By Blayne A. Banting
Maybe it shouldn't have bothered me, but it did. It was only one passing comment in a book filled with challenging ideas, but it was the one statement that haunted the unswept corners of my mind. Alarmed at the modern megachurch's flirtation with the process of secularization, Os Guinness referred to the comment of a Japanese businessman who said, "Whenever I meet a Buddhist leader, I meet a holy man. Whenever I meet a Christian leader, I meet a manager."1 While I have never been (and probably never will be) the preacher in a megachurch, this stinging rebuke dragged me, kicking and screaming, to a serious evaluation of my own ministry in general and my preaching in particular. Over the next several years I searched for ways in which my words and deeds would be expressions of holiness. Help came from an unexpected quarter: humor (or as we Canadians spell it, 'humour'). Preachers are not, nor should be strangers to humor. We want to know how to use humor and when in our sermons. We know humor's value and we have experienced the fall-out for its overuse or misuse from the pulpit. My route of discovery took a slightly different path. I unearthed, much to my surprise, the profound relationship between humor and holiness. This understanding of humor was not so much a matter of timing and technique as it was a perspective, a way of seeing and understanding my faith in Jesus Christ, a, if you will, 'humorneutic.'
Humor and holiness seem to be strange bedfellows, at least at first glance. After all our faith is serious business, and a lot of what passes for humor these days is anything but holy. True. And we have endured (or preached) our share of sermons where the preacher did more of a stand up routine than announce the gospel. Again, true. And is not humor mere escapism, allowing us to laugh for a moment and temporarily forget our despair? Granted. Allowing for the truth of these objections, and several more, it is still important to see the connection between growing in holiness and developing a humorous perspective to faith and life. If we see humor as our ability to take God seriously and everything else (especially ourselves) less so, then its helpfulness to our spiritual and homiletical formation is more obvious. This article, then, is not intended to be an exclusive endorsement of this path against all others. Rather, it is a tentative proposal to balance our perspective, when we approach the preaching task as a matter of the efficient management of technique, with a sense of reverent but playful awe. It is a call for the preacher to be and play the holy fool when it is warranted by the situation. After all if "God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe," (1 Cor 1:21b) we preachers would do well to learn what it means to be a holy fool.
The God Who is for Us
No perspective is worthy of consideration, let alone adoption if it does not have a proper theological grounding. Can we find support for the humorous, playful perspective in the person and work of God himself? Before an answer is attempted, a few terms need to be defined. Although related, 'humor' and 'comedy' are not identical. Comedy is more of a literary term referring to a dramatic genre which deals with the limitations, foibles, failures and incongruities of the human state and comes to a happy ending.2 Humor, on the other hand, relates more to the quality of any action, speech or writing which excites an amused response.3 So our biblical investigation of humor should be open to both evidences of comedic plot in Scripture as well as aspects, actions or words in Scripture that we would describe as humorous.