Welcome; welcome Ladies and Gentlemen and children of all ages! Please sit back, relax and prepare to be amazed and astonished at the one, the only, the Greatest Show on Earth! Yes, right here in this room you will find the most daring high wire balancing acts never seen before in this fair City. Yes, right here among us are some of the finest, the fastest high flying trapeze artists working entirely without a net and the most incredibly agile and attentive jugglers. We have the funniest clowns, in the best costumes with the best pratfalls, we have for your edification the most beautiful and graceful women, the handsomest of men and for your intellectual amusement all manner of individualists, heretics and eccentrics of every description. Welcome to the Greatest Show on Earth, brought to you by the grace of God and the Eternal Universe, welcome to the Universal Human Circus!

There, ladies and gentlemen, in ring number two is the minister! Just look at her, walking one more Sunday across a thin wire over the theological abyss. Will she get across or will she stumble and fall? Will she manage to balance on her nose, just like a trained seal, all those diverse and different theologies? Observe first at the bottom the big blue ball of our Jewish and Christian heritage, and right above it the red flag of Humanism, and then all the other balls: Buddhism, Hinduism, Earth Centered religions, and yes, just about every variation of belief you can possibly think of. Will she stumble, will someone throw her a curve ball and will she totter precariously off balance? Will she drop the ball entirely and watch it helplessly as it falls down, down into the abyss? Ups. There it goes! All the way down in the spotlight, the wrong words said, the meeting she did not make, the time she failed to keep even a semblance of a non-anxious ministerial presence. If she falls will that inter-dependent web be there to catch her?

Oh but she is not the only one. Why this entire room is full of acrobats, jugglers, hobby -horse riders, inner beast and lion tamers, clowns, dancers and fast talkers. And if that should fail to amuse you then just watch over there, our finest jugglers, the large troupe of Working Parents, keeping all those things that must be done in the air. Why we even have daring, courageous, famous Flying Social Activists. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, believe it or not, these people are actually going to attempt to change this world for the better. Look at us and tell me that God or the Universe does not have a sense of humor!

Thank God for the clowns among us who know just the right moment when it is time to put on their red bulbous nose. When the meeting gets far too long, when we begin to take ourselves far too deadly seriously there they ready are there to break the tension. Send in the clowns! Maybe evolution as a sense of humor too! How else would we get a creature like the camel, the duck shape of an aardvark's nose or the gaping mouth and great bulk of a hippopotamus? But since discretion is the greater part of valor, especially for a minister, I will let you, the audience, decide who is who when it comes to rest of our circus artists.

Now don't misunderstand me. I know that all these roles we play in our lives are sometimes plain hard work. Believe me I know all too well that often our lives are not funny at all. And as your minister I will likely take you more seriously than you may, at times, take yourself. Besides I am Scandinavian with all the darkness and seriousness of a winter night deeply embedded in my soul and imagination. I know only too well the dark interiors of an Ingmar Bergman movies and tragic is a natural state for me. Those long winter months without even a glimpse of the sun does take a toll on you.

But I think that it is precisely because our existence so often is tragic that we need the circus. We need to have the mythological trickster remind us that things are not always what they seem. We need to be amused, to be enthralled by the glitter, to wonder at the poetry and magic of such wonderfully clever illusions and to laugh at the humor that all great circus acts give us. The American Indian tribes on whose land we all live have Coyote as their trickster. He is unpredictable, half-divine, half- human and ever curious, a little foolish, vain and yet funny creature. When he becomes too full of himself and takes himself too seriously the Universe teaches him a lesson in humility, just like us.

Well, we Unitarian Universalists also have a trickster about whom we can tell stories: P.T. Barnum, our own Universalist trickster.

Some of you have told me that you would rather not claim him at all. And after I looked him up in my electronic CD dictionary, a magic illusionary act he would probably have greatly enjoyed, I am not too surprised. The man portrayed there is the clever entrepreneur to whom the saying " there is a sucker born every minute" was attributed, a con artist and a publicity hound. But frankly I think that P. T. Barnum has been given a bit of a bum rap! This self proclaimed " Prince of Humbug " has been a victim of his own showmanship. He refused all his life to refute anything written about him because he felt that any publicity was good for his business, no matter how untrue. And when it comes to his personal life he presents a far different picture. He was faithfully and happily married to the same woman, named Charity, for 44 years until her death. He was both an abolitionist and a supporter of women's vote. And while he began his show career by exhibiting a black woman slave named Joice Heth as the supposed childhood nurse of George Washington, no less than 161 years old, he would later push hard and make enemies as he tried to extend voting rights to black free men. This purveyor of fantastic and sometimes fraudulent curiosities such as the famous Freje mermaid, in fact a fish and monkey preserved and sewn together, really wanted to educate the people. His real dream was to create an American version of the British Museum and to do this he needed a great deal of money. This man, who had shown so many fake curiosities, was greatly disappointed when such real attractions as a live shark and a live hippo in huge aquariums failed to attract the crowds that the fake mermaid had. He was a man of many contradictory impulses, a benefactor and exploiter both. And a fervent Universalist who insisted that God was good and that all people would be saved. With his magician's eye he was quick to point out the falsehoods and the illusions that he thought he saw in many other religions. Some of these remarks were deemed so scandalous that they were omitted from several editions of his biography. So what may we learn from this showman? Why do we honor him with a service at all?

Perhaps the most important reason is that we need the Circus or something like it. We need to feel joy. We need to feel wonder. And as repulsive as some of Barnum's curiosities seems today they sprang from that same human need to be amazed, surprised and led into wonder. Remember your very first time at a circus as a child? I certainly do. It was a magical experience. The big tent with the lights and colors and a really loud band with plenty of horns and drums entranced me. Imagine horses wearing feathers on their bowing heads, the elephants holding each others trunks in a long line, the glittering sequins and the graceful bodies of the acrobats, the outrageous and for a child sometimes even scary pratfalls of the clowns. A certain ancient poetry is part of all this pageantry from a time when magic was not digitized and fed into Pentium processors, to appear as modern illusions on our computer screens. The circus had live people, live animals, and earthy smells of horses, elephants, sawdust and cotton candy.

It seems to me that such a show; a fleeting magic illusion is a fitting celebration of the human condition. I have to admit that I rather admire Barnum for the ability to put on such an act. Besides he is such a human trickster figure. He was a real prankster but not I believe a mean one. His human stars, that were called freaks in those days, were treated well and became sort of like rock stars of the time. Such as General Tom Thumb the pint- sized midget who became the toast of Europe and a particular favorite of Queen Victoria.

P. T. Barnum was born on July 5, 1810. His father was a tailor, storekeeper; tavern keeper and country store merchant but made no profit at any of these. Perhaps his drive to make money can be traced to the harsh punishments metered out to those who owed money in his hometown of Bethel. He said in a speech given in 1881: " The whipping post and imprisonment for debt both flourished in my youthful days. Suicides were buried at the crossroads. How blessed we are to live in a more charitable and enlightened age, to enjoy the comfort and conveniences of modern times and to realize that the world is continually growing wiser and better." Oh, we could use his optimism too. Barnum also recalls how he learned about the ways of the world in his father's country store. He told this story about a grocery clerk who was also a church deacon calling down to his shop assistant: " John have you watered the rum? " " Yes, Sir! " " And sanded the sugar?" All done Sir! " " And dusted the pepper? " " Yes, Sir! " " And chicoried the coffee? " "All finished Sir!" " Then come upstairs to prayer! " Hypocrisy was something Barnum would always abhor. He founded the American Museum in New York City, launched a mammoth Circus that still exists today and served four terms in the Connecticut Legislature and one term as mayor of Bridgeport. He brought Jumbo, the famous English elephant, to the US to publicize his museums. The animal and its trainer were stationed on a field near the busy railroad and given a timetable and specific instructions. Whenever a train was scheduled to come by the trainer was to have the elephant plow the field close to the railroad. He advertised this beast as the first agricultural elephant in the United States. He did not count on the response however he was flooded with letters from farmers asking how much work an elephant could do in a day, what and how much it ate and how much one cost and where could they get one? So Barnum wrote back and told the truth: no, elephants were not really good farm animals. It ate it's own weight in hay every day, could not work at all in cold weather and was far too expensive to be real asset on a farm.

For Barnum, despite all his showman ship, had definite limits on what he would do. He gave up drinking alcohol because he felt that as a prominent person he ought to set an example. After this conversion he then employed all his showmanship to the cause of temperance. He was close to several of his age's luminaries, a friend of Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an acquaintance of Emerson's and he attended and supported the churches of those Universalist ministers whom he found to be real or down to earth and not hypocrites. He wrote a pamphlet entitled Why I am a Universalist in which he wrote: " All Christians pray for the salvation of sinners, and yet profess it will never be. The first essential of prayer is that it be in faith. The Universalist church is the only one that believes in its success. I can not believe that in order to complete their paradise the angels need a sight of the evil ones roasting in hell. " His favorite psalm was the twenty-sixth, which declared that " God's mercy endureth forever."

He likely felt a need for that mercy for his life was a mixture of admirable and rather doubtful acts. To survive he became an illusionist who did not hesitate to misrepresent his shows or attractions. The hippo for example was advertised as the ferocious behemoth of the Bible, the great sea monster from the book of Job. He wrote a book entitled The Humbugs of the World in which he wrote: " A little reflection will show that humbug is an astonishing widespread phenomenon in fact almost universal." We all use humbug by his definition. Yet just as Barnum seems to be just the kind of man his critics loves to disparage he states that: " The greatest humbug of all is the man who believes- or pretends to believe- that everybody and every thing are humbugs." Such a man in Barnum's view is worse than a humbug: he is a fool.

Barnum offends people, I think, because he says out loud what many of us fear is true. He represents much of what we consider wrong or superficial about today's materialism. Yet nothing he did can compare or come anywhere near today's world of advertisement where the image is the message and empty slogans are presented as truth. It's the real thing or is it? He began it all, he was the greatest and first showman, a promoter par excellence and yes, he did fool people. None of those qualities are especially nice. And yet, he brought a sense of magic and wonder to many whom would never have listened to, for example, the wondrous voice of Jenny Lind, the Swedish nightingale. His life was a mixture of conflicting tendencies of high ideals and a fierce drive to survive at any cost.

In many ways this Universalist trickster is a mirror not only of his own but of our times as well. He offers us the optimism of his century and is a precursor of the cynicism of our own. His Universal Human Circus is also ours. The mirror he holds up to us shows some great illusions, a great deal of humor, a basic honesty and a shadow side as well. Yet his hope for his children are my hopes as well. At the age of seventy-one he told a journalist: " I believe in the ultimate holiness and happiness of all mankind. ...I prefer to have my children believe as I do - not as I was taught in my youth however - in a God of love, instead of cruelty and vindictiveness..."

The role of the trickster is to teach us humility. He reminds us that many of our vanities are illusions, or as Barnum would say humbug. Yet, with the healing laughter that follows such discoveries we take our real place in this universe. We are teaching ourselves to be human and that is enough. In fact it is plenty. If God is love then what does that say about how we treat this world and each other?

Let us celebrate our human lives! Let give thanks for the clowns! To whom it may concern in this vast and eternal Universe, by whatever name we chose to use, God or Goddess, Ultimate ground of being we thank thee! For the urge toward goodness that drives us toward a better world. For the love and compassion we often find when we least deserve it. For all the wonder and magic we can find in this world. Let us laugh and rejoice together as we affirm the dance of life. To our Universal Human Circus! To Life!

Sermon Quotes: Struggles and Triumphs or Forty Year's Recollections by P.T. Barnum, written by himself, Hartford, J.B. Burr and Company, 1870. Barnum by M. R. Werner, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1923, Humbug, the Art of PT Barnum by Neil Harris, Little, Brown and Company, Boston - Toronto, 1973. P. T. Barnum, America's Greatest Showman by Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr. Philip B. Kunhardt III and Peter W. Kunhardt, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1995.