OK, let’s get this out of the way, a number of people are telling me that they have seen the ad in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette of my upcoming speech on humor and health for the Active Living program at Baptist Health.  It has run in the paper under the title “Chuckle Therapy,” and that is bothersome to me on several levels.   There is a great big picture of me, and even though it is a very skinny Stan it is not the best picture.  In fact, it is scary enough that you might say it is more like “Chucky therapy,” as in Chucky that scary doll that they made about ten horror movies about.   Chucky was the scariest doll ever, except for maybe Malibu Barbie.

I have also taken a hit as some have suggested that it is more like “Chuckles Therapy,” AKA “Chuckles the clown,” a one time local buffoon of some import.  People would always run into Chuckles performing at local restaurants on a Tuesday night, or at kid’s night at the Dixie Café or Pizza Hut.  Nothing would ruin a nice meal at the Sizzler faster than that obnoxious clown coming around to the table to pick on you.  He had some kind of little hand puppet that he called “cry baby” that talked to you through the miracle of ventriloquism.  Cry baby was an irritating sort, and he was aptly named.  I wanted to jerk that puppet out of his hand and baptize it in my ice tea.  That would give cry baby something to cry about.  I was always glad when Chuckles moved on to a different table to harass someone else.  I think I heard that Chuckles was a Baptist preacher in disguise.  He was about as funny as a Baptist preacher who accidently voted for the lottery.  He was about as funny as a vote on where to put the bathroom in the new educational building. He was about as funny as I probably am going to be in my chuckle therapy speech.

It wouldn’t be so bad, but now they have my picture and the ad in full 8½ x 11 inch color on the announcement panels in all the elevators at the hospital.  There are about 13 gazillion people riding those everyday, they are the busiest elevator in Arkansas, and the ones who know me have already gotten their money’s worth of chuckle therapy just ragging me about the ads.

Of course it is easy to get your money’s worth when the seminar only cost ten bucks and they are throwing in a box dinner to boot.  I am thinking that means I will get nothing for the seminar, but hey that’s OK, it is what I do. Chuckle therapy.

A second reason the whole idea is problematic is that I was asked to write a bit about my talk, and I came up with a very dignified, highbrow sort of explanation on the science of laughter and the latest research on how the neuro-chemical pathways transmit endorphins that accompany laughter which has a therapeutic effect with a reciprocity on one’s sense of wellness that is inversely proportional to the type of laugher that is being exercised in a way that increases longevity and reverses key deteriorations in one’s health.  The ad company looked at it, labeled it Chuckle therapy and said to take two hearty guffaws and come to the session for a stand-up routine.  It was a little less dignified than someone of my obvious esteem and reputation is so entitled to.  In other words, I look like an idiot in the ad.

All kidding aside, what really does bother me is that they have been running the ad on the obituaries page.  The obituaries page, for heaven’s sake (no pun intended).  There is an equally prodigious ad right next to mine that invites one and all to an informative seminar on cremation.  Cremation! Shoot, I can’t stand competition!  There are people in great angst as to whether to come to chuckle therapy or to hear the latest breakthroughs in cremation.  If I lose out to cremation, it will burn me up (pun intended).  So come to my seminar, I can tell you whatever you want to know about cremation I have seen it done, and I think it might hurt, so forget it!  Don’t get cremated, come to Chuckle Therapy, it won’t hurt as much.  I want so many people to show up that they are dying to get in the session!  I intend to bury the cremation competition!  OK, down boy, I am getting all fired up.

I guess being on the page with the obituaries says a lot about my target audience.  For those of us involved in “Active” Living, the obits is a good place to advertise, because there is a certain segment of the population that reads the obituaries word for word every day. Of course some people read them to make sure that they are not in them.  If I don’t see my name, I am going to assume that I am going to have a good day.  How about it, do you read the obituaries?  For years when I worked on our cancer unit and for hospice I would look at the obituaries because there was always someone I knew on its pages.  Thankfully for my own mental health that is no longer true. 

I did however buck my recent trend and I did read 15 obituaries this week, all of whom are people who died in Iraq found online at iraq.pigstye.net.  Several caught my eye and my heart.  On April 15, while the rest of us were worrying about our taxes, Susan Nelson in Wisconsin got the news that her son had been killed in Iraq. When the military came to her door, she shut the door on them four times before she accepted the reality of their news.  She had just talked to her son, Cpl. Richard Nelson, Saturday–as they do weekly–and he reassured her that his second deployment to Iraq was God’s will. “He said, ‘As much as I don’t care to be here, I know God has a plan,’.” she said. She did not expect to hear about his death two days later.  Cpl. Richard Nelson, 23, of Kenosha Wisconsin died Monday after encountering an explosive device.  He died one week before his first wedding anniversary, which is tomorrow.

Now I am not trying to bum anyone out this morning, but I don’t think we can stick our head in the sand and pretend like nothing is happening over there.  In fact there is a real part of me that thinks that every man and woman in America should be forced to read these obituaries every day. To do so might get this foolishness over a little sooner.  It is far too easy to pretend like the worst is over and insulate ourselves from the great hurt that is this war.

But I also bring it up because it illustrates how fragile our existence is.  We are inescapably caught up in the human condition.  Our security is really an illusion, and our lives are only dust in the wind.  Feel better? Probably not, but before you walk out on me know that as senseless as life can be, how much more senseless is it without God in the equation.  How crazy is it if this is all there is?  And our faith gives us great consolation, and that is where our lectionary text today comes into play.

“Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also. And where I go you know, and the way you know.” I have heard these words read at every single funeral I can ever remember going to.  In fact, I almost always use them myself when I officiate at a funeral or at a graveside service.

These words are purportedly words of comfort; they are words of consolation as they are traditionally interpreted to be a reference to heaven, or to being with Jesus in the afterlife.  The promise of such is meant to offset the harsh realities of life.  Now I have to admit, that my fantasy was shot down a bit when my collegiate pastor told me that the real Greek suggested that the text never says mansion like it does in the King Jimmy, but has instead more of the connotation of an apartment or maybe a condo.  I do not know if that is so as I am allergic to Greek.  But I guess if it is like the condo I had at Orange Beach last October that would be fine, but I am not thrilled about that big apartment house in the sky.  I want my mansion just like the next guy.  It is my treasure that I am building up and am entitled to for being a goody-two-shoe here on terra firma (no comments please from folk who really know me!). 

And then again, maybe that is the problem.  We are mostly motivated to live as Christians because of the promise of having things that we never were justly dealt on this earth.  A place in heaven is more than consolation for the stuff we put up with on earth.  The suffering that we endure here is offset by the promise of the glory that we will someday receive.  It is consolation for what we have to deal with, it makes God seem OK for letting us suffer. It is also a great big fat paycheck. Our view of entitlement extends to heaven, right down to the mansions and streets of pure gold.  We force a materialism on the place that is foreign to the Jesus we otherwise know. You know the one, the one who said blessed are the poor.

I am concerned that all too much of our faith is based on “supernatural theism,” and as such our faith is nothing more than a great big coping mechanism for the problems and predicaments of life.  For those whose God is fashioned in this image, God becomes nothing more than a cosmic rescuer who intervenes in stuff that we can’t hopelessly get right because he himself created us to fail at it in order to create dependence on him.   A supernatural theistic view of God often involves a lot of magical thinking and an unhealthy dose of superstition.  If we properly stroke his ego, then he will favor us.  We are given a sugar stick so we will conform and pay the appropriate homage. And when we are in trouble, we take this theistic rabbit’s foot out of our pockets and claim something that offsets our pain. 

But the main problem I have with this brand of supernatural theism is that it makes our faith totally future, it makes it about fire insurance.  And that futurist view doesn’t help me a lot in the here and now.  I want my future to be eternally secure, and I want our present sufferings to be nothing in compared to our future glories, but I believe that faith has to be more than that.  But then again, maybe that is why we have Christians nine miles wide and only two inches deep.  If our faith is nothing but a mansion in the sky by-and-by, then there is nothing here that we need impact, because God is going to fix it regardless.

I seriously believe that we have to find consolation now and not just from a mansion in glory, where those who don’t think just like we do will burn and be tortured forever and ever amen, for a few lousy sins (the same ones we all do) for a few lousy years on earth.  Where is the goodness in that?  Where is the justice in that?  Faith has to be in the here and now, the Kingdom of God has to involve where we live now, not just after death.

This context of this passage of scripture comes with the news that in someway that the disciples don’t fully understand, that Jesus is leaving them.  It is a goodbye and they are upset.  Jesus consoles them by softening it by saying that well, guys it is OK because the goodbye is not permanent, or at least they would be with him again in some way.  A sort of “till we meet again” kind of goodbye.  The kind you always hope is true, but very seldom is.  Goodbyes are often just that, and sometimes they are significant enough that we grieve.  So the consolation is offered that we will indeed meet in another life when we know full well that we will not meet again in this one. 

  You see, grief is very hard; it is often more than we can endure.  The disciples would grieve after the crucifixion of Christ, but hey, they only had to grieve for three days.  So Jesus begins to prepare them here in our text.  For those of us experienced in college of sorrows, we know that it doesn’t even hit us hard until after several weeks.  In the first three days you are just shocked and stunned into inactivity. The hard work of mourning doesn’t oppress you until your loved one is not there on your day-to-day journey. It is as poet Mark Jarmen laments in “Unholy Sonnets” (a new favorite book of mine):

How long was their grief—so inconsolable

With a friend’s place empty at the table?

Not long at all.  In less than a weekend

All the deadened senses were reawakened

And the blurred world focused on a new vision.

Anyone stricken with real deprivation

Hasn’t hit bottom in three days.

They were spared years of weeping, numbness, haze.

Everything, really.  Ask the truly bereft,

The losers of all hope, the loved and left,

Who know the weight of ashes and cold clay.

These were bumping into the dead one not long after

And breaking bread with him in tears and laughter.

They were celebrating by the third day.

So they did grieve, but it was short lived.  It was not at all like real grief that endures for months or years.  Not like a grief whose devastation doesn’t even entrench itself until a few months down the road. Not like the grief that slams one the hardest when they think that it should have been long since over.  Not like the grief that leaves us cold when we absorb the reality of it permanence over time. Their grief was interrupted by the unspeakable joy that their Jesus really lived.  There was no real goodbye here.  What Good News it must have been for them!  Yet even though their grief would be nothing like, say someone who has lost a life long soul mate of 50 years, they still get the prep of John 14. 

So what did these words that comfort millions in Christendom mean to these guys?  After all, maybe they were like we are.  They heard something they wanted to hear in these words, but not what they needed to hear.  We need to hear that it will pay off for us big time to be Christians after our death, instead of the radical inconvience that comes from a living Christ taking up residence in our lives in the now. 

But who could blame them or us?  The truth is, we are all just looking for a little consolation, and that is all.  That is all we want.  We are not good at ambiguity, we are not good at random evil, and we are not good at grief.  We do whatever we can to short circuit the whole hurt-like-hell grief process.  If I could invent a pill to take to cure grief, I would be richer than Bill Gates. 

You see, we have to insulate ourselves from pain, or otherwise life is nothing but tragic.  Life is going to end badly for every single one of us in one sense of the word. So we have to think that the random and senseless suffering our loved ones endure will be offset and in the big scheme of things is really inconsequential or none of us would have faith or worship a God who allows such.  But the belief in such a reversal of misfortune in the hereafter gets our attention. It doesn’t motivate us to change the world, but it does motivate us to offer a way out to those we care about, and it especially gives us the wherewithal to say goodbye.

There is no escaping the fact that we hate intrinsically saying goodbye, especially when it is permanent.  I am the world’s worst at goodbyes.  I have over the course of 27 years in a major medical complex very poorly said many goodbyes.  Of the thousands I have seen die, I have known more than a few very well.  I have struggled to acknowledge my emotions or attachments.  Heck, this was even true of my reactions to my very own mother who died four years ago this month.  But I also know in my profession it is deadly to get caught up in goodbyes, because goodbyes are far more common than hellos. 

I have also said goodbye poorly to a hundred people (seriously more than a hundred) who have worked with me, studied under me, and in a few cases even ministered to me.  I usually say goodbye by keeping their ID name tags for posterity and therefore keeping a part of them alive, if only their picture.  I have a special drawer in my desk for such, and sometimes my goodbyes have been nothing more that a handshake and a throwing of their name badge symbolically in the drawer and slamming it shut.  Another chapter finished in the book of my life. But sometimes, you just can’t shut the drawer that easily.  Sometimes, someone won’t go in the drawer quietly.

Because there is no escaping the fact that there is something significant about the level of investment that you have in the lives of people who share a journey as intense as the one at Baptist Medical Center.  It is a game of life and death, of being witnesses to good and evil, to great joys and senseless and painful tragedies.  It is a shared journey where relationships transform us and are the only thing that save us.  It is not the promise of a mansion in the sky that keeps me motivated; it is the here and now relationships that redeem me by transforming me in to the image of Christ little-by-little.  I am currently trying to throw a dear friend and colleague in the drawer who just won’t fit in there with the others, and I currently am trying to stuff another one back in there who has been in there for years but keeps climbing out and messing up my desk.

I will let the later out of the drawer tomorrow as I travel to Memphis to meet with Eve, the young lady I spoke of several months ago now in another sermon.  She called me out of the blue on Friday, and wanted to invite me to a prayer service at her church in Memphis for her healing.  You recall that Eve is in her late twenties, and has a serious cancer (note, “All about Eve” is posted on providencecyberchruch.wordpress.com if you want to refresh you memory).  She has been treated with the latest and greatest protocols at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, and now is back home in Mississippi requesting our prayers.  Until I heard form her Friday, I didn’t know how she was doing, or if she was doing.  The cancer has spread to her bones and lungs according to a webpage her sister updates; it was already in her liver when I was reacquainted with her last August.  I said I would drop whatever I was doing Monday (and it is several things) to come and pray for her in the service.  She was silenced by my willingness to drop everything to come to Memphis; she said she was willing to drive to Little Rock for my prayers.  But I said I would be there, and besides, I needed to go to Memphis to eat some Barbeque.  She said she knew the very best place, and if I would come early she would cancel a Dr.’s appointment and go with me.  I said that would be great.

So pray for me tomorrow.  It will not be sad or tough; Eve’s ever-present charisma and great big smile will disarm that.  And we have the hope that there is a miracle somewhere in God’s drawer for Eve, and I am praying that she might not be easy for God to keep in the drawer either.  But I do know that when my car pulls out of the driveway tomorrow morning, I will cross a personal boundary and care for her in a way that I usually protect myself from.  There is a certain level of detachment and professionalism that has allowed me to survive 27 years mostly up to my neck in the tragedies of the human predicament.   I will throw caution to the wind tomorrow, and place love on the line, so pray that it doesn’t slay me.  But even so, pray for Eve. Please, pray for Eve.

But even an old skeptic like me also goes knowing that the consolation of consolations is that there is in fact no pain, no sickness, no grief, no tears in that condo in the sky.  That has to be true for me, for as senseless as life can be, how much more so is it without God in the equation?  God will indeed make the wrongs of this world right, call me naive, call me religiously sappy, but also call me convinced.  I am also convinced that God will indeed do so when we get about the business of the Kingdom, and for me that starts tomorrow at 4 P.M. at the prayer service when I acknowledge that people are the most important key in knowing God.  And how we love is directly proportional to how much of heaven we experience on this earth, and who knows, just maybe in the next as well.

Because what the disciples were grieving over was being left alone, that they were hurt by their goodbyes. Not the fact that Jesus would die, they were clueless on that.  His reassurance was that he would come and get them and stay with them forevermore.  And that there would be no more goodbyes, permanent or not.  And when they realized he was right, they literally turned the world upside down to share the ultimate Good News– that no matter what we go through in life, God is preparing the way.  That no matter how much we suffer, God never leaves us alone.  That no matter how much we want a miracle, the greatest miracle is that in spite of great risks, we love.  And that no matter where we live, God is making his dwelling place at our house. And no matter how many goodbyes we are called upon to make, nothing less that the one who is the resurrection and the life give us his ultimate hello, now and forevermore.  Thanks be to God! Amen.