Rev. Cwirla's Blogosphere

Humor in preaching - is it good or bad?  The question comes up all the time in preaching workshops and in homiletics classes.  Can the preacher use humor in the pulpit?

It depends.  Here I make a Luther distinction - magisterial and ministerial use of humorl.  Humor for humor’s sake, telling a joke to get a laugh - not good.  Humor in service of a point - good.

The apostle Paul used humor.  When he told the Galatians that those who were so enamored of circumcision should just cut the whole thing off, that was intended to be funny precisely where the rules of rhetoric said you needed to be funny.  That was no throw-off line; it served the point.  And it is funny.

Jesus used humor.  Ken Bailey [Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant’s Eyes (1983)] points out that many of Jesus’ sayings and parables would have drawn laughter from his hearers.  We hear Jesus solemnly intoned from the lectern and pulpit and tend to forget that His words originally were spoken much less formally on hillsides, in boats, and around tables with food and drink.  A lot of those red-letter Jesus words in the Bible are table talk.  I'm sure there were a few laughs as Jesus poked the religious types of his day.

Laughter is a gift from God; the doctors say it’s good medicine.  I don’t know if the evolutionists have come up with an explanation for laughter, but I’m sure they will.  Something about the release of beta-endorphins helping us to propagate our DNA, which to me just isn’t terribly funny, but then evolutionists rarely are.

We laugh for a variety of reasons.  We laugh at silly things like pratfalls and slapstick.  We laugh when we are surprised.  Many jokes work by misdirection, sending us down one path and then surprising us with the punch line.  We laugh when we see ourselves mirrored in the words of another.  A lot of stand-up comedy is simply saying what we are all thinking.  Laughter is an expression of delight, happiness, joy.  It can also be delight in the downfall of an enemy, an entirely different kind of laughter in scorn, derision, and mockery as when God laughs at men's plans to overthrow Him.

Sarah laughed at God’s promise but God got the last laugh with the birth of Isaac, whose name means “he laughs.”  People laughed at Jesus when He said that Jairus’ dead daughter was merely sleeping.  Jesus got the last laugh on that one.

Some of our best preaching profs in the seminary drew gales of laughter from otherwise stuffy seminarians.  They weren’t telling jokes, but they hit the nail so squarely on the law/gospel head that all you could do is laugh.

Jesus said, “Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh.”  He also said, “Woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.”  Sin isn’t funny, nor is death.  But God got the last laugh on sin and death in the death of Jesus, and faith has to have a good Easter chuckle over that once and a while.

I don’t think preachers should go for the laugh.  They should go for the Law and the Gospel, for repentance and faith, for the death of the sinner and the resurrection of the saint in the death and life of Jesus.  And if that draws a laugh, so be it.  There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, and if you can’t laugh at the undoing of Death in the death of Jesus, what can you laugh at?