The First Parish in Bedford Unitarian Universalist 75 The Great Road, Bedford, Massachusetts 01730 On the Common 781-275-7994

“Simpson Family Values”

A sermon by Rev. John E. Gibbons

delivered on Sunday, October 28, 2001

at The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts

 

 

It was denounced by George Bush the Elder. Barbara Bush called it dumb. William Bennett, the former Education Secretary, pronounced its values questionable.

 

Sounds like I’m talking about something you might be interested in, eh?

 

Well, it was The Simpsons that was the subject of their wrath and The Simpsons is an animated TV show – a cartoon – which is now in its 13^th season. At the outset, The Simpsons seemed like Exhibit A for what someone once called “humanity’s insatiable appetite for outrageous stimulation.” It was, and remains, full of clever, crude, blunt, sacrilegious (communion, in one episode, is described as “sacrelicious”), it’s full of savvy, cynical, smart-aleck…indubitably questionable humor. My mother, who forbade me to watch the Three Stooges, would surely have disapproved of The Simpsons and yet The Simpsons humor is sacreliciously better.

 

What is passingly strange is that The Simpsons have more recently become the subject of considerable establishment approval: there is a new book by a conservative evangelical author titled, “The Gospel According to the Simpsons,” and there are approving articles in many religious periodicals. The Christian Century in a cover story, for example, asks if The Simpsons are TV’s Most Religious Family? In contrast to most of TV, there is religious content in nearly 70% of The Simpsons’ shows.

 

There are, however, many dangers, toils and snares in preaching about popular culture – one of which is that many good Unitarian Universalists who watch only public TV or none at all, know nothing of what you’re talking about.

 

I am also reminded of the comment by one of our parishioners, at the time when there was discussion about a V-chip that would block objectionable programming, that he would only approve if it succeeded in blocking the very explicitly religious show, Touched By An Angel.

 

Who are The Simpsons? They live in mythical Springfield and there’s Homer, the show’s awesomely underachieving Everyman who moans about going to church (“What if we pick the wrong religion?” he asks. “Every week we’re just making God madder and madder?”). Homer is bald and overweight, with a weakness for beer, pork chops, television, and donuts. He works as a safety inspector at the local nuclear power plant.

 

Homer believes that if God wanted people to worship for an hour a week, God would have made the week an hour longer.

 

God, at one point, leaves Homer a note reading, “IOU one brain, (signed) God.”

 

Another time, God appeared to Homer in a dream. God had, Homer said, “Perfect teeth. Nice smell. (He’s) a class act, all the way.”

 

Homer once asks God about the meaning of life, and God replies with the old joke: He can’t reveal the meaning of life until Homer dies. When Homer says he can’t wait that long, God asks, “You can’t wait six months?”

 

Homer’s prayers are often to “thank God for nuclear power which has yet to cause a single, proven fatality, at least in this country.” At Thanksgiving he prays, “We especially thank you for nuclear power, the cleanest, safest energy source there is, except solar, which is just a pipe dream.”

 

As for his family, Homer once offers thanks “for the occasional moments of peace and love our family’s experienced…well, not today. You saw what happened. O, Lord, be honest! Are we the most pathetic family in the world or what?”

 

Homer’s wife is Marge, a long-suffering, stay-at-home mom with a towering beehive of blue hair. Marge’s prayers are often in the form of a bargain: “Dear God, this is Marge Simpson. If you stop this hurricane and save our family, we will be forever grateful and recommend you to all our friends.” During a nuclear meltdown at Homer’s plant, Marge prays, “Dear Lord, if you spare this town from becoming a smoking hole in the ground, I’ll try to be a better Christian. I don’t know what I can do. Ummmm…oh, the next time there’s a canned food drive, I’ll give the poor something they actually like, instead of old lima beans and pumpkin mix.”

 

Bart (an anagram for “brat”) is their ten-year-old son. Bart is the selfish but good-natured bad-boy, modeled in part on Eddie Haskell from Leave it To Beaver, the kid that gets away with everything. When Homer prays before a meal, “Rub a dub, dub, thanks for the grub,” Bart speaks the unspeakable: “Dear God, we paid for all this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing.” In saying what other people only think, Bart is more honest than most.

 

Lisa is a good-hearted and gifted eight-year-old – often the show’s conscience. She supports the poor, the powerless and the downtrodden; she is critical of the rich. She questions conventional wisdom, regardless of unpopularity. Asked to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” before a football fame, she uses the occasion to announce, “Before I sing the National Anthem, I’d like to say that college football drains funds that are badly needed for education and the arts.”

 

Lisa’s favorite time of week is that immediately after church on Sunday, because it represents the longest time until church resumes the following week!

 

And then there is Baby Maggie who does not speak and is rarely seen without her pacifier.

 

There are other characters: Ned Flanders, the evangelical next door. And Mr. Burns, the town’s richest man, the owner of the nuclear power plant and the show’s most sinister character. He warns children at the elementary school that religion is one of the “demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business. When opportunity knocks, you don’t want to be sitting in some phoney-baloney church or synagogue.”

 

And then there’s my favorite, Pastor Timothy Lovejoy of the Springfield Community Church, the First Church of Springfield. He’s described as “a pan-denominational windbag.”

 

(And if you were thinking that The Simpsons popularity has peaked, you should visit a store like Newbury Comics as I did yesterday. There are dozens of Simpsons paraphernalia items – Simpsons band-aids, Simpsons Monopoly, Simpsons CD’s and playing cards, and, for $24.95, a talking doll of Pastor Lovejoy, saying such things as “Not caring about people isn’t all there is to being a minister!” – along with a scale model of the pulpit from the First Church of Springfield. I was amazed!

 

In front of Pastor Lovejoy’s church is a marquee that changes with schedules and each week’s sermon titles. For example:

God, the Original Love Connection;

Evil Women in History: from Jezebel to Janet Reno;

Private Wedding, Please Worship Elsewhere;

No Shoes, No Shirt, No Salvation;

Today’s topic: He Knows What You Did Last Summer;

Next Sunday: the Miracle of Shame;

or the equally provocative,

There’s Something About the Virgin Mary.

 

Lovejoy’s sermons are typically something along the line of “May we burn in foul smelling fire forever and ever.” Homer tends to sleep during the sermons but once, jarred awake, he shouts, “Change the channel, Marge!” Lovejoy complains that his parishioners are smug: “Today’s Christian thinks he doesn’t need God. He thinks he’s got it made. He’s got his hi-fi, his boob tube, and his instant pizza pie.” Hmmm. Not too off the mark.

 

To keep people awake, he sometimes resorts to desperate measures, including sound effects like ambulance sirens and bird calls, and his own rendition of the song, “The Entertainer.” Once he offers a baby-sitting discount for anyone who can recall the theme of the sermon he has just finished preaching, but the congregation stares blankly and no one responds with the correct answer, “Love.”

 

The Simpsons gives equal offense to every faith. When Marge asks Pastor Lovejoy if he will conduct last rites for gravely ill Grandpa Simpson, Lovejoy responds, “That’s Catholic, Marge. You might as well ask me to do a voodoo dance.” Driving home from their nondescript Protestant church service, Bart says, “I’m starving, Mom, can we go Catholic so we can get communion wafers and booze?” “No one is going Catholic,” replies Marge, “three children is enough, thank you.”

 

Krusty the Klown provides the Jewish foil, and in one episode on a visit to New York Homer mistakes several Hasidic rabbis – black-clad and bearded – for the Texas rock group ZZ Top who favor the same attire plus sunglasses. And there’s Apu, the Indian Hindu who runs the Kwik-E-Mart. “You only live once,” someone says. Apu says, “Speak for yourself.” Next to Catholics, however, Unitarians are the most satirized. “If that’s the one true faith,” says Homer, “I’ll eat my hat.” Playing a videogame called, “Billy Graham’s Bible Blaster,” the idea is to convert heathens by shooting them with a Holy Book fired from a Bible gun. When a heathen gets hit, he turns into a conservatively dressed man with a halo. “Got him!” says Bart. “No,” says a friend, “you just winged him and made him a Unitarian.” When someone steals the money from the offering plate (a crime later found to have been committed by Bart), Pastor Lovejoy’s wife sees the empty plate and she shouts “Everyone turn around and look at this!” “What is it?” someone asks, “a Unitarian?” Interestingly and wisely, Muslims are pretty much off-limits because, according to the writers, “we’re not Muslim and we’re not sure what might be offensive.”

 

Family life in the Simpsons is usually messy. Selfishness abounds: Homer forgets Marge’s birthday and then compounds the oversight by rushing out to get her a belated present: a bowling ball drilled to fit his fingers, with his name inscribed – which he then accidentally drops in her birthday cake. There are ethical dilemmas large and small. Problems with school, problems with teachers (for her part, Bart’s teacher Edna Krabappel, finds herself in hell in one episode but observes that eternal torment in the underworld “beats teaching.”) There are also problems at work, there are temptations to steal, to cheat, to have affairs. On a drunken binge in Las Vegas with Ned Flanders, the two men mistakenly marry cocktail waitresses. (Hey, it happens.) Marge, as well, is in one episode infatuated with another man. She comes to a fork in the road, one direction heading to the nuclear power plant where her husband works; the other to Fiesta Terrace where her would-be lover is waiting. Marge hesitates, turns around, and in a takeoff on the closing scene from An Officer and a Gentleman, Marge walks into the plant and up to a surprised Homer. She dons a hard hat and Homer carries her out, to the applause of his co-workers, and he tells them proudly, “I’m going to the backseat of my car with the woman I love, and I won’t be back for ten minutes!”

 

So what’s it all mean? In laughing about all this with a parishioner this week, the laughing stopped and she said, “Well, what’s going to be the point of this sermon?” Good question, I admitted. In the end, the values are essentially conventional and decent but the show does acknowledge that nothing – family life especially – comes easily.

 

Matt Gruening, the creator of The Simpsons, says he first became curious about religion when, on a Boy Scout trip, he stole a Gideon Bible form a motel and underlined all the dirty parts. “Plus,” he says, “there’s lots of stuff that’s just weird. For instance, there’s a parable about Jesus driving demons into a herd of pigs, and the pigs jump off a cliff. I wanted to know what the pigs did to deserve that.” It’s clear by the great many biblical allusions – some muddled, some strange, and some just made up – that Gruening eventually got around to reading the whole thing.

 

Gruening also says, the Simpsons message is that “your moral authorities don’t always have your best interests in mind. Teachers, principals, clergymen, politicians – for The Simpsons, they’re all goofballs, and I think that’s a great message for kids.”

 

So my meaning, my point, my take-home message this morning is in part that: we’ve all got to find ways to stay interested in life, to underline the dirty parts and wonder at all that’s weird. Watch out – there are a lot of goofballs out there.

 

Now I know that’s not going to make the headlines of the World’s Most Innovative Religious Messages, but I think you’re doing OK if you underline the dirty parts and wonder at all that’s weird about this life and watch out for goofballs.

 

For all their flaws, the Simpson’s love each other. And no matter how acerbically it skewers human pretensions and social ills, “there’s a kindly spirit about the show.” “Some how there is goodness at the end of every show.”

 

And as for family values, let’s take off our hats to all our families that are yearning, struggling, hoping, despairing, on-the-brink, just getting by, not-feeling-very-good-about-it, getting up each and every morning and doing the best they can – even when they drop the bowling ball in the birthday cake – and maybe, somehow, sometime, once-in-a-while making some sort of, well, love. And laughter. There isn’t any one prescription for living in families; it can all be pretty tragic and it can all be pretty comic; and for sure it all ain’t pretty. Give yourself and the ones around you a little slack for being the tragi-comic human beings we are.

 

In the story about the father who broke up in laughter when he put on the rain-soaked hat, it was said that his laughter was “a raw explosion that came from somewhere deep within him, a force he had always kept dammed up.” And perhaps that is just another description of what it means to be religious: to release – in laughter and in love – that which we so often keep dammed up. This is the day – such as it is – that the Lord hath made. May we rejoice and be glad in it.