Holy Humour

A couple of my colleagues mentioned earlier this week that they would be working on the Holy Humour theme this Sunday. The first Sunday after Easter has been named Holy Humour Sunday by someone, somewhere and a growing number of congregations are picking up on the idea. It's interesting because there was a not-too-distant day when church was a place to be unrelentingly serious and humour was to be squelched at all costs. Yesterday I was pondering this when an email "thought of the day" rolled in with this:

As Christians, we are people of the resurrection, therefore we are people who love to laugh, who believe that laughter is a wonderfully life-giving, defiant act full of the grace of God. Easter is that which enables us to keep going, even in our moral failures, even when being a servant of the Word is difficult. Those who have kept at the Christian ministry longer than I will confirm the essential virtue of humor… The ability to laugh at life's incongruities, to take God seriously but not ourselves, to embrace the strangeness of [other] people instead of strangling them to death with our bare hands -- this is great grace…

Humor is the grace to put our problems in perspective,… to be reminded that Jesus really did need to save us, seeing as we have so little means to save ourselves. Humor is just a glimpse, on a human scale, of the way God looks upon us from God's unfathomable grace. By the resurrection, the gospel is enabled to be comedy and not tragedy.

-- William Willimon



I like these thoughts, even though I will stick with the story of Thomas and his uncertainty about the resurrection this week. Actually, as I drove past Trinity United, our neighbour, I saw a humour sermon title on the sign.

It seems to me that every week is Holy Humour week at St. Paul's in that our folk are quick to laugh and playful in outlook. We aren't yukkin' it up all the time, but we are able to express joy through laughter and laugh at ourselves. I'm hoping that it isn't irreverent and dishonouring God -- just fun. The playfulness of adults sends a message to our children that we are all children of the Christ who surely had a sense of humour, and I think that is good. Folk at St. Paul's loved it when Cuyler Black, the cartoonist, came as our anniversary speaker

What do you think? Are you uncomfortable with the shift, or relieved? Does God have a sense humour?