Episodes
Sunday Apr 20, 2014
Easter - Life Essentials: Laugh
Sunday Apr 20, 2014
Sunday Apr 20, 2014
Rev. Dean Snyder
Genesis 21:1-8; Luke
6:17-23
In my family growing up, stories and jokes were an essential part of everyday life. We were all expected to contribute. I can remember the first joke I learned to tell. I was four or five, I suppose, and I told everyone who would listen this joke. Ready?
How do you turn a pumpkin into squash? You throw the pumpkin up in the air and it comes down … squash.
But as is often the case with jokes, the next joke I remember learning, maybe when I was in first grade, was a little earthier.
There was a little girl from France who was visiting the neighborhood. The boy next door was playing with his little red wagon. He asked the little French girl if she’d like a ride in his wagon. She said: “Oui, oui.” The little boy immediately took off for home pulling his wagon behind him and shouted back to the little French girl: “Not in my wagon, you don’t!”
A few years ago Jane and I got a chance to go to Paris. It was amazing. We celebrated Ash Wednesday and got ashes at Notre Dame Cathedral. We had Valentine’s Day dinner at a restaurant that said on the cover of its menu: If you do not have at least two hours for a meal, we prefer you eat elsewhere. We visited the Louvre. We saw the place where Blaise Pascal is buried. Amazing.
And the whole time we were witnessing all these wonderful things in Paris, the words that kept running through my head were: Not in my wagon, you don’t.
We’ve been talking all this Lent about aspects of our daily lives that are sacramental. Daily aspects of ordinary life that are signs and vehicles of God’s grace. Breathing, sleeping, washing, crying, eating, exercising, moving … these are all ways that God releases grace into our lives on a daily basis. They are like sacraments and they can be offered to God as acts of prayer.
Colossians 3:23 says “Whatever you do, do it as unto the Lord.” Shower in the morning as unto the Lord. Go to sleep at night as unto the Lord. Go to the gym as unto the Lord. Let your tears be an offering to God. Let your laughter be worship.
Today, Easter Sunday, 2014, I want us to focus on laughing. Laughing can be a sign and vehicle of grace … a way that God releases grace into our lives. I hope you laugh every day.
Laughing is actually physically good for us. Researchers at the University of Maryland Medical Center have discovered that laughing causes the inner lining our blood vessels to dilate, increasing our blood flow. More blood flows through our bodies, thus more energy, thus more life, when we laugh. We are literally more alive when we laugh.
Laughing causes a reduction in stress hormones in our bodies. We can literally laugh our worries away.
Laughter also boosts the number of antibody-producing cells and enhances the effectiveness of T-cells, leading to a stronger immune system. Turns out, like the Book of Proverbs says, laughter may be the best medicine.
But perhaps the greatest and most important quality of laughing is that it creates community. Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, studied laughing for ten years to write his book Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. Provine and his students observed 1,200 people laughing spontaneously in their natural environments, from shopping malls to city sidewalks.
After 10 years Professor Provine came to the conclusion that the primary purpose of laughter is to create and build and sustain community. Laughter, Provine says, is a form of "speaking in tongues" (his words) in which we're moved not by religious fervor but by an unconscious response to social cues that create community. (http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200011/the-science-laughter)
Provine and his students discovered that often what people said that caused others to laugh was not in and of itself all that objectively funny. Laughter, they discovered, is a natural response to being with others you like and whom you feel care about you and with whom you feel safe.
One evolutionary scientist believes that the evolutionary roots of laughing among humans are in the practice of grooming in the animal world. When apes groom they comb through each other’s hair looking for bugs and when they find one, they eat it. The ape whose bug has been removed feels better and the ape who has a bug to eat feels better.
So evolutionary scientist Robin Dunbar says that when we laugh with each other we are removing the emotional bugs from one another and eating them to help both of us feel better.
Laughter creates and builds and sustains community, and nothing is more important to our health and well-being than community. I’ve quoted Harvard University’s Alameda County Study before. Harvard researchers tracked the lives of 7,000 people over nine years. They found that people who had health habits we consider not so good (like smoking, poor diets, obesity, or alcohol use) but who had strong social ties lived significantly longer than people who had great health habits but were isolated. In other words, as John Ortberg says, it is better to eat Twinkies with good friends than to eat broccoli alone.
Laughing releases grace into our lives. It is sacramental.
I think Jesus was funny. I think his humor too often gets lost in the translation
The Quaker writer Elton Trueblood who wrote the book The Humor of Jesus said it first occurred to him that some of the things Jesus said might have been funny when his 4-year-old son heard the Gospel story of seeing the speck of dust in your neighbor's eye and ignoring the log in your own and started laughing uproariously. Had we heard it in context, it is a very funny image.
Many things that Jesus said were funny. The idea that someone would have lit a lamp and put it under a basket is funny. The idea that a person would have actually built a house on sand is funny.
Some of the things Jesus said to the scribes and Pharisees were cuttingly funny.
And Jesus seemed to enjoy funny comebacks.
When Nathenial is introduced to Jesus of Nazareth, he says “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” He makes a joke, like we make jokes about West Virginia or Alabama. Jesus responds by saying, "Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!" This is a good guy. I like him.
When a Syro-Phoenician Gentile woman bothers a tired Jesus and asks him to heal her daughter, Jesus says he has come to heal Israelites, not to throw food to the Gentile dogs. The woman replies, “But even the dogs get to lick up the crumbs under the table.” A humorous comeback. And Jesus likes it and says to her: Your daughter is healed.
Jesus’ nicknames for his disciples were funny. Giving Simon who was impulsive and flighty the nickname Peter, which means Rock, is funny, says the Jesuit priest James Martin whose written a book entitled Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor, and Laughter are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life.
If you want to find laughter in the Bible, look at the story of Abraham and Sarah. In Old Testament times there was no greater disappointment for a woman than to not be able to have children. A woman who had no children was called barren. It was a term of pity and reproach.
Sarah was barren and, as the Bible discreetly puts it, “it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.” (Gen. 18:11) Abraham was 100 years old. Sarah was 90. An angel told them Sarah would become pregnant and have a child who would be the father of many nations. Sarah laughed at the idea. Abraham laughed at the idea.
When Sarah heard the angel predict that she would have a child at 90 fathered by her 100 year old husband, Genesis Chapter 18, verse 12 says: “Sarah laughed to herself, saying, ‘After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?’” Remember they hadn’t invented those little pills yet.
But a baby is born to Sarah and Abraham and they name him Isaac, which means in Hebrew means “laughter.”
It was one of God’s first jokes … that three major religions of the world would be born to a supposedly barren 90-year-old woman and a 100 year-old-man.
One of God’s first jokes but not God’s last.
Easter is God’s greatest joke. We crucify God’s own child and then God makes our violence, our hatred, our selfishness the very way by which we are saved and made whole. We do our worst and God makes it the best.
Jesus says:
Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you that weep now, for you will laugh. (Luke 6:20-21)
Listen, I know that there is a lot of pain and suffering in the world. We all know that. We just sat through Good Friday and watched the execution of an innocent person. Innocent people are crucified in our world every moment of every day.
Alan Zabel was here before 7 a.m. this morning to power wash our church steps because homeless persons sleep on those steps every night and they urinate on them and worse. When I started in ministry in 1968 there were not homeless people sleeping on church steps in America. I am very upset that I am about to retire and there are still homeless persons who have no place to sleep at night better than our cold cement steps.
Unless things change one out of three African-American boy babies born this Easter in America will spend time in prison during their lifetime. One out of six Hispanic boy babies born today will spend time in prison unless things change.
My friend whose 19-year-old daughter died three weeks ago from a drug overdose discovered that she had been trafficked to feed her addiction.
GLBTQ teenagers still commit suicide as a result sometimes of what they’ve been taught in church.
I am not saying that we should be flippant and giddy in the face of the evil that surrounds us.
I am saying that in the midst of it laughter is given us as a taste of the heaven that God is preparing for us.
I served a church once where sometimes, when the Spirit came, people would be moved to get up in the middle of the service and give their testimonies.
We had one member whose testimony was always the same. She would say: “Don’t let the devil steal your joy.”
She had seen some hard times in her life. She had shed her share of tears and more. But her testimony was always: “Don’t let the devil steal your joy.”
Easter is God’s punch line. All the suffering of the world will be swallowed up in victory. Those who weep will laugh.
Psalm 126 says: “When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, … then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy…"
Psalm 30 says: “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.”
There is nothing the devil would like more than for the Church of Jesus Christ to be full of despair and defeat and anger.
Whenever we are tempted to despair … whenever we are tempted to sink into crankiness and negativity … whenever we are tempted to give way to a spirit of defeat and resignation, Jesus rises from his tomb and says to us: “Not in my wagon, you don’t.”
Don’t let the devil steal your joy. It is Easter. Laugh.
Comments (0)
To leave or reply to comments, please download free Podbean or
No Comments
To leave or reply to comments,
please download free Podbean App.