G.K. Chesterton, writer of the "Father Brown" stories said that the reason angels can fly is that they take themselves lightly. Either he or someone else added that Satan fell from grace through the force of gravity. Sayings like that, and my own conviction that we’re enriched by being able to laugh at ourselves, encourage me to launch into a playful talk, rejoicing in life's absurdity more than its seriousness. There are anecdotes I like to tell, and I'm giving myself permission to tell them today -- I hope you'll respond later with some of your own, because the telling of jokes, the finding of funniness, can be a spiritual exercise. As "Reader's Digest" puts it, laughter is the best medicine.

But I have to start with something that didn't seem funny at the time. Once before, in another congregation a few years ago, I spoke on a similar theme at almost the same time of year and I happened to mention to a couple of friends that I wanted to somehow link foolishness with the Spring Equinox. I said this was going to be a challenge, since the Equinox is all about balance -- the equality of daytime and nighttime and so on -- and April Fools Day is just the opposite, about imbalance and disproportion and absurdity. One of my friends said yes, but he could see a connection: think how the weather can fool you at this time of year, he said; you think it's Spring because the calendar says so and then, bam, it's back to winter again. That friend was right. Just after our conversation I had an experience which brought home to me in a dramatic way how the weather can fool you.

It was March 20th, the day of the Equinox that year. I had been to the Southern Ontario Ministers meetings in Toronto, then to Dundas, and was driving back to the Windsor area. There had been some snow in the night, but road conditions didn't seem too bad and traffic was just a little slower than usual. About half-way along the 403 which connects Brantford with the 401, the car ahead of me slowed and slithered very slightly. I slowed in turn -- and went into an uncontrollable skid which took me three times from one shoulder of the highway to the other. I was zig-zagging right across the two lanes, with the normal amount of morning traffic behind me at highway speed. It was a situation in which the most likely outcome by far was a major pileup of crashed cars, and the second most likely that I would end in one of the deep ditches on either side. My only conscious thought, as far as I can remember, was "This is IT." Meaning Death.

No life flashing before my eyes, no light at the end of a tunnel. Just, "This is IT." Then, as I hit the right shoulder after the third time across, the car started to swing right round and I realized that nothing had hit me yet and thought that maybe I could avoid the ditch if I pulled hard to the right now that the shoulder was giving some traction. I came to a stop exactly facing oncoming traffic, but on the shoulder, alive and completely unhurt!

I sat there shaking for a few minutes, then started the car again, waited for a moment when there were no oncoming cars and managed to turn in the right direction again and resume my trip. The rest of the drive was pretty much of a nightmare, and I've never seen so many vehicles off the road, but I spent the whole time being utterly amazed that I was alive -- it seemed incredible that I'd neither been hit nor caused any accident nor ended upside-down in the ditch as so many had. I was aware as almost never before of the sheer, absurd, randomness of life and the fact that we can never be sure that we'll live another day or hour or minute. I could never have imagined a more vivid collision of the Spring Equinox and April Fool's Day: I had heard "You're dead" with complete certainty at one instant and seconds later "Just fooling," and although it wasn't exactly funny, I could see that it was the surprise kind of stuff of which all jokes are made.

So I no longer have much difficulty in seeing the link between the Springtime and Foolery, between the supposed steady balance of day and night and the obvious unsteadiness of any Fool's Day. I can see that the joke is built right into our readiness to trust that things are rational and predictable and manageable, and into our belief that living wisely and sensibly will protect us against absurdity. It won't, and sometimes the best response to life is to steer right into the skid, which I was unable to do because I haven't practised it enough. I really should practise it more; perhaps we all should!

In this resolve, I'm supported by many of the world's great teachers. Jesus spoke many times of reversing the priorities which are usually considered wise. "If you lose your life, you'll find it," he said, and "It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God," and (in one of my favourite sayings, from Matthew 6 -- the Sermon on the Mount) he tells us not to be anxious about our security, even if we're not working:

Consider the flowers of the field: they toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
I don't suppose many people would be inclined to take that saying very seriously these days. But Jesus seems to have meant it.

St. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, was even more explicit about the value of foolishness. He said,
Divine folly is wiser than human wisdom, and divine weakness stronger than human strength. My friends, think what sort of people you are, whom God has called. Few of you are people of wisdom, by any human standard; few are powerful or highly born. Yet, to shame the wise, God has chosen what the world counts folly, and to shame what is strong, God has chosen what the world counts weakness.

Shakespeare said, in King Lear, "When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools." And in Twelfth Night he said,
This fellow's wise enough to play the fool,
And to do that well craves a kind of wit.

George Bernard Shaw asked in his play, Candida:

Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about?

With permission from all these people, I'm going to give you a smorgasbord of pieces for the day after April Fools Day, some of which you'll find funny and some probably not -- because we're each foolish in our own way. I hope you hear one or two which illuminate some aspect of life for you -- most humour has that potential if it’s any good at all. Here goes (and for most of these I'm indebted to humour writer Dave Barry, who has great spiritual insight, I think):

First, here are some thoughts about how our individual daily lives are affected by the government and social systems within which we live.

You should get a thorough physical examination at least once a year, unless you have to pay for it personally, in which case you should get one every eight years or whenever you think something is really wrong with you, whichever comes first.

I don't want to alarm anybody, but there is an excellent chance that Earth will be destroyed in the next several days. Congress is thinking about eliminating a federal program under which scientists broadcast signals to alien beings. This would be a large mistake. Alien beings have atomic blaster death cannons. You cannot cut off their federal programs as if they were merely poor people.

Most government Social Programmes are aimed at Helping the Poor. Now the problem poor people have is that they don't have enough money for food, housing or medical care. The simple, obvious, efficient way for the government to help them is to give them money so they can buy these things. So that is not how the government does it.

Instead of simply giving money to poor people, the government Administers Programs for them. You've got your food programs. You've got your housing programs. You've got your health programs. And so on. This way you get lots of administrators. You also guarantee that poor people remain poor, since they're so busy being administered they don't have time to work.

And here are a few thoughts about young people and about modern life.

Many of you young persons out there are seriously thinking about going to college. Well, no: the only things you young persons think seriously about are loud music and sex. But trust me: these are closely related to college. Basically, philosophy involves sitting in a room and deciding there is no such thing as reality and then going to lunch. You should major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of drugs.

We're going to have to do something about children's television. Today's children watch shows like "Sesame Street," which teach them that the world is full of friendly interracial adults and cute puppets and letters that form recognizable patterns. This is, of course, not true. When I was a kid in New York my friends and I watched shows like "Captain Video," which taught us that the world was full of evil forces trying to destroy the earth, which turned out to be absolutely correct.

Groundhog Day is an old American tradition ... According to the tradition, on this day Mr. Groundhog comes out of his hole and looks around for media representatives who make a major fuss about it. It is one of those things that only media people care about. Another one of those things is the government of Canada.

There was a time when average citizens could get together and, in one afternoon, build an entire barn. Yes! A barn! Can you imagine average people doing that today? Not a chance! They'd spend weeks debating the membership and organizational structure of the Barn Architect Selection Committee, whose members would then get into a lengthy squabble over the design of the logo to appear on their letterhead.

The small Canadian town of Andrew recently, with the help of a provincial tourism grant, installed the world's largest fiberglass duck. The Edmonton Journal says it has a wingspan of 7.2 meters and weighs one tonne. The story quotes town manager Albert Holubowich as saying that the residents chose the duck as their symbol because Andrew is near a duck sanctuary. "It was either the duck or a chicken," he says, "but a chicken has no connection or bearing to the village."

Pornography is like tooth decay, eating slowly away at the molars of our morals, and if it is not stopped we will wind up as a toothless nation, gumming at the raw meat of international competition while the drool of decadence dribbles down our collective chin and messes up the clean tablecloth of our children's futures.

Well, that's all I want to give you from Dave Barry. I find his kind of humour allows us to feel at the same time included in the absurdities and able to separate ourselves from them by our laughter. We're part of this crazy world, a world of hungry people in which many of us are obssessed with dieting because we have so much food available to us -- but we have a chance at breaking the pattern simply because we can look at it and laugh at our folly. I find it important to be able to do this with all aspects of our life, from the most trivial to the most important -- even loss and pain and death can be the subjects of humour, even our religious faith, even being a Unitarian Universalist. Laughing at ourselves and our human condition helps us to see it all in perspective, helps us to realize that in Shakespeare's words, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep." Shakespeare put great wisdom into the mouths of the fools and clowns in his plays; he knew that wisdom is not a matter of how seriously you seem to talk but of how you can see the big picture while tied up in the details.

On these lines, with the understanding that laughing at ourselves does not destroy our caring for one another, or our caring about our spiritual life, and may in fact increase it, let me end with a brief reading from a UU minister, David Rankin, called "Manna from the Mailbox", which consists of notes he's received from his parishioners at various times:

Dear Pastor:
I hate churches and ministers! Could I see you on Thursday?

Dear Reverend:
I am pregnant. My husband is cheating with another woman. I know -- because he is not the father of my child. Could you help?

Dear Sir:
Politics has no place in the pulpit. When you said that in choosing between Al Gore and George Bush we should vote for the best man, you were obviously attacking the Republicans.

Dear Rev. Rankin:
I am moving to San Francisco. I need an apartment, a good paying position in insurance or advertising, and a park for my dogs. You don't know me, but my father was a Unitarian in Massachusetts.

Dear David:
Could you speak louder on Sunday mornings? Those of us who like to sit in the back can’t hear you.

Jesus said, "Except you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." May we always be as little children in our readiness to laugh at life's folly, to play the fool ourselves on occasion, and to giggle at a good joke. And finally, let's consider that a very wise observer has said: What makes a good sermon is that it has gripping beginning and a satisfying ending and that they're very close together. Amen.