Holy Humor

Perhaps this service seems a bit off to you so far. Why are we telling jokes? Maybe it feels a bit irreverent or even a bit silly. Maybe too much laughter should be reserved for other places, you know, outside of the sanctuary.

But sometimes we just can’t keep from laughing. I am willing to bet you have had those times in which you have burst out laughing in the middle of church or some other location in which you were trying to be reverent. Doesn’t it always seem that when we feel “we aren’t supposed to laugh” that something ridiculously funny occurs. And so we are there trying to stay in the moment but we feel it welling up inside of us, pursed behind our tight lips. But it can barely be contained and so our whole bodies start shaking.

I was talking to my cousin this weekend and he was sharing how on Easter there was a particularly long morning prayer. During what felt like the quietest moment, his friend’s four-year old little girl who was seated next to him passed gas and it echoed through the sanctuary. Of course he tried to hold in his laughter and bite his tongue. He thought he had held it together fairly well until he heard his wife breaking out next to him with this maniacal laugh.

One pastor shared that once during Easter worship “Someone snuck a sound activated potted plant onto the altar, hidden among the Easter flower array. Every time the choir sang it danced. Much laughter from the congregation and a totally confused pastor.”

Another pastor shared how “A church lady once caught her flowing dress sleeves on fire lighting the candles. She swatted at it, fire went out. Then it caught again! So the pastor ran over poured her bottled water on her. The church lady, now soaked, made the sign of the cross and thanked her saying"Jesus saves, but the Pastor came in clutch!"

Oh sometimes we can’t keep from laughing. One Ash Wednesday, my cousin and I went to impose ashes on a few of our homebound members. During one visit I reached out with the ashes and placed a cross on her forehead saying “ashes to ashes,” only I forgot to pronounce the h. I was mortified and luckily the lady seemed to be hard-of-hearing and not notice, but as soon as I got outside my cousin died out laughing and hasnt’ let me live it down since.

Sometimes we just can’t keep from laughing. When I was a young girl, my family and I would travel to this little church where my maternal grandparents are buried for decoration day. This was before they built their new sanctuary and so the overflow of the congregation would be seated in the back which was the small fellowship hall space. It was during the middle of the sermon when the young man next to me leaped up into the air and started jumping around. I looked at him like “what is going on?” when I saw it. A lizard scurrying around the floor. It had apparently dropped from the ceiling and landed smack across his nose. Well all the teenagers were seated back there with us and then they saw it and suddenly there was a swarm of legs shuffling and people standing on their seats. The pastor thought something was up for sure and shouted “Yes, I see that the Holy Spirit is on the move back there!”

Sometimes we can’t help but laugh. But the scene of the text begins after Jesus has died, and there is nothing funny about death. Everyone was in mourning, until Jesus appeared among them, showed him his wounds, and breathed the breath of the Holy Spirit upon them. Wow! What a resurrection appearance, but Thomas missed it. This amazing Easter encounter happens, and he missed it. We don’t know why Thomas wasn’t there, whether he was running errands or picking up dinner. We just know he missed it. They tell him all about it of course, but he doesn’t believe them. To be fair, too often we have judged Thomas. Thomas just wants the same thing everyone else received, an encounter with the risen Lord.

And so a week goes by. All of the other disciples are rejoicing in the Easter news, the good news of morning. But Thomas is still in m-o-u-rning. Jim and Francis recently moved into a new home and last Christmas sent out cards with the address spelled Mourning. When I first saw it, I thought to myself “surely that isn’t correct.” And so I drove to the neighborhood looking at all the street signs looking for it and found “Morning.” But as it turns out, Francis shared that the street sign is wrong as it is actually supposed to be “Mourning” as in a Mourning dove, a bird whose call sounds like crying.

Morning vs. Mourning. Resurrection vs. Grief. A week later, and Jesus appears again. This time he interacts with Thomas and tells him “here, put your hand in my side.” Now keep in mind these wounds are a week old. Eww. Jesus is resurrected. Why keep the wounds? Why not have those healed up or at least slap a band-aid on them? But then I thought about it, these are a different kind of wound. They are open yet healed, visible yet redeemed.

Malcolm Guite says “that whatever else is going on here it is not the case that all of the suffering that Jesus underwent is somehow erased or overwritten. Salvation is not about pretending suffering isn’t there or imagining it never occurred, or overwriting it in any way. It is about redeeming it and transforming it and not about forgetting it. I know that death can be tragic and not the least bit humorous, which is why I think the wounds of Christ are so important.

As Thomas touched the wounds, his own woundedness touched the wounds of God and in that moment he looked up and said “my Lord and my God.” The joke is that what should have killed Jesus became the source out of which his healing flowed. Suddenly, Thomas’s mourning turned into joy. As it says in Psalm 30:11-12 “You have turned my mourning into dancing; you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, 12 so that my soul may praise you and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.” Or in Psalm 126:2 which says “Then our mouth was filled with laughter and our tongue with shouts of joy.” This is parallel to Job 8:21.

Some of the deepest laughs I have heard have been around funerals. Not because grief isn’t immeasurable or hard, but because resurrection hope is real and contagious. When loved ones begin sharing stories and quirks and imaginations of what their loved one is up to now, laughter finds its way to the surface.

Today we celebrate not just any laugh, but what is referred to as the risus paschalis or the Easter laugh. We don’t know precisely when it started but during the early church centuries ago, the Sunday after Easter was observed by the faithful as a day of joy and laughter with parties and shenanigans to celebrate Jesus’ resurrection.  It was commonly held that with Easter, God had played the ultimate joke on the devil by raising Jesus from the dead, giving God the last laugh.

So, on the Sunday after Easter, congregations and pastors would often play practical jokes on each other, drench each other with water, sing and dance.  Holy Humor Sunday or Bright Sunday as it is also known was actually outlawed by Pope Clement X in the 17th century. Luckily, that seems to not have kept people from the Easter laugh.

The reason we can laugh deeply even in the face of death is because of Easter. Rev. Troy B. Cady says “Easter laughter is really an act of present defiance in light of future hope...That’s why the deepest laughter is Easter laughter. It sets you free even as it seizes you. Your gut hurts and you start crying. When you laugh deeply, when you are overcome with Easter laughter, it is not a time for shallow breathing. You have to gulp the air to keep up with the joy of it. Easter laughter oxygenates the soul.”

I know a lady who when she is deep in worship that she begins to laugh. At first the sound felt strange to me, but maybe, just maybe, it is the sound of the Easter laugh. The laughter of freedom. The laughter of resurrection.

Wendell Berry has a beautiful poem called Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front. In it he talks about practicing resurrection saying to laugh, for laughter is immeasurable.

A few years ago I was trying to help update our church membership records with the new software we had. I came across this one gentleman who had died several years prior but the data had him as alive and well. I edited the information. I marked him as deceased. I did everything to reflect that he had died, but try as I might, I couldn’t get the data to correct. Each time I would print out a report, there he would be. Alive and well. I laughed to myself thinking “it would seem Jesus has appeared in the Upper Room of our church records.”

So let’s laugh together, for when we sing and laugh today, we join in centuries of Easter people raising their voices with the sound of freedom, the sound of hope, and the sound of resurrection on our lips.