What is Preaching pt. 3

So exploring preaching (or as I like to say, procrastinating writing the sermon for this week), on a blog called faithlaughs, means I probably need to talk about humor.

Trying to describe humor is a terrible idea. If you have to explain the joke, it isn't funny.

But I think humor is necessary for preaching. Humor does several things at once. It ties together things that normally don't go together. It interrupts the usual view of the world and turns things on their head. In the form of clowns and parody and satire, humor takes ordinary things and blows them all out of proportion, sometimes showing us what we were not able or willing to see otherwise.

Such interruptions of normal life are not incongruous with the Bible.

I Corinthians 1:26-29 - (NRSV)

Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.

Rome doesn't stand a chance against such holy humor.

In preaching, humor breaks the seriousness which often infects and deflects the joy of our connection with creation, one another and God. If it is done well, humor interrupts our business-as-usual thinking that lets us settle for tomorrow being much the same as today.

I am also convinced that people learn more while laughing. We tend to be more open to learning while laughing, even if what we are learning what we have gotten wrong.