on the calendar.)  I’d looked up Schoolhouse Rock because I thought it might give me a nice, gimmicky launching point for today’s homily.  But instead, I sat at my computer stupefied for a moment, realizing that way back in 1978 Schoolhouse Rock truly had attempted to teach something of the nature of God.  Then I remembered (and this is true) that one of the creators of Schoolhouse Rock is Jay Sidebotham, who later became an Episcopal priest.  Wonder of wonders!

How is it that the one God is also three?  Why is it important in the contemporary world to maintain such a perplexing doctrine?  The other major monotheistic faiths, Judaism and Islam, as well as the Christian offshoot known as Unitarianism, find our Trinitarian notion of God problematic.  They say that, deep down, we aren’t monotheists at all, that we’re asserting three Gods in place of one.  But it isn’t so.  In fact, most of the explanations of the Trinity discarded over the past two millennia have been declared heretical exactly because they skirted to close to polytheism.  The Church has always ultimately asserted that whatever we mean by the Trinity, its three persons make up one God.  So, how are we to understand that?   

The challenge begins, at least in the modern world, because we are thoroughly Enlightenment people.  (Don’t doze off!)  We are Newtonians, and like good Sir Isaac, we implicitly believe that hard, solid stuff is the most real there is.  To our common sense, material substance is the basic building block, right down to those papier mache models of atoms we used to make around the same time we were watching Schoolhouse Rock.  It is consequent of that common sense that we have difficulty imagining anything that could be more than one thing while at the same time being only one thing.

When considering the nature of God, the challenge continues because we also use as an implicit analogy our sense of our own human self.  I am the one and only me, and that is the surest and perhaps only thing I can know in life.  As Descartes said four hundred years ago, “I think therefore I am.”  By extension, we want to grant God’s self at least the individual integrity we grant ourselves, and a God that is three in addition to being one seems to compromise that.

But in recent decades, both our science and our social experience have outpaced such old modes of thinking.  We now know that those models of atoms were grossly inaccurate, that behind all solid substance is quivering, impossible-to-pin down energy that constantly shifts and moves.  And we increasingly know that even the human self is not so singular and monolithic a thing as we used to think.  Rather than old philosophical monism, philosophers and psychologists now use images of webs, or even more recently, networks to describe the human self.

Philosopher Kathleen Wallace says, “You are a network.  You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind, or a particular social role…It’s not only embodiment and not only memory or consciousness of social relations but the relations themselves that also matter to who the self is.”  Wallace argues for a “more relational, less ‘container’ view of the self.”[i]

So, what does that mean?  Whereas we used to think of “me” as a singular thing, a “container,” and all my relationships as things that merely touch or ping that container, the newer realization is that there is no unchanging container at all.  There is no unalterable “me” in the center of my experience.  Rather, my self—if we can even call it that—is the sum total of the network of relationships and identities I experience in my life.  I don’t just have a relationship with my spouse, kids, friends, co-workers, you…I am those relationships. 

Two illustrations that may help:  First, a spider’s web.  The center of the web is actually a hole, an empty space.  It’s not really a center at all.  It’s a void.  The “real” parts of the web are the many gossamer strands that connect the web.  Or, second, consider an electrical arc.  The two solid nodes on either end are not the arc at all.  The arc—the “real thing”—is the pulsating, moving electrical current between the nodes.

That’s the network theory of the self.  I am not a singular unchanging thing.  I am the network of relationships of which my constantly morphing existence in this world consists.  This makes perfect sense when we consider what it might be like to go back in time and speak to, for instance, the “me” that sat in front of that television in 1978.  To what extent can we say that the two Barkleys are the same person?  The social identities and relationships that have pulsed through me and re-created me a thousand times in the past five decades, and that make up my dynamic self, are anything but static, anything but singular. And yet, enduringly, I’m also still me.

And that helps us skirt, at the very least, an understanding of the Trinity.  The essence of God, the divine reality at the center of all that is, is not a singular thing, not solid and unchanging like those old atomic models.  The essence of God is a network of pulsating, dynamic relationships between what we call the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  As in those of us created in the image of God, in Godself these three inform and interpenetrate and flow to and through each other, creating the one God made up of three arcs of flowing, moving, love. 

Can you envision it?  I know you experience it, the Father who creates you, the Son who redeems you, and the Holy Spirit who enlivens your faith and life.  And at the end of the day, that’s what matters more than any thirteen-and-a-half minute explanation.  In the end, Schoolhouse Rock said it best: “Somewhere in the ancient, mystic Trinity, you get three, there’s a magic number.  The past, and the present, and the future; faith, and hope, and charity…give you three.” 

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[i] https://aeon.co/essays/the-self-is-not-singular-but-a-fluid-network-of-identities