By V. Neil Wyrick
Mullin, in his book, Laughing Out Loud and other Religious Experiences, has a chapter entitled "Please God may we laugh?" And the resounding answer from many good Christians is "No!" For them, religion is deadly serious business and -- even at the risk of dullness -- one must not, as the Psalmist suggested "make a joyful noise." Don't just read this positive affirmation. Write it down. Sign your name to it and scotch tape it to your desk and anything else you often see.
It is not necessary, on a Sunday morning, to become a comedian for Christ. Yet neither is there a scriptural reference that claims blessed are the bored. No less a preacher than Spurgeon spoke of the mistake of thinking that virtue lays in gravity and that smiles are a symptom of depravity. Humor can grab attention that might otherwise be drifting away.
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Is there a danger? Of course! It always comes down to whether a laugh or two are well placed in a sermon or whether there are so many jokes the sermon becomes a joke.
When I decided to become a minister at the age of sixteen, I also gave long thought to following through on my decision because of the somberness of many ministers in my time. They approached humor as if it were an insidious disease -- should it infect their sermons, terrible emotional and theological problems would arise. Admittedly this was
62 years ago, but debate continues as to the place of humor in the pulpit.
As an old tennis player, I long ago learned that success on the court is best accomplished by having more than one approach to driving home a winning point. Success in the pulpit is no different. We should not become a prisoner of a particular way of sermonizing. To think that every sermon should produce some laughter is both faulty in the thought and ridiculous if applied. The shining wisdom of the divine spark at work may cut off an amusing story, and wisely so. But any system that has no room for change in either direction should be prayed about and looked at carefully.
Like it or not, people today have short attention spans and want to be engaged. Therefore, theology with an occasional tie-in laugh line is certainly better than the attention of a congregant journeying to where he will be Sunday afternoon rather than where he is on Sunday morning. The fuel of humor can warm the cockles of a listening heart. It is something a listener can hang a theological thought onto and carry on into the week ahead.
I still visualize a silly description that a preacher friend told me in the early years of my ministry, that preaching is like throwing a bucketful of water at a number of narrow-necked bottles. Unfortunately, people are not always big, wide buckets open to understanding any and every thought. Rather, they are prone to having wandering, narrow minds; preconceived ideas that don't like to be too firmly nudged; and sometimes, not laughingly so, they fail to understand what we were absolutely sure was crystal clear.
