Crazy the Lord

April 8, 2018     Holy Humor Sunday

Gen 8:9-15     Psalm 150     1 Corinthians 1:18-31     John 20:19-29

So … who was the shortest man in the Bible?
Actually, there were two: Bildad the Shuhite, and Peter—he slept on his watch.

How do we know that men are supposed to make coffee? He-brews!

What was the first sporting event mentioned in the Bible?
Baseball! (In the big inning)

Which servant of God was the worst lawbreaker in the Bible?
He broke all ten commandments at once.

Have you ever noticed how good jokes take something we know, something that’s expected, and then give them a twist, something ridiculous? I love the one about the man who visited a prison and listened to the prisoners shouting numbers out from behind their cell doors. “Eighty-six!” one would shout; “A hundred and fourteen!” someone else would yell. There would be chuckles, and every once in a while someone would say, “Oh yeah, that’s a good one.” The man asked his guide, “What are they doing?” “Oh,” the guide said, “they’ve been together so long they’ve numbered the jokes. Each number stands for a joke they all know.” Just at that time someone yelled, “Ninety-seven!” and one man began laughing like crazy. “Why’s he laughing so hard?” the man asked. “Oh, guess he’s never heard that one before.”

Jokes turn our expectations upside down a bit. Sometimes more than a bit.

The Bible is full of such “jokes.” The story of Sarah is one of my favorites. Remember Sarah? Abraham’s wife? She was, well, very old when God’s angels told her she was going to have a baby.

Writer Frederick Buechner has a wonderful description of Sarah hearing that news. “The place to start,” he writes

is with a woman laughing. She is an old woman, and, after a lifetime in the desert, her face is cracked and rutted like a six-month drought. She hunches her shoulders around her ears and starts to shake. She squinnies her eyes shut, and her laughter is all China teeth and wheeze and tears running down as she rocks back and forth in her kitchen chair. She is laughing because she is pushing ninety-one hard and has just been told she is going to have a baby. (Buechner, Telling The Truth)

Isn’t that a great description? Can’t you just see her? Of course Sarah laughed. Wouldn’t you?

All of Sarah’s life she’d been waiting and hoping for a child, but nothing. And God kept on promising that Abraham would be a father … until finally she suggested that Abraham get together with her slave Hagar, and of course Hagar had little Ishmael … but that whole relationship was nothing but grief for Sarah.

And here came an angel from God, once again, saying she’s going to have a baby. HA HA HA. Say it with me, HA HA HA. Like that’s going to happen!

Why is Sarah laughing? Well it’s just so ridiculous—someone saying that she’s going to have a baby. She’s older than almost all the women in this congregation—how would you women who’re over 70 (heck, over 50!) feel if someone told you you’d be delivering a baby in nine months?

HA HA HA. Sarah knows the way the world works—and women her age—those women just don’t get pregnant.

But of course, the joke was on Sarah. Nine months later and here came baby Isaac. And now she was laughing for joy. “God has brought laughter for me”—and wasn’t her child named he laughs?—“everyone who hears will laugh with me.” I imagine that every time Sarah looked at her little son, every time she held him in her arms, every time she saw him lying in the shade of the tent playing with his toes … I imagine then she felt that joy come welling up inside of her, that laughter of pure joy, for hadn’t God done something completely unexpected, completely wonderful … completely miraculous? Ninety-one-year-old women don’t have babies … but God promised it, and Sarah did.

There are lots of miracles in the Bible. And when you think about them—the burning bush that wasn’t consumed by fire, Jesus walking on water, Lazarus raised from the dead—they’re all violations of natural law, of “the way the world works.” These things “just don’t happen,” the same way 90-year-old women just don’t have babies. They’re so unexpected as to be impossible … and I wonder if laughter like Sarah’s isn’t the way people responded to a lot of the miracles in the Bible.

The sea parted—just dried up with a nice path through it—so the Israelites could come across!
What? HA HA HA. …
Wow.

The sun stopped moving for almost a complete day!
What? HA HA HA. …
Wow.

Jesus went to a wedding and turned water into wine!
What? HA HA HA. …
Wow.

Christ died and rose again.
What? HA HA HA. …
Wow.

Thomas had some trouble with that last one, didn’t he? He didn’t seem to be laughing when he told the rest of the disciples, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

It’s as if he was saying, when first confronted with this cosmic joke, this cosmic turning the world upside down, “No! That’s foolishness! I’m not laughing, I’m not rejoicing. I’m sticking to what I can see, hear, taste and smell. I’m sticking to what I know is the way the world works, and it’s a low-down, gritty, mean world. Stuff happens and then you die. That’s it.”

Uh-huh. Except that God is alive in the world. And God turned the world upside down by raising his son from the grave. God burst the bonds of death. God looked death in the eye and said, “Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah!” God looked at death’s power to end life completely and said, HA HA HA. And we say, “Wow.”

 

All this looks like foolishness to those who don’t believe. But as Paul said in his letter to the Corinthians,

Christ is God’s power and God’s wisdom. This is because the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. (1 Corinthians 1:24-25)

God’s foolishness is the greatest joke ever. For which of us would have ever set things up so that the way people come to faith is almost never through serious theological study or intense, pulpit-pounding sermons—not through wisdom or power. No, people come to faith by hearing Christians’ stories, by observing their joy … by being blessed by God with the crazy, upside-down-ness of grace.

 

The upside-down-ness of God’s grace. Our joy in that is shown in the story about a five-year-old I know of who was thrilled to learn the song, “Allelu, allelu, allelu, allelujah, / Praise ye the Lord.”

Like a lot of five-year-olds, though, he doesn’t hear the words exactly the way they’re written. “Allelu, allelu, allelu, allelujah,” he sings. “Crazy the Lord.”

Crazy the Lord! God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom. Crazy the Lord! God raised Jesus from the dead, defeating death and its power over us—giving us the gift of life eternal, life abundant starting now.

And like old Sarah, rocking herself back and forth, tears streaming down her cheeks, we can only grin and laugh, slap our hands on our knees, and shout with joy. It’s unexpected; it’s impossible; it’s miraculous. It’s grace.

HA HA HA. Wow.

Alleluia. Amen.

Jitterbugs of Joy

Easter Sunday — April 1, 2018
Mark 16:1-8

There’s an old story about a little boy who was a great fan of both Captain Kangaroo and Mister Rogers. (I told you this was not a new story.) Every day the boy watched both of their television shows, and one day it was announced that Mister Rogers would be paying a visit to the Captain Kangaroo show. The boy was thrilled! Both of his heroes, together on the same show!

Every morning he asked, “Is this the day? The day when Mister Rogers will be on Captain Kangaroo?” Finally the great day arrived, and the whole family gathered around the television. There they were, Mister Rogers and Captain Kangaroo together.

The boy watched for a minute, but then, then, he got up and wandered out of the room. His father followed him. “What is it, son? What’s wrong?”

“It’s too good,” the boy replied. “It’s just too good.”

 

That’s a little bit like Easter morning. It’s too good. It’s just too good. We get close to it and then we have to look away. It’s too big. It’s too good. It’s too unbelievable.

That’s why the women who found the empty tomb fled “in terror and amazement.”

We look, and we look away. We take a step toward the empty tomb, and then we step back. We do that dance of amazement and fear, of faith and doubt, that Christians have done throughout the centuries—that dance that starts with faltering steps and, when we’re blessed, continues with wild polkas of praise, jitterbugs of joy.

 

But before we get to that exuberant rejoicing, while we’re still in the box step—two steps forward, one step back—we stop to ask, but what does the Resurrection mean? Why does it matter?

Let’s say we’ve two-stepped through faith and doubt enough that we’ve decided to open our minds enough to say, yes, I’m going to believe that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. In spite of my experience, which says no—once dead, always dead. In spite of the laws of nature that say that water cannot be presto change-o turned into wine, that humans cannot walk on top of water, that five loaves of bread and a couple of fish simply won’t feed a crowd numbering in the thousands … that the dead do not rise again … In spite of my experience and my understanding, yes, I’m going to go out on a limb and say, okay, yes, Jesus was resurrected from the dead.

I’m going to be a little like Peter, who Luke tells us was the only one of the apostles who heard this tale from the women and didn’t dismiss it entirely. I’m going to be like Mary in John’s gospel, who hung around the garden long enough to find that Jesus was already there.

And then maybe, if I’m not too freaked out and if there’s not a new episode of “American Idol” about to show on TV or no basketball game scheduled for tonight, I’m going to think about that whole experience. No body where there should have been a body. The stone rolled away.

The stone in front of the tomb was rolled away. Was rolled, rolled away. That’s a passive verb, in both English and Greek. The stone was rolled away. By whom? How? We don’t know. We just know that the stone—that stone standing in front of the tomb—the stone was changed by whatever it was that happened here. The stone has been rolled away. It no longer guards a tomb. The tombstone is gone.

The tomb is no longer a tomb.

What is the meaning of the Resurrection? Why does it matter? It matters because there’s no longer a tomb where we thought there’d be a tomb. It means that the tomb has been changed, altered … defeated, even.

It means that death isn’t the winner. Because Jesus the Christ was dead … and then he defeated death and rose again.

 

And what does that mean for us, living our lives out in the 21^st century, when things are changing so fast we can’t begin to keep up? When we’re worried about our churches, our communities, our country?

It means that this life on earth is not the end, and it also means that in this life, death doesn’t win. Not death, nor depression nor hopelessness, not anguish and pain and grief, not soul-grinding poverty or spirit-stealing oppression, neither aching bodies nor confused minds—they may be horribly difficult, but ultimately they’re not the winners.

The winner is Jesus the Christ. Son of God, God the Son. And the winners are the people God loves—the people of this crazy, mixed-up world. That’s why Jesus was born, why he taught and healed, why he died and was resurrected—for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that all who believe in him may not perish but have everlasting life.

Everlasting life. Beginning now. Beginning with chocolate Easter bunnies and with smiles, with hands clasped in friendship and caring. With dollars given toward One Great Hour of Sharing. With joy so deep and overflowing that we cannot help but spill it over on all whom we encounter.

Everlasting life. It means that in a world that tells us we need to be rich and thin to really live, we can thumb our noses and go out and really live. It means the story isn’t over.

 

And that, my friends, is too good.

So good that it took the disciples a bit of time to deal with it. In each gospel report, the women got the news first and came running back to tell the eleven—and they didn’t believe them. Because it was too good. Just too good.

We’ve got to figure that since Friday they’d been settling themselves down to accept that all those weeks and months with Jesus were over. That the dream of a better world, a richer life, a life-giving love—that dream was over, and it was time to go back to their fishing boats and tax collecting. Back to their families and their homes. Back to normal, humdrum life.

 

We could do that too. We could listen to the story and say, “Right. That doesn’t have anything to do with me,” and go right back to our lives. We could be like the little boy who had to leave the room when Mister Rogers came to visit Captain Kangaroo because it was too good. And settle for the ordinary.

Because if the story did not end on Friday … if the tomb is empty and the tombstone rolled away … if death has been defeated … then we, with the disciples, are people for whom the stone has been rolled away—we are apostles, bearers of the Word, the Good News, proclaimers of joy!

So do it! Be it! Smile at someone who’s sad; forgive someone; practice gratitude. Work for justice; pray for peace. Spread the resurrection—the life!

Practice polkas of praise. Join in jitterbugs of joy.

Waltzes of wonder. Shuffles of sharing. Tangoes of trust.

Loving our lives and our Lord so much that our lives dance.

Alleluia! Amen.