s m a c a
... a forum for progressive Christianity produced by St Matthew-in-the-City Anglican Church Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. 19th March 2006 The Laughing God For your Lenten pleasure SMACA focuses on laughter, an essential ingredient in our preparation for the joy of Easter. Considered disrespectful to God and well-ordered worship for centuries, imagine our surprise when we begin to learn that God laughs. Glynn looks at the church's view of laughter and why we miss all the jokes in Scripture. eNZed leNZ looks at laughter as prayer and reveals what God looks and sounds like for those who are curious. Second Thoughts offers two sermons given back-to-back that rely lightly on humour to make their points. SmacaSmiles has a collection of religious jokes sites--what else? Weblinks offers some websites for exploring humour in Scripture and culture. NewSpots looks at recent controversies in the news. Dialogue has several thoughtful responses to our last issue The Freedom to Offend--Apologetically.
We hope this issue brings you a few smiles and perhaps some new insights. We welcome your responses and hope, if you enjoyed it, that you will pass it along to a friend.
Clay Nelson
Editor - THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK
- SMACA Prayer (My Plans )
- FROM THE VICAR (The Laughing God)
- eNZed LeNZ (Life is Too Important to Take Seriously)
- SECOND THOUGHTS (The Hole in the Roof Gang and the Shekel-a-Dozen Messiah)
- SMACA Smiles
- WEB LINKS Laughter
- DIALOGUE (Where you write in and tell us what you think)
- SMACA NewSpots
- How to SUBSCRIBE / UNSUBSCRIBE from SMACA
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THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK "One person's theology is another's belly laugh."
-Robert Anson Heinlein
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SMACA Prayer Dear God,
These are my plans...
Please fit yourself in accordingly.
Amen
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FROM THE VICAR
By Glynn Cardy © 19/03/2006
The Laughing God
The rabbinical student is about to leave for America. When he asks his mentor for advice, the rabbi offers an adage that, he tells the student, will guide him for the rest of his life. "Always remember," the rabbi said sagely, "Life is a fountain."
Deeply impressed by his teacher's wisdom, the student departs for a successful career in America. Thirty years later, he learns that the rabbi is dying, so he returns for a final visit. "Rabbi," he says, "I have one question. For thirty years, whenever I was sad or confused, I thought about the phrase you passed on to me, and it has helped me through many difficult times. But to be perfectly frank, I have never understood the full meaning of it. Now that you are about to enter the realm of truth, tell me, dear rabbi, why is life like a fountain?"
Wearily, the old man replied, "All right, so it's not like a fountain."
There is buried beneath the sobriety of much religion a strong tradition of humour. In Orthodox churches Easter celebrations often begin with the telling of joke. An acknowledgment maybe that laughter is both appropriate and therapeutic in the aftermath of evil.
Humour is reflective of self-transcendence, that ability to step back from a situation, see the funny side of it, and laugh - chiefly at ourselves. The health of a believer, the health of Church, I would measure in part by the frequency of its laughter. Psychologists tell us that laughter quickens breathing, enhances circulation, and ignites expectations. Similarly I suspect for Church congregations.
We have a laughing God. Read the Book of Psalms [2:4, 37:13, 59:8]. God finds amusement with many things, especially pretentious politicians. Likewise we have a laughing Jesus. This tradition is not only found within the Gnostic writings but is there within the Gospels themselves.
Bill Phipps in his book The Wisdom And Wit Of Rabbi Jesus locates Jesus' humour in the Jewish love of irony, puns, double entendre, and hyperbole. Is not, for example, the punned phrase "You strain out a gnat (kalma) but you gulp down a camel (gamla)" [Matt 23:24] an attempt to invite legalists to laugh at their misdirected behaviour? Or the hyperbolic admonition "If someone wants your outwear, let him have your underwear too" [Lu 6:29] an attempt to make people smile?
Yet so often biblical interpreters have thrown their own piety over the text smothering the humour. Regarding the underwear verse above, the King James Bible creates the fiction of a Palestinian peasant walking around in two coats! [In reality a peasant wore an outer garment and a loincloth.]
Many church leaders over the centuries have hermeneutically removed Jesus' funny bone and thus a central component of his humanity. By the 3rd century the laughing Jesus had been re-crucified to appease the gods of austerity and self-mortification. The great Cappadocian, Basil, expounded upon the alleged wickedness of laughter. John Chrysostem, the renowned preacher, said that Jesus never smiled or laughed. Saint Ignatius of Loyola, "I should not laugh or say anything that would cause laughter."
As I read quote after quote condemning laughter a great sadness came over me. The Church has suffered from killing the laughing Jesus. Society has suffered also as the Church took itself too seriously, deaf to or punishing of its critics, intolerant of children and clowns, colouring piety with the dull grey of sobriety. Even nowadays when most Christians will enjoy a good laugh there is an underlying unease about the place of humour in worship, or anywhere that is seen as holy.
I commend to you Christopher Moore's Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. Through the eyes of Biff - a sarcastic, sex-loving, crude, and deeply loyal friend - we get a very humorous, fictitious, and yet insightful look at Jesus.
From the first meeting with the 6 year old Jesus - he was bringing to life lizards whose heads his younger brother had quashed - to the righteous young teenager who secretly in the dark of night went with Biff to circumcise a statue of Apollo (yes, the chisel slipped!) - the reader knows this is no ordinary book. As the dust cover says 'this book is sick, seriously sick… but my kind of sick.'
"I'm going to be gone soon," [Jesus states]. "In the spring we'll go to Jerusalem for the Passover, and there I will be judged by the scribes and the priests, and there I will be tortured and put to death. But three days from the day of my death, I shall rise, and be with you again."
… A shadow of grief seemed to pass over the faces of the disciples. We looked not at each other, and neither at the ground, but at a place in space a few feet from our faces, where I suppose one looks for a clear answer to appear out of undefined shock.
"Well, that sucks," someone said." [P.391]
Humour, like beauty, art and music, is a very subjective thing. Within my family, for example, there are at least two different streams of humour. What will have two or three of us rolling on the floor laughing watery-eyed will have the rest of us looking bemused. So, if you don't find this funny don't worry. You're normal. But others of us aren't.
That's always the risk with humour. Recently we've been approaching renowned comedians to speak at a fundraising dinner in St Matthew's Church, the proceeds of which will go to the Organ. Dawn French isn't available. Next on the list is Rowan Atkinson, then Billy Connelly. Some comedians specialize in mocking religion. Some specialize in sex. Some, like Billy, have made swearing an art form. Even for broadminded St Matthew's I'm sure a few will find whatever choice we make difficult. As for our critics… well, they will make sure the event is thoroughly publicised!
Some of you will have heard of the Feast of Fools. This was a festival popular during the late Middle Ages. It happened between Christmas and New Year. It was bawdy and irreverent, and it happened in Church.
In many places a Lord of Misrule presided over the revelry. In France and England the ceremonies were often under the charge of a boy bishop. During the feast lower clerics and minor officials parodied the sacred rites and customs of the Church. There was the Mass of the Asses, Drunkards, and Gamblers. The smell of sour incense made of filthy old shoe soles assailed the nostrils. Men dressed as women sang outrageous ditties. It often degenerated into debauchery and lewd burlesque.
The festival had two themes. Firstly, and primarily, it was a day to laugh at the power of the Church. Bishops were ridiculed. Piety was ridiculed. Power was laughed at, and for at least a day the powerful seemed not to be in control.
The Church doesn't like to think of itself as powerful, particularly when our founder, Jesus, was critical of the religious hierarchy and suffered the consequences. Yet despite protestations, the Church, for good and for ill, is a powerful body and like all powerful bodies is constantly in danger of taking itself too seriously
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Or as Jim, my irreligious neighbour, put it: "The more hot air, the bigger the balloon; the bigger the balloon, the bigger the target; and the bigger the target the more they worry about little pricks."
The second theme of the festival was fun. Risky fun. Risqué fun. There was little control over the fun, and open to individual interpretation fun frequently degenerated into debauchery. In other words the humour of the feast danced across the line between acceptable and what was for many unacceptable.
So there were constant moves to stop the Feast. Yet the resulting backlash from the local laity and clergy was a more potent force than one can imagine these days, and bought the festival some time. There were compromises though: blasphemous extravagances and lewd acts were meant to happen only outside the church, and the boy bishop was only to be doused with three buckets of water during Vespers.
Eventually the Council of Basle forbade the Feast of Fools under the very severest penalties in 1435. Yet not before the Theological Faculty of Paris came to it's defense arguing passionately "even a wine vat would burst if the bung-hole were not opened occasionally to let out the air".
The wine vat is an interesting and profound metaphor, acknowledging our need to laugh and lampoon, and the role of humour in keeping humanity at its vintage best.
Send comments on this article to Glynn
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eNZed leNZ
By Clay Nelson © 19/03/2006 Life is Too Important to Take Seriously
If there is one thing I could change about myself, it would be my laugh. My laugh makes others laugh, unless the others are my daughters. I laugh loudly and with gusto, but it is my snort that makes it distinctive. My daughters, especially in those painfully self-conscious teenage years, preferred to acolyte at a solemn high evensong than go with me to see a funny movie.
My laugh makes them cringe, and still does (my oldest, now grown with a child of her own, was appalled when she heard a snort the first time he laughed). My youth groups through the years, on the other hand, loved to torment with the moniker "Fr. Snort." As I share this I'm aware of feeling a surprising vulnerability, not unlike when I watch a family video. While being taped I don't hear my laugh, in fact I try consciously not to, but on the playback my snorting mockingly punctuates the soundtrack. Ironically, no one but me seems to notice because they are used to it. It's just Dad. They only cringe when I laugh in public, not in the privacy of home. Our capacity to laugh appears to reside near the core of our humanity. While my dog grins a lot and often has a playful, mischievous look in his eyes, he cannot laugh, although I think he'd like to. Only humans laugh. Only they can tell a joke and be it at the same time. What does it say about the species that we can find ourselves in the darkest moments of our lives and still ask how many Anglicans it takes to change a light bulb? We wear laughter like our skin. It goes where we go and is always in fashion, be it to a funeral of a dear friend or to the wedding of our child. Its wash and wear and only wrinkles our crows feet around the eyes, giving them character and wisdom. Not even tears can shrink it. Yet tears are sometimes the fruit of our exuberant hold our belly, roll on the floor until we can't breathe laughter. But laughter runs more than skin deep. It reveals a complexity in our make up that is greater than the microchips allowing me to write this. Humour and the laughter it induces "thrives on incongruity, disproportion, the sometimes bizarre disparity between assumptions and facts, protocol and performance, the imagined past and the real past, the awaited future and the experienced present."[1] That is why just the notion of George Burns in the starring role of Oh, God! makes us laugh. When he refutes the charge that God does not have a sense of humour with the evidence of his making the ostrich and the platypus or when he acknowledges he's made some mistakes, like the pit in the avocado being too big we laugh sheepishly at our childlike desire for God to be a little like George. When Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof after yet another pogrom thanks God for having honoured his people by making them his elect, but then asks "Why couldn't you have chosen someone else?" We laugh at all the times we have said the same prayer. When Yossarian's lady friend in Catch 22 who, although herself an atheist, is so shaken by Yossarian's devilish indictment of God's ineptness or malevolence that she breaks into tears and retorts: "I don't believe in God, but the God I don't believe in is a good God," we laugh at the hope we share with her, to hell with all evidence to the contrary. We rely on laughter to deflate our self-importance, restore perspective, relieve our anxiety, assure us of our humanity after all is said and done, and to know what God looks and sounds like. For if we are in the image of God, we know that God waddles like Chaplin and deadpans like Jack Benny. She's as black as Whoopi and as Jewish as Seinfeld. She plans hare-brained schemes like Lucille Ball, swears like Billy Connolly, preaches the theology of chocolate like Dibley's vicar, Dawn French; and laments that she gets no respect along with Rodney Dangerfield. In our discovery that God is a laughing God, we chuckle and cry out with a slap to the forehead, "Of course!" That's why we feel like a resident of Whoville after the Grinch stole Christmas, when life and our predicament in it are no longer funny. We feel abandoned by God. Its open mike night at a comedy club, and She didn't show. When once we can laugh again, it is then we know that "humour is a prelude to faith, and laughter is the beginning of prayer."[2] It is then that we thank God for reminding us that life is too important to take seriously. Better to snort, than not to have laughed at all. 1 Daniel L. Migliore
2 Reinhold Niebuhr.
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SECOND THOUGHTS The Hole in the Roof Gang
by Glynn Cardy
I was asked to be a pallbearer this week. An old mate had died. Six of us, robed priests, carried him shoulder high out of St Mary's Parnell. A thought stayed with me afterwards: Occasionally we carry each other in death, but do we carry each other in life? Read more..
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Shekel-a-Dozen Messiah
by Clay Nelson
It was one of those weeks. Full of deadlines. A newsletter to put to bed. A workshop to summarize. A vestry report to do and a sermon to prepare.
Wednesday, taking a break from emails, I checked out Mark 2:13-22 to think about the sermon, when this guy Levi, also known as Matthew, jumped right out of the pages of the Gospel and plonked himself down. He had just had that 'follow me' thing with Jesus and wanted some vocational guidance.
"Got a minute Rev.?" Read more...
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==================== SMACASmiles
Religious Joke Sites
Aaron's Jokes
Ahajokes.com
Comedy Zone
Ship of Fools
Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua
The Wittenburg Door
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WEB LINKS Web Subjects
Humor in the Old Testament
The Simpsons as a Religious Satire
Book Review: Laughing Gods, Weeping Virgins
Book Review: Laughter: A Theological Reflection
Comedy as Theology
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DIALOGUE - Where you write in and tell us what you think. Susan Sieins of Maine comments to Clay on Freedom to Offend: I thought this last issue of the newsletter was terrific, but who really cares if they tear up the Koran and flush it down the toilet? Tear up the Bible and flush it as well! Who cares about cartoons and offensive writings?
What is truly offensive is bombing people. What is truly offensive is torturing people. What is truly offensive is force-feeding people. What is truly offensive is apartheid and lynching and slavery. What is truly offensive is destroying God's endlessly marvelous Creation.
When we think and behave as though ideas and pieces of paper are more important (to God, yet!) than the actual suffering and misery of living beings, we have a long way to go in our growth toward compassion. I have little respect for ideologies that deify human ideas and treat them as sacred while ignoring injustice and pain, and that includes the deification in these United States of corporate capitalism.
Commenting on Glynn's The Foundations of Tolerance Tom Anderson writes: Your article addresses the issues well and the theory stands, I believe, inarguable. In practice, real life, however, we humans don't often stand in such an 'intellectual' realm. Our emotional behaviour often sits behind the wheel while the intellect may take the roll of navigator. The passion of the emotional often drives with the pedal to the metal. Such is 'righteous anger' when the intellect, being informed by the emotional, decides the right to anger exists and surrenders control to the passion.
As a Christian I endure criticism, even abuse, every day and in my tolerance I accept it as the right of the abuser to voice their opinion. I only have to watch a couple television episodes of "The Simpsons" to hear the slander of my religion and recognize it has become embedded in my culture and while I laugh I also stand uncomfortably convicted. I accept this because I cannot escape it while I hear other Christians spouting off with what I regard as a shameful representation of my faith - I privately abuse Christians also.
I think many are asking where the justice is when Christians are abused and accept abuse without a second thought but when another faith is greeted with a shadow of what Christians are presented with, the world is literally burned to the ground. I stand in the light of guilt for the past offences of Christians, I apologize for my contemporary 'cousins' and I work mental gymnastics in working out a 'reactionary' theology that speaks of love and acceptance in a way that can be communicated while honouring the traditions of those others - an impossible task most of the time.
This whole issue feels out of balance and I think maybe we can all start by understanding that before we can claim to follow any faith, we need first to claim our flawed humanity and I take heart in the understanding that the past crimes of Christianity or any other tradition are, in reality, crimes of Humans. Where our faith traditions build walls between us, perhaps we can find commonality in our innate human idiocy and work from there.
I too am sorry for the offense felt as a result of the cartoons but I am also angry about it. What kind of world would we live in if Christians or Jews behaved this way whenever our faiths are slighted? I think that, although the Archbishop of Canturbury's words could have been a little more "considered" or politically savvy, He reflects the genuine reactions of many of us.
Tenzin Chosang commenting on the same article writes: Thanks for a thought-provoking article. I appreciated your take on the furor over the cartoons and agree that while we can deplore the offense, the right to freedom of speech remains. Firstly, It occurs to me that if one wants to question or even criticise something, the form that one does so is very important, especially if that something is rooted in a deeply held or profound belief.
Knowing that the cartoons of the Prophet would be deeply offensive to the Muslim world, the cartoonists could have demonstrated some sensitivity and refused to use that particular way of engaging questions about the religion and its founder. If they had to make a comment, perhaps another less inflammatory method could have been found.
If the intention was to create offense then the perpetrators should ask themselves whether the hatred and destruction they stirred up was really worth it. To my way of thinking, it was unnecessary and just added to the aggression and antagonism so prevalent in our world today. It just fueled hatred and divisiveness in a world crying out for dialogue, understanding and mutual tolerance.
Cynthia Spurr of Adelaide offers Glynn her appreciation of Presumption is the Mother of All Stuff Ups: I've never heard the story of Naman presented in such an interesting and relevant way. You have a great way of making something that appeared strange and hard to understand so very understandable in this world. Keep up the great work and thanks for you thoughts on this current topic of tolerance.
We welcome all emails, especially those commenting on articles published in SMACA. Letters to Dialogue may be abridged and edited at the Editors' discretion. Opinions expressed are those of the authors and are not necessarily the views of the SMACA Editors or St Matthew-in-the-City. Send all comments to the Editor.
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SMACA NewSpots Rowan Attkinson defends right to offend
South Park Chef Dishes it Out But Can't Take it
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