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You should know up front, I am an ex-lawyer, turned standup comedian and minister.  It’s ok, you can laugh.  It is a pretty strange combination I admit.  I like to think of it as following your dream.  Others consider it a personality disorder.   Whatever you consider it—it wasn’t easy getting here.  Like getting through seminary for example.  I can tell you my professors were definitely not prepared to teach theology to a comedian.  And they SURE weren’t ready to teach Hebrew to a southerner.  Baruk Atah Adonai…y’all. 

But as strange as they thought the combination of humor and religion was – I knew deep down that there was a powerful connection between the two.  In fact, I always said you could laugh your way to grace.  And you know what?  I was right.

Over the years, working as a minister and a comedian, I have discovered something quite amazing:   if you can laugh at yourself, you can forgive yourself.  And if you can forgive yourself, you can forgive others.  And isn’t that grace in a nutshell?  A generosity of spirit?  A capacity to forgive?   

Let’s just take a minute and look at each of these statements.  First, if you can laugh at yourself, you can forgive yourself.  I think one of the biggest problems we all face is keeping perspective.   We carry 3700 page to-do lists and then beat ourselves up when there is not a little check by every single item.  We spend our lives trying to manage and control and accomplish everything.  We create outrageous expectations for ourselves – expectations of who we should be, who we must be.  Well, I have news for us all.  It doesn’t matter how many checks are on the to-do list.  It doesn’t matter how efficient, or accomplished or important we have become.  In the end we are all human. 

There is a wonderful story about the Arch Bishop of Canterbury taking a train trip out of London.  He boarded the train, but what he didn’t know is that he had boarded a car that was also transporting a number of mental health patients from a local hospital.  As the train pulled out, a hospital attendant entered the car and began to take a head count.  “One, two, three…” when he got to the Bishop he said “ah, who are you?”  The Bishop responded brightly, “Oh I am the Arch Bishop of Canterbury!”    “Ah hun” said the attendant, “four, five, six…”      

In the end we are all human.  And when we start to think about our crazy efforts to feel in control, and accomplished, and perfect… it’s kinda funny really.   Look, it doesn’t matter how much control, or money, or accomplishments we may achieve in this lifetime, the bottom line is this:  the size of our funeral will always depend solely on the weather that day.   And the moment we realize that, the moment we can step back and laugh at our crazy expectations and our need to make everything perfect, that’s the moment we find a glimmer of forgiveness for ourselves.

If you can laugh at yourself, you can forgive yourself.  And if you can forgive yourself, you can forgive others.  Jesus, like many other world religious traditions, taught that we should love our neighbor.  Remember the story in Luke?  A lawyer questions Jesus (of course it is the lawyer that has to be the pain) and asks “Lord, what do I have to do to receive eternal life?”  Jesus, with his wonderful sense of humor, basically says, “um, its written in the law… you are a lawyer… you tell me.”   And the lawyer thinks and then says:  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself."

It’s a deceivingly simple formula.   Love your neighbor as yourself.  Or as W. H. Auden put it “love your crooked neighbor, with your own crooked heart.”  However you say it, doing it is not always that easy.  Love your neighbor?  What if your neighbor is a telemarketer!   I mean it’s a hard commandment.   But, you know…it shouldn’t be, for telemarketer or not, in the end we really aren’t that different from one another. 

One of the great accomplishments of this century is the mapping of the human gene.  And you know what scientists found in this discovery?  We are all 99.9% the same.  Doesn’t matter what our religion is; what color our skin is; what our ethnic origin is – we’re 99.9% genetically the same.  Which means all our warfare, and killing, and cruelty, and inhumanity– is about that .01% difference.  Yet, we just can’t let go of – we can’t forgive that .01%.  

The Buddhist teacher and author Jack Kornfield once offered a story about one ex-prisoner of war who asks another, have you forgiven your captors yet?  The other POW answers “No, never.”  The first POW thinks for a minute and then says, “well, then it seems they still have you in prison, don’t they?”

For some reason, we’d rather stay prisoners of our inability to forgive. For some reason, we want to drag that heavy, unnecessary baggage with us.  Like my Dad who used to carry all this extra stuff in his trunk of his car.  He had emergency flashers, and chains and snow tires and blankets…’cause you never know, he might hit a blizzard--a blizzard in the .7 miles drive from his office to our home… our home in Charlotte, NC. 

It is very hard for us to let go of that .01%.   Yet, one of the things that will loosen our grip the fastest is laughter.  When we laugh with someone, whether it is a friend, a stranger or an enemy, our worlds overlap for a tiny, but significant moment.   Its then we begin to see the commonalities, rather than the differences.

A good friend of mine is a standup Rabbi.  After 9/11, he went on the road with a standup Islamic comedian—to synagogues, mosques, churches, college campuses, to open an interfaith dialogue on healing.  I had the privilege of appearing in some of their shows.  And it was amazing to watch, for through humor, they were able to talk about things—deal with things— that no one else had been able to.  And why was that?  Because we all laugh in the same language.

If you can laugh at yourself, you can forgive yourself.  And if you can forgive yourself, you can forgive others.  And its not just “other people” that we need to forgive.  Sometimes we need to forgive God.  There are times in this life where we get hit with things—a cancer diagnosis, the death of a loved one, a divorce—things that can bring us to our knees; things for which we sometimes blame God.  But, laughter allows us to see a different view.  As Rev. Calvin Butts, pastor of the Abyssian Baptist Church said, “The will of God is never seen in tragedies.  The will of God is seen in our response to tragedy.”  

I lost my Dad a few years ago.  Course, I was the one that had to clean out the trunk of his car.  But, I remember sitting with him in one of his final days.  He was in a lot of pain-- in and out of consciousness.  Well, at least until the new nurse came in. She was about… seven?  Looked kinda like a Dallas cowboys cheerleader.  All of a sudden, my Dad sits up.  Starts smiling.  Fixing his hair.  (Did I mention he was 90?)  She then says to him, “Mr. Sparks, I am here to check your catheter.”   I immediately got up to allow them some privacy, and as I was walking out of the room, I heard him exclaim in a heavy southern accent, “well, honey, you just make yourself to home!”

In any place of tragedy, we have two choices.  We can sit in a place of blame and anger—refusing to forgive God and everyone else we can think of.  Or we can transcend to a place of gratitude and peace.  My Dad could easily have chosen to be angry and unforgiving—dragging everyone around him into that place as well.  But, he chose a different route—he chose to share joy and healing through laughter. 

Laughter is the tool that brings us perspective and allows us to forgive ourselves.  Laughter is the tool that allows us to break through that .01% of our differences and see the common bonds that join us as brothers and sisters. Most of all, laughter is the tool that empowers us to transcend suffering and blame. 

The philosopher Albert Camus said, “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that there was within me an invincible summer.”   We have all been given that holy gift of an invincible summer within.  It is the gift of joy.  To choose joy over blame is one of the most courageous of all human acts.  It is also one of the easiest.  For it centers around one simple act:  Laughing your way to Grace.  Amen.