Creekside Church Sermon of April 27, 2003 "Send In The Clowns" 1 Corinthians 1:20-31	Rev. David Bibbee
Send this sermon to a friend

In stressful times people find different ways to cope. People who are paid to observe such things have noticed over the past weeks that fewer people have been “going out” for entertainment. Move attendance is down. Restaurants are not as full as they have been, and other places people go to relax and have a good time. Apparently Americans are staying home, finding ways to divert their attention from the stagnant economy, anarchy, mayhem, war, and the rumor of wars. People are tuning out the depressive stuff to tune in to things which are more pleasant.

They say that we are reading more. We’re reading books that life our spirits, if only for a while—lighthearted, humorous books to help us do what we do too little of in a world where we are hit with wave after wave after wave of the latest dark developments.

If laughter is the best medicine, what books would you recommend to block the bleakness and unleash the guffaws? Some of you, okay, most of you don’t share my appreciation of Gary Larson’s “Far Side” humor, but its therapeutic for me. Sometimes I need to set aside the serious reading and browse through bound volumes of Far Side cartoons. I get a hoot from reading books by Robert Fulghum and Lewis Grizzard. Some of you may know about the “Wittenburg Door.” It is a magazine of outrageous satire created by a group of free-spirited evangelicals. The object of the Door’s satire is the church, causing it to look at itself in ways it hasn’t but should consider. Here is an example of Door humor:

Top Ten Bible-Times Fund Rasiers
10. Locust repellent
9. Spiral-bound manna cookbook
8. Hand-held Philistine detector
7. Ceramic model of Solomon’s temple with votive candle
6. Gummy Locusts
5. “Welcome to Our Desert Tent” plague
4. Flood Emergency Preparedness kit
3. Ceramic bears dressed as 2 apostles
2. Stale, over-priced milk and honey bars
1. Ten plagues refrigerator magnets

When I was in seminary they kept the Door behind the circulation desk because the seminarians would walk off with copies from the periodicals rack and “forget” to return them. And though you won’t find them in a book, I admit that I still enjoy watching the Three Stooges.

It would be fun to trade books with each other that have high laugh-factors. If we did, I predict one book would not be among those traded…the Bible. The Bible isn’t a funny book. The Bible is the most widely read book in history, but people don’t read it for laughs. The Bible is a serious book. It tells how creation and we came to be. It tells how we behave and are beloved just the same. It tells who we are and what would have been had not God become one of us. It tells us what we can become through Jesus’ grace, and ultimately what will become of the world… “The Kingdom of our Lord and his Christ and he shall reign forever.” The Bible is about ultimate purposes and ends. Its all business more lamentation than laughter, it seems.

The Bible’s shortest sentence is “Jesus wept.” I wish it was, “Jesus laughed.” Most people think that Jesus was all business. Neither his nor any other life was a laughing matter. But before all else, the Incarnation is good news! The implication of the Incarnation isn’t, “How terrible for Jesus that he was consigned to a human life.” It implies, “How wonderful for us that Jesus hallowed human life by coming to live it with us.” The Letter to the Hebrews says we have a high priest who can sympathize with us because he was tempted in every way as we are. He knew the whole gamete of human emotions. He wept at the death of a dear friend. No, the gospels do not say Jesus laughed. It is not mentioned because I think it is assumed.

“You attract more flies with honey than vinegar,” the saying goes. What made Jesus so compelling and what made the disciples so effective in drawing people by the thousands to the Christian faith? Sour-pusses aren’t effective when it comes to sharing the delight of God’s word. The motto of the Young Life youth ministry is, “It is a sin to bore a kid with the gospel.” It is a sin to bore anyone with it. Unfortunately there are lots of sinful preachers and teachers doing just that. Jesus was a powerful, charismatic, winsome man who was a joy to be with. His joy was contagious.

It is hard for us to link humor and the Bible because we don’t recognize it when we see it. In Genesis, God walks in the Garden in the cool of the day. Adam and Eve hear God coming and hide. God calls out, “Where are you?” Why aren’t you laughing? This is funny! What’s so humorous? God doesn’t know where Adam and Eve are hiding? How ludicrous that man and woman think they can hide from God. Remember playing hide-and-seek with your kids? They hid but never very well. You knew exactly where they were yet you call out, “Where are you?”

An angel told Abraham and Sarah they were going to have a son. Abraham nearly busts a gut trying to contain his laughter. Sarah was in the tent, eavesdropping on the conversation. She couldn’t stifle her laughter. “What’s so funny?” God asked Sarah. “Nothing. Nothing at all.” She replied. “You were laughing, Sarah. I heard you.” “Me, laughing? I’m ninety. Abe is one hundred. Why would I be laughing?” Well, God gets the last laugh when a son is born to the ancient couple. He was named Isaac. Appropriate, since Isaac means, “laughter.”

And speaking of Isaac, why was he twelve years old when God called Abraham to sacrifice his son? Because if he had been a teenager, it wouldn’t have been a sacrifice.

Speaking of children, a man went to see his rabbi because of a tough problem. “I’m very troubled by my son. He went away to school and he came back a Christian.” The rabbi said, “You know, it’s funny you say that. My son also left home and came back a Christian.” They decided to pray together about the problem and God said to them, “You know, it’s funny you say that…”

All we have of what Jesus said are his words. What we do not have is the way he said them. We don’t know his tone of voice, the expression on his face or the look on his eye when he said things. It’s one of the reasons we miss the punch line. We don’t see Jesus’ humor because of how we see him. Jesus was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief to be sure, but this isn’t all Jesus was. Most of us didn’t grow up with an image of a laughing Jesus. The image many of us had was of Salman’s serene, reflective, serious Jesus. The biblical picture of Jesus is more joyful and humorous than our stereotypes.

In Matthew 23:23 Jesus pokes fun at the Pharisees for carefully tithing offerings from their spice racks while forgetting the far more important offerings of mercy, justice, and forgiveness. He said they were so blind they strained gnats from their soup but ended up swallowing a camel. Jesus must have thought camels were funny. “Rich people have a better chance of threading a camel through a needle than getting into heaven,” he said. What about pointing out specks into other’s eyes and not seeing 2x4’s in our own? He was making serious points in ridiculous ways and did it with a grin.

Read the story in Acts 20 of Paul preaching at the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. He and the others had to leave early the next morning, but it was midnight and Paul was still preaching. A young man named Eutychus was sitting in a window. Paul went on and on. Eutychus fell asleep, and fell out of a three-story building. They ran downstairs and found him dead. Paul went down, hugged him, said, “There’s still some life in him,” and ran back upstairs and preached till dawn. When the service was finally over, Eutychus walked home. This is no serious, sober story designed to make people think twice before sleeping during a sermon!

What do Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, and Sadam Hussein have in common? None of them were funny. It’s not just the church which must go underground during dictatorships. So must comedians. Dictators can’t tolerate voices saying their power isn’t ultimate. They can’t take jokes, especially a joke directed at them.

But Christianity is different. We should be able to laugh at what we believe in most deeply. One of our sins is thinking more highly of ourselves than we should—inflating our importance, living as though God couldn’t get along without us. Relating to God as though God was at our beck and call.

There was a grandmother walking along the beach with her grandson. Suddenly a big wave comes along and washed the boy out to sea. She yells out to God, “Oh please, please bring him back!” Suddenly another wave come ashore and the boy is returned safely to her. She looks up to the sky and says, “He had a hat!”

Humor puts us in our place. Someone said, “Laughter occurs in the space between what is and what ought to be, in the gracious no-man’s-land somewhere betwixt how we view ourselves and how we really appear.

Humor has an essential place in our live because we know who is in control. This enables us to find humor even in life’s most difficult circumstances. As Henry Can Dusen lay dying someone said, “No one ever died with warm feet.” Henry replied, “Joan of Arc did.” During Hal Heeter’s last days he was joking about his beloved Cubs.

Humor and incongruity. Recognition that something is our of wack. For ecample, consider these things:

Why don’t psychics win the lottery?
Why is it that Doctors call what they do “practice?”
Why is “abbreviated” such a long word?
Why is the person who invests all your money call a “broker?”
Why is the time of day with the slowest traffic called “rush hour?”
Why isn’t there mouse flavored cat food?
Why are they called apartments when they are all stuck together?
You know that indestructible black box on airplanes? Why don’t they make the whole place out of that stuff?
If flying is so safe, why do they call the airport the “terminal?”

Fools for Christ:
Humor exposes our foibles, inadequacies, and our weakness. Therefore humor has a holy function in that it is in our weakness that God’s strength is revealed. We put useless stuff in the trash. We save the recyclables, but we haul the rest of it out to the curb for the trash man to take to the landfill. This is how the world sees us. Not worth much because what we believe doesn’t contribute to the human enterprise system.

Paul says that God used perceived weakness to defeat the world. “I’ll turn conventional wisdom on its head, I’ll expose so-called experts as crackpots.”

All of the sermons that have appeared in text form on our Web Site since August 1996 are available here in the On-Line version. Use the search engine below to find the sermon you want. You may search by date, sermon title, or content. The sermons are full-text searchable.

Sermon Search:



Exact phrase    All words (AND)    Any word (OR)