A young girl with a baby in her arms rides a donkey down the center aisle of Notre Dame Cathedral, and as the prayers end glorifying Mary and the baby Jesus, instead of “amens” from the crowd filling the nave, there are “hee-haws” and sounds of braying. The young boy presiding over it all as the “Lord of Misrule” holds tightly his staff representing his powerful position until the verse of “The Magnificat” is sung, “He has put down the mighty from their seat,” when the staff is snatched away from him. And all the peasants cheer at the mockery of authority.

No wonder that it officially was banned in 1431 by the Roman Catholic Church, “The Feast of Fools.” When the Protestants came along, they did not like it, either. It was a momentary, though annual, revolution, turning things upside down – the children rule, the poor have their say. As Harvey Cox, the Harvard scholar writing about this in 1969, says, “It exposed the arbitrary quality of social rank and enabled people to see that things need not always be as they are.” (The Feast of Fools, p.5)

Dangerous, indeed. The first step in starting a revolution is getting the peoples’ hopes up, having them believe that things could get better. And laughter is hope’s best weapon.

The Feast of Fools emerged gradually over the decades in the churches of northern Europe, most dramatically in France. You may remember that in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame Quasimoto serves as the King of Fools. It usually occurred sometime between Christmas and the Day of Epiphany, January 6th, and bordered on the blasphemous and obscene.     

So, the sermon title for today is not “The Feast of Fools,” but “A Feast of Fools,” and by that I do not intend to focus on the medieval burlesque but on God’s own comic moment. For Paul was right when he started his first letter to the Corinthians with this: “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” (1:25)

What can be more foolish than Elizabeth, an older woman, barren and without hope of ever conceiving, now pregnant, blessing her young cousin, Mary, too young to be pregnant but she is, because Mary will give birth to the savior of the world. Foolish, ludicrous, bizarre, tragic if it goes badly, comic if it turns out well.

And weak. A baby lying in the feedbox of a donkey out behind the inn in Bethlehem . . . why should kings fear that? Why should armies surrender? Why should evil tremble in fear? It’s nothing but a tiny baby boy.

We read the passage earlier from the Gospel of Luke. The young Mary greets the old Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s fetus kicks in the womb. It is John the Baptist already responding to the presence of Jesus, we are encouraged to believe. There will be a peculiar bond between the babies of these two women.

“Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb,” Elizabeth proclaims to Mary, blessed because Mary’s baby will revolutionize the world, that is, be the fulfillment of all the prophesies of hope that have been in the air for centuries.

Mary, for her part, sings a song, a song well-known before her singing of it. It is the song of Hannah generations before her. We will help the choir sing it at the time of our Offertory, but we already have sung it once this morning in our opening hymn. We know the words. “My soul magnifies the Lord for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.” Totally unexpected, that God would grace a poor teenager engaged to the local carpenter with the savior of the world.

Then, the song continues: “He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich empty away.” God, by coming to us in the person of Jesus, the “incarnation,” turns the world upside down, a total revolution, pure and simple. Scattering the proud, throwing the powerful off their thrones, elevating the peasant, filling the starving and starving the “fat cats,” as we might say. That is “revolution.” That is God’s own version of a feast of fools.

We have a tendency to idealize the Holy Family and the manger scene. The crèche that we have on the mantel or the shelf of the bookcase at home freezes that quiet, holy moment for all time. But, read on. Most of us do not like to read on in the gospel because as soon as the shepherds return to their flocks and the magi head out of town by the back road, the sun rises on a furious King Herod. Herod knows a revolution when he hears about one, and this pleasant little birth tableau shakes him to the core of his insanity. So, he orders his henchmen to go out into the countryside and kill every male baby they can find. The slaughter of the innocents, a reaction to a revolution.

The Cathedral in Siena in Italy is a glorious place. There is the art of Donatelli, Bernini, and Michelangelo. There are marble pillars ringed with black bands from floor to ceiling, a majestic carved pulpit, a stunning altar. But the floor, the marble floor, is filled from the entry all the way to the front steps of the chancel with scenes from the Bible. You walk on the biblical testimony of God. And in the north transept there portrayed in several square feet of brutality is “The Slaughter of the Innocents,” babies being torn from their mothers’ arms, soldiers with swords drawn to hack and hue. You can approach the altar by by-passing the north transept, but to do so obscures the truth so clear to Herod – the birth of this child changes everything. All bets are off, all assumptions are suspect, all structures of authority are toppled. To miss that is not to understand Mary’s song, not to appreciate God’s gift.

There is a play that I love which I saw at “The Goodman Theatre” years ago, “Red Noses,” by Peter Barnes. One critic wrote that it is the funniest play ever written about the Black Death. For three years in the middle of the 14th Century the plague ravaged Europe. A full one-third of the population died. Father Flote, the priest who is the protagonist of “Red Noses,” prays to God for a revelation. “Lord, show me what I must do. Trees wither, fixed stars fall, darkness swallows the world, and the dead are no longer counted. . . . There’s no pity, faith, or love left, when the breath, touch, or look of a loved one is pestilential, and the suckling babes drink up death instead of mother’s milk.” Not a promising start to a rollicking comedy.

Father Flote gets his answer from God in a slapstick moment of bludgeoning entanglement with a group of Flagellants. (This is better seen than described.) What Flote hears as God’s voice actually is the laughter of people around him as they see this silliness, and he prays, “I now know what I must do. Heaven’s to be had with my humiliation. God wants peacocks, not ravens, bright stars, not sad comets, red noses not black death. He wants joy. I’ll not shrink from the burden, Lord. Only turn away thy wrath. Give us hope.” (Act 1, sc. 1)

So, he goes out and assembles a band of performers as politically incorrect as you can get – a blind juggler who can catch nothing, a team of one-legged dancers, a stand-up comedian with a speech impediment, a mute poet, and a raunchy nun who clearly has left some of her vows behind. And they travel around and delight the people, giving them a ray of hope in the otherwise unrelenting darkness of pestilence and death. Father Flote calls it a “daily Fools’ Feast.” They are Christ’s Clowns, God’s Zanies. “We’ll sing, dance, and tell funny tales and all around us people will laugh and up there in Paradise the saints will interrupt their endless hosannas and laugh, too. . . . And the Supreme Judge himself will turn aside from sad pleas and soul-breaking prayers to hear the unfamiliar sound of joy and, perhaps, He will forgive His wrath hearing His people praise Him in laughter.” (Act 1, sc.2)

God may be laughing along with the Red Noses, but who does not find it funny? Some of the other priests. One of them pleads to the Pope, “”He is encouraging rebellion, Your Holiness. Laughter produces freedom. It’s against all authority, ripping off the public mask to show the idiot face beneath. When we’re lifted to joy, we’re taken out of the world and glimpse the world as it could be. Only God can be trusted to give us those delights.” (Act 1, sc.6)

But Father Flote gets the Pope’s blessing . . . until after the Black Death has ended. While it was at its height, the pontiff saw the Red Noses as a distraction, keeping peoples’ minds off how bad things really were. But, “now the plague has passed, we must immediately limit, tame, subordinate, rule. Submission and belief, the twin poles of the world must be restored.” (Act 2, sc.3) Ultimately, that leads to the killing of Father Flote and all the others, another slaughter of the innocents. A feast of fools, even God’s feast of fools, threatens the powers-that-be and the way things are.

God’s feast is offered here in this sanctuary every time that we gather to worship, most notably here at the altar when we celebrate Holy Communion. In this season it also is offered across the street in the manger scene. This year, I am told, the baby Jesus is bolted to his crib so that no one will steal him, as in past years. People will stand there every day, and while they hear the “Halleluiah Chorus” playing in the background, they will gaze upon the scene, the idyllic, timeless scene of the Christ Child lying in the cradle, with an extended family of shepherds and kings looking on.

But will they see the revolution depicted before them? The crèche turns everything upside down and calls to accountability the courthouse in whose shadow it stands. “Is justice being done in there? Does mercy temper the law?”

The manger cries out to Block 37, “What is for sale here? Is it worth the price? Does it serve a purpose beyond one’s desire to acquire?”

The Baby Jesus calls out to Channel 2, “Are you telling the truth in a way that ennobles, that uplifts, that makes this a city more reflective of the City of God?”

The light of Christ turns to the west and shines a pure spotlight on City Hall. “Anything done in the shadows will be revealed in the light of a new dawning day; all actions done within the precincts of City Hall will be exposed. So, do only that of which you will be proud.”

And then, the holy family of the public square judges us, the Church. Are we faithful to our calling? Are we sacrificial in our love? Are we forgiving in our relationships? Are we inclusive in our community? Are we brave in our witness? For us, too, the Church, Mary’s song is not a sweet lullaby but a stark challenge.

A feast of fools of God’s own making . . . that is what we have in the birth of Jesus. Elizabeth blesses Mary; Mary sings God’s praises. And we embrace the upheaval that Jesus brings to the world. “A world ruled by seriousness alone is an old world, a grave, a graveyard world,” says Father Flote, in heaven waiting for his audience with God. “Mirth makes the green sap rise and the wildebeest run mad. Not the mirth born of anxiety and fear but the mirth of children and sages, the laughter of compassion and joy.”
(Act 2, epilogue).

May the mirth of children and sages, the laughter of compassion and joy, be ours today. Amen.