*Let's Pray!

Hear us, God of joy, in our laughter and in our tears too, as we offer our prayer, Our Father in Heaven, let your holy name be known, let your kingdom come, and your will be done, on earth as in heaven. Give us today the bread that we need, and forgive us our wrongs, and OK, we'll forgive those who have done wrong to us too. Do not lead us into trial, but save us from evil. For we want for you alone rule in our hearts; you have power to transform, and in the light of your smile is your glory. Amen.

Robin Cardell, Oshkosh Rhythm Institute

Let's Sing We Are Walking in the Light of Christ

Singing . . . Praying . . . Working . . . Resting . . . Walking

We don't usually think of the Bible as a funny book. There are way too many horrible battle scenes, and pages of geneological lists and even more pages - miles and miles of pages, it seems - of obscure rules no one pays any attention to to mistake it for comedy. But humor is there - more than we can really appreciate.

One could make a good argument that Jesus is funniest man in the Bible. Not like a stand-up comic - no mere teller of jokes. But he used one of the elements of comedy - exaggeration - a lot to make his points. And I think the people listening to him did more than a little laughing - he could tell a good story, and could make you laugh at how some people - all people - do some silly things. And if you were really listening you could see yourself in those stories, and the joke would be on you.

Here are some examples. In the first one Jesus is talking about religious leaders who think they know everything, and try to tell everyone else what is right when they themselves have missed the point of true religion. He calls them blind guides . . .

Luke 6:39-42 (NLT)
³⁹ Then Jesus gave the following illustration: "Can one blind person lead another? Won't they both fall into a ditch? . . .

Slapstick humor - watching someone slip on a banana peel, or get a pie in their face - always makes people laugh. And so you have to picture here two blind men - picture them blindfolded, the one pretending to help the other, and both of them falling into the ditch - and now you have a sense of what Jesus is saying. It's ridiculous, he says, if you can't see to pretend you can help someone else who can't see.

Jesus goes on . . . talking about how some people think it's their business to correct everyone else, to set them right.

"And why do you worry about the speck - the tiniest thing - in your friend's eye when you have a log in your own?

Be sure you catch the exaggeration here: your friend has a tiny speck of dust in their eye - and you have a log - a telephone pole! - in yours AND YET you think you can help! Jesus says,

How can you think of saying, ?Friend, let me help you get rid of that speck in your eye,' when you can't see past the log in your own eye? Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend's eye!

Here's another place where Jesus makes fun of people who try so hard to keep the smallest law - like what you can and cannot on the Sabbath Day - but then forget the really important ones - like having mercy and doing justice:

Matthew 23:24 (NLT)
²⁴ Blind guides! You strain your water so you won't accidentally swallow a gnat, but you swallow a camel!

Again: exaggeration: we worry about the gnat in our soup, but think nothing of swallowing a whole camel! That's crazy, isn't it? But we keep on doing it, says Jesus.

That camel shows up again in another famous saying of Jesus, this one directed at people who think life is found in what they own, in their treasures:

Mark 10:25 (NLT)
²⁵ In fact, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God!"

How easy is it for a camel to go through a needle's eye? Not very easy . . . Impossible you might say! We can see his listeners laughing at such a ridiculous picture, a camel in the eye of a needle . . . . and then imagine the laughter dying down perhaps turning to anger as we realize that the joke this time is on us. For we my friends are rich! And we keep trying to jam that camel through that needle's eye . . . And it doesn't work.

Lastly let me share two stories in which Jesus says just how ultimately silly and useless - ultimately I say - is money. Now we're going to be soon collecting money right here in the "Got Money" part of the service! Money has its uses in this world, and Jesus knows that, but he puts it all in perspective in two stories, both about taxes - always a popular subject in any culture!

Here's the first:

Luke 20:20-26 (NLT)
"Teacher," they said, "we know that you speak and teach what is right and are not influenced by what others think. You teach the way of God truthfully. ²² Now tell us?is it right for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?" ²³ He saw through their trickery and said, ²⁴ "Show me a Roman coin. Whose picture and title are stamped on it?" "Caesar's," they replied. ²⁵ "Well then," he said, "give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God."

I think Jesus is playing with them - his answer is a joke. Let's see . . . Should we pay taxes? Well whose name in on that coin? Caesar you say? Oh well, then, it must belong to him! Give it back!

I don't think he was giving a serious teaching about our obligation to government. I think he was just joking - and we've all missed the joke.

And the second story, less familiar, and very odd. Again it's about paying tax, this time to the Temple - a religious tax!

Matthew 17:24-27 (NLT)
²⁴ On their arrival in Capernaum, the collectors of the Temple tax came to Peter and asked him, "Doesn't your teacher pay the Temple tax?" ²⁵ "Yes, he does," Peter replied. Then he went into the house. But before he had a chance to speak, Jesus asked him, "What do you think, Peter? Do kings tax their own people or the people they have conquered?" ²⁶ "They tax the people they have conquered," Peter replied. "Well, then," Jesus said, "the citizens are free! ²⁷ However, we don't want to offend them, so go down to the lake and throw in a line. Open the mouth of the first fish you catch, and you will find a large silver coin. Take it and pay the tax for both of us."

The stewardship committee has been at it again. They come to Peter - not Jesus, you notice - to see if Jesus is up on his pledge. Peter says He sure is! and gets out of there as quick as he can. In private Jesus tells Peter what he thinks of it all, which isn't much. And I think he plays a joke on Peter - if Peter falls for it. "I tell you what, Peter, my fishing friend. Go down to the lake, throw in a line, catch a fish and see if you can find any money in its mouth. If you do, go pay the tax!"

Well, Jesus used humor all the time to make his points.

And we do too. And sometimes we use humor just to make us laugh. And that's good too. So let's hear a few.

There are a lot of religions around today - some brand new ones, like Frisbeetarianism (n.) The belief that when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

Some religions are very old of course, much older than ours. One of those, Zen Budhism, has a group that meets right downstairs every Tuesday evening. They would I think like this joke: What did the Zen monk say to the hot dog vendor: "Make me one with everything."

It is a well-known idea in Zen, you know, that one should always be mindful. A famous saying goes: "When you eat, just eat; when you sleep, just sleep; when you walk, just walk." And these days we could add, When you multi-task, just multi-task!

I promised that we would have a guest comedian, and I am happy that one of the best joke-tellers I know has agreed to tell us some jokes - Max Bossert.

. . . . .

One-liners are always fun. Like this one:

I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.

You've got to love Woody Allen's strange sense of humor. He writes a lot about God:

How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank.

And he thinks a lot about death:

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve it by not dying.

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering; and it's all over much too soon.

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily lying down.

Puns are a favorite for some of you. Did you hear about the woman who went to France, had way too much French wine, fell out of a window, and found herself in a bodycast? She swore she'd never get plastered in Paris again.

And then there was the woman who had a soft heart for injured birds. She'd take them into her home, and nurse them back to health, sometimes to her husband's chagrin. One day he came home and found an oil-soaked seagull on his recliner, a sick mallard on the couch, and in the kitchen his wife was comforting a shivering wren. He loses it, and starts to yell something, but she cuts him off, saying, "Please dear, not in front of the chilled wren!"

Many of you, I'm sure, know and love the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, written in the 1920s. They are very funny stories - not laugh out loud funny, but it sure makes you smile, and think funny. In Pooh we see ourselves - and can laugh at ourselves.

I want to read a chapter from the book called, Winnie-the-Pooh where Pooh and Piglet go hunting and Nearly Catch a Woozle. In it we see ourselves reflected well: our need to appear very bright when we are very mistaken; to not let on to anyone that we are afraid, when we are; to imagine ourselves engaged in very important things when we are really following our own footsteps, around the same tree we're always going around. But we see in the end something else. We see acceptance of ourselves just as we are; we see grace freely given, and gladly accepted.

Winnie-the-Pooh is Edward Bear, a teddy-bear who belongs to Christopher Robin. In this chapter Pooh meets Piglet - a piglet who lives in the forest with Pooh, and Christopher Robin.

"A Little Talk With Jesus" [Morning Prayer Time]

There is a classic gospel song called "Just a Little Talk With Jesus" that has been recorded by everyone from the Stanley Brothers, to Randy Travis to Brenda Lee. The chorus goes this way,

Now let us have a little talk with Jesus.
Let us tell Him all about our troubles.
He will hear our faintest cry
And He will answer by and by.
Now when you feel a little prayer wheel turning,
Then you'll know a little fire is burning.
You will find a little talk with Jesus makes it right.

Bumper stickers can be pretty funny sometimes. I have one in my office that says, "Honk if you think I'm Jesus!" It must have been a church treasurer who came up with this one: "Tithe if you love Jesus! Anyone can honk!"

Offertory*Prayer (Unison)

#550 I've God Peace Like a River

8 new choir robes are currently needed, due to the addition of several new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.

Benediction . . .